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"From Edgar Award-winning novelist Timothy Findley comes a thrilling epic of our dangerous times. Headhunter is a classic adventure story of two dueling psychiatrists and the civilized horrors that surround them. It is told in a master storyteller's unique style - foreboding, wrenching, ironic, and humorous. This psychological thriller has already soared to the top of Canadian best-seller lists and promises to be of equal significance and value to its American readers." "It all starts when Lilah Kemp, a one-time librarian and sometime spiritualist, inadvertently lets Kurtz out of page 92 of Heart of Darkness and cannot force him back in. Lilah frantically begins her search for a Marlow to counter this literary villain. But who will believe her? Especially alter she discovers that the pale, thin man with the dyed hair is Dr. Rupert Kurtz, the Parkin Institute's supremely powerful Psychiatrist-in-Chief?" "Even as Lilah finds her Dr. Marlow, a sickening pall is falling over the city - a new and horrifying disease called sturnusemia. Birds, allegedly its carrier, are being gassed by municipal death squads. Only one lone civil servant - called Smith-Jones in Kurtz's file - has voiced his suspicions about the new plague. But he seems to have disappeared." "Dr. Marlow discovers how - in the boardrooms and bedrooms of the city - the rogue spirit of Dr. Kurtz wields an unsuspected influence over the powerful and the rich: the celebrated Wylie sisters, each held in thrall by her own demon; the surgeon's wife, Emma, whose legendary beauty is a testament to her husband's skill with a scalpel - and who falls in love with the mysterious James Gatz; John Dai Bowen, the society photographer who traffics in living pornography for the secretive Club of Men; and Austin Purvis, the psychiatrist whose roster of wealthy and influential patients is being raided by Kurtz himself." "And then there are the children - the growing number of mute, severely traumatized teenagers. What is it they cannot bear to remember? What can they never forget? Why does one boy react so violently when he sees Kurtz?" "Headhunter is a gripping, fantastical novel that tells of the power we give to the medicine men who make up our minds - and of how, like Lilah Kemp, we can try to win back our freedom. It is the master work of a gifted veteran writer."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)
User reviews
All are epics with many great characters. I did not want them to end.
the only thing wrong with this was that it could have been dragged out a bit longer. i guess that's a strange wish but when i finished it i wanted it to go on and on and on and on. oh, there was also 3/4 of a page with a bit of self insertion that had my eyes rolling but it was over and done with rather quickly, thank goodness!
this was my first book by findley and if there is any goodness in this world it will not be my last. i tried reading him when i was 11 when i found my mom's copy of not wanted on the voyage but she wouldn't let me read it because it was for grown ups or something like that. i am happy we were reunited.
sleep well you crazy old man. RIP and such
It's hard to describe this book. It is very entertaining, yet explores somber and difficult themes. I've been turning it over in my mind since I finished it.
The setting is near future
The action begins when a former librarian and current schizophrenic believes that she has released the evil Kurz from p. 92 of The Heart of Darkness. She determines she must find Marlow to help her return Kurz to his proper place before he wreaks havoc on the unsuspecting city. Marlow arrives in the form of a new neighbor, a staff psychiatrist at an institute headed by a Dr. Kurz.
All kinds of characters are introduced. Who is evil, who is good? Who is sane, who is insane? Is the epidemic real or invented?
This book is populated by mad (i.e. insane) people. There is Lilah Kemp, a former librarian, who has paranoid schizophrenia and believes that she releases book characters from the books she reads into real life. Some of them are benign, like Susannah Moodie and Peter Rabbit, and some of them are horrendous, like Rupert Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Amy Wylie also has schizophrenia but her delusion is that she can save all the birds that are being killed because they are believed to carry a disease called sturnusemia. There's her sister Emily who is pregnant and believes her fetus is talking to her. And even the doctors who are supposed to be treating them are not immune. Austin Purvis is under a great deal of stress because the director of the institute is stealing his clients. And the director himself, Rupert Kurtz, probably suffers from a number of disorders, chiefly megalomania.
Austin's good friend, the aptly named Charles Marlow, arrives in Toronto with his dog to take up a job at the psychiatric institute where Purvis and Kurtz work. When he moves in next door to Lilah Kemp she believes he is the answer to her problem with Kurtz.
These are only a few of the subplots in this book. One of my main criticisms is that I felt there were too many characters with too many things going on. It was hard to remember who was who. I also found one of the subplots very disturbing as it involved sexual exploitation of children.
Despite my reservations about this book I did find the writing wonderful as usual. And the following quote is an example:
A book is a way of singing. ..A way of singing our way out of darkness. The darkness that is night--and the darkness that is ignorance...(p.138)