FICTION

The Haunting of L. By: Howard Norman.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 326 pages, $24.

Review: Twice-nominated for the National Book Award, Norman demonstrates his masterful narrative skills once again in a quirky yarn full of sex, spiritualists, cops, red herrings and smoking guns.

Reviewed by John Freeman

Special to the Star Tribune

Over the past decade, novelist Howard Norman has won the kind of critical acclaim that few writers enjoy during a lifetime. But while his first two novels were finalists for the National Book Award, Norman remained unknown to most readers. Now, with his erotic and suspenseful new book "The Haunting of L.," all that is likely to change. Here is a tale that, once begun, is impossible to put down.

Set in the Canadian Arctic and Nova Scotia in the 1920s, "The Haunting of L." conjures a gullible romantic who gets involved with some "dubious characters." It's a quirky yarn full of spiritualists and beat cops, red herrings and smoking guns. Told in the voice of Peter Duvett, it demonstrates Norman's masterful ability to bring to life a storyteller who can't help but incriminate himself in the process of spinning a yarn.

As the story begins, Peter journeys to Churchill, Manitoba, to take up employment with distinguished portrait photographer Vienna Linn. On his arrival Peter discovers that life in this small Canadian town will present its challenges. The hotel staff is surly and often drunk. The weather is brutally cold. And Vienna's comely wife, Kala, is more than a little dissatisfied with her marriage.

Within hours of his arrival, Peter finds himself in bed with his employer's wife, where he learns the true nature of Vienna's trade. Taking pictures of Eskimos, Kala tells him, is only a front. Vienna's true employment is causing train wrecks, which he then photographs for a rich benefactor in London. Until now, he's earned a handsome living off this grim trade, but the last set-up went awry and Vienna owes this man a large sum of money.

Vienna's only way out of debt, Peter quickly realizes, is to stage an accident so garish and fantastic that he can pay back his benefactor and leave Canada for good. Peter's conscience tells him to stop this from happening. Innocent lives are at risk. But, when Vienna learns that Kala has been cheating on him, he threatens Peter into silence.

Norman, who began his career translating Cree Indian stories and later moved into radio and the stage, has a keen sense of how to turn the screws on his cast. Nearly every event in "The Haunting of L." sets up a later plot development, as Peter gradually gets wise to the possibility that both Kala and Vienna are manipulating him.

Like his 1994 novel, "The Bird Artist," this new story suggests that love is a leap of faith, one taken -- most often -- in a blinding snowstorm. Underscoring that theme here is Kala's interest in spirit photography, pictures in which the dead reappear as ghost images. Each night after they make love, Kala reads to Peter from an occult book called "The Unclad Spirit," which urges readers to follow their instincts, do the right thing, or else they, too, might be haunted.

In other hands this side plot might ring false, but Norman gracefully weaves it into this book's larger melody about the interlocking of good and evil, and the human costs of not understanding how closely they are bound. By the time Norman's tale comes to its dramatic conclusion, those costs are all too apparent.

-- John Freeman reviews for the Wall Street