[REVIEW] Marie-Claire Blaise, Mad Shadows

[rfmcdonald]

In his preface to the 1971 New Canadian Library edition of Québécoise writer Marie-Claire Blaise's debut novel, Mad Shadows (French La belle bête), Naim Kattan starts his discussion by noting that, when first published in 1959, the fact that it was a taboo-breaking novel written by a young woman led people to class her as one with Françoise Sagan. Kattan is right to point out that Mad Shadows has to be seen in the context of a Québécois society that, before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, was dominated by anofficial insistence upon the superiority of the traditional and the rural elements of Québécois culture that stifled in the emergence of a modern Québec. Mad Shadows takes the tentative deconstructin applied to this myth in, among other novels, Ringuet's Trente arpents, and follows it to its logical conclusion. Set in a prosperous farm in rural Québec, the small nameless family--the vain and fundamentally helpless mother Louise, her beautiful mindless Patrice, and her neglected, embittered and ugly daughter Isabelle-Marie--stumbles through one catastrophe after another, failing to resolve their mutual hatreds or to forge meaningful and durable relations with others. The continuity--of family, of bloodlines, of the land--that official culture praise is entirely absent in Mad Shadows, which takes all of its characters to nasty ends.

Is Mad Shadows a bit obviously propagandistic? Perhaps. The characters seem not to fully emerge as autonomous characters, being instead simple archetypes. That said, Mad Shadows still works rather nicely as the first novel of one of Québec's leading writers. Sometimes passion takes a relatively weak story far. Sometimes it should.