Review by Rob Reid
Who knows what dark, primeval forces lie hidden deep within the dank, mouldy basement of the human psyche, heart or soul, ready to erupt without bidding or welcome?
That’s the question Lynda Ellestad poses in her taut, compelling debut novel Hidden, which adheres to the modern literary model of fusing diverse genres. Equal parts psychological thriller, murder mystery, police procedural, ghost story, gothic romance, novel of corporate manners and feminist morality tale, readers are invited into a recognizably familiar world in which nothing is as it appears.
The story centres on Ada Sinclair, an unassuming, middle-aged spinster who works as an administrative assistant in an office in an unidentified city. Tall and thin, with ‘greying flyaway hair,’ she sees herself as ordinary--that most benign and innocuous of words. Conversely other women find her odd, if not troubled, even pathetic, while men of a certain ‘type’ find her sexually alluring in a clandestine way.
Her boss, a ‘snake’ of a man she fears as much as she despises, has gone missing and, like her female coworkers, Ada is concerned about his safety. Still, her nerves are frayed when police show up after opening an investigation into his disappearance and whereabouts.
Beneath its placid surface, Hidden is driven by strong undercurrents of obsession, desire and sexual yearning; of slow, simmering rage; of loss and grief verging on despair. Reality and fantasy coalesce as dream slips into nightmare. The story packs a punch enclosed in a satin evening glove. So, readers faint of imagination beware.
For her part, Ada is insular and isolated despite her tenuous contact with others. She routinely retreats inside her head, as the unforgiving past flows into the anxious present. Separating her inner world from the exterior world is not easy, leaving readers stranded in a landscape of uncertainty and foreboding, repulsion and fascination. And yet, at the same time, everything remains so ordinary, so damn ordinary.
Ada seeks solace in strange places: in the film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in the companionship of her censorious older sister who resides in a ‘lovely blue urn’ perched on a mahogany hutch in the dining room. Then there’s her absentee next-door neighbour who is heard but not seen, not to mention the ever-present bottle of cheap, red wine she customarily quaffs alone--but not necessarily unobserved.
We catch glimpses of Ada’s family, all dead for some years, through periodic flashbacks. Although well-adjusted as viewed from the outside, its inner workings tell another tale: her mother is emotionally fragile and an alcoholic, her father barely deserves a mention, while her beautiful sister plays the swan to her Ugly Duckling. Ada’s response to the sins of her family is to ‘disappear into my own life.’
We accompany Ada as she goes about the mundane rituals of her drab, tedious life, at work and in the house she has resided all her life. We descend the stairs with her as she compulsively cleans the basement of ghostly memories. We join her on solitary neighbourhood walks, oblivious to lurking danger, long after the streetlights come on. We watch as she is lured by stealthy silent shadows that stalk her in all their ominous seductiveness.
Ellestad’s writing is graced with a startling, sophisticated elegance. Her words conceal as much as they reveal; it’s what lies in the empty, hollow spaces between and around them that matter. Her heightened language seeks out fresh and vibrant expression because how she says something is as vital as what she says, thereby making the commonplace unsettling and memorable.
A selection of examples from the first few pages of Hidden will have to suffice, even though I would gladly provide an extensive list. Ada recalls a one-night stand ‘with breath like old hay.’ She observes a ‘beefy, cylindrical man’ walking his dog. Her acerbic eye lights upon a coworker as ‘the flesh beneath her arms waddles softly back and forth.’ An overturned lawn chair resembles ‘a figure curled into a fetal position.’ Finally, she feels queasy at a women’s support group meeting, ‘terrified my bowels might chime in.’
Ellestad’s prose pulsates with a precise, polymorphous sensuality. Images relating to the senses are tactile and evocative, whether smell, touch, taste or auditory. Similarly, Ada’s thoughts and feelings crave sexual gratification, reflecting a body that swoons in response to an intoxicating eroticism tinged with illicitness and covert violence. This is how she describes her initial encounter with a character we come to know as the Walking Man: ‘I feel the vibration on my skin, and it startles me, as though something warm and insistent has entered me.’
Hidden quietly and steadily gathers narrative momentum until it becomes impossible to put down. We bear witness to Ada’s splintering and disintegrating personality as she becomes confused and disoriented, leaving her desperate, yet determined as if her life depends on it. Deprived of sleep, she edges precariously close to the cliff of unconsciousness. Ellestad masterfully sets the stage as dramatic events unfold with a sense of inevitability, as if predestined by preternatural forces.
Ellestad concludes her novel by tying together various narrative threads. However, questions linger to perplex and disturb readers. Ada remains something of an unreliable narrator until the end, so it’s essential to remain open to ambiguity and ambivalence by willingly suspending disbelief.
Readers follow Ada on a harrowing psychological, emotional and spiritual journey through what the ancients called the ‘underworld’ and the mystic St. John of the Cross referred to as ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. In Ellestad’s compassionate hands the journey raises moral and ethical questions: when does prey become predator, what is the borderline between revenge and retribution? Can justice rise from the bed of violation.
Ada reveals herself to be more self-aware than readers might at first suspect, despite her obvious intelligence and edgy sense of humour. She comes to realize something essential about the human condition. Since we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone, the secret is to live life alone without suffering loneliness. This seems simple but is complicated by the fact that a dark shadow resides in the deep recesses of the unconscious which remains concealed and unknowable—in a word, hidden--from the light of consciousness. If a person cannot know himself or herself wholly and completely, how can anyone else?
I completed Hidden contemplating a woman who refuses to submit to the indignity, suffering and guilt of victimhood—or as Ada’s father once advises: ‘Sometimes you have to take things into your own hands.’ I also was left with the conviction that ‘ordinary’ is a menacing, potentially treacherous word with implications and consequences that are not always visible or seen.
Ada, if you’re listening. . . .
Rob Reid - Award-winning Canadian Arts Journalist and author of Casting into Mystery