In The Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien

In The Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien

It’s hard to classify this book as a mystery or thriller, although it has all the elements of both, but it is more of a novel with its exploration of complex ideas and situations.  O’Brien explores the life and death of a couple caught in politics, magic, and the horrors of war.

It is unsettling and in the end you wonder what you just read and what really happened, but then we will never know.  The principal character has a flawed childhood that manifests itself in a quest to be a magician.  It is an escape from an alcoholic father who damages his son with words, words that he does not realize are bullets and knives to the young mind.

From there the John Wade goes to war and in Vietnam his magic persona gains him the soubriquet – The Sorcerer.  It is a title that he personalizes and relishes, but he is not able to use magic to make his participation in the My Lai massacre go away, although he attempts to remove it from his life through illusions and stories he creates in a political lifestyle that leads to an attempt at the Senate.

The story begins in the aftermath of his disastrous loss,  and the revelations of the My Lai trails that insured his loss and the loss of the special magic he had always relied on.  At Lake of the Woods he and his wife Kathy go to restore their life together, but it is impossible, even for a magician, to restore such a shattered glass.

Kathy goes missing, John goes to the deep side of his war scarred personality, and we are left with illusions, deceptions, what ifs and a narrative that is unsettling and in the end unresolved.  It is a book that is extremely well written with lots of the misguiding movements that magicians use to lead the audience from the act that we perceive as magic.  In fact the book is a collection of what ifs – did he kill her, did they run off together, did they both die?  It is the indifference of the demeanor of the sorcerer that unnerves the locals and creates ambiguity in the reader.

“Although the inconclusive ending irritates many readers, O'Brien tries to argue that this is the truest way to tell a story…”  and in the end I am not sure how well I feel about the lack of an ending, the drift into uncertainty.