The Problem with the Problem with Evil: a review of Hugh Cook’s “Heron River”

1.

Heron River, a new novel by Hugh Cook, is jacketed by a breathtaking photograph  and contains a breathtaking opening scene. When I heard him read aloud from this opening, set twenty years before the rest of the novel, I was so taken with it I started reading it immediately when I got home. Cook manages a fine balance in this novel, maintaining a sophistication of character and voice while also writing a plot that keeps us moving through it the way the river cuts through the fictional town of Caithness. Dark and terrible things happen in this story, many of them to good, unsuspecting, and undeserving people. Guilt abounds.

Cook masterfully writes in several different voices, switching between a forty-nine-year-old female teacher, her brain-injured son, a thirteen-year-old boy grappling with a moral dilemma, a female cop, and a disturbed young man–a killer. Cook, speaking publicly, likened it to an movie with a strong ensemble cast, and I agree with the assessment: all of the characters draw us to them, either out of love or fear. All of the voices ring true, even the ones that must have been most difficult to write, like that of Adam, living with an acquired brain injury, and Orrin, who appears to be a psychopath. In Adam’s scenes, we see a man with great sensitivity and limitations that cause many things to be just beyond his reach, and we feel the poignancy of this; he goes through the details of his day as though trying to explain them to himself. In Orrin’s, we feel a creeping sense of how wrong things will manage to go:

when all the kids were playing outside and Mrs. Buchanan was in the teacher’s room he opened the latch of the cage and reached in and grabbed the gerbil and held his hands around its throat and squeezed it while the gerbil squirmed and wriggled until finally it twitched twice and then lay limp in his hand.

The story, then, is crafted carefully and elegantly. The moves between voices are so artful as to appear artless. The characters are gripping enough in their vivid humanness so that the suspense in the plot is bonus. There is much to love here, and I do: the careful detailing of the town of Caithness, of the different parts of each character’s life, the beautiful sentences which do all of this work without pyrotechnics. Somehow, even a mundane description of baking a pie, of “latticing” the dough, manages to seem strange and vaguely frightening. I can’t quite figure out how he did it.

2.

For most of the book I was haunted by an image in the tragic opening scene. Madeline, Adam’s mother, reads a children’s book version of the New Testament parable of the lost sheep. In this parable, a shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep behind in the pen to go out looking for the one he lost; the single sheep is so precious to him that he will go to great lengths to retrieve it. Madeline reads this story to her sons, and in their reading, they turn it inside out:

Who left the gate open, Adam asks, riffling back through the pages to the beginning and pointing to the illustration. Somebody left the gate open.

and then Madeline:

who took care of the sheep while the farmer was out looking for the missing one?

When fate is borne out–when the thing to change all of their lives irreparably does happen–Madeline imagines a

breach as wide as a gate someone has left open.

The questions are ones that many people have asked, and that many have lost their faith over: why, in a world ruled by a good and omnipotent God, are terrible things allowed to happen? The emotional truth of these questions reverberates through Heron River, touching each of its lost sheep, making us question, even, our own judgment of the novel’s most lost of the lost: the seemingly irredeemable Orrin. Late in the story, the female officer Tara reminds herself that ninety-eight per cent of people are decent and law-abiding–it is only the two per cent who cause trouble. Who wander away from their shepherds and get caught up in brambles.

It felt to me that this paradox and the difficulty of resolving it–how it feels to struggle with it–undergirds the whole story. If the farmer cares so much, why was the gate left open? What left me unsatisfied, then, in the novel’s conclusion, is the way it’s resolved: whoever is in charge of the universe of Heron River decides to stay with the already-penned-in ninety-nine. The one lost sheep, Orrin, is not afforded a resolution–some glimpse into how he, like the other four, might be made whole again.

Even so, the final scene, where we do encounter a good, caring soul (a ”dog” among “wolves”) watching out for Adam, is deeply moving; the story of Adam, throughout, moves us, shows us someone struggling to make sense of life and to be forgiven his mistakes. So my complaint, perhaps, is theological: it’s that, for the most part, in Heron River, forgiveness happens for the people who don’t as badly need it; forgiveness is omitted for the one who most badly does. The lost remain lost; the gate, still, swinging open.