An intricate paradox, posing the question of what the novel can tell us, in the guise of its telling
I am a ventriloquist for love, declares the narrator of The Charnel Imp, as he dares the reader to locate his voice in all the familiar places of human affection. Yet the narrative of Alan Singer’s innovative novel is a vast remapping of that terrain.
A desiccated prairie town, whose landmarks are a slaughterhouse of phantasmagoric proportions and a burlesque opera house, is the scene of this metamorphosis. Out of the din of destruction, the narrator precipitates a dubious array of voices: Moertle, who leads the cattle to slaughter; the local doctor, whose preoccupation with disease and contamination becomes a demonic prophecy; Dinah, the opera-star-cum-burlesque-artist, who performs a mimicry of domestic love both on and off the stage; and, most ominously, the wooden ventriloquist’s dummy, which threatens to swallow them all into the mysterious depths of its own darkly-inflected speech.
Each of their stories converges upon an obsessive, authoritarian demand for the gratification of memory and desire. In action hallucinated against the backdrop of the seething corrals and brutal slaughterhouse, in a series of surreal episodes climaxing in flood, famine, and fire, the narrative is propelled toward a reckoning with paradox and loss, and portends the characters’ apocalyptic encounter with the limits of human will.
In the ambiguity of its poetically charged language, the complex architecture of its form, and the resonance of its plot, The Charnel Imp rings with a portent for the reader as well. It is an intricate paradox, posing the question of what the novel can tell us, in the guise of its telling. Like the French recit to which it pays homage, The Charnel Imp exposes the infinite frailty of the mind that seeks to encompass its own knowing.
