Art and the Holocaust: A New Novel Tries to Blend Two Themes
By Jonathan Groner
It is 1938. The locale is Halifax, Nova Scotia. The main characters are a guard in a provincial museum, his uncle, and a rather odd young woman with whom the museum guard falls in love. The woman, half-Jewish, is the caretaker at the local Jewish cemetery. Meanwhile, an ocean away, the Nazis are on the march, and most of Canada seems not to care. This is at first glance rather unpromising material for a novel. Although in The Museum Guard Howard Norman makes the most of his quirky characters, he ultimately fails to bring all his themes together in a fully coherent fashion.
The key action is triggered when Imogen Linny, the cemetery caretaker, becomes obsessed with a painting that has just arrived at the museum. The work, entitled "Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam," awakens in Linny her Jewish identity, her aesthetic sense, and, most importantly, her desire to make a difference and to participate in history rather than watch idly as it passes by. Linny develops an all-encompassing identification with the woman in the painting and starts to refer to herself as the wife of the Dutch artist who painted it; then she goes farther, launching an ill-fated trip to Amsterdam in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, just as the Nazi menace approaches. All this is narrated through the eyes of DeFoe Russet, the meek, well-meaning (non-Jewish) museum guard who gradually finds that the woman he loves is not the person he thought she was.
Mr. Norman, in his third novel, draws memorable, offbeat characters, and his fine, understated irony keeps the reader involved. Although I know little about Halifax in the 1920s and 1930s, he creates a convincing impression of a bland but amiable town that is quite satisfied with its own local pleasures and prefers not to be disturbed by outside concerns.
However, The Museum Guard's fine writing and considerable charm are diminished by Mr. Norman's ultimate inability to develop his larger points--the relationship between life and art, the contrast between individual experience and world events--in a convincing manner. The reader ends up caring about Imogen, DeFoe, and the others, but not seeing their story as part of a larger canvas. In the end, The Museum Guard is a brilliant miniature.
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