rannie McCabe used to be the bad boy of the town of Crane’s View--a violent, smart-mouthed bully who everyone thought would come to a bad end. But Frannie grew up. Now he’s the police chief of Crane’s View, married to a woman he loves deeply, and settling into a comfortable life with his family, his motorbike and a peaceful job in a peaceful town.
But then he takes in a stray--a beat-up, three-legged dog whose name tag reads only "Old Vertue." The dog dies in Frannie’s office and Frannie buries it in the woods, but it refuses to stay buried. It keeps showing up again, still just as dead, but with a glorious perfume coming from it. It’s only the first of many surreal incidents that will turn Frannie McCabe’s life into a conundrum. A quarrelsome couple disappears into thin air mid-fight, leaving behind a beautiful feather. Frannie’s stepdaughter turns out to have just had the same feather tattooed on her behind. Frannie starts getting advice from his own younger, delinquent self. A sinister stranger steals his watch, grants him a week to figure the whole mess out, then shows him a vision of his future. And a dead girl gives Frannie a riddle as a baffling piece of the puzzle: “How do you cross a wooden sea?”
As if all that isn’t confusing enough, there’s the petulant millionaire who wants all his guests to wear the same clothes. And why the hell do a lizard and a shovel seem to be part of the picture? Frannie’s losing patience with the whole damned thing, except that he’s found out one piece of information from his time travels--if he doesn’t solve the mystery, his best friend will become a dog, and Frannie will lose his wife.
A witty, well-woven nightmare
Carroll’s writing in The Wooden Sea moves smoothly between an understated beauty ("We lose it, it disappears, evaporates. The edge, the courage, the black madness and abandon of the young") and a gritty toughness ("The heart attack that’ll nuke him will last a few seconds. The cold beer in thick mugs and perfume of grilling T-bone steaks are forever until he dies. It’s worth the trade-off"). For all the impossibility of the events, the characters and their responses ring true. Frannie’s stepdaughter Pauline has all the sullen uncertainty that adolescence can bring, and the mischievous seven-year-old boy near the end is a joy of characterization.
Up until the final third of The Wooden Sea, the novel feels as though it hasn’t a hope in heaven or hell of making any sense. But what glorious, compelling nonsense it is! Page after inventive page, Carroll cooks up a small-town world that’s rapidly melting into a Daliesque phantasm, and only the police chief knows that something is really not right. Frannie McCabe is a touching, flea-bitten, ornery soul of a man who loves hard, but tells himself that he doesn’t need to. And when he begins to lose the things he loves, the novel pulls all its crazy threads together and knots them with insane logic into a satisfying ending that manages to seem both unpredictable and inevitable. The plot device on which the novel’s solution turns is one element that feels a tad bit sketchy in conception, bound as it is to a default Christianity. For all that, it’s a unique and fresh notion on which to pin a story. The novel suffers only slightly for that small blip.
And how do you cross a wooden sea? Not telling. Read the book; it’s more than worth it.
I really looked forward to picking this book up each evening and continuing where I left off. It was one of those great reads where the journey was half the fun.
-- Nalo
