Her first travel book, Touch the Dragon, won a Governor-General's Award for its spirited recall of a teenage year in Thailand. Back in the 1980s, Connelly seemed a little more humble, a trifle less sure of herself -- after three months in Thailand, she wrote, the country "already owns part of me." The traveling self she discloses in One Room in a Castle -- while still young, still passionate, and still terrific at capturing the look and feel of a foreign land -- is not only more possessive, but also more more self-conscious as a writer. The change is not always to the good.
"Do you imagine that I forget anything I see?" Connelly asks rhetorically. Of course she does: forgetting is part of being human. Rapturous on Lesbos, she claims that "Poetry ripens and spills out of my mind like the fruit that overflows the valley now." It's a brilliant simile, at first glance, but the more you think about it, the sillier it looks. Occasionally Connelly does venture beyond rhapsody or personal vexation and into the deeper waters of analysis. The results, however, can be startlingly banal. "I am struggling to understand," she writes, "Why don't people recognize each other as the same species?"
I'm being unfair. One Room in a Castle contains many chunks of lyrical, evocative prose as well as a few fine short stories and some astute passages of self-discover. It is particularly good about sex -- rarely in explicit terms, more often as a state of aroused, erotic encounter with the world. For almost any other 26-year-old writer, this would be much more than enough. But this is Connelly's fourth book, she has won awards for her poetry as well as her prose, and she doesn't deserve to be reviewed with a patronizing nod and a bushel of excuses. Her work deserves to be considered by the highest standards of memoir and travel writing. And by those standards, One Room in a Castle falls short.
There are two main reasons for this. The first has to do with the book's curious structure. Written as a series of letters to real or imaginary recipients, it consist of four main parts. The sections on the Basque country, Avignon, and Lesbos have an internal coherence based on an external fact: Connelly spent months in each place, then moved on. But the first section is set in Alberta, where she grew up, and its letters are divided among Calgary, Banff and the foothills in between. Too much is left unsaid here, especially about Connelly's past and the reasons for her nomadic behaviour, and the city of Calgary remains an obstinate ghost. If part of the aim was to set up a telling contrast between home and away, it fails to persuade: whatever Connelly needs to say about home, she's not saying here.
The second major flaw has to do with her sheer fluency as a writer. At times she seems captivated by images, awestruck by her own perceptiveness, and unwilling to step back and think about the meanings of what she has experienced. "I look at the men around me," she says on Lesbos, "who dazzle with their humour, their enormous characters, their generosity, their love." But such wide-eyed naivete can't withstand time. Twenty pages on, even Connelly is admitting that "As I understand more Greek, I wake up by degrees to the reality of the people who live here. Their politics. Their rivalries. Their jealousies." Her initial impressions, in short, were founded on ignorance.
This is a problem endemic to much travel writing, not just to Karen Connelly. She knows far more about Calgary than about Lesbos -- but it's the unknown, the faraway, the endlessly strange that spring to life in her work. One way to deepen perception is to grasp at history: the ways in which the present was molded and burnished by the past. Yet Connelly resists history. Only in Avignon, a city she continued to dislike, does history impinge on her prose. Avignon guarded its secrets and resisted her possessive eye. The clashes between them -- the old European city and the young Alberta writer -- made her life difficult for a time. But they also inspired some of the finest pages in this book.
