The Compulsion of Art

In a book published recently, the pilot-writer William Langewiesche praised the view from an airplane for introducing a new way of regarding ourselves and the world: with patterns and connections that would have seemed wizard-like before such a view was available.

Howard Norman, author of “The Bird Artist” and now of “The Museum Guard,” alternates ground-level and aerial sightings. He endows his characters with rooted human quiddities and a fable-like float of purpose and fate. It is as if carpenters and angels were measuring them at the same time. Norman’s writing is not magical realism but a quietly and sometimes awkwardly eccentric realism given wings.

“The Museum Guard” is a cousin to its predecessor. Its theme is similarly the power of art to break through to those veins of life that we keep bound up for fear of lethal hemorrhage. In “Bird Artist” the breakthrough is ultimately festive. Here, despite the insouciant and often wacky surfaces (marched to the gallows, a Norman character would likely pause to scratch a mosquito bite on his ankle and one on his guard’s as well), it is tragic and frightening.

The story is set in the late 1930s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, provincial and seemingly walled off from Europe’s gathering tragedy. By the end, a window has been wrenched open and one of the characters has been sucked through. Art has done the wrenching. If that sounds grandiloquent, it is because it fails to convey Norman’s ability to suggest a blizzard by means of individual crystals of snow.

The violent transformation in “The Museum Guard” takes place in Imogen Linny, a bossy, alluring young woman who works as gardener and caretaker in the local Jewish cemetery. Half-Jewish herself, Imogen feels restlessly estranged and unable to make out the course of her life. Illumination comes when she visits a show of Dutch paintings at the local museum and sees “Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam” by a contemporary artist, Joop Hejman.

Hejman, it turns out, had painted his wife not long before she was arrested on a visit to her family in Germany and died in a concentration camp. Imogen keeps returning to the exhibit, increasingly obsessed. She had barely been aware of what was happening to Europe’s Jews; now, at a junction between the incantation of art and the reality it expresses, she all but literally becomes the painting and the figure in it.

As “The Museum Guard” unfolds, Imogen goes from spending entire days with “Jewess,” to trying to steal it, to dressing up as its subject. Eventually, her obsession turning to terrifying madness, she goes to Amsterdam and confronts the already shattered Hejman, insisting that she is his wife. In the final stage of this extravagant mission of atonement, she will disappear, presumably to share the fate of Mrs. Hejman and so many of Holland’s Jews.

Imogen’s story is the fierce pattern in the warp of Norman’s novel. It is lightened and transformed in a woof of disruptive glints woven by other voices and characters, notably by the narrator Defoe, Imogen’s hopeless lover and the museum guard of the title.

Defoe’s narration is a hurricane recalled by a window fan. Speaking with ostensible matter-of-factness and the awkwardness of a limited education, he insists on his modest condition, his sense of order--in times of stress he irons shirts--and his pleasure in the unpretentious usefulness of his museum job. His reasonableness, though, is an effort at containment, one that will be breached, eventually, by Imogen’s wild flight.

Defoe has come out of frightening chaos. Norman, who is never far from playfulness--a gift, though it can get out of hand--gives this disorder an antic touch. When he was a child, Defoe’s parents went up in a balloon at a local fair. The balloon crashed; the orphan was brought up by his uncle Edward in the Halifax hotel where he lodges, womanizes, philosophizes and plays poker with bellhops, porters and desk clerks. He is a longtime guard at the art museum, and when Defoe grows up, Edward gets him a job.

Assiduous in observing the rules for a museum guard--be neat, unobtrusive, keep a distance from the paintings and a close but tactful eye on visitors--Defoe finds in his turbulent uncle the epitome of the anti-guard. Edward comes in late, hung over, unshaven or not at all. Left in charge, he puts out a “Closed” sign so he can sleep. He is loudly vociferous about the paintings, butting into visitors’ conversations and disrupting lectures by Miss Delbo, a painfully proper art historian.

Defoe cleans him up, covers for him, remonstrates; yet it will be Edward who emerges as the teacher and, slowly and painfully, his nephew as disciple. “You could use a bath,” Defoe tells his uncle at one particularly smelly appearance; “You could use a day without one,” Edward replies. Defoe fights for a tidy removal from art and life; Edward stands for messy involvement.

Everything engages and challenges him: a beautiful woman, strong drink, the elements of both redemption and corruption in the paintings he guards and the horrors--mostly ignored in that placid time and place--that are occurring in Germany. Half in love with Imogen himself, it will be Edward who desperately tries to block her departure.

A character that could be a cliche of the shaggily vociferous free spirit--the kind Robin Williams keeps playing--is turned by Norman into something gritty, admirable and alarming. Like Imogen, Edward is ruled by passionate convictions that turn fatal. Together they will ignite Defoe out of his distances and his ironing. At the end, after an act of perilous engagement that, among other things, costs him his job, Defoe visits the museum for a final look at the “Jewess.” “Don’t get too close, please,” the new guard cautions him.

There are weaknesses in “The Museum Guard.” Norman is successful with the out-sized drama of his story: Imogen’s growing obsession and the stunning account of her flight to Amsterdam and her mutually deranged encounters with the painter Hejman. But some things are garish or forced: a double assassination, for instance, and a romance between the uptight art lecturer, Miss Delbo, and the museum director. Norman can be awkward with his lesser plot elements: a fictional counterpart to the theater problem of getting characters on and off.

Yet if this is a rougher book than “The Bird Artist,” it displays some equivalently magical strengths. Imogen, bearer of a tragedy that belongs to the world as well as to herself, has a deflected, zanily syncopated charm even in the extremes of obsession. Norman brings her to life as much by what his narrator doesn’t see as by what he does.

Defoe does a few things too many and several of them clumsily. Yet his voice, musing, discovering, announcing wrong turns and doubling back, is that of a Candide who takes no pleasure in his innocence, seeks to overcome it and never quite succeeds. Both the effort and the failure commend him, as do the equal measures of comedy and sorrow that burden his story along the way.