By
Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
They say there are basically two
kinds of mystery stories – one, a stranger comes to town and two, a person
visits a strange land. Of course, there are endless variations of the same
paradigm.
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| Gerald Hausman |
The truth is, mysteries depend on
what we don’t know and are hard-pressed to find out. How well the writer
handles this is the difference between a successful mystery novel and an
unsuccessful one.
Anne Hillerman in Cave Of Bones takes a stranger – a
reader – to a strange land. And what a land it is! As anyone knows who has been
to the four million acres of the vast Colorado Plateau. There is, in this
labyrinth of openness, “an abundance of places to get lost in,” as the author
states.
This clever novel begins by drawing
the reader deeper into the lostness of a land that has caves inhabited by chindis, “the restless spirits of the
dead.”
However it’s not ghosts that haunt
this novel; it’s the overactive spirits of the living. If there is anything
residual in the landscape of Navajo country, it is something else that informs
and shapes those who live there. Call it perhaps spirit of place.
Anne Hillerman’s gift as a novelist
is to inhabit her novels with deities of Diné:
“Bones made her think of Spider
Woman. She remembered the old story of how Spider Woman came for disobedient
children, took them up onto the monolith known as Spider Rock and devoured them
in her nest at the top where their bones formed a white ring in the sandstone.”
The Navajo gods are never vague
presences. They are the blood, marrow and bone of the earth itself, not to
mention the sky, waters and winds. “The Hero Twins born to Changing Woman made
the world safe for people.”
But these same symbols of good luck
also have grievance and mischief in them. Changing Woman, Mother Earth, had sex
with two men, according to the ancient myth.
Nothing in Navajo mythology is
linear or black and white. Everything is a weave of color. A loom of threads
that connect only when one has spent a life studying the weaving and seeing
that it is framed by the loom of life itself.
It is impossible to come away from
a novel by Anne Hillerman without some understanding of how humanity fits into
the spectral panorama of the gods, demons, and humans. They share the same
truth; but they do not define it. The beauty of Cave Of Bones is that, in addition to being a classic mystery
novel, it is also a guidebook into a precise, harmonic perception of human
values. Where, and why, do we go wrong as humans? The novel answers this in the
same way the old cowboy saying does – “There is no road so straight that there
isn’t a crook up ahead somewhere.”
Cave Of
Bones takes the reader up that road of crooks and crannies. To
say, metaphorically, that the reader may become lost along the way is not a
criticism. “To be lost” in a mystery novel is the very thing that brings us to
the book in the first place. We voluntarily wish to be lost; and then again,
found.
And so we are in this wonderful,
realistic, multi-faceted, novel.
(Gerald Hausman photo credit: Mariah Fox)
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Gerald Hausman is the author of Not Since Mark Twain - Stories and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
