The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cracks by Sheila Kohler
Irving Malin

Sheila Kohler. Cracks. Zoland, 1999. 165 pp. $21.00.

This haunting novel is like the other Kohler books I have reviewed in this journal: an elliptical, erotic work. It explores the mysteries of desire and violence, the perverse longings we secretly possess.

The women who return to a boarding school in South Africa have come to “repair” the school, but we learn that the real reason for reunion is their exploration of the death of a classmate when they were young. Kohler juxtaposes present and past, presence and loss, using style and structure to direct us to the meaning at the heart of her novel. When she presents the girls performing “The Eve of St. Agnes,” she heightens her language. Words seem to become wild, haunted, “deviant”: “Fiamma painted their upper lips with black pencil to make them look like men. Like a magician she transformed us. We felt like the inhabitants of some strange distant land, and in our anonymity and the half dark of our dormitory we could do anything, say anything, be anything we wanted.” This ritualistic performance which allows savage transformation creates an uncanny atmosphere in which love and death merge. Although I cannot reveal the results of the performance, I suggest that Kohler understands that “anything” must be restrained, that disorder cannot rule.

She finally reaches the “heart of darkness.” The women remember their love and hatred of Fiamma, the (un)holy center of the past, their guilty actions. It is fitting that the novel ends with these lines: “We do not walk back the way we came. We take another path and go slowly across the flat veld beneath the darkling sky.” They are now enlightened and they must live with the “darkling”—a romantic echo—knowledge they have been granted. Another transformation has occurred. Is it holy? [Irving Malin]