THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411170683
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
CAROL DAWSON'S new novel embodies a theme central to fiction and to life - the binding ties of past to present. While Dawson places the story in a location rife with history, her native state of Texas, Body of Knowledge offers a universal reflection on how what has come before shapes what is to be.
The well-written tale is told by Victoria Grace Ransom, a woman of midlife who has grown up a recluse in her family's mansion outside the small town of Bernice, Texas. Victoria, deserted by her mother during her youth, has been raised on a steady diet of stories about her parents, grandparents and other relatives. She has heard them from a woman who grew up among those previous generations of Ransoms: Viola, a servant who becomes the center of Victoria's affections.
Through the book, Victoria meditates on the power of the past. ``For history was what I heard, every day: vivid as the color of the sky over my head, rich as the odors of milk and my own excrement and the breakfast bacon, sharp as the dawn screech of my grandfather's peacock. . . history was, in fact, my memory, as real as anything I experienced first hand. It filled me as surely as the dinner did, fleshing me out in a slow round ball.''
Victoria physically embodies a life crammed with history. A childhood disease has wreaked havoc with her glands. By adulthood, she weighs 600 pounds and never leaves her home. Her life is given over to contemplating a sequence of events that she believes has determined her family's destiny.
The history in question dates back to the first decade of this century. Victoria's great-grandfather tastes an iced drink during a summertime trip to St. Louis and conceives of founding an ice business in Bernice. He enters into a lucrative partnership with local cattle rancher Archibald Macafee that launches the Ransom fortune.
The Macafee-Ransom business relationship evolves into much more than that in the next generation, when a Macafee son becomes besotted by a Ransom daughter, Sarah. According to Viola, herself a young woman at the time, what the normally ascetic Grant Macafee feels isn't love. ``It look like love, but it ain't. It make the man do things he wouldn't ever do if he had his sense, and the woman either likes it or she don't.''
Sarah declines Grant's offer of marriage, but she does becomes pregnant with his child. The baby's birth and Sarah's death are strands in an ever-growing web of dramatic events surrounding the Macafee and Ransom families.
Dawson peoples Body of Knowledge with richly rounded-out characters. They include the beautiful Sarah's less-favored sister, Mavis, whose malevolent personality is transformed by the discovery of an abandoned baby, and Sarah's brother, William, a kind man drawn into an ill-starred affair of his own.
And throughout the book, Victoria's graceful considerations of history are reminders of the meaning behind the plot - including the fact that the present always tinges interpretations of the past.
Dawson's first novel, The Waking Spell, earned many favorable notices. Her talents are well-displayed in this new book, which is both entertaining and thought-provoking. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ROBBIN GOURLEY and LISA SLOANE
Jacket illustration by LYNNE BUSCHMAN
by CNB