‘The Retreat’ a macabre treat
When Maeve Miller arrives at the High Water Center for the Arts in “The Retreat” it’s supposed to be all about new beginnings. She’s broken free of an abusive marriage and is returning to dance after several years not performing.
At 34 she’s at an age when dancers usually transition towards founding their own companies. She wants to script a new choreography of movement, a new physical language she can teach and program.
High Water is a remote hub of artistic creation where visiting artists work in purposebuilt studio spaces.
Maeve’s visit, funded by a grant, begins inauspiciously when a road washout stalls the shuttle bus and she struggles through a rainy last half mile to her destination.
The centre is the six-storey structure, built in 1922 and still exhibiting many Art Deco flourishes and a hot springs spa.
There are two roads but only one that’s travelable in winter, and its grounds are bordered to one side with a sky lift.
When she meets the centre staff and her fellow artists they are a slightly off bunch, full of jabs and tensions. Karo is High Water’s director, “the kind of enviable woman who’s equally at home on an Oklahoma ranch or an Oxford riding club. A Czech-born Saskatchewan farm girl; a painter who was once married to a famous playwright.” She greets Maeve by crying, “My dancing queen!”
Her assistant is Sadie Kwon, “my doctoral student — I found her in Venice,” a quiet, even sullen figure.
Dan is the facilities manager. Maeve first glimpses him dressed in camouflage and chopping wood. He’s an army veteran. Karo says: “He takes his work very seriously.”
The third staff member on site is Justin Doyle, the journalism director, “a lovely kid, pure fun,” again according to Karo.
As for the other artists, there are only two: Anna Barthelmy, a filmmaker from New Orleans on her second visit to High Water, and Sim Nielssen, a sculptor working on a massive, mysterious installation.
Maeve has deliberately chosen to come at a quiet time of year. She wants to focus, to create, not waste time and energy socializing. But she hadn’t really considered the weather. It’s early in the season but the snow, wind, and sheer cold are relentless.
She’s also, for the first time, away from her children, Talia and Rudy. They are with her mother, the woman who wrote the book on not respecting boundaries. No surprise maybe that Maeve ended up married to Iain, who manipulated, isolated, and finally terrorized her.
From the onset, Maeve’s stakes are high and her person raw and vulnerable. As a dancer she was respected, even famous, but her selfesteem has been eroded. She experiences and expresses emotions and situations physically and author Elisabeth de Mariaffi does an excellent job weaving the reader into this tactile sense of lifting and stretching, wincing and bruising.
The chapters are divided by day, and we know from the teaser opening that by Day 7 things have become seriously undone, with Maeve fleeing the centre for the sanctuary of her studio in the woods.
But her retreat began much more amiably, even if she senses everyone has a secret agenda — or, for that matter, just plain secrets.
Karo alternatively gushes and lectures. While Sadie holds herself beyond reserve, Dan is really, really welcoming. Sim’s composure is in its own way unsettling, while Anna and Justin can’t stop picking on each other. Plus Justin tends to film people without their permission. Maybe that’s why someone takes and hides his camera.
It’s drama Maeve has kind of walked into during the second act, and first she observes from a distance, keeping her work forefront.
But then an avalanche ploughs down the mountain, cutting off the centre. The day staff can’t reach them, no deliveries can be made, the power is out and they’re cut off from the nearest village.
At first they rally. “Like camp!” Karo brightens. “We’ll take turns cooking.”
They have to work together, plan together. Maeve feels she has an ally in Anna, who volunteers to move to the bedroom next to Maeve’s, so she doesn’t feel alone.
But then: Anna “douses the lantern before she goes, closes the door between their rooms softly behind her. Maeve sips the whisky in bed, the buzz reaching her cheekbones. Just as she’s drifting off, there’s a knock or some sound from next door.”
The racketing risk and fright is reflected and embodied in the wildlife around them: the delicate, imperiled deer; the rutting, startling herd of elk; the menace of a possible bear.
And as the hours pass with no rescue, Mariaffi’s classic horror setup gets ever more bizarre and macabre.
It’s a tribute to her skill that here, as in her previous work like “Hysteria,” that even as everyone — readers and characters alike — know this genre’s Number One rule, figuratively if not literally is “don’t go into the basement.”
But all hands keep veering in the most dangerous direction. Character and circumstances lure them there. Come hell or High Water.