Web of Angels, dark and painful world
‘It’s the kind of story that can happen anywhere,’ says author
Among the chatter and clattering crockery in the cavernous Faema Café, on the northern edge of the Dupont-and-christie neighbourhood where Lilian Nattel lives, and which she so vividly conjures up in her new book, Web of Angels, without ever once locating it in Toronto, the novelist appears amiable, calm and quite at home.
That’s a bit unsettling, given the material she’s here to talk about: teenage suicide, child abuse and its psychic ramifications, the debilitating effects of Dissociative Identity Disorder, all subjects she covers with compelling efficiency in her book, a psychological thriller unlike any you’ve ever read.
The mother of two boys, aged 10 and 13, and happily married, Natell looks more like the accountant she used to be before embarking on her first novel, The River Midnight, and its follow-up, The Singing Fire.
Eight years later, the Montreal-born writer is still emerging from a dark and painful world she barely knew existed when she embarked, on Web of Angels.
Nattel is reading from the book Wednesday night as part of the Authors at Harbourfront reading series.
So why doesn’t Toronto even rate a mention in the book?
“I want the reader to feel it’s the kind of story that can happen anywhere.”
It was Nattel’s aim with the novel to draw attention to the victims of child abuse after they’d grown up.
“No one gives much thought to what happens to them later, or to how much they’re changed by that experience. That doesn’t mean they’re pathetic, or that their lives are crappy . . . many of them lead rich and full lives, even those who’ve learned to cope as multiple personalities.”
While revisiting her own past, and “certain difficult life experiences” in online chat rooms and forums, Nattel said she got to know people who were confronting similar issues, including some with DID.
In the process of deconstructing events in the novel that lead up to the suicide of a neighbour — a teenaged friend of the main character’s son — Nattel’s multi-character housewife trips over a sordid mystery whose solution requires the combined efforts and varied perspectives and talents of all her inner beings.
It’s a clever twist on an old staple, the banal suburban crime novel, and, without giving too much away, what happens in the novel is rooted very much in events that are currently providing local newspapers with gruesome headlines.
None of this Nattel could have foreseen, of course, but in the detail-rich day-to-day realism of her writing are the chillingly disorientating convictions that evil is rarely where it appears to be, and that a damaged psyche is not evidence of a damaged soul.
“Because there’s so much misunderstanding out there . . . people with DID are afraid to come out,” she said.
“They smooth out the differences, carry their burden, and function in the world.
“They find a life beyond the pain.”