Facing up to your fears
What fears keep you up at night? Forced career change? Being separated from your family? Awkward social interactions? Isolation? The sheer force of nature? Being hunted and unable to escape? Thankfully, with St. John’s writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s new thriller, you don’t have to choose. “The Retreat” vividly renders all those fears — and more — in a book which will probably keep you up until dawn, caught up in its thriller elements, and likely dealing with fears of your own.
Maeve Martin is a former dancer, forced into retirement: “There are no more principal roles for Maeve. Not at her age, and not with this body history.” Taking advantage of a grant for dancers in her situation, she leaves her two children with her mother — their father, Maeve’s ex-husband, is no longer in the picture — to journey to the High Water Center for the Arts to begin the process of creating a dance company. It’s November, so the centre is sparsely populated, and Maeve is happy to get to work, barely tolerating the social evenings.
When an early blizzard causes an avalanche, the centre is cut off from the rest of the world, its electricity and cellular coverage shut down. After a body is found, frozen, outside the main building, it begins to come clear that there is more than the weather and rising tempers to be afraid of: there may be a killer among them.
While her debut, “How To Get Along With Women,” was a strong, literary collection of short stories (it was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2013), de Mariaffi has built a reputation over her last two books — both novels — for her knack for weaving the elements of genre fiction with keen attention to women’s lives and a strong literary bent. She outdoes herself here.
With “The Retreat,” de Mariaffi has created a thought-provoking thriller by simultaneously embracing some very familiar tropes (the isolated setting, the weather disaster and the killer lurking unknown within the small group are all classic materials) while incorporating a realistic examination of the smaller crises and decisions women are forced to confront throughout their lives (aging, family demands, career change and the shadow of male violence are all here, among others).
Maeve is a richly rendered, carefully drawn character, with deep-seated internal conflicts, and a tendency to second-guess her instincts. Her recurring questioning of whether she has said the wrong thing, or may be somehow responsible for other characters’ reactions to her, and treatment of her, for example, are unsettling in their familiarity. By setting “The Retreat” during one of the pivotal moments when everyday elements besieging a woman’s life seem to be conspiring to an overwhelming degree, de Mariaffi vividly humanizes what might, in lesser hands, have been a pro-forma, familiar thriller. Instead, “The Retreat” shines, at once thoughtful and chilling, familiar and unsettling.
Robert J. Wiersema is the author of “Seven