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The back cover of THE HESITATION CUT announces triumphantly "Blunt is back," and so he is. This time, however, John Cardinal does not accompany him. This novel is a standalone, a psychological thriller set not in northern Ontario but in New York City and it describes the utterly destructive workings of obsessive love.
Brother William has been living at the Benedictine priory Our Lady of Peace in upstate New York for ten years. This is where he fled following the disastrous conclusion of an unconsummated love affair with a young woman during his first year at college, "one of those campus romances one remembers years later as having lasted a year but in reality may have been an intense three or four months." When the young woman breaks it off, Peter falls completely apart and, unable to continue his studies or indeed find peace anywhere else, ends up in the monastery. Ten years later, he has been transformed from an anxious, nervy young man, comfortable only in the school library, into Brother William, calm, gentle, capable of a quiet joke, still happiest in the library, but absolutely settled in his new life.
Then, one fateful day, the library is visited by Lauren Wolfe, a young writer with a cult following who is researching a book on Heloise and Abelard. The prior, Father Michael, has detailed William to look after her, perhaps as a way of confirming the security of William's vow of chastity. If that was the intention, it backfires badly. It takes but one look at Lauren's wrist, which still bears the scar of an earlier suicide attempt, for William to fall head over heels in love with her. Lauren may have her problems, but insensitivity is not one of them. Sensing something wrong, she makes a beeline for Manhattan. But before you know it, William has headed after her, abandoning the priory, his vocation, his vows, and his name. Becoming Peter once again, he manages to track Lauren down and move into a room in the same building where she has her flat.
There he sets up a vigil, convinced that he and he alone can save Lauren (though from what is not absolutely clear in his mind). In time, a friendship grows between them, one that develops into a hot and heavy sexual relationship. Through it all, Lauren insists that she does not love nor is she in love with Peter; Peter hears but does not believe her.
Lauren is not in love with Peter because she is in love with Mick, a bit of rough engaged in dubious activities, who comes and goes in her life at will and who has been known to slap her around on occasion. "In love" is not quite the term - Lauren is as obsessed with Mick as Peter is with her and in an odd way for parallel reasons. Peter loves Lauren for her vulnerability, for the opportunity he thinks she offers for him to find salvation. Lauren is in love with Mick because she is in love with the idea of death, convinced that her flirtation with it is the source of her literary inspiration. (Lauren is modelled on a very early Sylvia Plath, though with rather less talent.) The relationship between Lauren and Mick is painful enough for the reader; how much worse is it for Peter downstairs, listening to it through the ceiling.
The reader knows that this collision between two obsessed lovers can never end well, but Blunt withholds just how badly until the final pages. The resolution, though horrifying, is brilliant in both its economy and its revelation. THE HESITATION CUT is a sometimes claustrophobic read but always absorbing - satisfying, serious, and appalling all at once.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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