Spadework opens at Stratford’s Festival Theatre in 1998, where Jane and her seven-year-old son Will wait to watch the handsome husband and father Griffin in his debut in Much Ado. Stratford is a beautiful town in Ontario, Canada that Timothy Findley was quite familiar with as he lived there for many years before he died in 2002.
Jane and Griffin Have Affairs in Spadework
It is written in the third person mainly from Jane’s perspective. Jane escaped to Canada from her suffocating rich family who owned a cotton plantation in Louisiana. She maintained an income from a job and an inheritance, which her husband resented to such an extent that he prevented her from purchasing a house.
Jane’s marriage begins to suffer as Griffin questions his sexuality after being pressured by his homosexual director. Both Jonathan and Griffin are married with a son, but Jonathan began his marriage pretending he could be straight, while Griffin begins his affair with Jonathan pretending to be gay.
Griffin slowly begins to abandon his family and then totally sacrifices them for the sake of obtaining better parts from his blackmailing director Jonathan. In the meantime Jane inexplicably falls in love with a telephone repairman she’s dubbed an angel.
Mercy the Nanny and Murder in Spadework
One of my favourite characters in Spadework was Will’s nanny Mercy. She helped hold the family together while Jane drifted off in a booze-induced crush on the Bell repairman Milos Saworski, while Griffin was only focused on how to get the better play parts. Mercy was a widow who eventually found companionship with Luke the gardener. Luke was the one who mistakenly cut the phone line, which led to a number of major disasters including a murder.
Mercy often took Will to the park and tried her best to explain and justify why his parents were neglecting him. Jane was acting extremely selfish because she barely spoke to Will but instead escaped with a bottle of wine while she sketched a picture of her naked angel. The fact that she was previously sexually assaulted by an ex and refused to tell anyone about it probably contributed to her drunken downfall.
Impressions from Spadework
Spadework (HarperCollins, 2001) examines how sexual orientation can affect a traditional family and how greed and/or lust can make people disloyal because they’re more susceptible to succumb to temptation.
The end was a little too neatly wrapped up as all would not be so simply resolved, but Spadework is an entertaining and interesting combination of romance along with a murder mystery.
Other Books by Timothy Findley
Other novels by Timothy Findley include: The Wars, The Piano Man’s Daughter, Famous Last Words, Pilgrim, The Telling of Lies, Dust to Dust and Not Wanted on the Voyage. He received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, CBA Author of the Year Award and he was an Officer of the Order of Canada. Headhunter (HarperCollins, 1994) also won the City of Toronto Book Award.
Sandra Williams - Sandra's a book addict and writer from Ontario, Canada. Her interests include cooking, health and personal development, so many of her ...
