The Towers of Babylon
Michelle Kaeser
Freehand Books, 2019
Winter Willow
Deborah-Anne Tunney
Enfield and Wizenty, 2019
Review by Marcie McCauley
Near the beginning of Michelle Kaeser’s debut novel The Towers of Babylon (Freehand Books, 2019) there’s talk of Venezuela’s Torre David and, near the end, talk of Saudi Arabia’s Jeddish Tower. In contrast, the tallest structures in Deborah-Anne Tunney’s debut novel Winter Willow (Enfield and Wizenty, 2019), are historic three-storey homes with porches and pillars, wherein characters reach for the top shelf and look up at chandeliers.
Both novels, however, chronicle the experiences of a set of characters who are reaching up and plummeting down (mostly metaphorically). Structures differ but themes intertwine—ultimately everyone is seeking answers to life’s biggest questions.
The Towers of Babylon’s setting is present-day Toronto and opens with Joly’s narrative, one of four points of view. Her character has much in common with Melanie in Winter Willow. Joly is a writer and Melanie is working on her PhD dissertation in English, but in 1978. Each woman is making decisions that will fundamentally alter her life ahead.
Joly observes that “maybe everyone has a shaky decade or two”. Her situation is still shaky and she is still young. Melanie, on the other hand, is looking back to 1978, observing her young and shaky years from a safe distance: “It’s only many years later when you recall the time, that things fit into a whole life, when they find their true significance.”
Babylon’s small cast also includes Joly’s best friend, her boyfriend, and her brother. Viewpoints shift distinctly but the structure is chronological, so readers glimpse the other characters through each individual narrator’s segment. Witnessing the characters’ experiences from different perspectives secures credibility and readers’ commitment.
Joly’s narrative launches with a group job interview. The scene’s logistics and dialogue—between the other applicants for the barista job and the coffee shop’s staff are entertaining and engaging. Kaeser builds Joly’s character, while querying patterns of conspicuous consumption, and teasing at the underlying risk of decay.
Kaeser’s scenic writing is strong, her observations astute, and her prose uncluttered. (Another favourite scene is the team-building workshop that Joly’s best friend, Louise, attends at the advertising agency.) There is tension surrounding even the characters whose daily lives seem aimless and untethered: “Contingencies, emergencies, surprises. It adds up.”
In contrast, Tunney’s novel is meditative and atmospheric. The action in Melanie’s story is interior and the most interactive scenes unfold in the campus library lounge. Later-life-Melanie cranes her neck to examine younger-Melanie, which is another way of introducing other perspectives in this first-person narrative, as she can more easily relate to other characters’ past situations with hindsight.
Joly and Melanie both face financial insecurity, which underpins a feeling that Melanie describes as being “cloaked in inertia”. Her thesis work in the ivory tower is stalled, but she does not withdraw from her program—when her funding is cancelled, decisions are made for her. She finds a “way of hiding away, of letting the season’s claustrophobia consume [her]”, where she escapes into stories. She accepts an aging novelist’s invitation and boards at Winter Willow to archive his correspondence and catalogue his libraries. (He has one library on each of the home’s two floors, and the contents of the attic remain mysterious, its entrance locked.) There, she finds “madness kept at bay by routine”.
Decades later, Joly’s boyfriend abandons his PhD work in The Towers of Babylon: “Ideologies in academia have shifted. The student has become the Customer. And the Customer must be satisfied. So what is a professorship anymore, really, but another groveling customer service gig? He might as well be making bagel sandwiches.” (Joly’s brother and her friend both represent financial security in Babylon, as does the aging novelist’s character in Winter Willow.)
Financial security does not guarantee happiness, however. All the characters suffer from some degree of disenchantment, a general malaise—what one character in Tunney’s novel calls “heart-weariness”.
Melanie’s thesis advisor recommends the works of English writers who are confronting the horrors of WWI, but Melanie retreats into Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, for whom the war is present but seemingly faraway. The extremes here exist between the books she turns away from and the books she turns towards. The pretense of calm in writers like Forster and Lawrence contrasts with the devastation of their worlds, but because Melanie seeks to escape those realities, they remain at a distance.
The extremes in Kaeser’s The Towers of Babylon are pronounced and contradictions proliferate. One character muses about labour inequity and modern-day slaves; another acknowledges the practices but consumes those manufactured goods. Adding to the personal disarray is talk of international discord, like Chinese factory workers’ suicides, even while closer to home, another character considers the “veil” on Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct, which was constructed to catch those who leapt off it. (Rumour has it that the aging novelist’s sister in Winter Willow also committed suicide.)
Joly’s friend Louise “never feels well” but she’s “always fine”. She excels at this “career of coercion”, the “mass effort to push increasingly susceptible populations into buying shit they don’t need” but struggles with personal meaning. While she stares upwards, at the ceiling of stars in St. Michael’s Cathedral, another character with a view from above orders too many rounds at a rooftop bar, and two characters book a room at the top of a boutique hotel for an extramarital liaison.
Sometimes characters reach up and sometimes they simply reach. Like Joly’s brother, who observes: “Alcohol is really not so unlike religion: both make the user a little more comfortable with the idea of imminent death.” And Winter Willow’s Melanie, who tries to refocus on her thesis, to find the “meaning that had been so important”, the “place where I could be alone and think about where fate was leading me”.
This place where one can think: soaking in a bath scented with products manufactured by companies that operate unethically, staring at the roof of a cathedral with stars painted like the ones on a child’s ceiling, a baseball diamond, a coffee shop, a campus library, a snowy street, an attic room. This place, wherever it is—it’s essential.
Joly slips into writing short stories: “Hope swells in her as she conjures a vision of a rejiggered collection made up of a perfect combination of these new titles and some of her older work.” Michelle Kaeser’s The Towers of Babylon is wickedly funny, a pleasure to read, and spot-on in its social commentary.
Melanie slips into her study of Mansfield and Woolf and later muses on its importance in allowing her to be “alone and content”. “This is important…this is the way you can survive the bleakness not only of an age but when your life itself sinks into despair.” Deborah-Anne Tunney’s Winter Willow is a sustained note of subdued tension, a gentle haunting, a wholly immersive story about what we lose and what we create.
Ultimately Michelle Kaeser and Deborah-Anne Tunney slip into fiction to share their stories of seekers, of people who move from uncertainty into safety, people who blur the line between risk and respite, people who insist on finding a space, between extremes, where they can write their way back to themselves.
Marcie McCauley writes essays, book reviews and fiction, published in print in Orbis (UK), Room (Canada), and World Literature Today (U.S.) and online at The Empty Mirror, Literary Ladies, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a Resident Reviewer at The /tƐmz/ Review and she also writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. She lives and works in Toronto, on the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wendat–land still inhabited by their descendants.