THE SEAL WIFE

The latest strange love tale from Harrison (The Binding Chair, 2000, etc.), who heads north to Alaska this time to follow the sorrows of a young weatherman.

Harrison’s taste for perverse love pre-dated her famous incest-memoir (The Kiss, 1997), and it has apparently not abated much since then. Here, she offers the account of an obsessive young man who finds himself possessed by two speechless women in Anchorage during the early years of the 20th century. Bigelow, a meteorologist sent north by the Weather Bureau in 1915, is a thoughtful, shy type not well suited to the kind of frontier life that Anchorage (a large camp, basically, of some 2,000 men and very few women) then provided. His job is a simple one: to wire the climate statistics daily to Washington, DC, and provide forecasts for the benefit of the local railway workers. He has a fair amount of time on his hands, and distractions are few and far between in Anchorage. He soon meets and falls in love a silent young Aleut woman who becomes his lover for a time but eventually disappears as wordlessly as she arrived. Crestfallen and melancholic, he puts his energies into the construction of a giant kite (the largest ever made) to be used for weather readings. He also becomes obsessed with a beautiful white girl named Miriam who sings but cannot speak. Miriam and her father, a shady storekeeper, trick Bigelow into proposing marriage to her, but he is still haunted by his Aleut girl. There is a good deal of grief and plenty of heavy prose (“Bigelow realizes that he’s been dead for the past year. Dead ever since the Aleut disappeared. . . .”), but everything gets patched up in good time for Bigelow to fly his kite with the Aleut girl by his side in the end.

Leaden, pretentious, and dull: a Harlequin romance in writing-program prose.