The blurb of Timothy Findley’s Spadework suggests that lust and murder lie within, but it’s no crime story, unless you count infidelity. Griffin Kincaid, a promising young actor in Stratford, Ontario, is initially corced into, then becomes a willing participant in, a gay love affair, while his wife grows sexually obsessed with a Greek-godlike telephone repairman. Meanwhile, in the suburban setting against which their marriage unwinds, a rapist-murderer is in the prowl, attacking single women in their homes. Most of these events are supposedly set in train when a gardener cleaves a telephone line with a spade: unreceived messages lead to disaster. But this device seems contrived; it isn’t clear—apart from the repairman episode—why they wouldn’t have happened anyway. Best thing is the description of the effect of the marriage breakdown on the couple’s child: his descent into sullen aggression rings both accurate and chilling.

I’d heard good things about Findley; his Famous Last Words has a strong reputation. But this posthumously published final work disappointed me. He was once described as “Canada’s finest living novelist”, and I’d imagine Saul Bellow would have a thing or two to say about that. But a more obvious point of reference, given the theatrical background, would be Robertson Davies, and on this showing, at any rate, Findley lacks Davies’ ability to fold the wonderful into the everyday. And just to throw a non-Canadian into the mix, any novel taking the Clinton/Lewinsky imbroglio as a major theme invites comparison with Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and is pretty assuredly going to come off second. Not one for the mystery genre fans. Not sure why Faber thought it would be, actually.