Hollingshead to speak at Shaman

The Healer

HarperCollins

Though not many modern novels deal with spirituality, it is a rare few that try to do so from a realistic perspective. In the new novel, "The Healer," Greg Hollingshead incorporates the themes of nature and spirituality in a realistic way. He focuses on the personal experiences of the healer and takes into account the social implications surrounding the profession. Yet, he does so not in a mystic, but in a pragmatic way with a lyrical style.

In essence, the book is about Caroline Troyer, a young woman with supernatural abilities to heal people. Tim Wakelin, a journalist and recent widower, goes to the small town where Caroline lives in search of a story and Caroline ends up changing his life. The ability Caroline has is well known by the people in the town and by her parents. Caroline's childhood is shaped by her inability to trust her mother and her faith in her father. But her father abuses her and betrays her in a way that completely destroys her.

The theme of abuse is another important aspect of the book. Hollingshead wanted to write about abuse in a way that did not seem like the culminating aspect was the scene of when the abuse happened. He feels that child abuse is a common theme in books and the anticipation of the abuse is not what he wanted to write about. Instead he wanted to convince the reader that the abuse broke down Caroline but also "laid the ground for the spiritual." Hollingshead said, "(Caroline) knows exactly what happened but that doesn't prevent her from being destroyed." Later in the novel, her father continues to be an "evil force" but Hollingshead says that he doesn't even understand what he has done to his daughter.

The fact that this book is more about how people treat the healer, as opposed to her profession and actions, makes it unique. Greg Hollingshead said he was "trying to write a realistic story about spiritual experience." He has done a great deal of reading about healers and Hindi mystics but wanted to explore in the book how private the experience is for the healer. He didn't want to exploit the idea of supernatural abilities.

For him, religion is an exploitation of spirituality because it is organized and "discourages people from understanding the primary reality." But there are religious images in the novel. At one point Tim Wakelin washes Caroline's feet, an image Hollingshead uses to represent Christ. The fact that Wakelin worships Caroline in a religious way is almost problematic. The book however, is not about religious figures, it's about real people with unusual strengths. It is about the personal experience of spirituality.

To express this Hollingshead sets the book in nature. One of the images he uses throughout the book is a rock. Hollingshead says the rock is supposed to be an "image of eternity." The eternity is not only about nature but about giving the reader "a sense of human affairs in the long term." Hollingshead is trying to express that the spiritual is understood as being in the present but that "it's outside of time, outside of human time anyway."

Nature and spirituality seem to come together in the book in a way that doesn't romanticize. The themes in the book help to further other points of the plot like Caroline's abuse from her father, and Time Wakelin's grieving for his widow. The themes come together subtly but the story is still complex and an enjoyable read for all.

- Caitlin Hall

02-02-99