Review of Meg Tilly's book,

Gemma

"Flip side of Lolita is a darker story yet
IBI KASLIK
Gemma, By Meg Tilly
Syren, 268 pages, $17.95

Gemma, a novel by Meg Tilly, is a graphic if simplistic exploration of the interior world of a sexual predator and his young victim. Tilly is best known for her portrayal as the suicide's gamine young girlfriend in the 1980s sleeper hit The Big Chill, as well as for her performance in the title role in Agnes of God, as a nun who may have murdered her baby. She left Los Angeles a decade ago, moved to British Columbia and wrote Gemma, her second book in 12 years.

Gemma's awful plight begins when the preteen's mother's boyfriend, Buddy, prostitutes Gemma to his friend, Hazen Wood. Hazen kidnaps Gemma from school, stores her in the trunk of his car and proceeds -- through systematic rape and violence -- to transform a feisty, lovable child into a passive sex slave. Hazen's infatuation with 12-year-old Gemma is fuelled by base sexual impulses and by a desire to possess her like an object; Hazen is depicted as a man with little to no humanity.

Gemma is a timely novel considering the kidnapping and confinement of young Austrian girl Natascha Kampusch, which captured the world's attention with its sordid yet commonplace details and dimensions. But Gemma, the character, couldn't be more different from the cool, self-possessed Kampusch, who was also objectified and psychologically tortured.

Unlike her real-life counterpart, Gemma is a raw bundle of nerves, guts and emotions turned inside out. After Hazen is caught and arrested, Gemma begins her life of freedom and regresses into a girly-girl who cries a lot and likes stuffed animals. Her regression is hard to believe -- never mind the fact that she is adopted by the policewoman in charge of her case and that she doesn't receive intensive therapy for her abuse. These are but a couple of instances where situations and characters do not play or act out in a believable way.

While the promotional material touts Tilly's sophomore novel as a "disturbing twist on the theme of Vladimir Nabokov's infamous novel Lolita," a reader would be hard pressed to find any parallels between the two works beyond the slight similarities in situations. For Lolita's success relies on Humbert Humbert's heightened self-analysis, his awareness of the fact that he is a monster. That is: Lolita is predicated on the reader crawling into HH's pathology and his strange, clever, if twisted, universe.

Hazen, on the other hand, is a primitive animal who, until the very end, does not even grasp the nature or the import of his crime. Creating a character like Hazen, who is barely sentient, barely human, is an easy out. Child molesters are the scum of society; there is nothing you can say to humanize them. Or is there? The fact that, statistically, male victims of sexual abuse grow up to become abusers while female victims of abuse grow up to be re-victimized bears exploration. It is too simplistic to create an Evil Child Molester with no redeeming or sympathetic qualities. Making Hazen himself a likely victim in the chain of abuse, for instance, would have made his character more life-like.

In terms of style, what is problematic is that both Gemma and Hazen, who share the narrative in Gemma, have precisely the same stuttering voice. Both narrators have the same stylistic tic of articulating themselves in sentence fragments. The similarities in style render the voices of victim and perpetrator indistinct, which is rather the opposite effect an author requires in a polemical narrative such as Gemma.

Still, although this book is not great literature, it is highly readable for those who have a high tolerance for violence and an interest in what victims of abuse undergo. It's also commendable on Tilly's part that half of the royalties of Gemma go toward organizations serving child victims of sexual abuse; it reveals that the author is not merely exploiting her subject, but has an honest intention of improving the lives of those she writes about.

Ibi Kaslik is the author of the novel Skinny, which is being published in the United States this month."

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There was an article about the writer, Meg Tilly in today's Art Section of the Globe and Mail.

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I find it admirable that someone has used their life's experiences to detail the horrors that are perpetrated on young girls as they grow up. It probably isn't written by the most skilled author. The review points out there wasn't enough contrast in the speaking styles of the two characters. What it does sound like the book captured is the raw horror that young girls experience by pedophiles, especially when they're shielded from prosecution by being members of girl's family. I'm in awe that an author is donating half of the proceeds from the sale of her book to help those who suffer similar abuse.