Charades

February 1, 1989
Neither artifice nor parlor game, the title refers to the various versions of herself considered by Charade Ryan, a young Australian searching for her father. Raised in the bush by her mother, an earthy, clear-eyed woman content with her 10 children and no husband, Charade is obsessed by a need to know her English father and leaves to find him as soon as she's old enough. His trail fades in England, but she continues on to Canada; then in America, she attends the classes at MIT of a famous physicist whose resemblance to her father was once noted by her aunt. Charade and the professor begin an affair that is erotic, episodic and very talky, befitting intercourse between a woman whose name echoes Scheherazade's and a man called only Koenig. Amid references to the flux of time, along with quotes ranging from The Book of 1001 Nights through Captain Cook's journals to Robert Oppenheimer, Charade tries to trace the truth of her beginnings. At the same time, Koenig attempts to disengage from his former wife, who was a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. How the two stories connect illustrates Turner's fine-tuned story-telling abilities ( Borderline ), but by this complex tale's end readers may be feeling as full of uncertainty as Heisenberg's principle of physics predicts.

Is there an authoritative version of one's life, free of faulty memories and misinterpretations? Australian wild child Charade Ryan pursues self-knowledge by seducing a renowned MIT physicist because an aunt once mistook him for Charade's elusive, charismatic father. The personal histories Charade tells her lover rival the intricacies and scope of his cosmic theories. Reader Kate Hosking confidently navigates this metaphysical maze of events and ideas. A listener might easily be lost with a less intrepid guide. Hosking's gift of elucidation blends clarity with enthusiasm. She is particularly enthralling during sporadic moments of dialogue when she suddenly transforms intellectual rhetoric into urgent emotion. It's heady stuff. D.J. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine