Borderline by Janette Turner Hospital
"Borderline" by Janette Turner Hospital is a novel that intricately weaves elements of a thriller with deep psychological and political themes. The story follows Felicity, an art gallery owner, and Augustine "Gus" Kelly, a troubled salesman, whose lives are forever altered when they encounter a harrowing border incident involving a truck transporting illegal Salvadoran refugees. Their impulsive decision to smuggle one of the refugees, Dolores Marquez, leads them into a dangerous web of conflict involving warring political factions and intelligence forces, raising pressing questions about identity and morality.
The narrative is presented through the perspective of Jean-Marc Seymour, Felicity's stepson, who attempts to piece together the events surrounding their disappearance. This complexity is heightened by a fractured plot and shifting characterizations, inviting readers to engage with the ambiguity of truth and memory. The novel challenges conventional storytelling, employing the thriller genre as a backdrop for a richer exploration of existential and social dilemmas, particularly regarding borders—both physical and metaphorical.
Hospital’s work not only captivates with its suspenseful elements but also serves as a commentary on the effects of crossing boundaries and the human experience entangled in socio-political struggles. The characters, while at times caricatured, embody the broader issues of displacement and the search for belonging in a turbulent world.
Borderline by Janette Turner Hospital
First published: 1985
Type of work: Surrealism
Time of work: The 1980’s
Locale: Boston, Montreal, and places between
Principal Characters:
Felicity , an art historian and gallery curatorAugustine “Gus” Kelly , a traveling insurance salesmanJean-Marc Seymour , Felicity’s stepson, the narrator
The Novel
On one level, Borderline is a thriller. Felicity, the owner of an art gallery, and Augustine “Gus” Kelly, a hard-drinking salesman and philanderer, are about to cross into Canada from the United States when a bizarre border incident introduces them to each other and to a world of intrigue and danger. A refrigerated-meat truck in front of them is inspected by immigration officials, who have been warned that it is being used to transport illegal aliens. Inside the truck, the officials find a dozen Salvadoran refugees, some already frozen to death. In the confusion that follows, Felicity and Gus discover Dolores Marquez hidden inside a carcass of beef, half dead from exposure. Impulsively, they smuggle her across the border.
After Felicity and Gus return to their normal lives, their humanitarian deed dogs them. They become involved in a violent struggle between warring Salvadoran political factions and intelligence forces. After a mysterious spy posing as an FBI agent tells Felicity that Dolores was brutally murdered soon after being smuggled across the border, another person telephones her to contradict that claim. Felicity and Gus, separately, try to trace her. The questions of who Dolores is, and whether she is still alive, become increasingly unclear, as do the alliances of a variety of shadowy figures who attempt to convince Felicity to help them.
While Felicity follows leads in Boston, Gus returns to the country cabin near Montreal, where he and Felicity last saw Dolores. Quickly, however, he sinks into a trough of despair and drunkenness that is exacerbated by his wife’s leaving him after suspecting that he is once again being unfaithful.
The novel is not, despite this narrative thread, merely high melodrama. To begin with, the reader has been told as this action unfolds that it may all be a figment of the narrator’s imagination. The narrator is Jean-Marc Seymour, Felicity’s stepson, a piano tuner who tries to piece together sketchy facts and surmises to figure out what happened to Felicity and Gus, who have become, like victims of the civil conflicts conducted in Central America and abroad, desaparacedos—the “disappeared ones.”
Jean-Marc’s speculation about Felicity’s fate only begins to explain the complications of the novel. Borderline’s plot is fractured, its characterization purposefully inconsistent or confused. It willfully defies expectations of how a novel should proceed. Janette Turner Hospital has used the thriller format as a framework. She exploits its metaphoric possibilities and introduces many other elements to create a strange amalgam of aesthetic, political, and psychological contemplation. Yet she also aims to retain, on one level, the thriller element of a plain good read.
Less central characters in the novel provide the context for the more cerebral considerations. Jean-Marc views his duty to immortalize Felicity as an opportunity to take center stage. Felicity’s lover, Jean-Marc’s father, is a famous artist referred to as the Old Volcano. Art is Felicity’s life, and when she sees the refugee hiding in the beef carcass, she imagines it to be “La Magdalena”—an image from a Renaissance painting by Perugino. That name and the others ascribed to the mysterious woman suggest some of the dimensions of Hospital’s intensely academic exercise. The fleeing alien is also referred to as “La desconocida,” or “unknowable one,” and as “La Salvadora,” “perhaps because of where she was from,” but just as bluntly to suggest a quality of the art that she resembles.
The Characters
Jean-Marc says that he has constructed the story of Felicity’s disappearance from odd pieces of evidence. Yet he also lays claim to a rare gift for tinkering. One requirement of his trade, he says, is precision: “I tap, I listen, I adjust the pins, I am priest of austere and inviolable computations.” That, he says, is only a beginning, for then,
This is where tempering comes in.
This is where art and intuition and musicality apply.
This is what distinguishes the master piano tuner from the mere technician.
Breaking free from his usual lowly role in artistic performance, he assumes the role of the maestro of his imagined representation of reality.
At the outset, Felicity is no more politically active than the philandering, venial Gus. Her interest is art. She is a distinguished art historian and curator of an art gallery in Boston. As Jean-Marc explains, however, she is a woman who has spent her life crossing geographical and spiritual borders, a skill which recommends her to Jean-Marc’s father. Felicity is chief among many consorts of the Old Volcano, the voracious artistic genius whose creativity and life flout societal borderlines.
Jean-Marc recalls that Felicity spent her childhood in India and Australia before coming to Canada and the United States, and imagines that she, always the vagabond, will eventually reappear. Yet there is a dark, foreboding side to Felicity, too. In a “wilderness file,” she keeps clippings of “dark and bizarre events, world news, the familiar international insanities.”
While Jean-Marc’s characterization of Felicity makes her appear ready-made for a disaster that will echo with existential significance, his depiction of Gus suggests that demise is his natural fate. A traveling insurance salesman, he sells people on the notion that they can shore themselves up against dying, against disappearing. His own policy calls for sexual infidelity on the road. His gift for lust is, however, limp and infertile compared with that of the Old Volcano. For Gus, philandering is furtive, and he appears to be biologically enslaved to it, just as he is to the alcohol that ceases to provide him with an emotional haven.
The representatives of clandestine Central American political groups whom Felicity and Gus encounter are less characters than caricatures. One, who shadows Felicity in an attempt to trace Dolores, is named Hunter. If the characters are wooden, the causes they pursue nevertheless suggest central, contemporary political questions involving the nature, morality, and resiliency of national borders.
Critical Context
In Borderline as in her two earlier novels, Hospital demonstrates her fascination with the effect on people of stepping outside the boundaries that hold their lives together. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (1982), which won the fifty-thousand-dollar Seal First Novel Award for Canadian-landed immigrants and citizens, for example, presented the outcome of a clash of Western and traditional Indian beliefs.
Borderline impressed some critics as a culmination of Hospital’s narrative and metaphoric skills but occasioned others to suggest that she had grossly overtaxed them. Both detractors and supporters cited the unforgiving texture of the novel and its disdain for readers’ normal expectations of fiction. Other charges made against Hospital’s earlier work could be made against Borderline, too, such as that characterization is patchy and rarely rings true.
Bibliography
Boston Magazine. Review. LXXVII (December, 1985), p. 122.
Cameron, Elspeth. “Borders,” in Saturday Night. CI (April, 1986), p. 57.
Library Journal. Review. CX (September 15, 1985), p. 93.
The New York Times Book Review. Review. XC (September 1, 1985), p. 8.
Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXVIII (August 9, 1985), p. 63.