The Thin Place

by: Kathryn Davis

Published by: Time Warner Books

Reviewed by Barbara Radmore

Rarely does a book come out that silences and humbles the reader. The Thin Place is one of this select few. By weaving the metaphysical, religious and philosophical search for meaning into the characters of a common, typical town, Kathryn Davis is able to take the reader with her on a quest for understanding. No aspect of creation is too minute, its role too trivial for notice as part of the world around us, a world we may not really see, a life we not really feel.
The Thin Place is a town like every other town in the world, full of people, animals, plant life and death. The small town of Verennes is home to schoolteachers and book binders, elderly ladies and young girls, bankers and reverends. Animals run throughout the town, escaping together to explore, protect and disappear--family pets and the wild ones. Pansies and the peonies grow there as does the lichen that flourishes as it has for thousands of years. The young can bring back the dead while the elderly can only watch.

Mees and friends since kindergarten are teetering on the edge of teen years. Lorne is the child forever looking for a home. Sunny is the pretty one, the good one, the boss of all. "Three girls, arms linked, shadows misleadingly alike." Only Mees can bring resurrection, a gift that seems timeless but one that can be lost forever in the tumor of evil. In an ending that both satisfies and surprises, Mees' talent proves to be uncontrollable and unreliable as virtue clashes with sin.

Kathryn Davis' extraordinary novel gives voice to the creation of the world, its progress and its potential ending. She creates the threads that follow the events of the past as they unravel into our present and our future. Embedded in the realities of diaries, police blotters and almanacs, the ordinary are extraordinary. The characters live with little notice of their effect on each other or on the world around them. Like the green Dodge Dart and war, the foxes and the flowers that quietly weave their way barely noticed throughout the story, so do the characters as they live, and die, barely having left a mark, never having heard the music.

"Space and time are made out of strings the universe conceived when it was still a baby, little and fierce. The strings wove together, they collided with other strings, releasing even smaller strings which were the new dimensions, humming, humming, humming. If a human being had been there to hear that music, it would have killed him. Eventually the strings made waves, some smaller than the smallest thing we've discovered so far, some greater than the distance between our world and the farthest star."

Armchair Interviews says: Highly recommended as an extraordinary read.