The Cloud of Unknowing - Hardcover

Cook, Thomas H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151012601 ISBN 13: 9780151012602

Publisher: Harper, 2007

Synopsis

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who—like David and Diana’s father—is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason’s condition.
 
Perhaps this is why, when Jason drowns, Diana will not accept the authorities’ conclusion that his death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. She begins to send David faxes and e-mails about ancient murders, driven by her growing belief that the earth is Gaia, a living witness to her son’s murder who could give evidence in the case she is building against her husband. David soon fears for his own family’s safety as the seductive qualities of Diana’s manic energy become impossible to ignore.
 
In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas H. Cook is the author of nineteen novels and two works of nonfiction. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award six times in four different categories, most recently for Best Novel for Red Leaves. His novel The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best Novel. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

Reviews

Starred Review. Jason Regan, a severely schizophrenic child, is found drowned in a pond behind his family's home in this unusual, chilling mystery from Edgar-winner Cook (Red Leaves). Jason's mother, Diana, believes that her ex-husband, Mark, has murdered their son. The story is narrated by Diana's brother, Dave Sears, who comes to believe Diana has gone insane. Dave has good reason to think so; their father was a raving paranoid schizophrenic. Cook employs a curious narrative structure, dividing the story into two alternating sections: one in which Dave is being interviewed by a police detective about an unnamed crime, written in second-person, and another that Dave narrates in first-person. In the beginning it's unclear if a crime occurred at all; the police rule that Jason walked into the pond on his own. Then it appears that there was not only one murder but possibly two, three or even four. Cook reveals all the pieces of the shocking story with an absolutely steady hand. It's a bravura performance. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Mania and mythology are among the intriguing topics tackled in this latest mystery from Edgar winner Cook. David and Diana Sears were raised by a paranoid schizophrenic father, who dispensed arduous intellectual quizzes and flew into frightening fits of rage. In his father's twisted world, David existed only in his brilliant sister's shadow; he was "checkers" to her "chess." When the father (referred to only as "the Old Man") dies, David is happy to see Diana getting on with her life. She marries a brainy biochemist and has a son, Jason. But it quickly becomes clear that Jason is not like other children: Could he have inherited his grandfather's devastating disease? When the boy drowns in the pond beyond just beyond his parents' rural Connecticut home, Diana resists police reports labeling his death an accident. She is certain Jason was murdered. She is soon sending David faxes and e-mails about ancient crimes and forming a disturbing attachment to David's impressionable teenage daughter. Is Diana slowly going insane? In crisp, chilling prose, Cook (Red Leaves, The Chatham School Affair) deftly juxtaposes the maddeningly complex Sears family and a straight-shooting detective "rooted in a world where crimes leap like fish from crystal streams of motivation." Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

We lived on Victor Hugo Street in a rambling, dilapidated house that was the family’s last remaining asset. For years the Old Man had strung a living together in pale bits and pieces, like popcorn on a string, freelance editing, book reviews, a little fact-checking here and there, the table droppings of the literary profession. Sometimes, when his ever-fluctuating mood allowed it, he’d even worked as a substitute teacher at the local high school. He called this “educational day labor,” and despised it. His students were beneath him, as were the lowly, salaried teachers who, he said, pursued their modest pensions like scraps of holy writ. His contempt was bottomless, and it erupted in fits of spiraling rage.

 In the midst of such seizures, he used the telephone like a whip. In the room where I was made to study, a tiny thing beneath its towering bookshelves, I could hear him leafing through the ever-expanding pages of the “enemies list” he kept in plain view on his desk, each entry made up of the enemy name and occupation, along with the Old Man’s one-word judgment: James Elton, professor, lackey; Carolyn Bender, editor, coward; Stephen Horowitz, headmaster, charlatan; and the like. At some point he would inevitably select certain names from this roll of the damned. Then the calls would begin.

 I remembered a particular afternoon when I’d suddenly paused outside the door of his study, then glanced through its slightly open door. He was sitting behind his desk, screaming into the phone: You are a fake, you hear me! You are a plagiarist! I listened as he steamed on, citing the crimes and misdemeanors of whomever he’d called. He’d gone on and on, then abruptly stopped, so that I’d heard the voice at the other end, metallic and inexpressive, The time allotted for this message has expired. Please call again to continue.

 It was pathetic, I thought at the time, all that mighty rage futilely expended into the insensate ear of an answering machine. King Lear had thundered against our earthly plight. In comparison, the Old Man’s fury seemed little more than sour grapes monstrously inflated. When he died, I felt that a dark, devouring force had been stilled at last. I wore his death like wings.

 At the gravesite, I told my sister exactly that, then added, “You can go on with your life, Diana. You don’t have to take care of him anymore.”

 She nodded silently, then tossed a single rose into his grave.

 And I thought, At last she’s free of him. At last she can be happy.

 But then came Death, as the Old Man might have put it in his stilted and archaic dictum, an untimely death that came like that fabled highwayman whose poetic exploits Diana had so often recited for his pleasure, Riding, riding, riding, as I can hear her even now, up to the old inn door.

It was a Friday afternoon when the court pronounced its judgment that no one was to blame for Jason’s death and that no one would be held accountable for it. Since Diana had already separated from her husband, Mark, by then, I’d come to the courthouse with her instead, the two of us seated at the front of an almost empty courtroom, listening silently as the judge declared Jason a “victim of misadventure.”

 “Shallow,” Diana whispered. Then she stared directly at the judge, watching as he rose and left the room.

 “Shallow,” she repeated in a tone exactly like the Old Man’s when he closed a book and with a word pronounced his verdict.

 I started to get up, and expected Diana to do the same, but she didn’t move.

 “Not yet,” she said, and gently tugged me back down onto the bench beside her.

 She remained seated for a long time, her hand resting on mine, both of us now waiting as Mark rose and left the courtroom. He was dressed in a white shirt and dark blue trousers, his usual attire. As he left, his eyes briefly darted toward Diana, then no less quickly skirted away.

 For her part, Diana never glanced toward Mark, but instead held her gaze on the mythical representation of blind justice that hung from the wood-paneled wall behind the judge’s bench. She breathed slowly, rhythmically, and her hands remained steady, with no hint of trembling. She kept her back straight, her head erect, and seemed determined to stay that way, not to grow faint or swoon. In such an attitude, she looked more like a warrior than a grieving mother, as if grief itself had become a lifted sword. Her eyes were dry and her lips were pressed together tightly, like someone sealing in a scream, though other than the few words she’d already uttered, she made no sound at all. After a moment, she closed her eyes and for those few seconds she actually looked resigned to the court’s decision, ready to accept it and move on.

 “Diana,” I said softly. “We should go now.”

 She nodded but her eyes remained closed, her body eerily still.

 After a moment, people began to trickle back into the courtroom, Bill Carnegie among them, looking suitably solemn in his neat gray suit. He’d represented Mark in the divorce, though there’d been little for him to do beyond making the offer Diana had immediately accepted.

 “Hello, Dave,” he said as he passed on his way to the defense table.
 Diana opened her eyes and stared at him.

 “Hello, Mrs. Regan,” Carnegie said.

 “I’m Miss Sears now,” Diana told him, though without any hint of bitterness, merely a fact-checker making a small correction.

 “Ah yes, of course,” Carnegie said.

 “The court has determined that my son died by misadventure,” Diana added.
 Bill glanced at me warily then turned back to Diana. “Anyway, nice seeing you,” he said, and quickly continued down the aisle.

 We rose, walked out of the courtroom and into a radiant late September afternoon, its light so bright it seemed to sparkle. Diana drew her hair into a bun and pinned it, exposing her long white neck in such a way that she looked oddly sacrificial, like a woman to be killed in exchange for rain.

 We reached my car, and without a word Diana took her place on the passenger side and waited for me to get in behind the wheel. She said nothing as I put the key in the ignition, turned it, and began to back out of the shady space where I’d parked. We were already at the main road before she spoke.

 “Truth matters, doesn’t it, Davey?” she asked.

 Her question abruptly returned me to the dinner-table inquisitions I’d endured from the Old Man, philosophical questions to which he’d demanded quotation-studded responses. His intimidating voice crackled in the air: What say you, my young Daedalus?

 “You sound like the Old Man,” I told her.

 “I didn’t mean to remind you of Dad,” Diana said. I shrugged, as if wholly indifferent to the mention of his name, though I continued to recall the nightly interrogations at the dinnertable, the Old Man firing questions or demanding that I recite whatever passage he’d assigned me. I’d always responded haltingly, stammering and faltering, forgetting lines, going blank. Which was when Diana had always cut in, lifting her small white hand into the air, saving me from any further ridicule or humiliation.

 “Bleak House,” Diana murmured.

 Before the Old Man’s death it had been typical of Diana to encapsulate everything in a book title, as if her mind worked in a high-velocity shorthand. But the practice had abruptly disappeared at his gravesite, and it surprised me that she’d suddenly returned to it.

 “Not bleak for you,” I said. “You were his shining star.”

 Again I found myself returned to the house on Victor Hugo Street, watching Diana from the shadowy corner where I stood like a poor relation, listening as she recited passage after passage, the Old Man erect in a chair before her, breathing softly, his shining black eyes fixed upon her. These recitations had been the way she’d found to quench the fires that burned inside him, the rage he felt for the world’s indifference to his genius, its corruption and mediocrity, what he called, quoting the Rubáiyát, “the sorry Scheme of Things entire.”

 “He could be cruel,” Diana said. “What he said to you that last day.”

 I saw him turn as Diana led me into his study, the cold glint in his eyes, that twitching mouth, the dreadful words they formed. You are dust to me.

 “But he was crazy,” Diana said. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

 Her mood was clearly darkening. I moved to stop its descent.

 “Why don’t you have dinner with us tonight,” I said. “We can all relax. It’s been a long day.”

 She nodded silently.

 “Good,” I said, then hit the small button on the console and locked all the doors.

 Her eyes shot over to me. “I’m not going to jump out of the car, Davey,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.” She seemed suddenly seized by a grim recollection. “Don’t ever think that I’m like Dad.”

Copyright © 2007 by Thomas H. Cook

 

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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151012601
• ISBN 13: 9780151012602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320