Accusation
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013
A Canada Reads Top 40 Pick
A NOW Magazine Book of the Year
While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children's circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations.
With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada's finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover "the truth." After a friend of Sara's begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past.
Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusation follows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bush (Claire's Head) centers her fourth novel on Raymond Renaud, whose Cirkus Mirak takes the abandoned children of Ethiopia and provides them with jobs capering skillfully for Westerners. When some of the performers beg for asylum, alleging mistreatment ranging from dangerous working conditions to sexual exploitation, impresario Raymond flees into hiding. once a victim of baseless calumnies herself, journalist Sara Wheeler is one of the few who considers the possibility that Raymond, who she knows, might be innocent. Determined to find the truth, she sets out to discover whether he is the monster he is accused of being or simply an innocent victim. Her quest will take her from North America to Africa, but whether she will find her unambiguous truths is less clear. The author's disinclination to embrace standard punctuation puts an avoidable barrier between reader and text, and the reward for overcoming this affectation is a tale more tedious than truly ambivalent. It appears to be intended as a depiction of one lone reporter daring to embrace a contrarian interpretation of the facts, but as cases from Steubenville to Penn State show, the default in cases like this is to blame the victims and not the accused. Bush's novel proves more obstructive than illuminating.
