|
On one level, there's the drop-dead gorgeous Elizabeth, afraid of intimacy and afraid of leaving her plantation home of Voshaylee. She's married to the ever-handsome and ever-persistent B.K., whom she exiles to Atlanta. But when B.K. returns to Voshaylee to claim his "marital rights," sparks fly.
On another level, there's Philip, Elizabeth's father, the recluse in the attic who is still in love with his dead wife, Maria.
Then there's "Mother," a character that defies a simplistic explanation, especially when his sexual preferences are involved.
For intense sexual excitement, throw in Travis, the young and ever-virile itinerant worker who rides horseback naked in the moonlight.
Catherine, Elizabeth's one-armed aunt, plays a viperous role with her pet rattlesnake.
Over these twisted people hovers Maria, affecting more havoc from the grave than when she was alive.
Crazy Dog, the hound who wanders into Voshaylee, sees everything but, of course, "says nothing."
Those are just a handful of the folks at Voshaylee; at Gavonlee there's a whole other set of just as interesting characters.
With the flashbacks the reader can become a bit confused of who's who, but the handy cast of characters reference in the front helps.
Don't dismiss any character, thinking he or she is unimportant, because each plays a vital, and quite shocking, role in the denouement.
Here's how B.K. describes Voshaylee on his ride in to see Elizabeth: "Voshaylee is only about 45 minutes from my place inside the circle of I-285 surrounding Atlanta. But it might as well be hundreds of miles and many years in the past. To be in Voshaylee more than a few days is to forget that the world has places like McDonalds, Computer World, Six Flags and 24 movie houses. Voshaylee would be an ideal escape for some people, if it were not for the morose and forbidding atmosphere that lies huddled around the place like a moist blanket of fog, even on a sunny day."
While the reader may be distinguishing what's real and what's not in "Crazy Dog Song," Addison captures the thin line of reality with: "People dream in sleep, and people not dreaming in sleep, dream in semi-sleep. The mind if caught off-guard in night thoughts running random. Love and hate, pity and self-pity, theme and antithesis wallow side by side between thin lines that fade and give, losing their strength as separators, and soon all thoughts are tied in a million knots, folding together, overlapping. The night mind has no walls or guides as the day mind. The tiny ant that crosses the sleeping face becomes a fiery hot sword ripping in the flesh at the hands of laughing tormentors. The hand dangling over the side of the bed with circulation stopped is suddenly being crushed under a fallen column of antiquity or caught in a trap from which it cannot be retrieved. The slight sound of a creaking roof is the ominous crash of a dungeon door that blocks the way to freedom and closes in perpetual blackness The body twitches. The pain is real. And the night mind works on, crawling."
Addison bases the title of her book on a thin line, too... that thin line between sanity and insanity.
"Act like a crazy dog. Wear scarves and other fine clothing and dance along the road singing crazy dog songs after everyone else has gone to bed" reads the Crow Indian saying quoted at the beginning of the book.
Long after everyone else has gone to bed, the reader of "Crazy Dog Song" will still be up well into the night, wondering how Addison aligns the past with the present, as well as reality with dreaming.
|
