An actress in love and in trouble

Lucinda Yates is 28 years old, single, and a renowned Canadian actress at the beginning of The Indulgence, Leslie Hall Pinder's new novel. Cast as Hamlet, Lucinda is interviewed by Eva Ryder, a freelance journalist who happens to be lovely and seductive. They begin a passionate, obsessive affair. Lucinda would like Eva to leave her husband so they could revel in a less secret, less stressful liaison. Eva, however, is unwilling to  divorce Lance; the affair with Lucinda ends; and Lucinda begins a relationship with—and eventually marries—Jack, a therapist.

Thirteen years later, Lucinda, now even more renowned, remains childless and her marriage to Jack has hit a rough patch. Eva is now a world-traveling, successful writer and has a 13-year-old daughter Norma back in Vancouver, and is divorced. Norma, suffering from her mother's indifference and her father's emotional abuse, runs away repeatedly, ultimately hiding out for five days with Lucinda. Norma is reported kidnapped and when the police find her with Lucinda, Lucinda is accused of kidnapping and sexual abuse of a minor (she is, after all, immoral). The Crown prosecutor has a cause, and the press has fresh meat. The last section of the book covers Lucinda's trial for these crimes..

Pinder studied English at the University of Saskatchewan and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. She received her law degree from the University of British Columbia and began practiced law in Vancouver in 1977. She was a courtroom litigator for 28 years. In her first job at a large firm, she was told she had to enter the firm's exclusive men's club by way of the servants' entrance because she was a woman. She went through the front door. Her employment ended.

The Indulgence is Pinder's fourth novel, joining Under the House, On Double Tracks, and Bring Me One of Everything. Margaret Atwood no less said an earlier book was a "haunting . . . novel by a writer of great talent and sensitivity. It treats a difficult theme with humanity and admirable complexity." If Atwood hadn't said it first (and better) I would have sad the same about The Indulgence. Here's an example of the author's writing: "A law firm on a Saturday had the feeling of a place where something counterfeit was being produced to send into the market first thing Monday morning."

My two paragraphs at the beginning of this piece do the author and the novel a disservice. They do tell you the story, but they do not begin to suggest the richness and complexity of the characters and their emotional lives. Nor have I mentioned a major character, Judge Terrance Semple who presides over Lucinda's trial. "Maybe he hadn't always been portly. He had the thin legs and barrel chest of a man past middle-age who had gradually become top heavy. He'd be tough to push over, so long as he was expecting it; but if he were taken unaware, or was especially tired, even a slight nudge would topple him. He often wondered how would he get up again."

Here's an example from several possible that evokes Lucinda's existence as an actress: "Shedding herself for a new life each night on stage was thrilling and Lucinda flourished. The problem was the ordinary. The theater was so intense, having to notice everything, respond to what another was doing, whether scripted or not; it took all her power. At home, she didn't want to be in charge of anything; blindness set in, even before the cocktail hour. Part of Lucinda' myopia was she didn't see that Jack had become a bit flat and predictable, in service to the exhilaration and exhaustion required of Lucinda's high wire profession."

Presumably because Pinder is writing from the inside, her evocation of the judge's thoughts and her report of the trial are persuasive. The text jumps forward and back in time and from Lucinda's to the judge's to Eva's point of view but the reader (this reader, anyway) never becomes lost. I thought Pinder was writing herself into a corner, into a situation where a last minute witness would have to appear to set everything to rights. But no. The Indulgence ends plausibly and satisfactorily and without a surprise witness.