SOURCE: “Just Being Alive,” in Macleans, March 6, 1989, p. 62.

In the following review, Bemrose concludes that Charades is “an uneven achievement.” While praising Hospital's vivid writing and incorporation of science themes, Bemrose finds shortcomings in the novel's evasive cleverness.

Oscar Wilde's words—“Truth is rarely pure and never simple”—could stand as an epigraph for Janette Turner Hospital's fourth novel, Charades, a book that is as much mind-tease as story, as much about what did not happen as what did. Hospital has seemed on the verge of writing such a novel for some time. Ever since the Australian-born writer burst onto the Canadian literary scene with The Ivory Swing, which won the Seal first-novel award for 1982, her richly inventive, highly intuitive prose has strained to escape beyond the borders of ordinary perceptions and narrative style. Now, with the example of certain Latin American and European writers before her, Hospital...