by Keith OatleyGoose Lane
~ Review: Halifax Herald, July 2010
Set against the backdrop of the Hitler’s escalating threat to peace in Europe, Keith Oatley’s latest book, Therefore Choose, follows George and Werner, undergraduates at Trinity College. George is a thwarted writer, studying medicine “because I don’t have the courage to cast off and write.” Werner is German, a philosopher. They become friends and that summer they travel together to Germany. In Berlin, George meets Anna, the editor of a left leaning literary magazine. But it is 1936 and the threat of war is ever present. Anna wants George to stay, to study in Germany. George is clear that this would be a difficult and perhaps dangerous thing for him to do. He returns to England.
It is Anna who sees clearly the consequences of George’s choice to leave. In a letter to him, she writes “One does not make decisions and wait to see what will happen, or whether the decision would be better than some other decision one might make. It is the other way around. One makes a choice to live one’s life in a certain way, and throws oneself into it. One becomes the person who has acted and chosen in that way.”
Oatley’s ponderings on choices as ever unfolding, organic systems which profoundly impact our lives and the lives of those around us create a thoughtfulness which lingers long after the book is closed. But this is a work of fiction, and the hearts and motivations of his characters remain a mystery, walled off from his readers in spite of the drama of their unfolding stories and the conflicts created by the timeline they inhabit.
Keith Oatley is a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. His first novel, The Case of Emily V., won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. This is his third novel.
