SOURCE: "Imaging the Writer," in Canadian Forum, July-August, 1993, pp. 39-40.

In the following review, Guth finds Graven Images challenging and complex, but somewhat inscrutable for the reader.

Audrey Thomas' Graven Images is primarily a novel about writing, about the ambivalence of anchoring the flux of life in words. Thomas plays with the idea that the images that carve themselves irrevocably into memory are both fluid and fixed, both inspiration and impediment to the writer of fiction. Images graven on memory (grave images, images of the grave) expand and glow in the mind of writer-narrator Charlotte Corbett, but they illuminate only obliquely the lives of her mother Frances, her friend Lydia, and herself.

The novel opens with Charlotte and Lydia on a ship bound for England, in the fall of 1987. Each has her own reasons for undertaking the journey. Lydia, evacuated as a child from the rubble of World...