Peter Cameron (1) (1959–)

Peter Cameron’s hauntingly enigmatic novel, What Happens at Night, chronicles the adventures of an unnamed couple from New York who have ventured to a frozen outpost in the northern reaches of an unnamed European country to adopt a baby. The couple is childless—in the past the woman has suffered through several failed pregnancies. She now has cancer, and the couple’s search for a baby has pushed them to this foreign extremity because everywhere else they have looked, her show more diagnosis—indeed, she is gravely ill—has disqualified them as potential adoptive parents. After a lengthy journey, the final leg of which is completed by train, they emerge into the nocturnal wilderness surrounding an apparently abandoned train station but manage to secure a taxi to take them to the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. Cameron establishes the setting of his story hazily, but with many intriguing particulars. It is a world that is at once eerily familiar and yet profoundly alien, with a bleak, snow-blanketed landscape and an indefinite timeline that leaves us with the impression that the train has carried the couple not just miles northward but also decades into the past. Like the town, the hotel recalls the threadbare opulence of a previous era, and its inhabitants equally seem to have fled into the pages this book from an assortment of mid-twentieth-century novels. Livia Pinheiro-Rima, a woman of late middle age who apparently lives at the hotel and periodically sings for the amusement of the hotel’s guests, takes a meddlesome interest in their situation. For the couple, very little goes as planned. On their first day in the town, there is a mix-up, and the taxi, which is supposed to take them to the orphanage, instead deposits them at a clinic run by a local “healer” named Brother Emmanuel. Tensions mount as the woman’s health deteriorates, and the man, who eventually emerges as the novel’s focus, finds himself dealing on his own with the many challenging obstacles standing in the way of him taking the baby, a boy, which he names Simon, home with him to New York. Repeatedly, he expresses doubts about his ability to be a competent and loving father. However, with his confidence buoyed by the indefatigable Livia Pinheiro-Rima, he makes his choice and acts. The novel has a dreamlike, enchanted quality (reminiscent of, though very different from, the author’s earlier masterpiece, Andorra) that Cameron invokes by never quite allowing us to pin down exactly why these people behave the way they do. A shadowy yet beguiling tale of the risks people are willing to take for love, What Happens at Night provides further evidence—as if any were needed—of Peter Cameron’s exceptional genius. show less

Following the death of his wife and daughter Alexander Fox moves to Andorra to start his life anew. He quickly falls under the spell of this tiny isolated country that moves at its own pace, its ancient stone buildings and people who come from everywhere and nowhere. In Andorra's capital, La Plata, he meets an Australian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dent, who have moved to this strange place seeking a fresh start for reasons of their own. He also becomes involved with the Quays, a family of show more aristocrats, well established on La Plata's outskirts in their estate, called Quayside. But as Fox builds new relationships his old life comes back to haunt him, and he begins to understand how difficult it is to re-invent oneself and leave the past behind. Andorra is a mesmerizing and seductive novel. Peter Cameron's prose is a delight to read, memorable and evocative and gently rhythmic, much like the lapping of waves upon the shore. The story unfolds slowly--building mystery and suspense but so subtly that you hardly notice how gripping it is. If you prefer fiction with all the questions answered and everything tied up in a neat little package, then maybe Andorra is not for you, but if you don't read this book you're missing a brilliant work by a master novelist. show less

Peter Cameron’s novel is about people who believe they are out of options and act, or fail to act, out of desperation. In 1950, a young private nurse named Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House in the remote English countryside to care for elderly Edith Hart, who is dying of cancer. Also at Hart House are Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart’s middle-age son, who was injured in the recent war, and a surly cook and housekeeper named Mrs. Prence. When Mrs. Hart dies, Clement, faced with a life of show more solitude, decides that Coral represents his only chance at happiness and asks her to marry him. Coral, utterly alone in the world, having endured an emotionally barren childhood and who was raped at her previous place of employment, comes with issues of her own, mostly having to do with trust and self-worth. With great ambivalence, motivated primarily by the bleak prospects her own future hold out to her, she agrees to become Clement’s wife and the mistress of the house. But there has been a gruesome murder in the picturesque forest behind Hart House, a place where Coral was known to take frequent walks, and she comes under suspicion. Rather than see her arrested, Clement helps her flee. She ends up in London, where she tries to put the murder, Major Hart, and the emotional turmoil she suffered behind her. She builds a new life and meets new people. But the past is never far behind, and two years later when Clement tracks her down, she is forced to settle things once and for all. The novel is short, intricately plotted and fast-paced, and though it seems at times to be composed in a kind of narrative shorthand, it is exquisitely written and emotionally complex. Coral is a fascinating but curiously docile creature whose habit of thinking poorly of herself lands her in hot water more than once. It is only when she learns to assert herself with greater confidence that she begins the process of turning her life around. One of Peter Cameron’s great strengths in his fiction is his ability to inhabit the minds of disparate characters and convincingly convey their desires and motivations to the reader, and in this regard the novel is an undoubted success. Even if a couple of plot elements seem a tad sketchy, Coral Glynn remains an emotionally satisfying and solid entertainment. show less

One Way or Another, Peter Cameron’s first book, published in 1986, chronicles a wide range of troubled relationships and instances of people falling short of forging a meaningful connection. Cameron’s characters are mostly young, emotionally and professionally untethered, and usually in some manner at odds with their families or loved ones. The teenage narrator of “Memorial Day” is so annoyed with his parents, who are a year divorced, that he’s stopped talking. But he’s show more especially pissed at his mother, who in the interim has married Lonnie, a wan and entirely forgettable young man only thirteen years his senior who, in his opinion, has nothing to offer the family. In “Nuptials & Heathens,” Joan and Tom are heading to Maine to spend the weekend with Tom’s family. But it turns out that Joan and Tom have misread each other’s intentions, and when Tom proposes, Joan’s first thought is to wonder, “How could she have let things go this far?” “Grounded” tells of another failed relationship. David’s grandmother is moving out of her Connecticut home and into his parents’ house in California. Since she won’t fly, he’s agreed to drive her across the country. His girlfriend Ann has said she will go with him. David is serious about Ann, but to his shock, at the mere mention of marriage, he discovers that Ann feels very differently about him. And in the poignantly amusing “Fast Forward,” ever since attending college together, Patrick and Alison have enjoyed a mutually supportive friendship that’s never veered into romance. When Alison asks Patrick to accompany her to Maine to visit her mother, who’s dying, Patrick agrees to go. It’s only once they’re in the car together that Alison confesses to Patrick that for years she’s been feeding her mother a fictional version of their relationship. Cameron’s terse dramas unfold rapidly and are told in quick bursts of revelation and sudden insight: a kind of emotional shorthand, if you will. The style is fluid and engaging but doesn’t allow for the deeper kind of character development that elicits a visceral response in the reader. If some of the stories leave a final impression of shallowness, it will come as no surprise that eight of them originally appeared in The New Yorker. Despite this, in 1986 One Way or Another served notice that Peter Cameron was (and still is) a writer who can deliver the goods. His subsequent award-winning career as a novelist has more than borne out the promise of this early work. show less