Magic in a scientific world

He's not a mystic, per se, or a Luddite or a wiccan or an alchemist, but those scents waft over the story now and then as he plumbs the tension between ancient wisdom and modern knowledge. That opposition breaks into the open when a pregnant girl dies and rumors point back to Mammy's herbal abortifacient. With her encyclopedic knowledge of the town's sexual abuse and folly, Mammy has plenty of enemies among the irresponsible men in town, and some hope that her patient's death will provide a convenient opportunity to silence the old witch for good.

While Mammy struggles with crippling guilt, newer enemies begin to swarm in, too. England's system of socialized medicine has drawn the government into healthcare matters that were long considered private. Suddenly, Mammy's practice and even her personal health are matters of official concern: Who authorized her to heal without a license? And, come to think of it, should a woman of her mature age be living without the benefit of modern medical care herself?

Mammy quickly finds not only her profession but her sanity questioned, and for the first time, Fern must move to protect them both against official and maniacal forces that Mammy used to fend off by herself. "Mammy had stood like a door of oak and iron," she says, "between me and the outside world."

The subtlety of Joyce's position is one of the many pleasures of this novel. If there are slips of melodrama and pretension here, they quickly dart behind toadstools, and we're left to consider the friction between nature and technology.

On one side, members of The Few, a shadowy group to whom Mammy belongs, have no use for pharmaceuticals and X-rays, while on the other side, the doctors regard Mammy's herbs and premonitions as ridiculous.

But Fern struggles to nurture some compromise between these worlds. When Mammy can't work any longer, Fern enrolls in a midwife course and does her best to endure the instructor's condescension and the chilling impersonality of the hospital. She can effectively sense the position of a fetus with her touch, but she marvels at the ultrasound machine. Is there no overlap, she wonders, between these two competing systems of thought?

The hippies camped out at an adjoining farm seem to offer another viable alternative to modern technology, but Joyce is clearly unimpressed by their self-absorption. Their mushrooms help no one; their rejection of marriage falls heavily on unattached children; their commune is laziness dressed up as idealism.

Fern must find some way to harmonize these forces in her life that refuse to cohere. She must temper the materialism of the hospital, the radicalism of the mystics, and the selfishness of the hippies. It's a challenge that almost costs her her life.

This is a strange little novel, full of ideas that are sometimes deep, sometimes vague. A surreal dark-night-of-the-soul climax involving a giant rabbit is particularly dramatic, even if I'm not always entirely sure what it means. But the story is thoroughly charming, in the old and modern senses of that word, and as Fern remarks toward the end of her journey, "Strange can be good."

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail toRon Charles.

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