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Lesser Bainbridge is still Bainbridge

07.10.11

Features perplexing, twentysomething Rose (“She was an empty box, only dust under the lid”), a British dental receptionist on a quest for Dr. Wheeler, a guru-like figure. Long ago, he’d helped Rose get over a disastrous childhood (another classic Bainbridge trope). Equally idiosyncratic, not to mention nervous and angry, is Rose’s driving companion, an American investor named Washington Harold. Harbouring a completely opposite perspective about Wheeler, Harold keeps his true mission – vengeance and murder – a secret.

He’s watchful and harsh as he drives with Rose (believing he is “dealing with a retard” ). Rose, drifting between attentiveness and reverie, formulates her own psychological profile of the man behind the wheel: “he was a soul immersed in darkness.” Their motto might be “Let’s agree to disagree.”

Driving from place to place in search of their on-the-go target, Rose and Harold squabble and kvetch as they encounter odd people (such as a manic woman who took part in an experiment involving massive LSD ingestion) and random and eerie events (they hit a dog in Utah, attend the funeral of a stranger in New York, witness a bank robbery in Illinois). When they finally get close to Wheeler in California, they stumble into one last and unexpected misadventure: the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Source: Globe and Mail