Seduction Paperback - 2005

From the jacket flap

During her decade in prison, Kate Fitzgerald has learned a few things. The best way to survive is to absorb yourself in your own world. Never make eye contact with your fellow inmates. And the last person you can trust is your prison psychiatrist - not only is he likely to be lazy and incompetent (really, why else wouldn't he be getting rich off of well-heeled clients instead?) but if you complain about him you're going to be labelled as a "permanent malcontent" and denied parole. So when Dr. Gardonne offers Kate a temporary absence and a job working for him, she only takes it because she knows that turning him down could be worse for her in the long run - counted in prison years, of course. But the real challenge is figuring out why he would choose "her.
On the surface, it's pretty clear. Kate has spent her incarceration immersing herself in the writings of Sigmund Freud, and has become a recognized expert on his work. Dr. Gardonne represents the members of a psychoanalytic organization that is being attacked at its core: Anders Konzak, the hand-picked director of the Freud academy, has been boasting to the media that his new research on Freud will bring the entire profession of psychoanalysis to its knees. He's also been receiving death threats. And Kate, as an outsider, is the only one Konzak will talk to. Though she doesn't trust Gardonne, Kate accepts his offer, and she races to uncover Konzak's secrets before he publishes his work.
Never one to work well with others, Kate is less than thrilled to find out Gardonne has hired a private detective to be her partner. Jackie Lawton is a hardened ex-con who has spent most of his life in prison and only recently turned thingsaround by starting his own business. From the moment the two meet, Kate sees that it won't be easy working with a man who isn't really interested in the intellectual battle at hand and who keeps her prison time at the forefront of every conversation. And can he really be trusted? When key players - who were all last seen with Kate - begin to turn up dead, there's the very real possibility she's being set up by Gardonne. After all, who would believe the word of a convict serving time for murdering her husband? All she can hope is that following the threads of Konzak's research to his sources will keep her one step ahead of Gardonne and lead her to the real killer.
With Seduction," Catherine Gildiner gives us not only a gripping detective story full of shifting characters and fast-paced twists but a remarkable intellectual thriller. Through the letters and papers of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and the venerable Wedgwood family, Gildiner brings the personalities and ideological conflicts of the past to life in the present. Along the way we meet an assortment of characters, from social misfits to the demure but resolute Anna Freud, who is still living in the London house where she brought her ailing father for the last year of his life, and where she actively guards his legacy. The story takes us from Toronto to Vienna, London, the Isle of Wight, New York and back again to Toronto - each locale seen through the eyes of Kate, who relishes in the beauty of a world that has been denied to her for a decade.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

PART 1: PEN PALS

Chapter 1: CELLULAR ACTIVITY

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
—Freud, One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis


It's really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why I killed my husband.

The vast majority of people do not kill their spouses. I’ve faced that I’m in an extreme minority. Since I’m locked in here anyway, I decided to try to figure out what I missed that everyone else seems to understand. In a former life I studied Darwin and examined how drives become instincts. It was great for watching birds make their nests and fly south, but it didn’t give me any clues as to why I killed my husband, or help me figure out how to conduct myself when, and if, I ever get out of this cinder-block cell. I tried reading religion, but it didn’t grab me. Philosophy was interesting, but it only made me wonder if I was here at all.

However in 1974, about eight years ago — I’ve been in this cooler surrounded by frozen tundra for nine years now — I ran across Freud. I started with volume one of his collected works, because I’m that kind of person, and read all twenty-three. (I’m that kind of person too.) Freud’s theory is a turnkey operation. You only have to buy into the unconscious and the rest falls into place. It’s like buying the model suite: you may have quibbles with the furnishings, but you have somewhere decent to live.

My greatest interest was early Freud, in all the discoveries he made before he was famous. In his letters he would explain that he’d seen patients all day and was then alone in his small study working through the night. Even when he went to sleep, he had dreams of planing wood — still honing the theory. Freud called this first decade of his most original discoveries, before he had any followers except for one loopy buddy named Wilhelm Fliess, his time of “splendid isolation.”

I was also alone, reading Freud day and night in my six-by-nine-foot cell. Maybe it was the similarity of our splendidly isolated circumstances, but I felt Freud was writing to me. I even answered his letters in a notebook that I kept hidden in my cell. When I got on a real roll in the middle of the night after ten straight hours, I felt we were co-authors.

They say prison is hell and I suppose it is in most conventional ways, though I look at it as a monastic opportunity where all distraction is mercifully wiped away. Not many people share a cell for nearly a decade with one of the greatest geniuses of all time. Of course, I never said as much to my prison psychiatrist — he would think it was delusional — but I feel doing time with Freud kept me sane.



Fifty percent of female prisoners have a grade nine or lower education; forty percent are illiterate; the majority were unemployed at the time of their crime. Even though Native people make up two percent of the population nationally, they are thirty-eight percent of the Canadian prison population. Two-thirds of female prisoners are single mothers. Eighty percent have histories of sexual or physical abuse. Less than one percent of women in prison are there for violent crimes. On the rare occasions when their crimes are violent, the aggression is almost always toward a spouse who has repeatedly abused them first.

Not one of these statistics applies to me. And I’ve always been a fan of stats, since numbers pretty well paint the picture.

The only thing I’ve had in common with my fellow prisoners, as my psychiatrist likes to remind me, is that we’ve all committed crimes. Somehow I don’t find that an icebreaker. Now Freud, on the other hand, was a biologist turned psychologist, like me. In fact he described himself as “Not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker . . . I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.” These are traits I also have in spades. In terms of curiosity I’ve studied everything I could get my hands on since I was a kid. If you want to talk about daring, then let me remind you that I killed my husband. If these are the qualities that make a conquistador, then Freud was a great one and I, albeit pathological, am one as well. No wonder I bonded to him.

I was determined to read everything to find out why I was so unusual. Depending on what psychological assessment you read on me, you can substitute the word psychopathic or paranoid for unusual. I never got too riled up over those labels because, let’s face it, psychiatrists get paid to call you something.

Before prison, I liked science with all the bells and whistles — hypothesis testing, finding physical or numerical results, and measuring the difference. It’s called hard science when you have something hard or physical to measure. There’s a lot of comfort in measuring something you can see. Although Freud was a medical doctor, his greatest love was physiology and the biological research it entailed. When, at the age of forty, he didn’t get the academic research appointment he wanted, he qualified as a neurologist and set up a private practice. Back in the days before psychiatry was an official discipline, the psychotics wound up in insane asylums run by doctors who were called Alienists. As far as I can tell, they were fairly alienated from the patients. Their job was to make sure the doors were locked and the lunatics had straw in their cells. The neurotics of the nineteenth century had nowhere to go, and out of desperation wound up dragging their anxiety, hysteria and nervous tics into neurologists’ offices. Freud, one of the few neurologists who agreed to investigate hysteria, spent hour after hour seeing patients, mostly women, who had all kinds of symptoms with no apparent physical basis. Wanting to follow the rigours of the scientific tradition, Freud was in a quandary because he needed to study the mind in order to help his patients, but the hard sciences didn’t have any methodology for doing so. You can’t measure and quantify mental phenomena. Wanting to stick with the sciences, he had to invent his own science or method, which became known as psychoanalysis.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Very clever . . . definitely a cut above other thrillers.”
–NOW (Toronto)

"There are enough twists, turns and identity shifts to keep you guessing... Like a dream, it makes you question what's real and imagined."
—Time

"Seduction is smart and entertaining — brainy fun for a cold winter's night."
—The Globe and Mail

"Book-review clichés come to mind: "I couldn't put it down," "compulsively readable," etc. Seduction is a fast-paced modern novel filled with snappy dialogue, exotic settings and juicy intellectual plums, somewhat in the manner of The Da Vinci Code."
—Montreal Gazette

"A stylish suspenseful romp through psychoanalytical academia."
—The Bay Street Bull

“Seduction is certainly a romp, and the author’s pleasure in writing it comes across, a rare enough literary event. Her devotion to the subject matter is apparent.”
–National Post

“A fast-paced intellectual thriller . . . Dr Gildner’s insights about the desires that motivate us will keep you hooked.”
–Chatelaine

“Seduction introduces crime fiction to literary mystery. . . . An addictive thriller that combines a crash course on Freudian theory with an old-fashioned detective story . . . Seduction is written with the kind of wit and intelligence reminiscent of another page-turner, The Da Vinci Code.”
–The Hour (Montreal)

“A psychologically deep novel that combines two ex-cons, Anna Freud, and ambitious archivist and a zany catalogue of characters.”
–Elle (Canada)

“A snappy pageturner of a debut.”
–Ottawa Citizen

Praise for Too Close to the Falls:
“Memorably and skillfully told. . . Anyone who ever was, or has, a child considered different
in some way will enjoy this book.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Richly detailed and absorbing, Too Close to the Falls has only one real fault. It ends too soon.”
—Toronto Life

“A fascinating childhood is no guarantee of a fascinating memoir. It still takes a gifted writer to translate the past into a work of art, and Gildiner is a gifted writer.”
—Toronto Star