Jane and Anna Campion's Holy Smoke: A Novel

Holy Smoke: A Novel

Miramax Books/Hyperion, $22.95 hard

Call her Ruth. "Ruthless," she quips. But don't be fooled by the spiritually conflicted anti-heroine at the center of Holy Smoke. She carries much more baggage than her self-given misnomer entails. As deceptive as she is vulnerable, Ruth Baron serves as an interesting case study in this oddly experimental novel, the first collaborative effort by sisters Anna and Jane Campion. Built upon the psychological ruminations of its two main characters, Holy Smoke lacks the poetic air that made Jane's The Piano so hypnotic, but compensates with its philosophically complex examination of the human psyche.

When Ruth abandons her university studies to travel in India, her materialistic (and quite irritating) parents initially scoff at her fledgling desire to find "enlightenment" in a locale far-removed from her native Australia. But when Ruth decides to prolong her stay, she becomes involved in a nameless, Jim Jones-esque cult lead by an Indian guru named Baba. After Ruth's sanctimonious mother fails to retrieve her daughter (who refuses to return home even after learning of her father's ailing health), she enlists the services of a renowned "deprogrammer" named P.J. Waters, an uptight mastermind from New York who quarantines Ruth for a three-day intervention. When a battle of the wills ensues, Ruth and P.J. find themselves wrestling (metaphorically) with issues of religion, philosophy, and (literally) sex.

Holy Smoke alternates between Ruth and P.J.'s point of view, and the Campion sisters do a fine job of illustrating the evolution of Ruth's cult experience both prior to and during her deprogramming. Ruth's perspective is initially full of non sequiturs ("God, fuck love. My stomach seizes up -- like a cricketball, no an emu egg"), but as she plays P.J.'s introspective mind games, her prose takes on a more controlled, determined feel more in sync with her actions. P.J.'s character doesn't evolve as convincingly. His professional motivations abruptly fall by the wayside the moment he succumbs to his carnal desires ("Everything is in my dick," he insists). And does he ever succumb.

The Campion sisters create an erotic, psychosexual world punctuated by their characters' incessant (and increasingly acrobatic) quest for self-satisfaction. P.J. never really employs any groundbreaking techniques in his deprogramming (unless you consider seducing your patient a stroke of brilliance). Rather, it is his own obsessions that bring Ruth to her sexual zenith and mental nadir in a sweltering climax set against the Australian outback.

Let's hope the film adaptation of Holy Smoke (due this November and starring Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel) transcends the novel's atmospheric inertia and plays upon its precise characterizations. Judging by Jane's work as the director of The Piano, that should be no problem. The real problem, alas, may be casting Keitel as an object of sexual desire.