Cult Figure

Author Pearl Luke. Courtesy Harper Collins Canada Ltd.

When Pearl Luke was nearing the end of the five-year process of writing her second novel, Madame Zee — based on the life of the mistress of the infamous 1920s cult leader Brother XII — she came across a clipping from the Nanaimo Times claiming that there was a curse on anyone who wrote about the Brother’s West Coast sect.

“I really laughed at that one,” she says over the phone, from the Salt Spring Island home she shares with her partner, poet Robert Hilles. “I have to say it made a certain amount of horrible sense. It was a difficult book to write.”

But Luke isn’t just talking about the enormity of the research, or the tricky task of bringing the story to life without hammering the reader over the head with the historical record. Nor does she mention the challenge of following up her debut novel, Burning Ground, which scooped a regional win in the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Luke is actually referring to more personal difficulties that arose while working on Madame Zee, troubles that ran the gamut from the deaths of three family members to money problems to computer crashes that required her to rewrite chunks of the book.

“There was so much going on in my life when I was writing the book that when I read that article I had to laugh,” she says. “I guess part of me wants to resist that sort of thing about a jinx, but part of me feels there’s something to it.”

And anyone who’s heard even a whisper about Brother XII and Madame Zee will find it perfectly fitting that a certain kind of dark magic is associated with telling their story. Brother XII (a.k.a. Edward Arthur Wilson) was a onetime British sea captain and adherent of occultism and Theosophy who claimed he was a messenger with a direct line to the “Masters of Wisdom.” In the late 1920s, he set up a utopian community called The Aquarian Foundation just south of Nanaimo, B.C., at Cedar-by-the-Sea, attracting disciples happy and willing to do his divinely inspired bidding — all in the name of creating a “universal brotherhood.” Madame Zee was another transplanted Brit whose real name was the more prosaic Mabel Rowbotham. She became Brother XII’s lover and right-hand woman after she moved to the commune in 1929, gaining a reputation for anger, sadism and a penchant for carrying a horsewhip.

The colony fell to pieces in the early 1930s after Brother XII became increasingly arrogant and paranoid — forcing his acolytes to work 24-hour shifts in the fields and demanding they build mini-forts to defend his headquarters against the authorities — but it left behind a strange and muddy tale of gold, guns, sex and black magic. All of which could make for a fascinating epic novel, but it was the bit about Madame Zee that piqued Luke’s creative interest. After watching a documentary about Brother XII, she found herself curious not just about what she’d heard about Zee, but what was left out.

Courtesy Harper Collins Canada Ltd.

“She is essentially a stick figure in the history,” Luke explains. “I wanted to find out about her partly out of a sense of fairness. I wondered if she were really as cruel as they said. She has this vile reputation, but it’s based on three paragraphs of historical account. It hardly seems enough to base such a vilification on. Frankly, it sounded chauvinistic to me.

“What if I went out one day and did something nasty and that was all that was ever recorded about me?” she laughs. “It wouldn’t be the whole story.

“I wanted to dig up stuff to disprove Zee’s tarnished reputation. What I found, instead, were lots of contradictions. Some people said she was horribly ugly. Others called her beguiling. Out of those contradictions I tried to create a character who could have this sort of mixed reputation. Someone who’s real, who, like most people, makes lots of wrong choices.”

In breathing life into the character of Mabel Rowbotham/Madame Zee, Luke found herself talking to psychics, studying the tenets of Theosophy, reading the writings of Brother XII and his disciples, and even tracking down the sorts of plants that grow in an English meadow.

“For the most part, I loved doing the research,” Luke says. “But I’m not sure I would ever write a historical novel again. It was a lot of work. Interestingly, when people read it, it’s the parts I made up — the back story for Zee that I could never find in the archives — that they find most interesting.”

Luke begins the novel in Lancashire County, where Mabel was born, imagining a young girl who discovers early on that she sees things that no one else does — visions, premonitions, she’s not entirely sure what. When her beloved older sister dies tragically, Mabel even sees her ghostly presence. Eventually, she becomes a schoolteacher and immigrates with her parents to Saskatchewan, where she falls in love and marries a handsome bank manager. But after she discovers he’s a con artist and a gambler, she leaves him and begins to truly accept her gifts, exploring her burgeoning interest in the occult, spiritualist matters and her own apparent clairvoyance.

Luke carefully builds Mabel’s story, establishing her essential goodness, but also planting the seeds of the girl’s tormented inner life: her questions about her potential and her growing attraction to extreme people, including a Theosophist with deep pockets and a nasty temper, and, of course, Brother XII. Madame Zee is a powerful and affecting book because of this thoughtful rendering of Mabel’s growth and change, the complex choices (both good and bad) she makes, the psychic ability she cultivates, as well as the roaring 1920s milieu in which she comes of age. The reader is offered a tender and nuanced view into what might have made Mabel into the passionate and polarizing Madame she would become.

“I’m in midlife,” explains the 48-year-old author. “So was Zee when she met Brother XII. As I age, I see there are lots of reasons to act in a bizarre way. I wonder with Zee was it some sort of midlife hormonal change? Was she expressing her frustration? She was severely beaten by one of her lovers — maybe she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Did she act the way she did because of the resentment the other colonists showed toward her? I just think the likelihood of those accounts of her anger and her whip being all there was to the woman is pretty slight.”

Luke, in fact, succeeds remarkably in rescuing Madame Zee’s reputation, creating a larger-than-life but believable character full of contradictions, intensity, intelligence and insight. If there was ever a curse on this book, its author has clearly not allowed it to affect the final story.

Still, Luke is pleased to be finished, glad Madame Zee is finally out there in the world: “I’d like to think the real Zee would like this new version of herself.”

Madame Zee is published by HarperCollins Canada and is available in stores.

Andrea Curtis is a Toronto writer.

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