In Accusation, Bush explores the ethical and philosophical quandaries that arise in questions of innocence and guilt. A novel in which “nothing is certain” (87), it resists passing judgement and avoids supplying the reader with a final, authoritative account of what really happened between Raymond Renaud and his group of circus performers. It’s worth asking whether or not Accusation makes a fetish of its own commitment to uncertainty. As Nichols writes: “our access to historical reality may only be by means of representations,” but this does not preclude “the persistence of history as a reality with which we must contend” (7). That our knowledge about the world is limited, mediated, or otherwise fragmentary isn’t to say that there’s no knowledge to be had, nor is it to say that all truths evade equally. The challenge of postmodernism (is it now post-postmodernism?) is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: to acknowledge the constructedness of our apprehensions of reality while agreeing that the real remains a category worth troubling over.
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