3.5 Stars
The protagonist, John Delano, is an RCMP officer nearing
retirement in Saint John, New Brunswick.
He receives a letter which suggests that a 13-year-old boy went missing
from a foster home twelve years earlier.
Delano feels he must investigate but there seems no record of such a boy
since he was never reported missing and even his name is unknown. His very existence is questionable, though
the novel’s opening flashback shows that he did indeed exist and explains what
happened. Delano is thwarted every way
he turns, a colleague even suggesting Delano is planting evidence. Regardless he persists.
Delano is a broken man.
His health is failing, his career has stalled, his marriage has failed,
and he is tormented by the unsolved disappearance of his stepson and by the
horrors he witnessed during the Rwandan genocide. Delano arouses sympathy in the reader. He has suffered a great deal. He feels responsible for his stepson’s
disappearance since he wasn’t at home because of work; the boy’s last words to
Delano were, “’Dad, you forgot to say goodbye’” (178). When his psychiatrist asks if he has ever
considered suicide, Delano replies, “’Oh – not so often. Four, maybe five times a day’” (171). When asked if he has friends, he says, “’Not
that you’d notice’” (201). His
professional reputation has suffered; his actions and comments have been
incorrectly interpreted to label him a racist and sexist.
He also arouses admiration.
Delano is a brilliant man with uncompromising ethics. He has a personal code of honour. Believing that evil exists in the world (69),
Delano feels that he must root out evil wherever he suspects it lies. If his pursuit of evil means that he must
suffer, so be it: “If Saint Catherine’s
heart could be pierced by the cross of Christ, why shouldn’t his be”
(178)? Delano is very much David in a
David versus Goliath struggle between good and evil. He and his goodness are at odds with a
society in which political correctness and appearances take precedence, in a
world in which “common decency” (117) is exceptional. His
decisions and actions often complicate the struggle; his unwillingness to
deviate from his principles means his enemies can portray him as an inflexible
troublemaker.
There is one major problem with how Delano works on the
case. At the beginning, he mentions that
though he is no longer an active officer, he does get called in to work on
cases: “He was better than good at
them. Why this was he wouldn’t have been
able to tell anyone. He had in fact been
around the globe doing work. He had been
an officer for many years” (11). His
reputation proves to be deserved, but his powers of observation seem almost
superhuman. Everywhere he searches he
finds objects that are clues to a decades-old disappearance. Every object he finds turns out to be
relevant to the case. From the flimsiest
of clues, he builds a narrative that always proves to be correct. Some of his leaps of logic are astounding. Often he seems to rely only on
supposition. It is understandable,
therefore, why he is often regarded with suspicion; evidence does appear by
chance and he always makes astute analyses and uncanny predictions. At the end, one colleague is astounded and
asks, “’I know he is good, but is he that good?’” while another replies,
“’Except . . . he is that good. He
always has been that good’” (255).
In terms of characterization, another issue is the portrayal
of the villains. Melissa Sapp, for
example, seems to be the embodiment of evil.
A career politician, she seeks revenge against Delano because he openly
opposed her decisions many years earlier.
She portrays herself as an altruist but she is a hypocrite because she
does only things that will aid her ambition and bring her more power. She is beautiful and intelligent and uses
those traits to be unscrupulously manipulative.
The author takes pains to state that Sapp “did have one entirely
admirable trait. . . Although not in her marriage, she did have loyalty in most
other things that concerned [her husband]” (266). The author, however, “doth protest too much,
methinks.” Velma Cheval is another
villain who, likewise, seems to have no redeeming qualities.
The tone of the novel is sometimes troubling; the author’s anger
almost overpowers the narrative. He
lashes out at academics, social workers, feminists, political bureaucrats, and
even writers. For example, Canada’s
special envoy to the UN is described:
“This special envoy had the pallid, studied look of a world-weary
intellectual and a practised, face-saving inscrutability when he spoke of
delicate matters – matters when to actually be concise and forthright was
critical. That is, like so many
diplomats, the more vital the need the more tenuous the response” (75 –
76). Then there are comments like, “[John]
had seen as many self-serving and wounded feminists as chauvinists. A few of them had murdered. But more of them had done something even
worse, in John Delano’s mind unforgivable: Like some of the writers he had got
to know from Newfoundland to Saskatchewan, they had pandered” (60). Professors do not fare well: “the security professors had, the safety they
enjoyed, the coddling they experienced, . . . and the monies they received
seemed disproportional to anything they had achieved. If there was an ideal idle class, a class
that pretended to have great experience, even great suffering, without
experiencing the pain, professors certainly came close” (160).
Another weakness in the book is the interconnectedness of
characters. Saint John is not a huge metropolis, but it is
not a small town either. It is unlikely
that everyone will have a direct connection to Delano. When the relationship between Delano and a
petty criminal is revealed at the end of the novel, it explains a lot, but then
everyone seems related to everyone else.
“By some trick of fate” (77), a political mandarin is the father of a
man Delano once arrested. That son
influenced the decisions of the parents of the missing boy and is a friend of
Melissa Sapp. So many tricks of fate
seem excessive. Certainly, Melissa Sapp’s involvement in so many aspects of
Delano’s life over so many years stretches credulity.
My review of this book seems negative, and I feel there are
definite problems. Nonetheless, I would
recommend it. David Adams Richards has
been a favourite novelist of mine for many years; in my blog, I’ve mentioned
that his Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul is a book that should be read
by all Canadians. Though this book is
not his strongest, I still found it enjoyable.
A damaged detective solving a case suggests a police procedural, but
this is anything but a conventional mystery.
It seems that David Adams Richards always surprises and offers something
out of the ordinary.
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