Author Lawrence Barron releases fourth book
INGONISH HARBOUR — After a career devoted to teaching school and municipal politics, Lawrence Barron decided to do a little writing after he retired about eight years ago.
Several short stories and four books later, the 72-year-old has written a whole new career for himself and there’s no plans to slow down any time soon. Even though he just published his latest book, “The Bear Clans,” last week, he’s already at work on his next book, a collection of short stories.
Normally when he publishes a new book, Barron promotes it with a series of events but that hasn’t been able to happen this year due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“COVID shut everything down so it’s very difficult to do anything now,” he said Friday in an interview from his Ingonish Harbour home. “Maybe later on in the spring if things open up. I usually do one at the Halifax Library and one at the Sydney Library but this year, everything closed down so you can’t do a public event. It’s been a little bit rough.”
It didn’t help matters that his books went missing, forcing him to cancel a book sale although they did eventually show up and the sale went ahead. He’s hopeful he’ll be able to do launches in Sydney and Halifax in the spring when COVID worries wane.
“The Bear Clans” shows a world where competing factions, this time among the animal kingdom, cause problems for each other and those affected rise up - not unlike the world today, says Barron.
“It’s based on class,” he says. “I decided to use the animals based on this type of system where you have the higher class of animals and the lower class of animals and that’s sort of like what is going on in the world today.
People are still being held in bondage, not in slavery, but in bondage because of the economic situation so I thought how can I put that in a novel and I used animal characters to portray what is happening on the the news every night in the fight for rights across the world.”
Barron draws his inspiration from such novels as “Watership Down” by Douglas Adams and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” He enjoys spending time in the woods of the Highlands so he’s familiar with the terrain and wildlife of the region.
“All the main characters act and talk like people so but it’s different in that it’s set with Nova Scotia animals and it’s set in the Highlands,” he says, adding that while it features a cast of animals, don’t expect a kid’s story.
“It’s an adult book, it’s not intended for children.”
With two main and several sub-plots, the book covers a lot of territory within the human condition.
“The books has a lot of themes in it - it’s not just a story about animals. It’s about redemption, it’s about mental illness. It’s about guilt and forgiveness and freedom and betrayal and cowardice and anger and loss and grief and greed and scorn.
“You could relate situations in the book to what is going on in the world today.”