WHO GETS TO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE?

In Alberta writer Marina Endicott’s new novel, The Difference (Knopf, $32.95), one of the many differences she outlines is between two half-sisters: the married Thea Grant and her much younger sibling, Kay Ward, the story’s main protagonist.

The novel is divided into two almost equal halves, the first recounting a sailing voyage from Yarmouth, N.S., down through the West Indies, round the Cape to New Zealand, up through the South Pacific islands to ports in Asia, then round the Horn and home.

The second half is a trip by steamer 10 years later, undertaken by 22-year-old Kay and her adopted brother, Aren, from Yarmouth, through the Panama Canal, and back to the South Pacific.

In the same way that Moby Dick is and very much isn’t just a novel about whaling, The Difference is often a ripping sea adventure, replete with storms, whales, eccentric sailors and ports, but is much more about what a novelist can do — and some certainly feel must do — in post-truth and Reconciliation Canada.

Endicott, who spent a number of years in Saskatoon as an actor and director, and is moving back, takes on the challenge of facing up to the role white, self-declared, decent Christians took in the pain and suffering visited upon First Nations people under the guise of missionary work and education. Indeed, The Difference, freighted with metaphor, is buffeted on high seas of nightmare, bad memories, and interminable argument between the two sisters.

As they head out from Nova Scotia in 1911 aboard Thea’s husband’s ship, the Morning Light, all seems as good as it can be considering Thea’s seasickness and Kay’s uneasiness over being made to feel like the tagalong to her newlywed sister. And there’s more. Kay has long been waking up with gruesome nightmares

— an embarrassment to Thea — about the sisters’ time in Blade Lake, Alta., where their father, a Christian educator, ran a residential school. Kay remembers in vivid details the punishments meted out by both father and a sadistic teacher to First Nations students who seemed wilfully incapable of learning and being grateful.

Kay sees the entire episode through the lens of a child: what she would feel like being taken away from her parents, what extreme punishment would feel like to her, and how, compared to her life, what these children endured is not fair.

Her older sister sides entirely with her father, who she sees as doing God’s work, and she repeatedly reprimands Kay for not seeing the bigger picture, that punishment is sometimes necessary and that, yes, unfortunately, some children died.

As these arguments seethe, Thea’s seasickness is revealed as pregnancy, she loses the child, and in the West Indies the ship takes on a passenger — a white missionary taking the Christian gospel to the South Sea Islands. But Mr. Brimner is nothing like the girls’ father. He’s a gentle Greek and Latin scholar, not entirely sure if what he’ll be doing in the islands is right, but happy to earn his passage by taking Kay under his wing as a student.

Near the South Sea island of Ha’ano, a flotilla of Natives canoe out to the ship, begging for food. Through the confusion, it slowly becomes apparent that these islanders want to trade a small boy for tobacco.

To keep the people from climbing aboard and capsizing the ship, the crew toss cans of tobacco, eventually picking up a breeze and pulling away, with the child. This event is a true story Endicott heard from her piano teacher while growing up in Nova Scotia. She’s made it the kernel of a story about the right and wrong of helping people who may not wish to be helped.

And so, with a living, breathing example of good, or misguided, missionary work right in front of them, the argument between Kay and Thea continues.

Endicott marshals missionaries, captive monkeys, dolphins, whales, a Shanghai garden, and a pair of tuberculosis wards to illustrate the sisters’ debates. As Kay stands on the sailing ship’s deck one day, “up from underneath came a blue-black swell rising in a long arc, longer than thought, unthinking, unknowing, unknown. Kay waited, immensity pressing on her, hovering in the difference between herself and the whale.”

She understands difference and accepts it — her consciousness of it inescapable.

Thea asks about God’s forgiveness, about understanding that, as missionaries, they did the best they could. Would a captive monkey be better off released into the wild? Would the boy they adopted be better off at home starving, eventually succumbing to TB?

Kay is relentless in her difference of opinion, never, as Thea accuses her, being “persuaded to leave well alone but always ... prying into things.”

When Kay glaringly offends her older sister’s sense of right, Thea’s “head went up in flames again, so that it was all she could do to stand still and not lash out in every direction. How much anger had she been swallowing all this time?”

The reader can see where Endicott’s sympathies lie, but her careful construction of Thea’s character, and of the overall story, invites us to be part of a rational, even though often heated, discussion, something sorely lacking in our political and social discourse these days.

The Difference is all about just that: animals, people, different customs in different parts of the world, and the eternal question of who gives who the right to impose their way on another person, place, or thing.

As Kay says to Thea: “I don’t care about virtue, or whatever people say is virtue. I care about being kind.”

Endicott’s new novel shows how many mistakes may lead to kindness.