Ponderous gloom is far too dark
Similar to its predecessor, Lane’s second novel features cast of broken characters
Taking place over two days in an isolated B.C. sawmill town in1960, Deep River Night, the second novel by Governor General’s Award-winning poet Patrick Lane, is similar to his 2008 Red Dog, Red Dog in more than just setting. Like its predecessor, it punctuates human drama with poetic interludes focused on the natural world. It features, too, a cast of broken characters and an atmosphere of ponderous gloom.
Art Kenning is the sawmill’s firstaid man. A veteran of the war in Europe, he’s beset by traumatizing flashbacks every time he’s summoned to stitch-up injured workers. The mill’s smoke conjures flamethrowers; the local dump bombed ruins and corpses. If you didn’t already know war is hell, then you will after a long, slow drip of proclamations such as “Terrible things happen in wars and there are some men who can’t let them go.”
To get through the days, Art selfmedicates with whisky and the opium he smokes with the poetry- quoting camp cook, Wang Po. A fellow veteran (though of a different war), Wang Po has seen equally terrible things, but being a Buddhist he’s able “to let things like the past go.”
Among the things Art can’t let go of are a lost love affair with a woman in Paris and his failure to save a Belgian woman and her daughter from the abuses of his fellow soldiers. So when a woman from the village disappears after he treats her for self-inflicted wounds, he sees a chance for atonement.
As the main focus of men’s impulses, women are the novel’s grist, yet they’re mostly single-serve objects with untapped inner lives. Myrna, a Pollyanna-ish, milky-skinned farm girl, has a Madonna complex: when young Joel gets her pregnant, she discloses the news in an abandoned church where she greets him at the altar, hands on belly.
When he’s not trysting with Myrna, Joel fantasizes about Alice, a quiet, beautiful Indigenous girl who serves and scrubs at the local store. Though Alice’s backstory is touched upon — the shop’s owners purchased her from a residential school where she was abused by nuns — she’s little more than a Cinderella awaiting rescue: Rumour has it that her bosses plan to release her from the shanty where they keep her locked up at night to attend the upcoming village dance.
The revelation that another besotted villager, Cliff, is half-Indigenous all but ensures that he, not Joel, will prevail as Alice’s suitor.
There’s a whiff of Shakespeare in the order-from-chaos inevitability of this, but while there’s honour in sticking with the girl you knocked up, the novel’s implications about the invisible bonds of race is far less comfortable.
Clichés and repetitive, circular prose compound the above. Deep River Night is, like war, far too long and far too dark. Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries