Genre-bending prairie tale mix of memoir, fantasy and fiction
Aman,“tarpaper poor” long ago, returns to an abandoned shack with a sagging roofline and broken window panes. He’s there for his roots.
The man’s already thoughtful and grieving, and the sights within — a hula hoop, the traces of a cellar, a chair with a missing leg — inspire memories, good and bad, of a nine-child family and a life “of poverty, of the fringe of the greater society, of survival, and even of a little shame.”
The narrator, born like the author in 1957, understands the place as part of him, and vice versa, and he comprehends as well that he is someone else currently, changed, shaped by his experiences, his successes and his failures, into the introspective person he is today. Nevertheless, the house prompts memories that “come in a rush.”
Subtitled A Biography, a Fiction, a Fantasy, a Thought Experiment, Harold R. Johnson’s eighth book, titled Clifford, refuses to distinguish fact from fantasy or fiction from biography. In doing so, Johnson highlights the vagaries of memory and the invention inherent to recollection; he also draws attention to the psychology of narrative, that impulse to create neat coherence from a tangle of threads.
Structured in chapters that depict memory-based vignettes, Johnson’s story moves steadily away from images of familial happiness toward strife and fateful moral complications.
Acknowledging the dimness of his memories, Ray recalls growing up near Molanosa (a.k.a. Montreal Lake, North Saskatchewan, the author’s current home), his Cree mother’s stories, and his Swedish father, a taciturn hunter and trapper who’d integrated into the Ab- original community decades before Ray’s birth. Along with Clifford, his elder brother by six years — and an inspiration and rival until Clifford’s death — Ray’s father taught him “to read, to count, to imagine.” Outgoing, a scientific thinker and mechanically gifted, Clifford was an especially important guide for his younger brother. With the sudden death of the narrator’s father in 1965, the path changed; the narrator became “a different person,” as did his brother. Naturally, the very nature of the formerly close sibling’s relationship altered. Loss, distance and conflict ensued. A destructive dynamic played a role well into the boys’ adulthoods, right up until Clifford’s death in a car crash in 1985, in fact, an incident for which Ray feels some responsibility.
Guilt and regret animate Ray’s wanderings through his past. If the “beginning of healing” that appears in the final chapter registers as both conventional and overly pat, the story’s meditations on loss, family, and fateful actions prove absorbing from the opening page.