WRITER’S DEBUT NOVEL IS A COMPELLING READ
Set in Cape Breton, coming-of-age tale spans generations of a divided family
The Light a Body Radiates Ethel Whitty Caitlin Press
There’s a saying that everyone has a book in them and in the case of Ethel Whitty, the former Carnegie Community Centre director, it’s true. The Cape Breton Island native and longtime Vancouver resident wrote her debut in “stolen moments” while working in the Downtown Eastside and participating in Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio. And what a debut it is.
The ambitious coming-of-age novel, set mainly in Cape Breton, spans 25 years and touches on key moments in Canadian history, from ’60s counterculture to the AIDS epidemic.
The Light a Body Radiates opens when Eileen MacPherson is eight years old and a family fight drives her beloved teenage brother Francis from home, leaving their siblings bereft and confused.
Eileen is a born storyteller, and, over the ensuing years as she pieces together overheard conversations and tries to understand the family rift she becomes the keeper of the MacPherson narrative.
It’s one of trauma and tragedy, and deep misunderstanding. But it’s also one of love and loyalty, and the lengths family will go to care for one another.
Eileen is not just a storyteller, though; she’s also a trailblazer. Stifled by the claustrophobic working-class world she’s been raised in, she yearns for a life of independence, education, art and culture.
As a result, she herself leaves home, heading to Toronto and then Halifax, to pursue these dreams. Feeling bold and brave, she realizes only later that she’s living out the destiny of her people, so often forced by lack of opportunity to leave the land they call home.
Written with much lyricism and heart, the Cape Breton of the past comes alive on the page, with its close-knit culture, spectacular windswept vistas and grinding poverty.
The characters are vivid though the inter-generational plot line occasionally gets crowded with players and a bit jumbled, but the authorial voice is compelling.
The underlying psychology? Downright haunting.
But it’s the attention to detail here that proves most evocative: the lobster sandwiches and home-baked pies; the fiddle that’s passed from one generation to the next; the boiled potatoes that a mother hides in the barn for her runaway son; Trudeau’s pirouette behind the Queen; the feeling on the streets of Yorkville in Toronto in the ’60s.
All told, The Light a Body Radiates is a standout debut. A sign of good things to come.