It was an act of murder that brought me back to my faith. It wasn’t any priest that convinced me. When I realized that the greatest sin was murder, I realized that perhaps there was a God after all.
Author David Adams Richards
Murder and Other Essays
David Adams Richards Doubleday
It was a July night, on a lonely stretch of highway in northern New Brunswick. David Adams Richards was listening to his car radio and the group Kansas was singing to him about the futility of dreams in a world where we are all “dust in the wind.”
An appropriate musical background, perhaps, to what would happen when Richards picked up a hitchhiker — a likable young Micmac who announced he was on his way home to kill someone.
Richards is a writer whose fiction shows a preoccupation with moral choice. But arriving at the proper decision is not always that easy, as he tells us in the opening chapter of his latest book, Murder and Other Essays. When he drops off his would-be killer, he’s faced with a dilemma: Should he inform the police or not? And being the kind of author he is, he also finds himself brooding about the relationship between the slayer and the slain. Through what prism do killers view their victims?
“Fundamentally they look at the person as non-important, but actually this person that they’re targeting is the most important person in their lives at that moment,” he tells Postmedia. “That’s always fascinated me about the crime of murder.”
This author’s award-winning novels have repeatedly demonstrated his gifts as a storyteller. These narrative powers are to be found in this new non-fiction book, a rewarding assemblage of memory, meditation and — for the first time in a distinguished career — several pages of poetry. But Richards remains haunted not just by the experience described in his opening essay but by the chilling awareness that within his own lifetime he has known more than a dozen murder victims.
“It was an act of murder that brought me back to my faith.” The novelist is on the phone from his New Brunswick home, taking a break from his duties as a member of the Canadian Senate, and thinking back to another event that touched his life. “It wasn’t any priest that convinced me,” he says. “When I realized that the greatest sin was murder, I realized that perhaps there was a God after all.”
But that realization, discussed with quiet eloquence within the pages of this book, didn’t make his dilemma any less easy the night he encountered a young man convinced that his life was worth nothing and equally convinced of the need to commit murder.
This strange story seems an integral part of a volume that might best be summed up as an exploration, filtered through its author’s own personal prism, of the processes of living. Richards cherishes his own independence of spirit, so it’s not surprising that he takes the time to urge young writers to safeguard their freedom against the pressures of fashion and convention. Even classes of creative writing have their perils, in his opinion.
“It’s not the creative writing class per se,” he says. “It’s the group think that can follow it, so I’ve tried to point out in many of these essays the danger of mob action and group thinking because it limits one’s own possibilities both professionally and spiritually.”
Richards is also asserting his right to march to his own drummer — sometimes to the despair of postmodern critics blind to the virtues of old-fashioned storytelling. He figures that Lord Byron got it right a couple of centuries ago: “I wish men to be free/as much from mobs as from kings.”
There’s similar passion in his evocation of place — in the case
New Brunswick’s Miramichi region. As with Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Richards can bring a mythic intensity to the world that has nurtured his creativity for so many years. It can be a violent world, both emotionally and physically — his Giller Prize winner, Mercy Among the Children, explores a landscape in which genuine goodness struggles to survive in a hostile and predatory environment — but it’s one in which the gnarled humanity of the writing always sees the possibility of a better future.
At 69, Richards still seems to be in pursuit of self-knowledge and the need to live a good life. He can be amusing about his mission — witness the chapter chronicling his battle to give up a smoking habit that began at the age of three. Indeed, much of this book is driven by affectionate and sometimes poignant remembrances of times past and of lessons learned. He treasures the Miramichi of his childhood and youth.
“Unfortunately it’s not the way it was when I was growing up,” he says, and there’s a tinge of ruefulness ion his voice “There was a cross-section of humanity and class. A critic once said that one of my novels was filled with class differentials, and he was right. We had ships of all the worlds coming in. We had mills and mines, lawyers and politicians, ladies of the night and various unsavoury characters. In many respects it was a wonderful place in which to grow up. It gave you an idea of what life was all about.”
Some of the new book’s most beguiling pages deal with the days when a movie theatre was the family business in Newcastle, and particularly with his feisty grandmother who had to assume full charge in the 1920s — much to the chagrin of a male-dominated business community. “She had to stand up to so many people.”
Richards started reading the novels of Charles Dickens when he was 14. And when he entered the world of Oliver Twist in all its messy humanity, he immediately felt at home. “I realized I knew most of these people one way or another.”
The new book reveals an author especially at ease talking about his own literary heroes — notably that great Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, whose life and art are celebrated in a moving, heartfelt essay
And what about the art of the essay? “I love the essays of Joan Didion, of Albert Camus, of George Orwell,” he says. “There are a lot of people who write absolutely brilliant essays. It’s a wonderful form for those who can master it — I’ll say that much.”
As for his own contribution to the form: “In so many ways, these essays are always a reflection of myself,” Richards says.
“It’s the same with my novels. I’m not trying to figure out the world for anyone else — just for myself.”
Fundamentally they look at the person as non-important, but actually this person that they’re targeting is the most important person in their lives at that moment. That’s always fascinated me about the crime of murder. David Adams Richards