Secrets that bind us and keep us apart
Eugenie is in a funk. Her husband has stayed behind in Spain to learn marquetry and she has moved into the rundown New Brunswick farmstead left to her by her grandmother. There are tons of things that need fixing, but lethargy stalls her. Then a stranger wanders onto the property offering to help her lay out a vegetable garden. Dean claims to be living at his uncle’s hunt camp in the woods and Eugenie is willing to pay for his help. Thus begins a relationship.
Pamela Mulloy, a Kitchener writer, grew up in Moncton, N.B., and is the editor of The New Quarterly, a journal of short stories and poetry, begun at the University of Waterloo in 1981. (Full disclosure: I was a fiction editor at TNQ for a few years under Kim Jernigan’s and then Pamela’s leadership.) She has had short fiction published in Canada and the U.K. This is her first novel.
Dean turns out to be an American soldier who refused to return to the war in Afghanistan and slipped across the Maine border into New Brunswick. There is no uncle’s cabin. He is sleeping in the woods and struggling with PTSD demons. But Eugenie believes she can help him recover, even as their relationship is becoming romantic.
Her husband, Michael, keeps delaying his return from Spain, and Dean is helping her get the farmhouse in order, as they overcome their loneliness. But when her sister arrives for a visit, the tryst is hard to keep secret. Ivy announces that she wants to stay and give birth to the baby she’s pregnant with — and she won’t be telling the father, her professor in Japan.
So, “The Deserters” is a book of secrets and the power they hold over the main characters. Dean is in hiding, fearful that someone will discover his military status and send him back to a court martial. Mulloy deftly explores his war experience, and the loss of fellow soldiers that haunt him.
In the midst of reading this book, I saw Stephen Fry’s one-man show, “Mythos,” at the Shaw Festival. The third segment (Gods, Heroes, Men) was a retelling of “The Odyssey,” surely the archetype for all war stories in Western culture. Dean is reading “The Iliad,” a book left behind by his army buddy killed by a sniper. This book reminds us that war has many more casualties than those lost in battle.
Eugenie, cut off emotionally from her husband, is drawn to Dean’s vulnerability. She tells Michael about this hired hand but not about their affair. She is also jealous of Ivy’s pregnancy but resents her moving into the farmhouse. The farm is full of reminders of her eccentric grandmother; both girls as teens, orphaned by the death of their parents, came to live with her.
Michael’s life has also been touched by grief: His brother drowned when he and Eugenie were travelling in England before he found a master woodworker to apprentice with in Spain. But it is Dean’s psychological wounds that are the main focus of “The Deserters.” He discovers an abandoned sauna in the woods and asks Eugenie if he can fix it up for the winter. But like his distracted mind, it proves impossible to plug all the leaks in the walls.
There’s a frightening scene as Dean tries to trim a huge elm tree with a chainsaw. While he’s in the upper branches, a storm arrives; he falls with the tree, injuring his shoulder. It certainly is the nemesis of the story: Dean will eventually have to risk discovery when he goes to the local doctor.
Four people, all deserters from somewhere, are being shaped by a New Brunswick farmstead and its thick forest. “There’s always been a sense of exile to this place that she (Eugenie) could never understand. And now, years later among the blackflies and mosquitoes of summer, it was still serving as an exile to those who claimed it.”
We all crave connection — with the land, with each other. “The Deserters” is a well-wrought tale by an author whose editorial experience sharpens her writer’s eye.