POWERFUL PROSE, TROUBLING TONE
Shrill, hectoring approach mars narrative in this tale of morality
Principles to Live By David Adams Richards Doubleday Canada
With his new novel, Principles to Live By, New Brunswick writer David Adams Richards continues his career-long inquiry into the nature of morality, the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, and the conflict between the often nebulous nature of good and the frequently petty forces of cruelty and evil.
The novel begins in November 2011. John Delano is no longer an active RCMP officer, slipping toward retirement with occasional involvement in cases and a deepening relationship with alcohol.
It’s an inglorious existence, but not a surprising one: Delano is not only suffering after a heart attack and ongoing treatment, but still reeling from the disappearance of his son nine years before.
His ex-wife holds out hope the boy might be found, which deepens Delano’s lingering pain and sense of responsibility (the boy disappeared from a camp, where Delano had sent him when his duty required him to travel to San Francisco to recover a suspect).
When a letter addressed to Delano arrives at the police station documenting the disappearance of a young boy from foster care in 1999, Delano has little moral choice but to pursue the claim.
When he discovers there have been no reported disappearances, he is not put off the trail.
Instead, he’s drawn into the mystery, not only because of its similarity to the disappearance of his son, but because of how it seems related to his posting with the Canadian delegation to the United Nations in the time leading up to the massacres in Rwanda, and his own journey to that country to attempt to rescue Canadians trapped by the carnage.
Delano is a powerfully drawn, devastatingly flawed central character, gifted with intelligence but hampered by his own actions and reputation.
Captured in Richards’ seemingly effortless narrative, which whorls between past and present, between internal and external, Principles to Live By is admirably broad, both in the scope of time and geography it covers — from New York and Rwanda in the 1990s to New Brunswick over the course of Delano’s life — and in the thematic questions it raises, from our duty of care to those in need to the moral failing of the United Nations during the Rwandan genocide.
Unfortunately, it also suffers from a strange smallness in terms of approach and tone.
Despite the range of the storytelling, the novel revolves around small grudges and vendettas. Every character seems to have a direct connection to Delano, from the driver who takes him into the Rwandan countryside to members of the Canadian delegation to the UN to Melissa Sapp, “provincial watchdog for exploited and abused and abandoned children.”
It’s natural, of course, for a mystery to revolve around the investigator, or for there to be a personal connection (especially in as small a world, geographically and socially, as Delano inhabits), but the interconnectedness in Principles to Live By defies belief.
The tone of the novel, however, is more troubling. While much of what Richards writes is fair comment (the moral failings of the UN in Rwanda and the inefficiencies of bureaucracies, even those charged with the protection of children, are well-established), the voice of the novel is shrill and hectoring. When Richards refers to the special envoy as “our Lion of Justice” rather than affording him a name, for example, it reads not as incisive commentary but as unearned parody.
Similarly, Sapp, Delano’s chief adversary, is treated as little more than a caricature. When Sapp and other female characters are introduced as “feminist,” the term is clearly pejorative, dripping with scorn.
While such characterizations would be troubling but valuable from Delano’s point of view as a means of character development or revelation (others judge Delano as a chauvinist and a bigot, among other things), they are disturbing coming from the narrative itself.
Which is unfortunate. There is a powerful story here, written with Richards’ usual attention to detail and his wholly original approach to both prose and narrative, with a powerfully evoked, deeply flawed main character at its centre.
The smallness of the novel puts the reader in an unenviable position, at once sympathetic to Delano and supportive of his crusade, but detached from him, and the book as a whole, by the seemingly petty viciousness.
Hopefully, this is an element Richards will deal with in his next books.
He has said Principles to Live By is the first novel in what will be his final trilogy.
As a longtime reader and admirer, I am hoping for the best.