As he lay dead

Underlying the road trip south is a keen concern with age, loss and regret

Cadillac Cathedral

By Jack Hodgins Ronsdale Press 213 pp; $18.95

One of the pleasures of being a longtime reader of a particular author is that one has the ability to step back and to observe that writer’s career as a continuum, to follow the ebb and flow of their canon as a whole. The context such an examination affords can result in a reappraisal of individual works, a re-casting of the familiar into wholly new lights.

Such is the case with Victoria writer Jack Hodgins.

I’ve been a passionate reader of Hodgins’ work for more than two decades, since a copy of his first novel, The Invention of the World, was pressed into my hands as a freshman at the University of Victoria. The gesture was one of welcome, of inclusion. This, it seemed to say, is Vancouver Island. This is where you live now. I’ve never left. That gesture of welcome, that declaration of identity, goes to the heart of Hodgins’ work itself. From his earliest stories, Hodgins’ fiction is rooted in the territory and the characters — quirky, larger-than-life, though familiar and realistic — of Vancouver Island. It is his approach to those roots that has shifted over the course of his career: From the mythic magic realism of The In

vention of the World, to the historical complexity of Victoria in the 19th century in Innocent Cities and post-First World War Portuguese Creek in

Broken Ground, to the contemporary, connected

world in Distance.

With his most recent works, 2010’s The Master of Happy Endings and his latest, Cadillac Cathedral — which began life as a “song-and-narrative” performance piece with Victoria’s Chor Leoni Men’s Choir — Hodgins returns to the small-scale stories and vivid characters of his earliest fiction, informed by the realities of aging and the modern world encroaching on the characters’ rural doorsteps, leavened with wry humour and everyday absurdity. “Portuguese Creek,” Hodgins writes, early in

Cadillac Cathedral, “is a quiet country place of woods and fields spread out along the Old Highway — houses flanked by trees at the head of long driveways, cows grazing in orchards, sleek horses looking over fences at the passing traffic. There is no sign saying ‘ Welcome to Portuguese Creek’ or ‘ Thank you for Visiting.’ ” Arvo Saarikoski, who spent much of his life working in logging camp mechanic’s sheds, now spends his days in his shop, rebuilding and restoring cars that have been abandoned in the wild. His workshop has become something of a social hub, drawing a ragtag group of locals who gossip while Arvo works.

One of the longtime shop regulars was Martin Glass, a one-term MP and local history buff (and a descendent of one of the Portuguese Creek settlers from Broken Ground) who, as the novel opens, has died in a hospital in “the city.”

The decision for Arvo — who is the executor of Martin’s estate — and his friends is simple: rather than letting him be buried in the city, “We’ve got to go down and bring the poor man home.”

The bulk of Cadillac Cathedral — the title comes from the palatial 1930s hearse which Arvo reclaims and restores for the mission — follows that road trip south. Unlike similar literary journeys, including Graham Swift’s Last

Orders and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hodgins treats the motif with sly humour and outsized gestures and narrative developments. Underlying that, however, is a keen concern with age, loss and regret. Part of Arvo’s motivation in going to the city is to try to reconnect with the woman he loved (from afar) as a young man; that melancholy strain, played against the humour and with the presence on the voyage of Cynthia, a widow who clearly has designs on Arvo, lends the novel the richness, and strength, of burnished wood.

That sense of melancholy, of loss and regret, comes to the fore in the novel’s climactic scenes, set upon the wanderers’ return to Portuguese Creek. It’s in this sequence — which I won’t describe — that one’s sense of the arc of Hodgins’ career comes into sharpest focus. One can’t help but be reminded of the outlandish, mythic wedding that rounds off The Invention of the World, two novels, four decades apart, climaxing with communities coming together, history being made, stories being resolved. The difference is chiefly in the treatment; what comes through in both, as it always has for Hodgins no matter his approach, is his abiding love for these people (it seems a disservice to refer to them as characters), and the depth of his connection to this place.