A love-hate relationship with the Rock
Newfoundland family saga raises troubling questions in ongoing search for truth
Few writers today rival Newfoundland’s Wayne Johnston’s sheer power to astonish. First Snow, Last Light begins on a snowy St. John’s afternoon in1936; home from school, Ned Vatcher finds his house empty, his parents gone. No trace is found of either parent or their fancy Brougham car. Just like that, a child’s world crashes and burns. The gut-punched 14-year-old thinks, “The snow, the snow, that’s all people talked about, as if the snow itself had made off with the Vatchers.” His grandmother says, “people who went missing in the woods at twilight . . . had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow where there should have been no snow, a rogue blizzard when winter was a month away, led astray by the pale, bewitch- ing light of late November, the lulling light of sunset in the fall.” Johnston’s Newfoundland can seem a treacherous place, a mythic mother who devours her children. This idea — reminiscent of James Joyce — weaves in and out of his books, which now number eleven (ten novels and a memoir). (He’s also prone to riffing from great writers; the last scene in his previous book The Son Of A Certain Woman deliberately mimics Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses; and in this one, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is paraphrased to great humour.)
The facts are these: Edgar Vatcher, born on the wrong side of the tracks but with enough talent to become a Rhodes Scholar, then a prominent political fixer, has vanished, along with Megan, his English wife. Money is owed. Emotionally supported by Father Duggan, his track coach, and by hard-drinking journalist Sheilagh Fielding — a favourite Johnston character, she’s also appeared in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise — Ned moves in with his bitter grandparents, bound in hatred by the mysterious death of another son at sea — swept away by “a rogue wave” that left his father suspiciously dry. Life in his grandparents’ “Flag House” — garishly painted the same stripes as the island flag — is Dickensian, at best.
Digging deep into the mystery that is family, Johnston raises troubling questions. Who were our parents, re- ally? And how could they disappear? Questions act like combustible fuel on Ned’s life. Returning from college in the States, fired by ambition and the “American Way,” Ned determines to recreate his father’s early success. St. John’s proves fertile ground for the New York-style tabloid he founds — an overnight success that funds his obsession with the “Vanishing Vatchers,” a search for truth funded, ironically, by lies. Harder to uncover — and much closer to home — are the lies that permeate Ned’s eccentric family tree. His business empire expands and so does his ego; he adopts the “Last Newfoundlander,” a boy born minutes before Newfoundland joins Canada in 1949.
But his obsession with the past, with finding his parents, is relentless: Ned hires detectives, a pilot to help him comb the province from the air, consults a psychic. As each effort yields part-answers, he drinks more, falls into unrequited love with the motherly Sheilagh Fielding, pays blackmail to an odious uncle. As his bourbon-fuelled search ramps up, he drives and flies drunk. From the air, “my life was laid out before me in a code I couldn’t crack.” Newfoundland yields its secrets with agonizing slowness.
Respite from Ned’s obsession comes with other narrative voices, especially Fielding’s, whose drinkconquering sojourn in an abandoned railway shack reveals the Newfoundland we much prefer: a land of privacy and enchantment. Healing is possible, it seems, even for lives “overthrown” by youthful disasters that won’t let go.
Johnston’s always been interested in writing historical fiction. And he’s on familiar turf writing a turbulent Newfoundland family saga. This one recalls, perhaps, a nostalgia that many still harbour of an independent Newfoundland, but at the heart of it is a love-hate relationship with the Rock. This is a wondrous book. Nancy Wigston is a frequent contributor to these pages.