Criminal minds and redemptive love
Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in a decade is ‘a master-class in character and storytelling’
Celebrated Saskatchewan writer Guy Vanderhaeghe (“The Englishman’s Boy,” “The Last Crossing”) returns with his first novel in almost a decade, one that is a master-class in character and storytelling, revealing a novelist at the height of his powers. Written in muscular prose with whiplash narrative drive, “August into Winter” is an epic tale of crime and punishment, the debilitating shadow of war and the redemptive possibility of love against all odds.
It’s March 1939, the world is on the cusp of another war and there is a disturbing series of incidents in Connaught, a small prairie town. The nuisance crimes that infect the community begin innocently enough, with a half-eaten cheese sandwich left on a kitchen counter. Soon they escalate to pornographic playing cards and sexually posed corsets, the prowler taunting with an increasingly disturbing game of cat and mouse. As a result, betrayal works in the Connaught’s citizens “like a slow, insidious poison,” and many install locks and place shotguns beside their beds.
Constable Hotchkiss suspects narcissistic 21-year-old Ernie Sickert, who “had always been a painful parcel of hemorrhoids.” Figurative language is a strength throughout the novel and especially in descriptions of the sociopath Sickert, whom Hotchkiss looks forward to rolling up “like a tube of toothpaste … until the truth squirted straight out of the son of a bitch’s mouth.” Cornered, Sickert lashes out and the horrifying result sets in motion escalating crimes that effect many innocent in their wake.
Fleeing Connaught with his intended child bride, the morally bankrupt Sickert is pursued by Corporal Cooper with the help of brothers Jack and Oliver Dill, both First World War veterans, who struggle with ghosts from the front and beyond. While Jack is beset by delusions of grandeur and religious hysteria, his younger brother, Oliver, is a widower who has been trying since his wife Judith’s death to at best “offer an unconvincing impersonation of a human being.” Internal storms are made manifest in the dangerous weather that floods roads and forces Sickert to abandon his getaway car and seek shelter in a nearby schoolhouse where he is found by Vidalia Taggart, the newly hired teacher, who is dodging her own past and problems.
Like Oliver Dill, Vidalia Taggart is bereaved. Her former lover, Dov Schechter, was killed the year before, part of a volunteer brigade in the Spanish Civil War. His visceral accounting of those months is all Vidalia has left of him, a journal that becomes for her “a talisman, an object of solace and comfort,” as she tries to make her life anew.
Vanderhaeghe’s characters are utterly convincing in their thoughts, words and deeds. When Sickert’s behaviour spirals even further out of control, leaving Vidalia wounded and homeless, and Sickert running for his life, Oliver Dill takes charge. First, he arranges for Vidalia to be attended to by the town doctor and offers her respite until she is able to think clearly. And then, he traps Sickert for the police, his motive personal revenge. At home, however, Dill begins to thaw as he and Vidalia share their separate grief, their “tattered, mismatched scraps of sadness, resentment, grievance, gladness, pride, confusion, and joy” previously hidden.
And then comes Nov. 11, which begins with the Dill brothers benignly marching with fellow veterans in the town parade, that Remembrance Day plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy as corpses pile up in Connaught. In the end, with luck, the remaining characters will be able to adapt, putting their unhappiness behind them to get on with the present business of living and loving.
Vanderhaeghe is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, all narrative threads weaving purposefully together here, his characters complicated and compelling, profoundly human in their frangibility.
is the author of “Yours, for