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Flame of Separation

by Des Kennedy

After three books about gardening, eco-activist and columnist Des Kennedy’s first novel, The Garden Club, was shortlisted for the 1997 Leacock Medal. Interestingly, Kennedy’s new novel is a psychological mystery, told without any noticeable horticulture or comedy.

Dexter Cooke, the novel’s narrator, is trying to sort through events that changed the course of his life. Everything leads back to when the hippies – charismatic Gabriel, sensual Angela – arrived and transformed him from the town’s golden boy to would-be writer. Now in his thirties, glumly teaching high school, he is shaken by several crises. His estranged, confused father attempts suicide. One of Dexter’s students has visions about a beautiful man in a nature reserve by the river, whom Dexter at once recognizes as Gabriel. Suddenly he’s on the verge of full-blown disaster: a murder investigation, accusations of sexual impropriety with the student, possible loss of his marriage, job, and reputation.

Kennedy’s depiction of 1980s small-town Canada turns up the usual cast of characters: the socially prominent lawyer, the folksy doctor, the local bad girl, the newspaper editor with a past. Flashbacks alternate with Dexter’s present as he – along with the reader – weighs conflicting versions of the past.

It’s an absorbing tale, with some clever writing (students’ hands rise in class like “seagulls off a landfill”), marred by occasional breakouts of purple prose. Some narrative threads tend to unravel and split by the end instead of forming a satisfying knot; a subplot about Dr. Mengele, Nazi angel of death, feels tangential. Yet there are wonderful moments too, as when Dexter sits in a packed Toronto theatre, numbed with shock from a bombshell of revelations, trying to watch a play.

Less dramatic but more ultimately important is Dexter’s growing sense that the life he is living is not a wasted one at all.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Insomniac Press

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 324 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894663-64-0

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2004-5

Categories: Fiction: Novels