Like so many novels of childhood, Flying in Silence is structured like a contemporary Odyssey – only in reverse. Where Ulysses confronts miracles and monsters on a voyage to his elusive homeland, today’s hero is more likely to try and put as much space between themselves and their dysfunctional family home as possible.

And this, perhaps, is where Flying in Silence, Turcotte’s first novel, fails. Set in a working class district of Montreal, the novel contains more than its share of childhood wonders: a towering retarded boy who loves to sing, primitive warfare between Catholic and public school students, a hypersensitive mother and stoic father, and the hundreds of private rituals that must be protected from an army of bullies. The problem is that most readers will have met these characters and tropes in countless other novels and short stories.

Which is too bad, because Turcotte is an otherwise excellent writer. Though he tends to be insistent with his symbols, his writing demonstrates a sure hand with mood, emotion, and characterization, especially in capturing the nuances of dialogue and perception of a bilingual family. However, the novel’s much shorter second part, where the grown-up narrator returns home from Australia to tend to his dying parents, seems tacked on, like a staged denouement to wrap up emotional loose ends.

But besides covering too-familiar territory – can our literature really bear any more Catholicism bashing? – the novel has the overly modulated feel of a well-workshopped creative writing thesis. One thematically integrated chapter leads to the next, the hero takes another step away from the poisoned home, his parents are inexorably devoured by their troubles – leaving readers to ask, Doesn’t anybody have something nice to say about childhood?