BOOK ReMARKS
By: Harold N. Walters
The Clarenville Packet
The Clarenville Packet
Finton Moon
Finton
Moon [Killick Press] is the best, the most huggable novel I’ve read all
summer—truly.
Huggable?
Yes, huggable.
Surely you’ve felt the urge to wrap
your arms around a book, especially after its pages are all puffed up and
swollen from reading, embrace its characters and clutch its content to your
bosom as if clinging to stirring moments that you know are certain to fade…
…or something.
No surprise, there is darkness in the
human heart. Gerard Collins tickles that darkness almost making it merry. Or is
that just my imperfect thinking?
Example. Finton has been to confession
and has revealed his dark ol’ sins to the priest. Back outside the
confessional, Finton feels better about himself as if God has cleansed him
“like taking a toilet scrubber to his soul and scouring it clean.”
Go on. Grin.
Remember that Frank O’Connor
story—“First Confession”—in one of the school books in which Jackie climbs atop
the wicket to unload his burdensome sins?
Beaucoup
yucks in that yarn…
…but none any funnier that Finton
vomiting on the priest.
In times before electricity reached
Newfoundland outports, before the lights came, many houses—especially those
dark and dank grandmother homesteads—had shadowy corners beyond the range of
lamplight, shadowy corners in which—who
knows?—black-hearted [as opposed to sweet and cuddly] demons dwelt.
Gerard Collins knows what lurked in
those corners.
Next door to Finton’s home is the
Battenhatch house, candlelit and delightfully gloomy with oodles of shadowy
corners: “There was something delicious in the dark, musty air of the
Battenhatch house that held him [Finton] captive.”
Speaking of the Battenhatch house…
…Battenhatch…idden that a name that
would lure Old Charlie D. from his grave and have him scravelling for his pen?
Bridie and Morgan Battenhatch are
women who worm their way into your brain and coil up in serpentine curls. Like seductive
red fruit dangling from limbs in Eden, Bridie and Morgan are—each in her own
way—characters you acknowledge only in the “delicious dark.”
As does Finton: “Miss Bridie pursued
him to the darkest corners of his mind,”…to say nothing about where Morgan
takes Finton as you’ll see when you read this book. “I just want to corrupt
you,” she says, fruit of sinful knowledge in hand—kinda.
Finton’s mother Elsie constantly cleans.
She scrubs dishes and swings her broom more industriously than the Dutch
Cleanser missus dusts her doorstep. It seems as if Elsie’s life is a continuous
effort to sweep away ugly dark stuff: “Elsie was almost religious in her
ritualistic gathering of dust, hair, furballs, and bits of lostness to her
dustpan.”
…bits
of lostness…
I’ve probably mentioned before that my
favourite dead English novelist is Thomas Hardy. Reading Gerard Collins’
stories reminds me of less-than-sunny Tom.
Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders features a giant tree that might be, disregarding
metaphor, just a tree.
Forgive me, Gerard. I can’t help
thinking of Hardy when Finton considers that Bridie Battenhatch—Battenhatch, jim dandy!—“looked a lot
better from the distance of a high tree branch.”
I know. My imperfect slant again.
As do John in “Treed” [Cuffer Anthology II], and Finton Moon, I
do understand the succour to be found up beyond where birdies nest.
Sometimes, however, danger hangs among
the boughs of a too flimsy fir.
Once upon a time in a different bay, a
callow bay-boy watched a movie in which some lumberjacks bobbed the tops off several
of those humongous trees that grow out in British Columbia.
Next day, said impressionable bay-boy
dragged a bucksaw up a fir with a mere three inch butt, intending to imitate
the movie lumberjacks.
The bay-boy set the saw and made a
stroke. The tree jerked. The saw jumped and ripped its teeth across frail human
flesh.
Look, the scar is still visible in the
meat of my left hand.
Thank you for reading.
SEPTEMBER
20-12
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