It didn't take him long to bury me." The speaker here is Alice, a dead child whose ghostly perspective haunts Red Dog, Red Dog, and particularly her father and gravedigger, Elmer Stark. From the very first line, the reader is told the past weighs heavily upon the present, and few are asked to shoulder a burden more crippling than the Stark family.
Red Dog, Red Dog
, by Patrick Lane, McClelland & Stewart, 332 pages, $32.99
Patrick Lane, one of Canada's foremost poets and a celebrated memoirist, revisits familiar territory in his debut novel. Set in the Okanagan Valley during a fateful few weeks in 1958, the one-time Vernon resident's Red Dog, Red Dog tells the story of Tom and Eddy Stark, brothers with a painful past and secrets to keep. Eddy is the firstborn, doted on by his mother and, for this very reason, hated by his father. Neglected Tom is "born to blood and hiding." Alice and Rose, meanwhile, are the "between children," infant girls abandoned by their mother and left to die in spite of the pathetic efforts of their father and brothers. Elmer accuses his wife Lillian of being a prairie Medea, but Alice's posthumous point of view provides us with some perspective. "He said she wanted me dead, but he was wrong. She just didn't want me in the world she wept in."
Much of the early going is spent recounting the family's restless history. Going back generations, the Starks crisscrossed the West with little regard for borders of any sort. Elmer teaches his sons that they come from "a line of people who could not live among others and saw anything not their own as plunder, the things people owned fair to be taken." While Tom believes that there must be limits somewhere, and searches fruitlessly for them, Eddy is truly his father's son.
The story proper begins with Eddy's decision to take his revenge on a local cop for an old wrong. Sergeant Stanley had Eddy sent away to serve a year for petty theft, and did things to him in a holding cell that no one will acknowledge. When he returned, Eddy had "entered a place without a story, for he believed there was nothing that could happen to him more than what already had." Addicted to heroin and past caring, Eddy sets into motion a chain of events that threatens to bring family secrets to the surface and force Tom to account for his own place in the story.
Lane contrasts the keeping of secrets with the telling of stories, the ability to make sense of one's past and, presumably, future
He does so during a climactic set piece that brings the central players together at a dog fight. Going down the generations, dogs (particularly red ones) are about the only thing that arouses a Stark's compassion and provide glimpses of their better nature. The fact that Eddy is well and truly lost is illustrated at the beginning of his downward spiral when he gets back at Stanley by poisoning his German shepherd. But the fact the entire town shows up for the pit fighting is indicative that the Starks, mad and bad as they are, are merely representative. The Okanagan Valley may be sublime - Lane devotes many passages to beauty - but it is also "the land of Cain."
