The simple and straightforward title of David Adams Richards’s latest novel, Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, evokes the unadorned biographical style of a police report. Fittingly, the eponymous character is an officer in the RCMP. Yet that is where the similarity ends, for Markus Paul’s story, centred on several “incidents” that prove fateful for him and fatal to others, is not related in the detached, clinical manner of a police account, but with the searing emotion and stirring probity we have come to expect of an author fighting to stave off anachronism’s claim to right and wrong, good and evil.
In 1985, Roger Savage, working on a wharf in New Brunswick, is wrongly accused of having caused a cargo load to fall and crush to death a young Mi’kmaq man who had been given his job. Facts of the case aside, Roger, whose house borders the Mi’kmaq reserve and who is involved in a dispute over housing and fishing rights with his neighbours, does not immediately realize that “who he was and what he represented in the Canadian consciousness was going to come into play.” Blue-collar and of limited education, Roger is the guy society loves to revile as “right wing” and racist. Max Doran, a (white) journalist who comes to the reserve to cover the story, exploits this to the hilt.
Hovering over the entire issue is the spectre of historical injustice suffered by the first nations at the hands of whites. Increasingly irrelevant Mi’kmaq chief Amos Paul, seemingly the only person who believes Roger is innocent, observes that some of his people “wanted justice for crimes of the past. For something they could not get even for.” Shortly thereafter, Roger dies in a blaze ignited during a gunfight with Mi’kmaq toughs closing in on his home, and is posthumously blamed for the killing of a Mi’kmaq child caught in the crossfire.
That might have been the end of the case. But Amos’s 15-year-old grandson Markus (who plays a small but important role as an adult in Richards’s The Lost Highway) is determined to exonerate Roger and eventually joins the police. Incidents alternates between 1985 and 2006, when Markus finally establishes what happened on the wharf and in the gunfight.
As with most of Richards’s novels (Giller Prize co-winner Mercy Among the Children is a notable exception), Incidents is related by an omniscient narrator. From inhabiting the mind of a character to offering a panoptic viewer’s observations on that character’s predicament there lies a difficult segue, one which Richards does not always manage smoothly. But the characters themselves, who could have been frozen into moral archetypes – as has happened in previous Richards novels – attain a welcome level of complexity.
This is especially true of Roger and his nemesis, journalist Max Doran. Roger, after all, is no paragon of virtue. (In fact, the story might have proved even more powerful had he been an anti-Indian bigot, thereby challenging readers to sympathize with an innocent man even as they recoil from his views.) Meanwhile, Doran, who in many ways personifies the smug and elitist pseudo-intellectual Richards famously loathes, nevertheless grows increasingly conscience-stricken.
In fact, although the story owes its birth to Roger and its continuation to Markus, who becomes consumed with a case everybody considers closed, Doran emerges as its most compelling character. He alone experiences an inner transformation. Frustratingly, much of this moral metamorphosis occurs off-stage, during the two decades between Roger’s death and Markus’s resuscitation of his case. But the beginning of Doran’s journey occurs very much in the foreground, during the momentous events of 1985. Richards deliberately has Doran start to doubt himself even as the proverbial noose he helped set around Roger’s neck takes to tightening. Looking back years later, Markus realizes that “Doran’s greatest moment as a journalist had occurred when he was on his own in a small shed at night, because he refused to do a story or help arrest Roger.”
Doran was too late; he could not save the man whose name he had tarnished. In the immediate sense, this makes for classic tragedy, but Richards’s larger picture includes a moral lesson at once topical and timeless. Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul serves as a potent reminder of a politically incorrect truth: Legitimate historical grievances cannot justify the pernicious notion of inherited guilt. Roger Savage dies early in the story, but his fate pointedly and hauntingly demonstrates that attempting to redress sins of the past sometimes leads to victimizing innocent descendants of the sinners.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut, Lebanon.
