REVENANT
By Tristan Hughes
Douglas & McIntyre 258 pages, $29.95
Revenant opens on the springtime busloads of seniors who visit the island village of Ynys Môn. Like silent, ineffectual mystics, these “ancient water-gazers, these withered lilies” prowl the Welsh island throughout Tristan Hughes's latest novel. Ominous and omnipresent, the pensioners hover throughout the book, not quite ghosts, not quite belonging. The eerie languor of the place is unsettling and exact, and could provide the perfect backdrop for a suspenseful psychological drama such as Hughes is attempting.
As in his previous two books, the Ontario-born Welsh author creates a modern small-town gothic replete with old wounds and unexpiated sins. The novel is set 13 years to the day after the drowning of Del, a stubborn, homely girl who was the leader of her little gang. The difficult anniversary reassembles the three surviving friends, who explored the woods with Del, played at being hoodlums and weathered together the hiccupy transition from childhood into adulthood.
Hughes's Ynys Môn is the sort of insular, nervous place where kids hang out in the bus shelter, where a come-from-away spends her entire life clamorously regretting her more cultured roots, where the well-pickled pub dwellers are as much part of the furniture as the stools they sit on.
Neil is the only one of the three protagonists who hasn't left. Paralyzed by phobias and tics, he longs to live in a suspended state: “[S]omewhere out in space, between the earth and the sun, there's a place called the Lagrangian Point. It's the juncture at which the gravity of these two bodies is cancelled out and any object left there will not move, not ever.” Two bodies pull at Neil: Steph, the outsider who lived in town and went to a fancy school, and who ran away at 15, and Neil's best friend Ricky, the dark, fatherless cynic who has roamed the globe for years.
The stutterer, the runaway and the wanderer return to the sites of their childhood traumas. Steph torches the house where she was assaulted by the reclusive Candyman, Ricky ransacks the now-empty schoolhouse where he was taunted and ostracized, Neil loses it by the grave of his grandfather's favourite pig. They exorcize their demons rather superficially as Hughes puppeteers them one narrator at a time, from the future to the past and back. Del is revealed as the pivot among the three, as much posthumously as when they were young.
Hughes subtly provides insight into the unformed, half-conscious intentions of his characters. He takes care not to belabour the symbolism of Del as a prototype for a new local saint, nor does he overtly lay out the youths' transformations into the roles that await them outside the protective/restrictive limbo of the island. At his best, he is a wry, articulate writer, whose prose is arrayed with “superfluous cats,” with a “tobacco-blackened” sea and with ghosts that are “just memories in the wrong time.”
He also occasionally shows himself to be a good storyteller, as in Ricky's recollection of his grandmother's gypsy days, complete with caravans and dancing bears, and in the scenes from Neil's childhood featuring the aforementioned pig, who, despite the grandmother's protestations, lives and is eventually buried in front of the farmhouse kitchen.
The novel as a whole, however, lacks the narrative movement that makes these episodes satisfying. Revenant doesn't plausibly pull off the latent violence of contemporary rural noir, nor the suspenseful jigsaw of a mystery story. The slim plot is prodded along by remembered excursions and physical details, and narrated in hindsight by each of the three main characters. Perhaps Hughes is pointing out the pitfalls of living in the past, or the passivity of memory, but the act of remembering unfortunately has more weight than what is actually remembered.
The result, atmospheric rather than kinetic, is fine for the first two or three sections, but the ephemeral tenor and static pace become wearying, and undermine the disquieting, isolated setting Hughes has worked so hard to create. By the time Neil is reading repressed desire into the relationship of two old schoolteachers or waxing poetic about the “premonitory hint of leaves yet to unfold,” the reader is itching for catastrophe, catharsis, something to happen.
Even the circumstances of Del's death remain unsatisfying, unresolved by a return, a ritual and a semi-redemption that are hollow – not tragic, just uninteresting. As Del was pulled out to sea, her three friends watched impotently. Beyond the rocks, a group of pensioners stared “with the blank, granitic eyes of statues,” a chorus seemingly as ancient as the island and its people and traditions.
With his talented ear and precise pen, Tristan Hughes has created a world worth writing about; more momentum, a more muscular story, would make it a world worth reading about.
Writer, editor and translator Katia Grubisic could use some suspense in her life.
