Amazon.com Review
Thomas MacMillan is 40, an orphan, an heir, a laboratory technician, an autodidact of esoteric intellectual appetites, as he writes this interrogation of the past disguised as a letter to his absent lover. Like Andre Alexis, both Thomas's restlessly sexual mother, Katarina, and his courtly mentor, Henry Wing, were born in Trinidad and resettled in Canada. Their unconventional lifelong relationship is both the deepest mystery and the central fact of Thomas's life, the creature in the center of his heart and the heart of this fictional memoir, the beast he walks around and around, prods with questions and tries to fix with lists of explanations and attributes. From his quasi-scientific attempts to understand the past, the nature of love in general and theirs in particular, Alexis derives some entertaining narrative quirks, including Thomas's notes, graphs, and footnotes in the text, letting paragraphs elide into nothingness as questions of motivation remain unresolved. After Thomas's grandmother dies, an event it takes him the better part of a day to discern, his footloose mother appears to claim her son, accompanied by a lover who abandons both on the road to Montreal. Mother and son seek refuge in the Ottawa home of the deliciously eccentric Henry Wing, a stock trader with a home laboratory and a gigantic library, who may or may not be Thomas's biological father. By the end of this gently funny and genuinely original little novel, we come to understand that what first seems linear and picaresque is actually a perfect circle, as Katarina goes home to die in her mother's bed and Thomas comes to inhabit Henry's wayward style of scholarship and his patient, distant style of loving. A debut this sly and satisfying promises fine things to come.
--Joyce Thompson
From Publishers Weekly
The love affair between a young black boy's wayward mother and a man who may or may not be his father forms the intriguing background to this enormously appealing first novel by Trinidadian-Canadian author Alexis (whose short-story collection, Despair, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize). "I've been thinking about Love, you see," begins the first-person narrator, now in his early 40s, addressing his absent, unnamed inamorata shortly after the death of his mother, "and theirs was the first and most puzzling romance I witnessed." Katarina MacMillan, only 17 when her son is born, promptly deposits Thomas in the care of her forbidding mother, Edna, in their small hometown of Petrolia, Ontario. Edna "was past the age of easy tolerance, and she was cantankerous," Thomas observes. "Also, she used to drink a lot of dandelion wine." Under her stern tutelage, Thomas grows up to be a book-loving, secretive boy. When his grandmother dies, the mother he knows only through legend suddenly arrives to claim him, and they are both soon abandoned roadside by Katarina's lover, the French-speaking Mr. Mataf. They must make a new life in Ottawa under the protection of a courtly dabbler in chemistry, Henry Wing, who initiates the boy into the secrets of alchemy. Thomas also learns about love and life by watching the games of power and romance that take place between Wing and his mother. Alexis often employs the apparatus of scientific research in order to convey Thomas's earnest searches for the truth; he breaks down memories into outlines, bulleted lists and footnotes, preferring the forms of proof to those of guesswork. The novel is an engagingly honest effort to order the stuff of a life, and it marks the maturation of an impressive new voice. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
