Sarah Butler (Courtesy the author)

Rufous and Calliope, the stunning new novel by West Kootenay, B.C., writer Sarah Louise Butler, begins with a glimpse of the past. On Halloween night, 1979, five siblings in costume are trick-or-treating in a small town, “buoyed by the unfamiliar weightlessness of blending into a crowd of children, of nobody questioning who we were, where we lived, just who exactly was supposed to be taking care of us,” before sneaking back to the treehouse, “built between the trunks of three mature cedars,” near the Caribou Pass, where they are living. And hiding.

In a few brief pages, Butler skilfully and seamlessly introduces several of the multitude of questions that power this dynamic novel. Who are these children? How did they come to be living in a treehouse? Who are they hiding from? We are also introduced to the narrator, Rufous Flanagan, a middle-aged cartographer who works closely with biologists, mapping species decline and the impact of human activity on the natural world.

As the narrative through line of the novel begins, Rufous is on his way to that treehouse, to reunite with his siblings, who he hasn’t met as a group since 1979. (More mysteries, more secrets.) It is summer, fire season – “ash falls from the sky as I walk” – but this is perhaps the least of the hurdles facing Rufous. Suffering from an undiagnosable brain disorder, Rufous’s “memories continue to slip away, and not in a way that fits any expected pattern. Decades of my own history, almost my entire adult life, have become a mystery to me.” He also experiences hallucinations and disorientation, and a disconnection between his brain and body that results in clumsiness and falls.

Most crucially, he has developed acute claustrophobia, which prevents him from being inside a car, or taking a bus or plane. As a result, he is forced to hike through to the treehouse and the anticipated reunion.

As he journeys, facing the perils one might expect from one so afflicted on such an odyssey, time begins to blur, with the mysteries and revelations of the past feeding into the mysteries and revelations of the present (and vice versa). Butler doesn’t handle this as a simple interweaving of flashbacks with the present, however. With his memory failing, Rufous, and the novel, seem to exist in a perpetual present, a fog of unknowing, a blurring of the porous boundary between memory and experience.

Butler’s first novel, The Wild Heavens (Douglas & McIntyre, 2020), was a 49th Shelf Book of the Year and made the Vancouver Public Library’s Top 20 Favourite Books, and she was named a CBC Writer to Watch in 2020. In Rufous and Calliope, she has crafted a smoky, hazy dream of a novel, weaving together strands of environmental fiction and nature writing, while remaining firmly centred on Rufous himself. There is a moment late in the book, for example, when his experiences tree planting as a teenager resonate into a moment of grief that is, literally, breathtaking.

Rufous and Calliope is an understated, bravura performance. A writer to watch, indeed.