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Close to the Fire

by David Helwig

A decade ago David Helwig was an Ontario novelist, poet, scriptwriter, and editor, publishing the substantial narratives of a writer in his prime. He now lives on Prince Edward Island, and Close to the Fire, his first work of fiction to appear in some years, is svelte yet masterful and spirited. It is haunted by several unfinished tales, one of them Dickens’s interrupted final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The other is the unnamed narrator’s own. In well-nourished middle age, he is still preoccupied by the victims of his own happiness: his wife’s kindly, decent first husband and their two little girls. He calls himself a “wicked uncle” after Dickens’s murderer and feels himself equally tainted by evil.

Helwig casts his tale with characters of Dickensian eccentricity – the lovely stolen wife, now become a substantial figure dubbed the Dutchess (she is Dutch), a young handywoman known as Jane the Carpenter, a mysterious actor. As winter closes in on the Maritime countryside, the wind howls, and darkness licks at the margins. Wicked uncle plots to invade his wife’s literary turf. She is resuscitating Dickens’s wife’s cookbook; he will finish what the inimitable left undone, as a play, perhaps. Suddenly, instead of a disappearance as in Drood, the wronged figure from the past materializes – the cuckolded first husband, alive, if barely so. More literary shades loom, among them Cathy and Heathcliff, Punch and Judy.

By the end, the wicked uncle is restored to grace in a fine concatenation of fire, wind, death, and birth, with lashings of drama and food. Close to the Fire is tightly scripted, mordantly funny, and wise, and while it requires no more than a sketchy recollection of Dickens’s Drood, a not inconsiderable side benefit is that it may send us back in curiosity to the inimitable source.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Goose Lane

DETAILS

Price: $14.95

Page Count: 100 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-86492-272-8

Released: Feb.

Issue Date: 1999-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels