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Confession

by Lee Gowan

Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, that oft-quoted paragon of unreliable narrators, said you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. It’s an absurd statement, of course, as any parole officer or criminal psychologist will tell you. And yet, who among us in the literary world, upon sitting down to some lurid first-person tale of a life violently curtailed, doesn’t want Humbert’s axiom to be true?

In Lee Gowan’s new novel, Confession, the murderer is Dwight Froese, a school janitor who recalls the details of his troubled upbringing in Broken Head, Saskatchewan. His father, we learn, was an abusive, perennially sozzled paranoiac with a prosthetic arm and a penchant for custom-built firearms. His mother, a former stripper and teenage bride, was sometimes given to sexually soliciting her son or dressing him up in women’s clothes. Domestic bliss, needless to say, proved elusive.

When the novel begins, Dwight has fled his hometown and resettled in Toronto. His parents are dead. Mom was killed, and our anti-hero, wrongly convinced that his father was to blame (and determined, evidently, to wreak revenge in the most anachronistic way possible), challenged him to a duel which resulted in the older man’s death. The rest of the book is devoted to exploring the consequences of Dwight’s lethal error in judgment, and to revealing the true identity of his mother’s killer.

With such a bizarre story, we might expect the narrator’s voice to be startlingly idiosyncratic in some way. But Dwight is something of a non-entity: a rather bland fellow, curiously bereft of the verbal tics or sheer lunacy that might have made him an engaging confessor. The descriptions he provides are perfunctory; he lapses into stock utterances like “pitch black” or “low man on the totem pole”; and the exchanges of dialogue he recounts, frequently overlong and loosely sprung, should in many instances have been replaced with pithy exposition. Ultimately, readers may feel that the novel’s appealingly macabre goings-on would have been better related by a narrator whose oddity and expressiveness had been more boldly imagined.

 

Reviewer: Matt Sturrock

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-307-39683-9

Released: Jan.

Issue Date: 2009-1

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels