Gaétan Soucy’s novel Atonement is as carefully put together and as disturbing as a painting by Belgian artist René Magritte. Although the surrealist painter meticulously represents a familiar world, Magritte’s universe, like Soucy’s, seems ordered by unnatural laws of physics. Soucy, who won the Grand Prix de Montréal for Atonement in 1998, describes concrete, physical things such as food and snowballs, but these objects constantly change their form and context, creating the impression that they are all part of a dream.

Initially, the entire storyline appears straightforward, told in clear, well-constructed sentences. On a brilliant December day shortly after the end of the Second World War, 44-year-old Louis Bapaume travels toward a village in Quebec where he lived as a young man in order to atone for a past misdeed. En route, he falls asleep and dreams that he is five years old and seeing his father for the last time. But when he’s jolted awake, he discovers that the car he’s travelling in has become stuck in the snow. Bapaume must be in Montreal in time to play the organ at the Notre Dame Basilica for Christmas Eve, so he enlists the help of Canadian soldiers who are deployed at a railroad station.

That’s a simple enough beginning, but early in the story Soucy sows the first hint that all is not what it seems. “Louis’s dream had plunged him into such a state that he was still waiting for proof that he was well and truly awake. What was happening now didn’t convince him. Perhaps he’d emerged from one dream only to enter another.”

When the incongruities and strange coincidences multiply, the reader begins questioning the difference between reality and memory. Soucy’s compelling, if curious, novel is translated by Sheila Fischman, who does an excellent job.