Wally Greene, closing in on his fifties, spends his days in his workshop building props for Vancouver’s Phoenix Theatre. It’s 1987, Vancouver is deep in post-Expo torpor, and Wally’s life is suspended between two women – his wife, Georgia, and Peggy McLean, a recurring presence in his life since she was evacuated to his family’s farm in Wales during the Blitz, now dying of cancer – and two young men – his son Alexander, a fledgling pianist with a secretive nightlife of drug abuse and cruising, and Ned, Peggy’s troubled youngest son. Ned’s arrival at the workshop to fulfill court-ordered community service triggers a reliving of Wally’s past.

Wally, the new novel from Montreal writer and actor Greg Kramer, is a powerfully written depiction of a slow dissolve into madness, a compelling account of life and love viewed from the Gaff, the backstage world where “your left is house right, you live your life from front to back, you belong in the whispering wings behind the veil.”

Kramer’s writing is cuttingly detailed and sumptuous in the service of bleakness, urban ugliness, and beautifully evoked pain. He has a keen sense of place, evoking both postwar London and late-1980s Vancouver without resorting to clichés or glib shorthand.

Wally is a relentlessly male novel. While Wally is a character rich in contradiction and life and Alexander is a skilled depiction of disaffected youth, Georgia and Peggy remain distanced, simply not understood (rather than enigmatic), functioning more as symbols or narrative devices than as characters in their own right.

Wally’s downward spiral is carefully crafted, effortlessly shifting between timelines and characters to explore both his inner life and the consequences of the smallest of actions. Unfortunately, the tour de force ending, while thematically appropriate as a break from reality and well written, is at odds with the measured realism of the rest of the novel. The juxtaposition is too shocking, too sudden, to be entirely successful.