At the outset of the Second World War, on Canada’s West Coast, a young man attacks his father with a tire-iron in an argument over enlistment. (He wants to go, his father insists he stay.) As a result, while others march off to war, Sandy Grey is marched off to an asylum for the criminally insane, his chances of coming out alive little better than they would have been at the Front.

The cuckoo’s nest depicted in Bowering’s fifth novel is a familiar one. The medical apparatus is barbaric and bizarre, the cures more devastating than madness. The inmates are at the mercy of a brutal attendant’s whim. But in the hands of Bowering, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, the material is dramatic and at times lyrical, the story rich and strange. Sandy is a kind of Everyman, with a normal capacity for love and anger, his fine intelligence beaten down in the name of Christian obedience. The irony of his incarceration at a time of global bloodshed is abundantly clear. It is also no accident that the central characters include a German, a Japanese, and a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Their crimes are mysterious – “just the usual,” Sandy figures, “some bad mistake in love.”

While the pacing is taut and suspenseful, Bowering’s judicious use of the fantastic reminds us that this is no ordinary thriller. The sea serpent Cadborosaurus surfaces at a critical juncture to save Sandy from drowning. Sandy’s research into the case of a wronged inmate soon allows him to virtually channel the man’s life on the page. The beautiful blond alcoholic who providentially intercedes is as much celluloid vision as flesh and blood, and the euphoria and optimism of the ending feel like a dream.

It is harder to believe than to disbelieve, Bowering seems to be saying; yet believing, against all logic, that happiness is possible is a large part of what it takes to be fully human.