Grace Lake

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Glen Huser is an Albertan, founder and current managing editor of
Magpie, who has studied creative writing under Rudy Wiebe, Margaret
Atwood, and W.O. Mitchell. This novel began as a play written a decade
ago under the title The Flowers of Alberta; in that form, it won the
Edmonton Journal Literary Competition. Rewritten and newly published as
a first novel, it does not betray its theatrical origins.

The protagonist, John Hislop, has spent an entire lifetime denying his
feelings and his desires—in modern terms, “denying his gay
identity,” but this is not a modern novel. Having recently suffered a
heart attack, Hislop returns as a counsellor to Grace Lake summer camp
for boys and tries to pick up the threads of past seasons. Debilitated
in health, he cannot prevent the memories of a number of boys—boys who
have touched him deeply, but never until this time consciously—from
encroaching on his daily activities.

Huser’s writing has an almost botanical precision in the descriptions
which make up its bulk; passages of sensory memory and unascribed
dialogue dredged up from the past often intermingle with impressions of
the present. Hislop’s plight is not unlike a melding of A Death in
Venice and The Ship of Fools: with each turn of the page, the reader
expects either the protagonist’s final encounter with fate or a
jarring confrontation with his sexuality. Instead, we follow Hislop’s
diversionary thoughts as he recalls the uncannily perspicacious words of
a deranged neighbor and various litanies of the women who have cared for
him during periods of illness. The observation of his meandering thought
processes is minute, so that piece by piece a picture of his life is
constructed and its major events painted with the brush of subjective
detail. It is a low-key life, with only a few events of dramatic impact,
and even fewer abortive forays into self-realization. The reader may
welcome reminders that the novel is set in Alberta and that capital-L
“Life” is identified with the West Coast (the Pacific National
Exhibition) and not the East. Grace Lake in the final analysis is the
story of a soul, told gently, in old-fashioned terms. Therein lies the
secret of its poignancy.