Dark Jewels

Gemma Files is a Toronto-based free-lance writer.

Murdoch MacFarland, a Cape Breton miner, digs for coal while
spontaneously flipping from point to point in his own memory. His World
War I experiences, his tragic first marriage, and the death of his
eldest son superimpose themselves, uninvited, over his impoverished
present—which is bad enough to begin with. MacFarland’s memories
become the dark jewels of the title, resurfacing more quickly as each
excavation goes deeper, the money gets tighter, and the plot becomes
more convoluted. Sorrows pile up, fast and hard, sheer pressure
squeezing them into diamonds.

Donovan’s prose style clearly reflects her central image’s compact
clarity. A typical quote: “He sees a dress form beneath the partition,
beginning to turn black. It is smoking underneath; it is all flames. A
bride’s dress, he can’t believe how beautiful, as the flames lick
the headless woman up the sides, burn bright bands across her stomach,
her breasts are blinding him, and piece by piece she is roasting, flesh
smells dark, she is burning.” The word “dark” becomes inescapable,
recurring relentlessly: “[H]e grappled like a man adrift, everything,
everything out of control, drifting away from everything he knew, human
dark and faces in the pits, horses blind, rat-eaten, stumbling, fur of
dark licks, tongues; old man on the shore in the wind, in the human, in
the human dark he clawed himself back.”

Though constrained by MacFarland’s disintegrated point of view,
Donovan juggles characters and plot deftly, guiding us through a
desolate inner landscape, so lovingly mapped out that it assumes the
ring of history. An uncompromising, and exciting, debut.