Parksville

Stan Chung teaches English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince
George, B.C.

Artistic, postmodern, captivating, puzzling—these words describe some
of the strengths of William Lynch’s Parksville. Here is really fresh
prose written in a style that energizes and rewards the reader,
challenges the reader’s visual imagination, and focuses the reader’s
attention on the nature of creative expression. It also highlights the
strange mind set of its narrator, Nillo, an artist obsessed with faces
who is hired to create masks for a Greek tragedy.

But the plot is not predominant here; the evocative voice of the
narrator is—in all sorts of unexpected ways. Sometimes his
observations push the reader into new perspectives on the ordinary; for
example, upon seeing a telephone lying on its side he says “the
receiver looks like a wounded thing. I’ve seen wounded things
before.”

Lynch is a talented and skilled writer. Artists challenge reality, and
this is what Lynch’s novel does. When we see through Nillo’s eyes,
we begin to perceive what it takes to be an artist. It is a rare work
that can accomplish two feats: see into the artist and be art itself.