The Mysteries

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Doctoral student Robert McGill of Wiarton, Ontario, has written a novel
about the secret lives of the members of “Sunshine,” a similar
Georgian Bay community. He dispatches a literary double, also named
Robert, to establish his narrative. Robert is the boyfriend of a lawyer
who defends the town council in a Native land claims case. On their way
to that community, they pick up a hitchhiker who hands him a notebook
and asks him, “If you run into a woman named Alice Pederson, can you
give it to her?” Since Alice is missing, the reader is introduced to
the first of several mysteries.

One is able to inhabit the soul of Tamar the tiger without losing
respect for that animal’s integrity. Defining local hockey coach
Stoddart Fremlin presents a different problem. Since the old man molests
Rocket DeWitt, his young Native star player, one can in good conscience
only ask the reader to examine the perpetrator. Readers enter his
consciousness, enabling them to understand his lust and guilt. The
author places Fremlin’s crimes in their proper perspective. He refers
to the pleasure the deviate takes “from coaching a group of unfamiliar
boys in a sport he’d never played, the rules of which he hadn’t even
known at first.” Such an unqualified volunteer is an obvious predator.

Unfortunately, the author’s prose does not display other literary
virtues. The Mysteries will appeal more to students of Ontario
literature than to average readers.