Opium Dreams

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

This hallucinatory first novel by short-story writer Margaret Gibson
follows World War II veteran Timothy Glass as he travels through the
subterranean world of Alzheimer’s disease, a voyager likened to the
“great white blind worms” who inhabit deep-sea “ink-black grottos
and glassy green caverns.”

Bearing witness to Timothy’s inexorable descent into coma—the murky
“Land of Not”—is his “Number-Two” daughter Maggie, a writer
and epileptic who makes regular visits to the “Country of Fugue.”
“[B]orn with a secret beat” and nicknamed the Dreamer by her father,
Maggie is a lifelong outsider. Like Timothy, she has spent time in a
mental institution—he as a returning soldier in the 1940s, she as a
teenager some 20 years later. The often nightmarish memories of father
and daughter unfold in language thick with lush and startling imagery.

In lieu of a psychoanalysis of her two main characters, Gibson presents
the reader with an unblinking and deeply poetic expression of her
central theme: the tragedy of loss.