Kindly Light.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Kindly Light, New Brunswicker Robert Gibbs’s fifth book from Oberon Press, is a quiet and gentle fictional memoir of a childhood spent in and around Saint John, New Brunswick, at the period just after the Second World War. The narrator is Francis (Frank) MacBean, 12 years old at the time we meet him leaving Mrs. O’Donnell’s rooming house where he has been staying in the custody of his Aunt Harris. Harris leaves her nephew a letter when she departs, informing the boy that he is to go to live with his grandfather, Archie MacBean: “You’re to leave today,” the letter says. “The SMT bus leaves at 3. So be sure you’re on it.” So begins the journey which will introduce Frank to his long-lost family, most of whom he meets for the first time.

The journey, geographically, is not far; emotionally it is wide-ranging. “It would take literally years for all that I learned that night at that supper table,” he remembers, “to become part of me. Still there were moments when the deja vu phenomenon poised on the threshold of my consciousness as if ready to dissolve my tenuous hold onto present time.”

Frank is a widower during his reminiscing, an elderly academic visiting his daughter and her husband in London. Gibbs moves his account from past to present, back and forth, creating an interlinear that works well. “It is not to clarify anything not yet clear,” writes the mature MacBean from his Harrow retreat, “but to make something tidy out of things inherently messy. I do not pretend to understand my travels and travails any more than my origins.”

Gibbs is well-known in Atlantic Canada, having taught for many years in the English department of the University of New Brunswick. He served for many years as editor of The Fiddlehead, and is presently director of UNB’s Creative Writing graduate program.