Quintet.

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

When the accidental deaths of their parents in a Florida train wreck brings them back to Cape Breton for the funeral, long-separated triplets Rory, Adrian, and Cameron Hines decide to reconnect by starting a journal, alternating chapters among themselves, mailing their efforts after four-month intervals, first to one, then to the others.

The 40-year-old brothers are as disparate as they could be. Adrian is gay, a chef living in Copenhagen, mourning the death of his long-time partner. Cameron lives in Halifax and is a practising carpenter, while Rory is a Toronto artist and gallery owner who paints only in the colour red. In the pages of the journal contributions Brown sets down the shards of their lives, jagged with events past and current. But the triplets form only three-fifths of the novel. Another piece is older brother Talbot, “the Big B,” whose shadow looms large over the lives and psyches of the others. Quintet’s fifth and final performer is revealed at the end of the novel and creates, unfortunately, a somewhat underdeveloped addition to a fascinating and emotion-filled story.

Himself a Cape Bretoner, Douglas Brown has written two novels (Quintet is the second), a collection of short stories, and two children’s books.

There are obvious dangers in juxtaposing personas and points of view in one novel told in the first person. Brown pulls off the feat admirably, developing the brothers not only as individuals but equally as members of a largely dysfunctional family which, as these things tend to do, points them in often unfortunate directions. As the story unfolds, Brown gets more and more comfortable with shifting attitudes, interspersing one with the others to form an intelligent and seamless whole. Highly recommended.