Violets of Usambara, The .

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

Seventeen chapters set in March, 1997, alternate between Thomas Brossard on a trip to Africa and his wife Louise back in Montreal. Thomas has moved from work in industry to a political career that has recently faltered, while Louise has stayed at home and raised three children.

Their narrative separation mimics a gap that has persisted throughout their marriage. Flashbacks and reflections put the history of their relationship at the center of the novel. Mid-life retrospection sets the mood.

It becomes apparent that most of Thomas’s achievement has been engineered by Louise. Overweight and averse to public settings, she has lived through her husband. Louise arranges the trip to Burundi for Thomas, who is at loose ends, when she herself should have been the traveller: “Africa was her continent.”

At a point of crisis, Thomas wrecks his wife’s carefully nurtured African violets (their alternative name is the novel’s title) and he begins an odd, haphazard quest for local wild violets. The outcome of that search symbolizes the pair’s unhealthy mutual interdependence.

A psychosocial dimension enhances the story. Thomas, the offspring of a broken marriage, first comes to Canada to attend private school, and he returns as an expedient draft dodger. An inexperienced young Louise latches onto Thomas, because he seems exciting without being frightening. From there onward they engage in a Strindbergian dance of death.

Two minor subplots make the novel’s world seem a uniformly difficult place. Cousin Frédéric struggles with his homosexual orientation. Housemaid Rosa worries about her husband’s grocery business. Both of these characters also provide occasion to elaborate on Louise’s pervasive Catholicism.

An afterword mentions research and travel that contributed to the writing, and claims for the book a broad context in recent Canada-Africa (particularly Rwanda and Burundi) interrelationships and their portrayals.

The genre of this deftly written novel is bourgeois domestic tragedy. As characters, Thomas and Louise remain strangely unappealing.