A Blue and Golden Year

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

There are many corpses in this novel. Some of the dead bodies we never
get to meet, while others are destroyed by a seemingly random collision
of events. Characters who survive have met with horrific acts of
violence or live only in the reflected sadness of other people’s
lives. Strangers bond because of what they want. Women born as sisters
live in uneasy loathing of each other.

This fragmented novel, which is billed as a mystery, is certainly a
puzzle: its pieces take a while to fall into place. The narrative skips
between the Canadian prairies and the Mexican coast as it presents the
characters’ incoherent lives, which turn out to have some connection.
Interspersed with murder, drugs, sex, and scatology are quiet moments
when people reach for the real thing, the real love. In the end, for
those who remain, it comes where least expected.

The author does not dig very deep. Her characters seem to have the same
voice, and we never feel strongly for them because their damaged
backgrounds are never fully developed. At least two characters are truly
evil, but we know nothing of what made them so. Most of the people we
meet are severely punished for pursuing their own needs. By the end of
this melancholy story, the reader has come to fit the pieces into an
uneasy pattern and to be touched by the battered lives lived in a part
of society that falls between the cracks.