Tranter's Tree

Michael Laing is a policy analyst with the Ontario Ministry of
Education.

An earlier novel by H.R. Percy, Painted Ladies, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 1984. Both it and Tranter’s Tree are published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in their International Fiction List, along with such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Josef Skvorecky, and Graham Greene. So Percy, by this evidence, is in the big time.

Tranter’s Tree is an encyclopedic work. It spreads out to take in many of the people who live or have lived on Salvia Street in a small Nova Scotia town. At the same time, it moves backward and forward in time, back to the coming of Ned Tranter to the New World to find his fortune and leave his monument, and ahead again to the present and certain menacing events.

The tree of the title was planted by Tranter in the 1720s to mark the spot where he first saw his true love. It becomes his monument: as he is caught up in the French and English conflicts and the expulsion of the Acadians, his fate and the tree’s are closely joined. In the present, the tree and the lives of the people who live around it are threatened by more banal (but no less lethal) circumstances — the politics of progress, in whose way the tree stands.

The novel is about remembering, about being possessed by the past and being both nurtured and discommoded by it for present and future. In effect, it’s about the myths that form us. To those who live on Salvia Street, the tree is a symbol of the past and a participant in the events of the present. With its fate are linked the lives of the narrator and his friends. Of course, once the past loses its symbol, the present has surprises, not all of them welcome.

The inclusiveness of the novel is well matched by the whimsical energy of its prose. At its best, this results in a playful irony, entirely appropriate to its subject, the making of myths. But this best is not always achieved. Percy insists on having his narrator call his wife “Lizzikins”; a dog out for a walk “consults her decalogue of odours.” This relentless cuteness, or defiant jauntiness, is distracting, and at times infuriating.

For its range, its energy, and its understanding, Tranter’s Tree is a welcome participant in our own makings of myths. Percy has much to say that’s worth hearing. I hope he can hit a finer balance in his ways of saying it.