The Year of Fears

Ruth Kennedy was a librarian and fitness instructor in Islington, Ontario.

Davey Bryant is again the central character of his fictional autobiographies in this, his seventh book. The plot is not strong; the novel is another episode in the life of Davey which has taken him from his Cornish childhood half-way across the world to Vancouver. This time he is recalling his life in California in 1953 during the McCarthy terror. That dreadful period is vividly recalled with between-chapter quotations from 1953 U.S. publications. “The largest single group supporting the Communist Apparatus in the U.S. today is composed of Protestant clergymen.”

In Davey’s search for work, and in his jobs in a university library and a bizarre bookstore, he becomes mainly involved with fellow homosexuals. The habitues who use the book-store for their private readings in private rooms — where they can exercise their busts, and are occasionally supervised through a keyhole — introduce a variety of humorous situations and characters. Davey’s transient meetings with numerous homosexuals are wonderfully descriptive, and provide excellent characterization and background. The heterosexual people sometimes seem exaggerated in their idiosyncracies and their worries about Communism, but are probably products of the times. In retrospect Davey states that he “learned to laugh and cry perhaps just a little bit more keenly than before or since.”

Watmough writes immensely readable fiction; his use of words is often brilliant and disciplined, always literate and lively. He is a master of skillful writing, of characterization, of dialogue. Here is an author who deserves a wide audience.