Vibrations in Time

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Davey Bryant is a familiar figure from Watmough’s five earlier titles in which Davey developed from unhappy Cornish boyhood to mature years as a self-possessed adult, half a world away in British Columbia. In the present collection of eleven short pieces, the author has “striven to so strike chords of memory that Davey’s experiences, however singular in themselves, however locked into the specifics of place and present history, can liberate those vibrations in time which can thus be communicated and shared between author and reader.”

Certainly Davey has acquired an almost physical presence, built up of successive impressions and insights: his experiences will indeed suggest parallel occasions to the sympathetic reader. This collection tends toward the darker side of life, to recollections of moments of pain, insult, and hurts of the day that portend sleepless nights; to the battering of treasured privacy battered by unfriendly strangers.

These are more complex and less powerful than earlier Davey stories. Vibrations tends to language a little too rotund, verging on pomposity. But a brilliant character sketch (as in “Davey’s Dream”) of an imagined, forsaken mother and her friend, matches the best of Watmough’s writings.