What's Bred in the Bone

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

There’s a grim old proverb that says “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.” So many mysteries are bred in the bone of Francis Cornish: the strange story of his parents’ oddly successful marriage, and the events leading up to it; the living mystery in the parental attic, and the strange acolytes of that guilty secret. Francis’s talents, too, are out of the ordinary. He has a gift for things artistic, to be sure, but only the local undertaker knows just how that talent is nourished.... Add to this the prolonged, silent, religious tug-of-war for the boy’s faith, fought in the absence of his parents by his fiercely Catholic Aunt Mary-Ben and the equally influential, fiercely Presbyterian cook, which left the boy, and later the man, the legacy of a soul forever adrift between the two. In school, in love, in war and espionage, most of all in the world of art, Francis Cornish’s life is a riddle inside an enigma. Who and what is the real Francis Cornish? Did he know? Was he a national benefactor? A war hero? A dishonest, picture-faking scoundrel? The reader, tracing a complex life through the richly embellished pages of a baroque and immensely satisfying novel, will have to reach a personal decision. Bred in the Bone is the work of a masterful writer at the peak of his form.