Eye of the Father

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

David Williams has performed astonishing feats in this new novel. He has fashioned a rich work spanning three generations; he has peopled it with perhaps a dozen memorable characters; he has framed it within the Norse legend of Sigurd and Loki and Baldur. Williams has, moreover, accomplished these things in under 200 pages.

Eye of the Father is a retelling of an ancient story: a father’s curse reaching down across the generations to poison the lives of his children, of his children’s children. Williams moves into and out of each of his characters, using their voices, blending stream-of-consciousness, narrator, protagonist/ first person perspectives. There is a feeling of internal unity and forward movement across the time frames and the terrible realities.

Magnus Vangdals leaves his native Norway a step before a shotgun wedding. He makes his way to the Canadian West, with stops and fitful starts in New York City, Duluth, and North Dakota. He swindles and cheats and steals and pimps. And he leaves this legacy to his wife and his daughters. The saga is less one of action than of feeling; of situational and emotional instability. Finally, the grandson, Wayne, breaks the death wish of the old man both by adopting a son of his own and by writing his grandfather into his novel. One of the book’s finest scenes is the one in which the two daughters of the now-dead Magnus take a tour of the gold mine in Trail, B.C., in which their father worked as a lease miner. Daughter Christine senses his presence: “I have come to the place where Daddy spent the better part of a man’s life and I have nothing to offer, nothing more than he had to show for his labours. Sigfrid looks so helplessly depressed, there is nothing I can say to help her. But strangely I do not feel so depressed myself, there is something I don’t understand taking place in my depths, a shifting sensation far beneath the surface.”

The novel is, finally, about the expiation of guilt and about the necessity for children to get out from under the weight of their parents. It is about freedom. Wayne’s Ukrainian wife, Karen, says at one point: “are we going to make all the same old mistakes with our son? Or do you think it will help because we’re not his maker?”

Williams succeeds in evoking scenes which range from Norway to Saskatoon; he has the ability to write about snow and cold and how people are affected by these elements; about block heaters for car engines, and how it feels to crunch through the hardpack on the prairies. Eye of the Father is, first, a novel about character and about the ways in which we must rid ourselves of the negative influences of our ancestors. Second, it is a novel through which the author sends us on a journey, through the cold and wet places of the world, to the Canadian Prairies where a spell can be broken and love can be reborn.