Strangled Roots

Nora Robson was a writer living in Montreal.

This sentimental, sometimes pretentious novel about Frank Tilitsky, who was raised in the western prairie community of Goose Lake, takes place between 1948 and the early 1950s. At 16, Frank has been thoroughly indoctrinated by his parents in their stern but contradictory Mennonite beliefs. When he leaves home, because of his father’s accident, to work in Winterton and, later, West View, he is exposed to other cultures and religions. These experiences lead him to a critical examination of his family’s blind dedication to the narrow and hypocritical confines of the community religion.

Quiring’s description of Goose Bay’s silly girls (Frank’s girlfriend, Gloria Wiebe, for example) and their adolescent obsession with sex and forcing men into marriage through thoughtless pregnancies, seems somewhat trite. It does serve, however, as a contrast to the more mature females like Michelle Perrault and Eileen Heidebrecht, whom he meets later.

His attendance at West View Bible School, which leads him to apply for a teaching position upon graduation, puts him in a dilemma where he is forced to choose between accepting an offer at Goose Lake and rejecting the position along with everything it stands for. The novel’s open-ended conclusion is unsatisfactory and puzzling.

Quiring’s apparently autobiographical tale, thinly disguised as fiction, might be compared to Rudy Wiebe’s early work, which is also concerned with Christian tenets, particularly those of his own Mennonite Anabaptist faith. He, however, unlike Quiring, sustains the reader’s interest fairly effortlessly. For this reason, Strangled Roots will no doubt have a limited appeal to readers.