Oceans Apart

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

There is a strange feeling of expansiveness in this Toronto-born
poet’s first novel. Set in the post-Vietnam era, the book contains
structural and temporal elements more commonly found in works of greater
length. Morton situates his hero and narrator, a young Calgary activist
and literary teacher, in the late 1970s, but Thomas Stanley’s memories
move the plot back to the years surrounding World War II. Flashbacks are
populated by family: his parents, his Aunt Mary, and his Uncle Ray—all
early influences. The most important influence in Thomas’s
contemporary world is his Chinese wife, May, a Calgary speech therapist,
whose desire to help children leads the couple to her native Hong Kong
in an attempt to escort Vietnamese children incarcerated in refugee
camps to safe homes in Canada.

Morton’s writing is simple and spare. There is a scrupulous avoidance
of verbiage. As the plot moves from Tom’s boyhood in Ontario, through
flashbacks to the lives of his family during the war, and then to the
present in Calgary and Hong Kong, Morton’s descriptions remain on
target. He is especially adept at rendering the ambivalence of
relationships under pressure, whether the pressures are created by war
or other external factors. This is an impressive debut.