Briefly a Candle

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Briefly a Candle is the first-person narrative of protagonist Jason
McMullin’s odyssey from a preteen primary schooler to an early 20s BBA
college graduate employed by the federal Atlantic Development Agency.
His trip begins and ends in and around Fredericton, with major stops
along the way in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto, and side trips to other
locales for fishing trips, baseball tournaments, and family vacations.
As one of three children in a dysfunctional family headed by an
alcoholic and spousally abusive father, Jason marches from childish
pranks in his lower-class neighborhood to petty thievery, sexual
promiscuity, and drug abuse. An overdose that almost kills him is a
wake-up call to change his lifestyle.

This is Mooers’s first novel (he has 19 short stories and more than
200 poems to his credit). Its value lies in the descriptions of physical
settings and the graphic detail of drug episodes and their debilitating
effects on the characters involved. For his main theme, Mooers has
chosen Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy,
with its bleak references to life as the brief candle referred to in the
book’s title. Mooers deftly portrays his characters as Macbeth’s
walking shadows, strutting and fretting in their hours of sound and fury
on their way to dusty death. Briefly a Candle is a dark and foreboding
novel about characters searching for meaning in all the wrong places.