The Ocean Tree

Stephen Elliott is a librarian in Peterborough, Ontario.

To set a novel in a white-male summer cadet camp in the 1950s would seem
an act of anti-PC defiance. However, The Ocean Tree is distinctly
revisionist (i.e., 1990s) in outlook. Its characters include a New Age
telepathic telephone operator, a commanding officer who seems
inordinately concerned with group dynamics and the psychological
well-being of his colleagues, and teenage boys who are so dysfunctional
that sex and sports barely enter their vocabulary. At the centre of the
novel is Harry Young, a young man haunted by images of the enormous tree
next to the parade square, and of his dead father moving dreamlike under
the asphalt. The “ocean” of the title is the lake as imagined by the
telephone operator whose boyfriend—a cadet—died overseas. The
operator shares with Harry a capacity for self-torture, subjecting
herself to an endless stream of young men who remind her of her Eddy.
Although the novel is competently written (if not stylish) and its
characters are well drawn, it is far too depressing to be enjoyable.
Where the author excels is in his seamless, virtuosic shifts in point of
view.