Drowning in Darkness

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

Darkness is everything in Peter Oliva’s first novel. Mood, locale,
theme are all infused within a suffocating blackness. Set in the
coal-mining community of southern Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass, the book
moves contrapuntally from two trapped miners to the different darkness
of a bad marriage.

Oliva knows his material; his great-grandfather, grandfather, and
father all worked in the Crowsnest Pass mines. He writes of the methane
gas that seeps through the coalface, loosening the deposits and creating
the constant danger of fire and suffocation, and of the tragedy of men
(and women) who can look forward only to the end of a shift, the return
to the daylight. Suffusing the novel are the superstitions brought
unadulterated from the boot of Italy, a mythology personified most
powerfully in the character of Serafina, whose dreams of her homeland
magnify her unhappiness.

Oliva’s writing is dense, heavy, and imagistic. The juxtaposition
between the doomed miners and Serafina’s misery blocks the plot’s
flow. The reader must work at this novel, but it is worth it. Oliva is a
writer to watch closely. Highly recommended.