A Fit Month for Dying

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

The themes and issues of this novel may seem somewhat worn and
old-fashioned: a tug-of-war marriage between people of different faiths;
the shame of bastardization; the seeming social impertinence of being a
female politician; and the tragedy of having a son embroiled in a sex
scandal with a Catholic priest—all set in the narrow confines of a
Newfoundland Catholic community. In M.T. Dohaney’s artistic hands,
however, they are anything but. She not only brings to them a fresh
perspective, making us see how the past impinges on the present, but she
invests them with such vibrancy and poignancy, and places them in such a
realistic environment, that we are faced with nuances of meaning we have
not experienced before. Her main characters—two of the indomitable
Corrigan women so well known from her previous novels—anchor this
story, but it is the ordeal of Tess Corrigan’s son, Brendan, that
gives it a heart. Dohaney’s ability to depict the family’s trauma
(and eventually the son’s death) with touching realism, avoiding
sentimentality and cliché, is truly remarkable. On both the
experiential and aesthetic levels, this novel is a powerful work of art.