from Breakwater Books

It is Christmas Eve, 1968, in the filmic opening scene of Monica Kidd’s new novel, The Crane. A young man sits on a train, “trees smearing past his window,” squinting at his broken eyeglasses on the table in front of him. He is James Anderson, a native of Wyoming, and he has fled to Newfoundland to evade serving in Vietnam, in the war that has recently killed his twin brother, Dave. The broken glasses and his compromised vision become a metaphor for secrets, stories that remain buried or obfuscated. A conflicted dodger, James is also embarking on a quest to fulfill the wishes of his dead brother. He carries a small wooden crane—ironically a symbol of peace, honour and good fortune—carved by Dave’s close friend Eric, also a casualty of the war. Birds are a recurring motif in the novel, their presence variously suggesting both freedom and entrapment.

A man compelled to seek the truth, James is aptly hired as a fact-checker for the St. John’s newspaper, The Daily Standard, but soon his editor assigns him to northern Lewisporte to cover the story of the scuttling of an old British warship, Calypso. In the remote coastal outpost, he becomes acquainted with locals who are enduring their own traumatic search for a man lost at sea. In a self-imposed exile, having lost his twin and his country, “James was just a trespasser, thinking about how the dead reign over the living, with their things unsaid, their eternal silent witness.”

Kidd’s vivid dialogue captures the cadences and poetic precision of the Newfoundland dialect; her thorough research evokes the natural beauty of Vietnam and the brutal wastage of war. A physician by profession, she writes fearlessly about the ripple effects of violence and trauma, the walls people build to survive and the restorative power of community. ■

CLARISSA HURLEY is the founding co-editor of the new literary journal, Camel.