#55 - The Custodian of Paradise

I read The Custodian of Paradise, Wayne Johnston's companion novel to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, in a flash this weekend for an interview I did at work this week (today, in fact). The novel tells the story of Sheilagh Fielding, the larger than life, both figuratively and literally (as she stands six-foot-three) character from Johnston's Colony, as she tells her side of the story, the side we didn't read in the aforementioned novel.

Wayne Johnston is a favourite of mine. The fall where I read the paperback copy of Colony was the first year that my RRHB and I were living together. It was a tough year, not because of that, but because of all the stuff we waded through, much of our own making, to get into our apartment (feuding friends, feuding ex-partners, crazy fall-out from the last time the disease flared, etc) and the book was a breath of fresh air; Joey Smallwood doing for me at that moment what Owen Meany had done for me in Banff, lifted me up and out of my doldrums and pushed me right back in my imagination.

The Custodian of Paradise, while not a broad, sweeping historical novel, sort of did the same thing. Although I don't recommend reading it like I did, pushing it down in a timeframe because you want to prepare for your interview, but rather savouring it like a good bottle of wine you're drinking as the sun sets at the cottage. It's an interior story, Sheilagh's story, told mainly through her own writing, her newspaper articles, her journals, her letters, which makes it thoroughly intense in terms of emotional investment.

And it's a sad story, but triumphant in that Sheilagh's a survivor: she rides the wave of her mother's abandonment, triumphs against her father's dismissal of her (he refuses to believe that he's hers), suffers a truly heartbreaking heartbreak, and is forced to give up her children. But through it all, you can see Sheilagh's delicate nature balanced with her skillful wit and her sharp tongue. It's this contrast that makes the book so engaging; and it's a rare accomplishment for a man (and I know, I'm sorry for the gender bias) to write a female protagonist where, not once, I questioned her own innate feminity and/or characterization (see Updike for any proof of how to get this wrong, wrong).

All in all, it's my favourite to win the Giller this year, but I'm not taking any bets as to what'll actually happen.