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Aubert always keeps the reader engaged
Book Review
By Derryll White
Aubert, Rosemary (1998). Free Reign.
This is Rosemary Aubert’s first novel. Aubert is a professional criminologist as well as a writer, working out of Toronto. This novel is set in Toronto with the primary character, Ellis Portal, living as a vagrant in the Don River valley which cuts through the heart of the metropolis. Once a respected lawyer and judge, Ellis Portal is now a wanderer and citizen of the kingdom of free reign.
Aubert picks up an interesting theme here. She looks hard at the pressures immigrant children experience to both succeed and conform. Ellis Portal was born Angelo Portalese, the son of an Italian brickiere (bricklayer). He was raised in an Italian family and culture, and was expected to succeed. So he did, shedding his name and background in the process. Aubert pays a lot of attention to the contradictions and stresses a situation like this spawns. And she has Ellis Portal vent by means of serious temper tantrums which impact the outcomes of his life.
The novel continually asks what justice is – how does it work? Aubert puts a human face, Ellis Portal, on an abstraction and makes the ideal tangible. There are some weaknesses, such as that the novel could be tighter and shorter, but it is not a fatal flaw. Aubert asks the reader to think – about a wide spectrum of things such as friendship, family, homosexuality, Alzheimer’s, and continually about personal justice.
Rosemary Aubert is a comfortable writer to read. She takes the reader slowly through some large and lofty concepts, and always keeps the reader engaged. I will look for more of her work.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
LOVE – “She’s the one you were sweet on all these years, isn’t she?” Queenie asked. “Like a dream person. Like a movie star. Everybody on this earth loves someone at least once in their life way more than they love back.”
ALTRUISM – “Look, Tim, I’ve heard things like this before. A bunch of people with money get together and buy something that used to be public so they can make it private and keep it safe. That’s very nice. But what happens if they change their mind – if somebody makes them a good offer? How do you think people with money got that money? By always going for the best offer, even if it means changing their philosophy – even if it means revising it.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
