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A book for anyone who has lost love
Book Review
By Derryll White
Blunt, Giles (2006). By The Time You Read This
I always come to one of Giles Blunt’s John Cardinal mysteries with a sense of anticipation and also a measure of trepidation. What is he going to throw at me this time? Blunt always seems to surprise me emotionally, and sometimes take me places I don’t necessarily want to go. I do trust him as a writer however, as he has an impeccable honesty of emotion and sense of human understanding.
About three chapters in I realized that John Cardinal had just lost his wife and partner of 30 years, Catherine. This realization made me pause as I lost my own partner, Shirley, a year and a bit ago. That was a dizzying, life changing loss and I wondered if I could deal with Blunt’s emotional honesty, his wonderful ability to make the page wring out the reader’s tears. The real intent of lines such as “Pain was not a big enough word for this country of agony, this Yukon of grief” were not lost on me and hammered at my sense of healing. They rang so true. I do trust that as a writer that is how one gets well – one writes about it. Having done that myself I thought I should buck up, trust Blunt’s skill and innate humanness, and read this book.
I am so glad I did. The reality of the small perceptions such as Wal-Mart wiping out small business with its “deadly munificence” makes things very real in a Canadian context. Blunt also deals with faith in a way that is familiar to me, a political presence not necessarily connected with God. “A shadow passed over Cardinal as the smoke that had been his wife dimmed the sun.” Not exactly my experience, but he comes oh so close.
There are major sub-texts in this novel; suicide and child pornography being the most pronounced. Blunt is very adept at demonstrating the human cost of both to close friends, family and to police officers drawn into the cases. He extracts aspects not often considered – the emotional drain of addressing the needs of distraught family members, the ugly pit nurtured in the stomach and soul of officers drawn into the exploitive world of child porn, the splash-over of suicide into the lives of medical workers, students and associates of the dead person. He is gentle and graceful in his considerations, possesses boundless empathy in his main characters, and is very sensitive and accurate in his portrayal of how death touches John Cardinal. He brought tears to my eyes several times.
This is definitely a book for anyone who has lost love. “The Planet Grief” is in most of our personal solar systems. I found myself understanding Cardinal, supporting him in his loss and confusion and, consequently, feeling more grounded and more peaceful in my own. Throughout this book I got many, many small signals of what I have already come to know – Giles Blunt will make an indelible mark on Canadian literature.
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.
