The Globe and Mail says Madeleine Thien is, after her debut novel, "already as adept as Alice Munro'. Alice Munro, in turn, calls the young author "splendid'. Such direct, pointed comparison is unfortunate - this book, and this author, are capable of standing alone.
The characters of Certaintyare flawed and haunted and detailed. The three different plots twist together and settle, and although the narrative leaps between continents and centuries - from modern-day Vancouver to wartime Borneo, to Jakarta and to Amsterdam - it is easy to follow and always effective.
We first meet Ansel, a doctor in Vancouver, who is mourning the death of his passionate radio-reporter wife Gail. She died of a simple stroke but left Ansel's life almost unbearably tangled.
Skipping back to Borneo, Gail's father Matthew is a child watching the horror of war destroy his village. He has one friend, Ani, and the two pull each other through. As teenagers, after the war, they fall in love and hope for the best.
But Ani makes the devastating decision to leave Matthew so that he will take up an opportunity to study at a university in Australia. Lost on her own, Ani heads to Jakarta, where she meets a war photographer, then to the watery haven of Amsterdam.
Decades later, Ani and Matthew meet again to swap secrets in a park.
Meanwhile, Ansel slowly comes to terms with living alone.
There's a certain something about Canadian writing that always gets me, an ability to stand back and pick out the detail but not swamp a story in minutiae.
Thien does this perfectly.
It is a mark of her skill that Ansel's grief - over one simple death - hits just as hard as Matthew's nightmares of watching his father being shot by soldiers. Splendid, indeed.
