D.R. MacDonald: Cape Breton Road

By DAVID HILL*

When it comes to a brooding, bleak, backblocks backdrop for a psychological thriller, the wild woods of Nova Scotia have definite site appeal. This debut novel by a man with a big hat and big moustache brings a feckless young crim into a landscape of spruce forest, hip-deep snow and plants that can kill.

Innis is a car thief, deported from Boston's streets of gold to Cape Breton's roads of mud. He doesn't intend to stay. When spring comes and he's scored some cash from a few dope sales, he'll be off west to the bright lights and matching vehicles.

Meanwhile, he has to endure a stripped-down life in which a stove, an axe, a hammock are icons as well as fittings. Men are men and women are a puzzle. There's much soliloquising about identity and purpose.

Like the marijuana seedlings Innis tries to grow in his uncle's attic, the story is slow to get going. But as the rhythms of storm and stillness establish themselves, plot and protagonist begin to quicken.

There are great evocations of the land in winter: "the dry creak of wood in the wind ... the black trees at dusk like a drape across the window."

Then the enigmatic, fairly implausible Claire arrives in Innis' world. He treads into a time crackling with danger. People reach for each other and don't always know if they've touched. Innis has a highly wrought, overwrought moment of moral choice which carves things to the bone.

Often in this novel you can feel the prose veer towards a Hemingwayesque, I-Wrote-This-With-The-Hairs-From-My-Chest posturing. Often, the only difference between the gaunt men and the gaunt trees is that the latter sway more in the gales.

But the lyrical, mysterious Gaelic language and lore that drift through it, plus the alternation of oratory and silence, lift its best bits well above the usual level of the genre.

Chatto & Windus

$34.95

* David Hill's new teenage novel is The Sleeper (Puffin).