Book Review

By Derryll White

Giles Blunt (2000), Forty words for sorrow.

Can you spell D-E-S-P-A-I-R?  He doesn’t say it but I believe it is one of the forty words for sorrow.

Edie, one of the main characters, is so down on herself, her life, her own physicality, that she plunges ever deeper into despair. “I love Eric with a terrible passion, but I don’t like him. He’s mean and selfish and cruel and a bully. And I love him.” He teaches her to kill, remorselessly, and she loves him. This is the world Blunt explores so relentlessly both here and in another of his novels, Breaking Lorca, the world of human pain.

That is not to say that ‘Forty words for sorrow’ is a dark book. Maybe because of Giles Blunt’s unyielding quest after the meaning of life the book reads easily and with some joy. There are some very nice turns of phrase, evocative, such as “this creature moulded from the clay of pure thug.”

Death and happy children, silence and noise. Blunt uses contrasts to his advantage as a writer. He investigates the tools people use to create environments of comfort out of the misery of rejection and pain. “I am a conquered country,” Edie writes. “He has taken me by storm.”

The look of fear is the one look you can trust. Bleak in spots, mirroring the ice and cold of winter in northern Ontario, the author incessantly pushes for more understanding of what makes the human animal function, provides gratification, pushes the boundaries of acceptability.  Stepping outside these boundaries with the action, the reader grows a greater understanding, and bond, with the principal investigator John Cardinal.

The details regarding bureaucracy run so true.  Blunt takes apart Algonquin Bay’s police force, the penny-pinching rationalizing insipid logic of Cardinal’s supervisor, but it could be any government department in Canada. We love Cardinal because he searches for truth, does not give up in the face of self-serving reason.  Cardinal states the facts of his analysis and his boss replies “Sorry Cardinal. Your reasoning is out of Alice in Wonderland.” Yes, every reader has worked with someone like that poisoning the reader’s life.

Cardinal’s wife Catherine suffers depression. Blunt’s handling of this pervasive condition is incredibly sensitive, non-judgmental. Cardinal is humbled by the magnitude of her desolation while remaining aware of his potential judgmental anger. It struck a chord with me and anyone familiar with depression will understand the personal struggle Cardinal goes through.

The author is excellent with memory, the evocative properties of same and the mental side trips memory inevitably pulls one down. The reader is lured into little personal passageways to other times, former loves and conquests, former losses. It is fully engaged reading to the point of the reader injecting his or her own persona into the story, only to be pulled back by the consequences.

As a writer he uses insulting detail – gagged with her own underpants – to assault the reader’s sensibilities. “Virtue was just an invention like the speed limit, a convention you could obey or not, as you saw fit.”

Giles Blunt is a force to be reckoned with, emerging out of northern Ontario with a thoughtfulness and sophistication one expects from someone older and more worldly. Death of a violent nature is reduced to the almost commonplace in the utterances of the murderers. And in a rural town roughly twice the size of Cranbrook, where I write this.  But this reduction itself pushes both writer and reader past the boundaries of place, struggling for some comprehension of how humanity itself devolves to this level.

“Todd Curry getting his brains beat out. It’s just words, Edie. You can say them”  mutters the main deranged character, Eric Fraser. But the serious reader knows the consequences of naming, knows that naming such acts drags them closer to reality, closer to the dark streets we commonly walk down.  Although frightening as hell, Blunt cannot deny himself.

This is a heavy work, dealing with some of the most reprehensible human tendencies. It is the first work in an ongoing series from this author. To Blunt’s credit he takes the time and has the awareness to insert light trivialities as delightful surprises, such as a lineman whistling ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ after lamping a hot little number behind a retail counter just before he discovers yet another human tragedy.

John Cardinal, the principal investigator and continuing lead in Blunt’s John Cardinal series, is a flawed human being. Therefore, to me, he is very real.  In fact I love him because he cares too much about his family, cannot deny them and therefore gets himself into trouble. We can all relate.

It is nice to stumble across the hidden Canadianisms, such as Peter Gzowsky.  Meaning nothing to an international audience, these small touches still pull at my heart strings.

I enjoyed the tension set up between the various police departments, with the city cops wary of the Ontario Provincial Police and everyone constantly dissing the RCMP. “The problem with the horsemen is they’re broke.”

Blunt is also a polished storyteller. The reader is more than 300 pages (won’t tell you where) into the book before the author reveals the details of the crime, which haunts his principal investigator from the beginning. The man can certainly keep a secret, and use it to build character depth and reader interest.

It’s about control, about the way we manipulate each other subtly constantly often silently. Blunt knows people, how they work psychologically. He gives the reader enough information to form opinions, to like characters even, and then things change.  I certainly think Giles Blunt and the John Cardinal series are worth a reader’s look.

– 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 .

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