Fourteen-year-old
Ned Vatcher returns home from school one day in 1936 to discover that his
parents, Edgar and Megan, have disappeared.
Though he has to live with his paternal grandparents, Nan Finn and Reg,
it is Father Duggan, a Jesuit priest, and Sheilagh Fielding, a friend of his
parents, who become his most stalwart supporters. Cyril, Edgar’s brother, also remains an
important character in Ned’s life, though not always in a positive way. Various points of view are provided, but the
focus is on Ned and Sheilagh.
Ned’s
entire life is driven by his parents’ disappearance. He realizes that “to find out what had become
of them would be the main goal of my life.”
He also decides that unlike his parents who were destitute and
debt-ridden before their disappearance, “I would never want for money if I
could help it, no matter what I had to do to get it.” Unfortunately, he ends up losing
himself. He becomes “deaf to the tones
of my own life” and feels “There simply was nothing at the innermost of me.”
Characterization
is a strong element in the novel. Ned is
a dynamic character who changes as the years pass. As mentioned, he is shaped by the mysterious
disappearance of his mother and father; he spends his life “lamenting the loss
of things [he] never had” and loses himself; at one point, he is pointedly told,
“’I know who and what I am, Ned Vatcher.
Not everyone can say the same.’”
Besides
Ned, there are other characters who are fully developed. Nan Finn and Sheilagh Fielding are among the
most memorable. Both are sharp-tongued, targeting
those who displease them. Nan Finn, for
example, had no sympathy for Megan who was very unhappy in Newfoundland and
yearned to return to London: “’I can
tell by those eyes of hers. It’s a
wonder dinner gets cooked what with her being so busy bawling and wishing she
was there instead of here. . . . What do people do in London? . . . Sit around
and talk to each other with their eyes closed.
I better keep busy or I’ll get bored and long for London.’” Sheilagh’s targets are the rich and powerful;
she writes a regular newspaper column in which she exposes their foibles and
hypocrisies.
Sheilagh
appears in the previous two novels of the Newfoundland Trilogy: The
Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The
Custodian of Paradise. Both titles
are actually mentioned by Sheilagh. It
is not necessary to read these books first, but they do provide background to
events which are mentioned in this third book.
This book brings Sheilagh’s story to a close. It has been a while since I read the first
two novels in the series and I think I may go back to them.
Abandonment
and disappearance are central motifs in the novel. Edgar and Megan disappear and leave Ned
feeling abandoned. Sheilagh disappeared
from the lives of her children and ends up feeling abandoned herself. Prowse abandoned Sheilagh and his children and
in the end “There was no sign in [his eyes] of anything.” Phonse, Ned’s uncle, vanished at sea on a
calm day and was never found; Nan Finn, in particular, tries to understand what
happened to him. Ned adopts a child but
makes a fateful decision which he comes to regard as his worst mistake, “his
sin against his son, which was all too similar to the one that Edgar and Megan
committed against him – abandonment to the hands of strangers.”
Even
Newfoundland is abandoned when there is a vote to join Canada; Sheilagh muses
about “the colony of unrequited dreams that would never be acknowledged as a
nation except by those of us who made it one.”
Appropriately, the books about Newfoundland that are collected by both
Edgar and Ned are lost or damaged. And
it is surely significant that The Last Newfoundlander loses his voice because
of a botched operation.
As a former
English teacher, I loved the many literary allusions. Sheilagh has a room in a brothel; she
paraphrases T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow
old, I grow old. In the rooms the women
come and go, talking of Mike and Al and Joe.” Ned alludes to Joseph Conrad’s novel when he speaks
of being “in quest of the heart of no one’s darkness but my own.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar makes an appearance (“’I come to query Cyril, not to
please him’”) as does The Tempest (“’We
are all such stuff as murder is made of’”).
One theme
is that “you can taint your whole life by doing one thing wrong” so “even a
good man might be the engine of a tragedy.”
This theme is mentioned both at the beginning and the end and developed
through the lives of several characters.
Though the
book is more than a mystery, interest is certainly maintained throughout as to
what happened to the Vanishing Vatchers.
Just like Ned, the reader will find him/herself trying to learn what
happened to Edgar and Megan and why no trace of them was found. There are sufficient clues given so an astute
reader may guess the solution.
I have
enjoyed Wayne Johnston’s previous novels and this one is no exception. It is great literary fiction with memorable
characters, carefully developed themes, and a strong sense of place.
Note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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