Dark Sunshine

At the enviable age of 28, Robert McGill, a Rhodes scholar from Wiarton, Ontario, has published an impressive first novel. He and I have Wiarton in common. I left when I was ten, he left as a young man. And therein lies a world of difference.

In my own personal mythology, leaving Wiarton was a true fall from grace. The small town on the Bruce Peninsula, that narrow finger of land that juts into Georgian Bay, was the scene not only of my childhood happiness but of my family’s happiness, to the degree that when we reminisce it is mostly Wiarton and its characters we talk about. Peewee Porter, Winkie Wilford, Hector Hepburn, Bill Smiley. The Rouse with no arms who drove a team of horses by holding the reins between his teeth, the Twigger boy whose hands were invisible under a plague of warts, the principals (including my father) who wielded the strap, the local Indians—Joe and Anna Mae—who lived at the dump, the daughter of the prominent family who wore a hockey helmet...