Violence and Beauty

Patrick Lane stopped living in the Okanagan Valley around 1958, when he was about 20, but he has never left. The brutality of his childhood (alcoholic parents, abuse, petty criminality, poverty and the casual savagery of that time) shaped his adult years. He became an eloquent, acclaimed (and apparently charming) poet who saw violence and cruelty everywhere he went, who used and abused lovers, family and friends, alcohol and cocaine, until about ten years ago when he entered rehab and emerged to write the beautifully tempered memoir, To Everything There Is a Season—in which it seemed that the healing of gardening and meditation and love would finally release him from the valley of darkness.

But no. Immediately after finishing the memoir (documenting his first sober year in 45), Lane began to write this novel, which takes place over one week in 1958, in a small town in the British Columbia interior. Red Dog, Red Dog begins with the unconsecrated...