A Broken Head

When s a murder not a murder? When is a patricide not a patricide? When is Satan involved and when is God? These are some of the questions that Lee Gowan puts before us as he unwinds his first-person account narrated by a janitor reflecting on his upbringing in small-town Saskatchewan and the events that drove him to Toronto. The town is aptly named Broken Head because in so many ways the protagonist of this novel has a broken head. The line between fantasy and reality is one he has trouble drawing, and we, the readers, sense this early on.

This is Lee Gowan’s third novel. Shortlisted previously for the Trillium Awardry hi and published under the prestigious Knopf imprint, Gowan is a talented and ambitious author. His willingness to take chances is evident in the narrator he has created in Confession. Dwight Froese, the janitor, is a man who has trouble understanding the world and the actions of its inhabitants. He does not mix easily and his comprehension of social mores is limited. He turns the real into daydreams and while we all do that, we know how to exit, but somehow he does not. He lingers there and cannot extract himself.

Dwight has a peculiar set of parents. His mother is a former hooker and his father is a lapsed Mennonite who runs an illegal gunsmithing operation on his farm. Dwight is close to his mother and distant from his father, who seems very much the typical patriarchal figure so often associated with the rural prairie novel genre in which sex and violence are the underbelly of a very straight society. All three characters are outsiders in a community where being different is a problem. How each one tries to relate to the others and to the townsfolk is viewed through the eyes of Dwight.

While the seemingly socially challenged Dwight speculates that he has a special gift of insight, he lacks the basic skills of comprehending the implications of what he is being told. Dwight overhears his father telling a buddy that he once had a vision of God who told him he would die at the hands of his own son. What is Dwight to make of this? Father Froese has turned his back on his religious beliefs by serving in World War Two, drinking alcohol and of course gunsmithing. But he obviously has some use for prophecy. Dwight is happy to oblige fate and do his God-given duty. He believes he must kill his father.

Father Froese has returned to his father’s land, which was willed to him and where he is destined to die. When Dwight, who is still in school, comes to believe that his father has murdered his mother, he becomes the prophesied instrument of death. Dwight’s imagination projects various people from his life into ghostly apparitions with whom he converses. He then considers these episodes as real interactions. This confusion allows him to fabricate narratives that people disbelieve. But when he tells the truth, they are equally disbelieving. They prefer projecting their view of reality.

When the local coroner tells him that his mother was not killed by his father but that she fell, hit her head and died accidentally, Dwight does not believe him. He is fixated on his own version of events, which he refuses to surrender. The narration flows back and forth in time as Dwight pieces together his shattered and confused life in order for the reader to try to understand what happened and the rationale for it. For example, he claims in convincing detail that he has had an affair with Gloria, the coroner’s daughter. He believes that he made her pregnant and that the woman’s daughter named Caroline is his daughter rather than the husband’s. He follows the family to Toronto to be near “his daughter” and insinuates himself into the life of the girl’s nanny as a way of being near both his lover and “their” daughter. It is up to the reader to judge the validity of Dwight’s claim.

Dwight has inherited sex, violence and religion as three preoccupations from his family and he embraces all of them enthusiastically. But he is not able to integrate them into a unified whole. They are separate compartments whose links to each other are tenuous and speculative. Dwight does have a moral code, which tells him to go along with the contradictory ways of the world and do what people say. He is generally obedient and it is through doing what others ask of him that he feels actualized, even though he cannot make sense of their requests.

His adversaries have a penchant for dying off. He is enamoured of Russian writers and fantasizes that one day he might join a Hutterite colony. These daydreams allow him to float through life without ever being brought down to earth. At one stage he pronounces that “We’re too much like machines, and it’s the devil who operates us.” This fundamentalist statement is a commentary on how he experiences his life, as a mechanical operation lacking nuance or sophistication. Dwight is very much a linear thinker who is caught up in validating his own view of the world.

Dwight’s credibility is less the issue for Gowan than the nature of fixation and how it distorts reality. Dwight projects chaos on his personality and envies the orderly lives of others, but in fact he is the orderly one and his presence produces chaos in the lives of others around him. Here is a misfit whose development has been arrested by the death of his parents and who has to make his way in the world with very little understanding of how it operates. His Broken Head relationships are very complicated, while his later life in the big city is simple and direct. In Toronto, his anonymity replaces his hometown notoriety and allows him to live in a sealed-off, one-person, constructed universe.

Toward the end of this novel there is a line about “remembering and dismembering the memories,” which captures the spirit of the work. There is a demonic power in the main character that mesmerizes the reader with its combination of shrewdness, naiveté, angst and volatility. At the same time, Dwight’s sexual adventures and miraculous escapes from ordinary law and order seem a bit of a stretch. In fact, the border between the believable and the unbelievable is not fixed in this novel. We can get lost in Dwight’s world very easily and experience the blurring of fact and fiction as he does. Then Gowan pulls us out of this confused state with a strong external character, like the coroner who easily contradicts Dwight’s narrative. In the end we do not know for certain what or whom to believe.

Gowan is a talented writer who is able, for the most part, to stay in the voice of the problematic Dwight. His portrayal of small-town life in Western Canada echoes with authenticity, even when he creates a roller-coaster atmosphere around events, mythologies and personas. These waves of exaggeration only help his fiction. As readers we are able to enter Dwight’s twisted world, both imagined and real, and in that confused world we emerge out of our shadowy selves with more understanding of our own inner mysteries. Gowan has used the Russian trope of the “village fool” to great effect. As the outsider, the fool offers the world convoluted and unclear truths that make us uneasy about our own certainties. This is a disquieting novel about one man’s confession and the many characters who are complicit in it, including ourselves.