Murder on the Miramichi

David Adams Richards is on familiar ground in his eighteenth novel. The inhabitants of the Miramichi, New Brunswick, are affected by a series of missteps, misalliances, and misdeeds so serious that people are killed, lives are upturned, and malevolence is triumphant. Songs of Love on a December Night takes place on conventional Richards turf, with a narrative formula practised to perfection. His readers have been here before. As he says of one of the protagonists: “He came back — as all do to the Miramichi. He came home.”

We have several deaths: accidental, inadvertent, and intentional. They are all linked. The dramatis personae consists of the standard list of Richards character types. There are the preternaturally innocent, the ideologically blinded, the hypocrites who thrive among the credulous, the essentially good souls buffeted by frauds and left-leaning dimwits, and the vulnerable misfits preyed upon by well-respected folk.

The story opens with the arrest of seventeen-year-old Jamie Musselman, who is charged with the murder of his father. Colonel Musselman was a military man and a physician who had worked in Bosnia and other geopolitical hot spots before dying, six years earlier, from a gunshot wound in his home. The delayed indictment exacerbates years of rumours around Jamie’s motivations. Between the town’s antipathy and envy toward his family and the heroic singularity of Jamie himself — who, by his own admission, has the “gilt of the outsider”— all of his plans for happiness and stability are disrupted.

Jamie is innocent of patricide. But those involved in the killing of his father — a troika of disenfranchised, disappointed, and disgruntled people — were not bent on murdering the colonel. They bungled a simple robbery and, in turn, their lives. Trying to mitigate the misfortunes of their respective lots, the trio come to realize that the “road to redemption begins with terror” and that their futures secured with a faulty lie are doomed to shatter.

The most pathetic of the three perpetrators is a university dropout, Weaver de Speck. His relationship with his mother, Vivian, a social climber and progressive advocate of every trendy cause, and his father, Orlif, a tenure-deprived and morale-battered professor at a local university, is emotionally corrosive. He is a product of his mother’s self-deceit and narcissism and his father’s spineless ineptitude and unexpressed love.

In pursuit of success, Weaver left New Brunswick to attend Ryerson University, in Toronto. While there, he took up all the ultra-liberal causes beloved by his mother, engaged in intellectual chicanery that backfired, and ultimately returned home covered in self-induced ignominy. Now he sees himself as a failure, much like his father. And he is desperate for a change in fortune.

The university, a fraudulent sanctuary in Richards’s universe, is a redoubt of fake magi, a home to mockers and mimics packed with professors and students who are “caught up in the insulated inexperience of the time.” It promotes “an intolerance that allowed darkness to come into the hearts of cruel men and use it to their benefit,” but its culture of bullying and conformity permeates society at large, contaminates relationships by perpetuating the toxin of social class divisions. It nurtures the human proclivity for mendacity, which is everywhere in the book. Danielle and Marsha, two viperous gossips and spiritual mountebanks, thrive on whispering allegations that destroy reputations.

As was observed in Richards’s Mary Cyr, from 2018, “Once you are doing things that morally make you slide, you do slide, and the slide reaches speeds that make it hard to find traction. So you give up trying to find traction.” Many of the Miramichi’s townspeople give up trying to find traction. But not all.

Richards has a gift for creating characters with various impairments of body and mind, whose differences do not diminish them but exalt them. Throughout his work, flaws humanize the marginalized and those “society had abandoned.” In a world populated by moral corruption, the lives of two characters, Pruty and Little Nin (and, yes, she is as Dickensian as her name suggests), offer an alternative of wisdom and insight, steeped in the Gospels. Often the victim of taunts and condescension because of her wheelchair, Pruty stands out among liars and deceivers. “In all the world, people are only frightened of one thing,” she tells Weaver, after the murder of Little Nin grips the town. “Of not loving enough.”

Religious concerns and symbols surface in most of Richards’s writing, but Songs of Love on a December Night is unapologetically Catholic, replete with devotional practices and laced with themes of evil, redemption, and forgiveness. Richards is Canada’s most demonstrably Catholic anglophone novelist since Morley Callaghan, although he is more inclined to creedal nostrums and settled certitudes than his theologically nuanced predecessor.

Not insignificantly, Father Benjamin, the priest who is an Indian disciple of Mother Teresa and unaccustomed to the harshness of a Maritime winter, is dismissed by most locals as a risible hangover of a desiccated religion. His naïveté makes him a joke, but his faith makes him, along with Pruty and Little Nin, an agent of goodness in a darkening landscape.

In his war against the political and philosophical orthodoxies of our time, David Adams Richards gives no quarter.