Alluring tale by a master

It’s a tease, of course. When, after almost a hundred pages, this opening gambit plays out, it feels strangely muted, with little of the fireworks that such curt, declarative statements seemed to promise. By then, though, far from disappointing, such an unfurling feels inevitable. Ford builds his story from its foundations so that nothing is forced, and we are led to a complete and complex understanding of the events, their causes and effects.

Canada is a ruminative reflection on the life of one man, the narrator, Dell Parsons, now nearing retirement from a teaching position and looking back on his life’s big moments.

When he was 15, in 1960, his parents, almost on a whim, but influenced at least in part by his father’s wartime experiences and traumas, carry out an inept bank robbery in Great Falls, Montana, a crime for which they are subsequently arrested. Berner, his twin sister, flees, and he is smuggled across the Canadian border into a small Saskatchewan town and taken in by Arthur Remlinger, a mysterious American running from his own dark past but not running quite fast enough. Things turn quickly bad and Dell is put in the position of witness/ accomplice in a savage killing.

Laying out the plot’s punchlines in this fashion might suggest a page-turning, action-based story, but actually Canada focuses more on consequences. This is a novel that explores the fragile fabric of family life and how easily and naturally, the fine line between ordinary and its opposite can be crossed. It also fixates on the fallout of the crimes, and how their ripple-effect reshapes the life of Dell Parsons and the sort of man he is to become.

With the passing, in recent years, of writers like John Updike and Norman Mailer, Richard Ford has been elevated to the status of elder statesman in the field of American letters. A Pulitzer prizewinning author of such modern classics as Rock Springs and the acclaimed Frank Bascombe trilogy, his reputation is already set in stone.

Canada is everything that followers have come to expect. It is ambitious in scale and delivered in a prose style polished to a gleam, still boasting the rich, assured languor of the Sportswriter and Independence Day, but with a hardness that harks back to the taut sentences of his early novels and, in particular, his stories. Most of all, his genius for painting characters in all their dirty realism is fully to the fore. Proof, if any was needed, that novels can be good, perhaps even great, without breaking new ground.

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