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The Mountain Clinic
by Harold Hoefle
Ottawa: Oberon Press,
2008, ISBN 978-0-7780-1327-3, 109 pp., $18.95 paper.
The Mountain Clinic is a short, intriguing novel that explores complex existential predicaments. Its author, Harold Hoefle, is a teacher who has published stories in several Canadian literary journals and anthologies. This is his first book.
The novel, despite its brevity, is wide ranging, both in time and place. It covers thirty years, from 1966 to 1996, and its action occurs in a variety of locations, including Toronto and environs, Montreal, Vancouver, northern British Columbia, Nicaragua, and Austria.
The story is told in the first person. In all but one of the chapters, the narrator is Walter Schwende, who, at the outset, is a seven-year-old boy working on Saturday afternoons in his father's small window factory just outside of Toronto in the spring of 1966.
Later that year, Schwende's father mysteriously disappears. As Schwende matter-of-factly puts it, "one morning my father left for work and never came back" (13). This is the central event that drives the plot. Schwende grows up not knowing if his father is alive or dead.
The novel relates various episodes in Schwende's life, interspersed with accounts of what happened to his father. Gradually the picture is filled in, and the novel concludes with a surprising denouement.
What is so remarkable about this book is how Hoefle is able to pack his spare narrative with credible, distinctive characters; he really has a gift for characterization.
However, one aspect of the novel that does not ring true is Schwende's interest in the 1980s in Central American politics, an interest that seems to emerge ex nihilo. There is nothing in his background or experience to explain his hostility to American policy in Central America, and his sympathy for the Nicaraguan revolution. He eventually travels to Nicaragua to volunteer on a farm. Hoefle, to his credit, does not romanticize the Nicaraguan regime. The chapter about Schwende's sojourn in Nicaragua is the only one in which he is not the narrator; the story is told by one of his fellow farm labourers.
At just over one hundred pages, The Mountain Clinic does not take long to read, and it is a memorable novel.
Graeme Voyer is a Winnipeg writer.