Revenant
by Tristan Hughes
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008, ISBN 978-1-55365-349-3, 258 pp., $29.95 cloth / $13.99 paper.

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Ontario, but he grew up in Wales and graduated from Cambridge University with a PhD in literature. He has published three well-received novels in the United Kingdom, and Revenant, the third one, is the first to be published in Canada.

The setting is a Welsh island off the coast of Wales. Neil, one of the three main protagonists, has lived there his whole life; now in his twenties, he tends bar at the local pub, the George and Dragon. He has asked two of his boyhood friends, a young man named Ricky and a young woman named Steph, to return home. They've been gone for years, and we suspect the reason for the summons has something to do with Del, the fourth member of what used to be their "gang."

The method author Hughes uses for telling the story is reminiscent of Graham Swift's in his Booker-Prize-winning Last Orders. In Swift's novel, several characters took turns relating events, each in his or her own vernacular. In Revenant, Neil, Ricky and Steph alternate as first-person narrators.

Ricky's selections are presented in his informal speaking voice: "And it seems so stupid now how excited we got to find crap. But crap's different when you're young: it's like treasure or something, like booze and fags are going to be later. Take a seagull's egg. It's nothing, is it--a big greeny-brown egg--but . . . Del and I almost broke our necks a hundred times climbing up the cliffs for them. . . . And when we got them what do we do--we chuck them right back off the cliff!" (171)

The Steph and Neil narrations use more formal diction. Neil's sections must be either his thoughts or his writing, since we are told by Ricky that Neil has had a bad stutter all his life and tries to avoid speaking.

As in Last Orders, the narrative moves back and forth from present to past and back; it's sometimes difficult in reading Revenant to keep track of where we are. Usually the tip-off that we are in the past is the presence of Del, the rather plain girl who more or less led the foursome and instigated most of their forays into mischief.

Billed as a gothic novel, Revenant (the word refers to a person who's returned from the dead, or a ghost) is full of portent, with its brooding landscape, its imposing woods and its scary sea. There is, however, little or nothing that is supernatural or fantastic.

Hughes's great strength is in conveying the island (Anglesey, or Ynys Mon, where he himself has lived) and the village, which is so small that the two-room school is closing. Here is Ricky on village life: " . . . everyone's waiting for something and they don't know what it is and it's never going to happen, it's never going to turn up. . . . It's like you've retired before you've even got started. Sod school and that, they should just give you your pension book when you're born and have done with it." (95)

The George and Dragon is effectively evoked, with its regulars who engage in the same banter day after day. We see the village brace for the influx of tourists, who seem ever present, like so much background.

Steph is perhaps the most mysterious character; she wishes she were less of an outsider (she comes from the nearest town, not the village) and could rival Del for leadership of the group. She knows she's much prettier than Del: "The boys [Del] banters with tie up their tongues in front of me and start hitting each other or stealing car aerials." (62)

Ricky is attracted to Steph; in their adolescence, he tries to get close to her and does kiss her at one point, but there is no burgeoning sensuality in this novel. All the characters show bursts of anger--Ricky most of all--though emotions mostly simmer.

As Del leads the group through the woods, Neil muses: "I realize how thankful I am that she can take me here and make me feel safe, that she can live so fearlessly in this world of monsters. I sense that ache of gratitude that I think is love. And maybe it is. Maybe it's the simple thanks we give for protection." (72)

It's the ghost of the intrepid Del that pervades this oddly moving novel, as three flawed but well-fleshed-out young characters try to come to terms with what happened ten years before and sort out what kind of people they've become without Del in their lives.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist whose favourite part of Wales is Blaenau Ffestiniog, not far from the setting of Revenant.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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