Beside Still Waters [Hardcover]

In 1989, Barry Callaghan published The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, the story of a Canadian war correspondent named Adam who treks deep into Africa, braving violence, privation, and infectious disease in order to find his vanished lover. In 2009, he is publishing Beside Still Waters ... the story of a Canadian war correspondent named Adam who treks deep into Africa, braving violence, privation, and infectious disease in order to find his vanished lover. Why Callaghan felt impelled to overhaul a 20-year-old novel and then release it under a new title is a mystery; the publicity material is mum on the issue, and the author himself has not yet, to my knowledge, advanced a public explanation. What’s clear, however, is that Beside Still Waters remains, like its previous iteration, an ambitious and eccentric work. The story is episodic, with fragmented chronologies and plot pieces strewn across the streets of Toronto, the casinos and hotels of Puerto Rico, and the swampy wilds of Gabon. There are discussions of Verdi, the blues, the metaphysics of evil, and the fallen state of humanity. There’s enough sex to embarrass a pornographer. There are surrealist touches, like a Bavarian polka band showing up to a firefight in a subequatorial shantytown. And just to increase the oddity of this entire enterprise, the finale in a remote leper colony is itself filched from a 1979 magazine article Callaghan wrote, “The Light in Darkness.” While the book showcases Callaghan’s worldliness, his erudition, and his poetic sensibility, some problems endure. Non-sequiturs and unanswered questions riddle passages of dialogue, presumably to keep resolution at bay and tension high, but the resulting conversations can leave characters sounding imbecilic. Other literary effects, like breathless run-on sentences used during moments of turmoil, become wearisome affectations with repeated use. Following hard on his excellent story collection Between Trains, and his incisive, learned books of non-fiction, Beside Still Waters seems like a minor misstep made for the second time.

"Beside Still Waters has all that is great of Hemingway, Conrad and Dostoevsky." (Winnipeg Free Press )

"breathtaking...Callaghan's prose is pure poetry" (Globe and Mail )

This is a passionate love story, with its roots in Toronto and its resolution in the dark heart of contemporary Africa. Adam Waters’ search for the woman he loves, who has mysteriously disappeared from their hotel room, takes him from the casinos of Puerto Rico to war-torn Gabon and a leper colony deep in the African bush. Counterpointing Adam’s quest are his memories from boyhood, and of his father, wandering jazzman Sweet Web Waters; his experiences as a war correspondent; and the girl who becomes his lover, dancer Gabrielle. Callaghan confronts the pure joy that can be in sexuality and the evil that is inherent in the nature of growth itself, by combining the excitement of an adventure story with the exuberant love of language.

BARRY CALLAGHAN founded the internationally celebrated literary quarterly, Exile, and imprint, Exile Editions, while he was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. He is a novelist, poet and man of letters and his work has been much anthologized. His numerous awards include Toronto’s One Hundred Outstanding Citizens Award, the inaugural W. Mitchell Award and the Foundation For The Advancement of Canadian Letters Award for Fiction which he was honoured with twice.