Distance [Paperback]

We follow Sonny Aalto from Ottawa to Vancouver Island, then across the Pacific. There's even a side journey to the woods of Finland, his family's origins. The journey confronts us with Sonny's family. "Confront" is fraught with meaning, since Sonny's interactions with his family are tense and acerbic. Pleasant words don't often appear and "dislike" is the mildest epithet available. Yet the hostility is tempered with another side to all the characters. Family life, no matter how conflict-filled, still carries an undercurrent of mutual respect and tenderness. Sonny, who has strenuously resisted communicating with his father while seeking closer ties with his own children, is induced to return home.

Why is Sonny so frequently on the move? He's spent a lifetime edging eastward, following various careers, seeking his children. He travels incessantly - ruined cathedrals, shrines to pagan gods, remote villages. The driving force is his father, Timo - "Swampy" Aalto. Abandoned by his wife Viira, Timo, quite unprepared for the role, becomes a single parent. In a remote corner of Vancouver Island, missing part of a leg, and virtually unemployable, he resents the role and his life. Sonny is either left to his own devices or forced to clean up after Timo's drunken debauches with whichever women will tolerate him. Leaving home wasn't a hard decision for Sonny. Once departed, he just never stopped. Ottawa is his latest refuge - "he wanted to belong" . Will it be his last?

Skating the Rideau Canal on one of Ottawa's notorious February days, Sonny is confronted by a stranger claiming to be his brother. "Believe me, mate. I would not risk frozen gonads for a prank!" Jerrod has travelled half way around the planet to deliver an invitation: come to Australia and visit his mother. And shoot boar - they kill sheep. Sonny demurs. He hasn't used a rifle in thirty years. Far more significantly, he's uncertain how to deal with his long-vanished mother. Lured to Victoria by his ailing father, the island continent beckons. Timo, who has his own reasons to confront Viira, endorses the journey. Crippled, seriously ill, he embraces the idea of the adventure. Timo as a travelling companion is compounding risk.

Family relationships, especially those dominated by confrontation, make compelling reading. Sonny has inherited his father's tendency to steer away from family ties - his son is "up the Valley" running a craft store while his daughter Charlotte returned to Vancouver pursuing a photographic career. Charlotte scorns Sonny, while son Warren seems to communicate only to request money. Under Jack Hodgins' perceptive eye and skilled narrative style, these characters become vividly staged in this engrossing tale. The family gathering in the Australian bush becomes a cockpit of conflicting experiences and interests. For all his mother-deprived upbringing, Sonny is a successful businessman. He must hold his own against half-siblings, and on their home turf. Hodgins doesn't invoke a false hero in Sonny, but there's strength and motives to persevere against stiff odds. Timo also shows unexpected drive, his patriarchal role may be challenged, but rarely relinquished.

Hodgins' characters are finely drawn - he has a keen sense of details about people and their habitats. His ability to convey idiosyncrasies of local speech borders on the uncanny. You can hear the bushman's voice of Jerrold Hawkins. Timo's irascibility echoes the stress of years struggling in Vancouver Island's own bush environment. Sonny's firewood supplier's laconic observations reflecting life in the upper Ottawa Valley. This isn't stereotyping, it's identification.

Hodgins draws more than characters. In tracing Sonny's wanderings, each locale is characteristically depicted. Ottawa's chip wagons, Vancouver Island's isolated "up-island" towns, and the novelty of the island continent. His Australian visits enable a special talent for conveying the contrasting environments. When he takes Sonny to the vastness of Australia's desert, he pictures it both with the eye of a casual visitor and established resident. You share Sonny's role as the intruder into both family and place with sympathy. The vast stretches and novel circumstances of that distant and unusual land. Jack Hodgins introduces us to people and places we may never encounter. Follow his lead into journeys of mind and space. It's a rewarding jaunt. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]