Century of November

October 18, 2004
Wetherell (Morning
; Chekhov's Sister
) traces the arc of a father's loss in this poignant, probing story about a Canadian judge who journeys from Vancouver to the European battlefield where his son died during the waning days of WWI. Charles Marden is a widower quietly absorbed in his life as a rural magistrate, but his foreboding is also revealed immediately: "He judged men and he grew apples and it was a perilous autumn for both." When he learns that his son, William, has been killed in battle, he immediately decides to visit his grave. Marden is initially denied permission to visit Flanders by the British authorities, but the sudden end of the war changes his situation, and his journey becomes more urgent when he learns that William had impregnated a girl from Belfast, Elaine Reed, who is already in Europe at the battle site. The plot takes several odd, macabre turns once Marden reaches the village where William died, especially when he has to make a deal with a shell-shocked soldier in order to visit the exact death site and learn the particulars of William's final hours. Wetherell's prose and character writing are unflinching, and the final meeting between Marden and Reed is gut-wrenching. Though the novel travels a well-trodden route, Wetherell's take on a parent's anguish is deeply moving.

October 1, 2004
This taut and mesmerizing novel, Wetherell's fifth book, leaps from an apple orchard in Vancouver to the blasted trenches in the aftermath of World War I, where Charles Marden searches for his son. As the book opens, Marden learns that his son died in battle, and he leaves for Europe right away, although uncertain of any gratification in the journey. Marden meets many embittered people on his trip to the front lines, all cast with an expressionistic dark haze. When Marden discovers that his son made a lover pregnant, the woman becomes the goal of his search, but his purpose becomes lost in the act of looking at his surroundings, and at himself. By interspersing third-person observation with wrenching first-person rumination, Wetherell achieves the rambling reflective quality of W. G. Sebald but with even more hard-hitting angst. And Wetherell's charred battlefields--rife with unexploded mines and poisonous gas--create one of the more arresting recent portraits of war's devastation, a profound statement that reminds us, unforgettably, of war's personal and universal tragedies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)