“Principles to Live By” was faded over the door of 87 Shelf Street. The residents of that house had kept foster children for seventeen years. Today, fog had come in across the bay to make all the houses gloomy. It swept toward the city that noon hour. Car lights shone bleakly, and all the trees reminded one of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe.By far, my favourite perk at my new job is the access to advance reading copies; even if it's only by a couple of weeks, I love being able to read new books before the general public. When I saw that there was a new David Adams Richards – I do not disagree with the statement that he is “perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive” – I pounced and greedily snatched up Principles to Live By for myself; what a coup! So imagine the pickle in which I now find myself: I've finished a new work by a writer I admire, and having not really liked it all that much, I come to see what others have said and I can find neither a goodreads review nor yet one from a newspaper. I am entirely at the forefront with a negative evaluation and I don't want to be here. I'll stress that I was working from an ARC – so I won't be heavy on quotes – and even that bit I opened with might not be in its final form.
The book begins with a brief scene from 1999 (a happenstance at the above-mentioned foster home) and then shifts to 2011 and an anonymous letter to the police that obliquely refers to those events. The letter is addressed to John Delano – a one time superstar of the RCMP, now marginalised, friendless, and limping towards retirement – and as we nearly immediately learn that Delano's own young son went missing years before, the reader understands why he has a particular interest in child welfare cases. Yet, right from his first reading of the letter, I got the sense that Delano's powers of perception are just too good to be true: based on the thinnest of clues, the cop is able to piece together exactly what the letter writer is trying hard not to come straight out with (putting together a story in his mind that exactly matches what the reader has already witnessed in the first chapter), and as his investigation continues, not only does Delano recover twelve-year-old evidence everywhere he looks, none of these scraps of paper, old clothes, or half-burnt photos that he recovers from closets, sheds, and fire-grates turn out to be not relevant. I appreciate that after thirty-some years on the force Delano would have seen it all and become an astute predictor of human behaviour, but I simply didn't believe in these leaps of logic that always propelled him in exactly the right direction.
Early on, I was also confused by all the extraneous characters, and especially because they are always referred to by their loose or longterm connections to Delano and each other through time and space (who was that again? when?). I was confused that there was a character named Melon Thibodeau and one named Officer Melonson (the first time Melonson was mentioned, I misremembered and thought it was Melon grown up), and isn't it unnecessarily awkward to write scenes like, “Melon said to Melonson...”? That's obviously a conscious choice, but why? Is it a clever way to show that in real life you might meet people with such similar names and it would be authorial cowardice to always shy away from such clunky scenes that might have a basis in truth? By the end, all of these characters are necessary because they are somehow all related to one another (some even, surprisingly, by blood) and the “finger of fate” became wearisome: if Delano hadn't gone to Rwanda and had a driver who told him about his sister who Delano saves thereby ticking off Melissa, then Melissa wouldn't have been out to get Delano and working behind the scenes on Bennie's case so that Bennie was released in time to go for a drive in the woods while Delano is in San Francisco picking up the ecoterrorist son of the man who suggested an Edmonton family go to Rwanda: and just who was that Canadian kid in Rwanda again? But again, Richards is too clever a writer to be making these connections casually, but yet, their purpose is beyond the likes of me.
As for the politics of this book, Richards gives voice to a lot of my own beliefs – ivory tower academia, the hypocrisy of the UN, the futility and falseness of the Occupy Movement, the throwback hippydom at the CBC, the bureaucratic powerplays that undermine the ministries that civil servants are meant to serve, even the beyond-the-borders promotion of Margaret Atwood at the expense of fine Canadian regional writers – but they're so in-your-face as to startle even someone like me with sympathetic views (and I am looking forward to seeing how this book will be received at the CBC, Toronto Star, and other liberal media). Most oddly, Richards namedrops some of his own books in Principles to Live By (not too flatteringly), and again, he's too deliberate to have done this for no good reason.
So here's what I think: As Delano stands strong against those who would accuse him of sexism and racism, as he ignores those who would mock his faith, he's one of the few characters who actually adheres to his own principles to live by, refusing to chase the politically convenient in order to get himself ahead. This book is a contrast between those – bureaucrats, politicians, and academics on the one hand and police officers, foster parents, and activists on the other – who do everything out of self-interest while declaring altruism, and those others – not only the good cops, social workers, firefighters and soldiers, but also the humble bakers, welders, and taxi drivers – who do their work for the work's own sake. As a writer, Richards himself could fall into either camp, but by mocking self-serving institutions like academia and the Order of Canada (each of which Richards is a member of), and even by taking his own earlier work less than seriously (as Melonson says, I've never even heard of that book, or that writer, for that matter), it feels like an eye-wink; a dare to choose where to pigeonhole him.
So, I didn't like Delano's superhuman detective skills, didn't like the way everyone and everything is related (Saint John isn't that small; I lived there as a child in the seventies myself and don't appear in the storyline, har har), I didn't find the politics to be nuanced enough (but perhaps that's an all-too-Canadian complaint), and the characters are too black and white; wholly good or wholly self-serving. I understand that this is the first book in a trilogy (Richards' last trilogy?), and I'm not turned off enough to give a pass on the rest of the series; I will always greedily snatch up a David Adams Richards ARC if I see one; I will continue to buy my favourites of his books for my own collection. And I will be a coward and give Principles to Live By a very wishy-washy three stars.
