First Snow, Last Light

As Nan Finn said of people who went missing in the woods at twilight, they had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow when there should have been no snow, a rogue blizzard when winter was a month away, led astray by the pale, bewitching light of late November, the lulling light of sunset in the fall.

First Snow, Last Light is the third volume in Wayne Johnston's Newfoundland Trilogy, and having now read all three, I get the feeling that this series wasn't pre-planned as such from the beginning; that Johnston simply decided to revisit an old idea (and his most striking character, Sheilagh Fielding) two more times over the years. Because I've read the first two books in this series, it would be hard for me to say if this one stands alone as a compelling read, but taken as a whole, it's a satisfying, if uneven, trilogy. Note: I read an Advanced Reading Copy, so excerpted quotes may not be in their final forms.

The Vanishing Vatchers. I was left with nothing but the setting of their lives, the stage, the props and costumes, the performance that only I had fallen for and which had moved on to somewhere else. That its run was done, everyone but I believed.

First Snow, Last Light begins with a short second-person introduction: “You” arrive home from school to a locked and unaccountably empty house – your recluse mother has always been there to greet you before – and even after you go get your coach, Father Duggan, from school to come and wait with you, your parents never return. The narrative then begins properly, from the point-of-view of Ned Vatcher, the boy whose devoted parents mysteriously vanished one November afternoon in 1936 when he was fourteen. Told in a straight timeline from 1936 to 1961 (with some of Ned's childhood memories woven in at the beginning and moving a bit beyond at the very end), the perspective jumps from Ned to Sheilagh Fielding (and a couple other characters, including whoever intermittently comments on Ned's sections, calling him “you”), and we watch as Ned grows up an orphan; eventually earning a Track & Field scholarship to Boston College and returning to St. John's to become a millionaire by transplanting the American ideas he had learned while away. The nagging mystery of what happened to Edgar and Megan Vatcher was enough to keep me engaged, but the overall plot – the poor boy gets rich and devotes his life to finding his parents at the cost of his own happiness – felt a little thin. And while I had been looking forward to reading about Fielding again, there were fewer scenes of her verbal jousting to enjoy than the last time around, and then everything I have grown to love about the wry dipsomaniacal giantess is upended by this:

I spent the balance of the war setting down an alternative version of my life, which I called The Custodian of Paradise and which I fancy I might someday publish. Such was the measure of my despair that I devised a fictional existence that was far stranger, far more fantastic than my real one.

Whaaaat? The interesting parts of Fielding's history – the self-exile, the Provider and his delegate, the reason behind the fallout between her parents – is all “fictional”? It just makes her dissolute life seem even more pathetic, and I wish Johnston hadn't reduced her so. I appreciate that we get to see how Fielding's life turns out (even if I can't quite believe the number of marriage proposals she receives over the years), but I didn't like how it turns out. And in the end, I didn't much care for how Ned's storyline pans out either. Still, it's pointless to complain about an author not writing the story I wanted to read.

I turned round and rested again, facing west now, up the Bonavista as the section men said, toward the continent of Newfoundland, the intersection of the main line and the branch, the never-glimpsed wilderness from which the question we had failed to answer had been borne to us, the country that would never be discovered or forgotten, the colony of unrequited dreams that would never be acknowledged as a nation except by those of us who made it one.

Here's my overall takeaway: I think that The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was a work of genius; a five star literary interpretation of Newfoundland's history. The Custodian of Paradise was an interesting reworking of the first book, filling in the perspective of Sheilagh Fielding; probably Johnston's most compelling character. The timeline of First Snow, Last Light begins just before the end of the first two volumes, and through the story of the enterprising Ned Vatcher, references how Newfoundland modernised itself – transforming from British colony to Canadian province – but this book doesn't really add much to the understanding of Newfoundland; it lacks the big picture historical events of the first book and the community-level strictures of the second. Other than to tie up Fielding's story – and she felt pretty peripheral to its plot – I don't know what the overall point of this book was. Even so, I was looking forward to reading this book and am glad I did. I recommend it to other completionists.