The Custodian of Paradise

And that's how it started, Miss Fielding, the very serious but entertaining game of inventing synonyms for God and imagining what it was like after he cast out his fraternal twins and paradise was deserted but for him. The “hermit of paradise” we called him. “The recluse of paradise.” Even “the charlatan of paradise,” because we could not shake the notion that the fall was “fixed”. My favourite was “the custodian of paradise.” “We are all three of us, you and I and Miss Fielding, custodians,” I said, “withdrawn from the world to preserve, to keep inviolate, something that would otherwise be lost.”

It seems obligatory to mention that I had fallen for Sheilagh Fielding while reading The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: with her wit and fire, this fictional newspaper columnist made the perfect foil for the actual first premier of Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood; the pair together used brilliantly by author Wayne Johnston to give Canada's youngest province (but the site of North America's oldest European settlement) a proper origin story. Had I known that The Custodian of Paradise was a retelling (and expansion) of that first book – from Fielding's point-of-view this time – I would have picked it up sooner: what reader wouldn't want to know more of the inscrutable Fielding? Something about this book's lukewarm reception must have made an impression on me when it was first published, something must have kept it off my radar, and now that I've finished it, I feel...lukewarm. Perhaps some things are meant to remain a mystery; perhaps I just didn't want to know Fielding's sorry history after all; to behold her (mismatched) feet of clay.

I wrote those words when I was half Sarah's age. A girl. Seventeen and soon to meet the man I fear has followed me to Loreburn. Fear it, yet fear even more that I have hidden too well for him to find me.

As Custodian opens, Fielding makes her way to a deserted island off the coast of Newfoundland; a place that had once been settled (precluding the need to build a house there by herself) but now abandoned save for feral dogs and a small herd of horses. She brings with her journals and letters (written by herself and others) in order to review and record the story of her own life; and she also brings a large quantity of Scotch, despite having been sober for years, just in case she can't handle confronting her own truths. The format, therefore, jumps from quoting old letters and journal entries, filling in the missing parts of her history, and commenting on everything while narrating what is happening in the present. The narrative mirrors what was mostly told from Smallwood's point-of-view in Colony (with a significantly felt change in perspective; and especially as regards their “romance”), and introduces some maddeningly drawn out mysteries: Just who are the “Provider” and his “delegate” who have followed and protected Fielding for her entire life? And could either of them really have trailed her out to godforsaken Loneburn?

Some day, Miss Fielding, I will ask your forgiveness for three transgressions, two of which have yet to be committed.

I was truly intrigued by all the mysteries that the Provider represented – what did he know of Fielding's history and what are these two eventual future transgressions going to be – so even when the narrative seemed to drag, I was always led forward by the promised resolutions. Yet when the answers came, they really didn't satisfy me; and coming as they did near the end, they left me feeling overall unsatisfied. Which is too bad because of all that I had enjoyed along the way: the perfectly captured time and place; an exploration of religious hypocrisy and the iron fist of imposed community morality; and especially, Fielding's “use of an irony so close to absolute that I would seem to the tone-deaf majority to be saying the very opposite of what I meant” – I was constantly delighted by the clever turns of phrase that Johnston put into Fielding's tongue and pen. It was just too bad that Fielding's story was so sad: her quips don't come from a place of power, but of inferiority, and in the end, this outsized, brash and intelligent, ahead-of-her-times woman, seemed merely pitiful.

So, what do the experts say? Colony was not loved by The New York Times:

Now and again, Sheilagh’s wit saves a scene. (“You reduce everything to comedy,” her father says. “Elevate,” she retorts.) Occasionally, Johnston’s prose shifts skillfully into the present tense, as if dropping into a lower gear for power. But by the time Sheilagh limps from a sanitarium, her right leg withered by tuberculosis, even he seems to have lost patience with his twice-told story. Without a strong countervailing voice to balance hers, Sheilagh Fielding, so alive at the beginning of the novel, becomes merely a collection of forced and unlikely eccentricities, and the characters around her little more than silhouettes.

While The Walrus finds genius in this book in the context of Johnston's body of work:

In choosing to dig up his own site, to unearth settlements and gardens lodged within the archaeo-logical record, Johnston is going about the business of the major novelist in mid-career: custodianship of his own properties. Asserting that a spit of rock in the Atlantic Ocean is a snowbound Eden is not so strange if your spadework has revealed the layers underneath. Chip away at connections, sift through stories and metaphors, especially of the sort you have been digging away at for years, and conclusions become inevitable, as do perfect truths and perfect paradoxes.

And Quill & Quire, after a wishy-washy review, concludes:

By the book’s end, many mysteries have been laid to rest, only to be replaced with new ones. This raises the happy possibility that Johnston intends to return to the scene again.

And although it has taken many years for that “happy possibility” to come to fruition, I am currently in possession of the third volume of this ostensible trilogy and am delighted to see that it also features Sheilagh Fielding. Custodian may not have blown my socks off, but I'm in danger of tripping over them as they dangle; I am always willing to dip into Johnston's world.