Highly charged and profoundly important, Incidents in the Life of
Markus Paul is a new masterpiece from one of Canada's greatest writers.
On a bright morning in June 1985, a young Micmac man starts his first
day of work--but by noon he is dead, killed mysteriously in the fourth
hold of the cargo ship Lutheran. Hector Penniac had been planning to
go to university, perhaps to study medicine. Roger Savage, a loner who
has had to make his own way since his youth, comes under suspicion of
killing Hector over a union card and a morning's work. Even if he can't
quite put it into words, Roger immediately sees the ways in which
Hector's death will be viewed as symbolic, as more than an isolated
tragedy--and that he is caught in a chain of events that will become
more explosive with each passing day.
The aging chief of Hector's band, Amos Paul, tries to reduce the
tensions raised by the investigation into Hector's death and its
connection to a host of other simmering issues, from territorial lines
to fishing rights. His approach leads him into conflict with Isaac Snow,
a younger and more dynamic man, whom many in the band would prefer to
lead them--especially when the case attracts press attention in the form
of an ambitious journalist named Max Doran, the first of many outsiders
to bring his own agenda and motives onto the Micmac reserve.
Joel Ginnish, Isaac's volatile and sometimes violent friend, decides to
bring justice to Roger Savage when the authorities refuse to, blockading
the reserve in order to do so. And though perhaps no one really means
for it to happen, soon a single incident grows ineluctably into a crisis
that engulfs a whole society, a whole province and in some ways a whole
country. Twenty years later, RCMP officer Markus Paul--Chief Amos Paul's
grandson, who was 15 years old when Hector was killed--tries to piece
together the clues surrounding Hector Penniac's death. The decades have
passed, and much about the case has been twisted beyond recognition by
the many ways that different people have sought to exploit it. But,
haunted by the past, Markus still struggles towards a truth that will
snap "those chains that had once seemed impossible to break."
This is a novel that begins with an instant from today's headlines, and
digs down into the marrow to explore the oldest themes we know: murder
and betrayal, race and history, the brutal and chaotic forces that guide
the groups we are drawn into. Nothing is one-sided in David Adams
Richards' world--even the most scheming characters have moments of
grace, while the most benevolent are shown to have selfish motives or
the need to show off their goodness. All are depicted with an almost
Biblical gravity, framed by an understated genius of storytelling that
makes this novel at once both an utterly gripping mystery, and a vitally
important document of Canada's broken past and divided present.
