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In her introduction to the reprint of her 1984 novel, In the Shadow of King's, Nora Kelly talks about her character, Gillian Adams, when she first appeared: "she was more diffident than she later became. Her perspective, too, has altered with time, and she's had to make some hard decisions about her life." In Old Wounds, Gillian has made several of these decisions and will make more. She has taken a sabbatical from her university post in British Columbia, a year she originally planned to spend with her lover, the British policeman, Edward Gisbourne. If Gillian is getting older (she and Edward have now been together for fourteen years), her mother is rapidly declining, and instead of London, Gillian has returned to her childhood home in the Hudson Valley in New York State to be with her at what appears likely to be the end of her life. She is teaching part time at a local women's college and is preoccupied about what to do with her life and how to cope with her mother's illness. One of her students, Nicole Bishop, is found brutally murdered and suspicion falls on Gillian's elementary school classmate, the ever unpopular Arnold. The death throws Gillian into close and sometimes uncomfortable contact with figures from her past and raises unpleasant questions about how she herself behaved when young. More than her perspective has altered with time; Gillian has lost the rather brittle, somewhat artificial manner she sported in Shadow and the reader, thankfully, is no longer reminded of Amanda Cross. True, she is still an academic, but one who bears her learning lightly and with dignity. Appropriately, the book is set in early autumn as there is a muted sadness about it ãsadness at the lost potential of the very young, both of the murdered girl and of the failed promise of Gillian's schoolmates, sadness for the evident decline of a beloved mother, and sadness at the prospect of inevitably, in the fullness of time, following in her wake. Nora Kelly has a marvellous talent for sketching even the most minor characters in vivid detail and for carefully avoiding sentimentality while being unafraid of emotion. She has developed wonderfully as a novelist and Old Wounds richly deserved the Arthur Ellis award it won in 1999.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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