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In his early seventies, Arthur Beauchamp, QC (pronounced Beech'm, he is at pains to point out) has retired to his farm on Garibaldi Island, a fictional Gulf Island in the chain off the east coast of Vancouver Island. He has but one ambition - to win the Mabel Orfmeister Trophy for Most Points in Fruits and Vegetables in the upcoming Fall Fair. All seems set for a genteel and dignified retreat from active public life into a sweet and harmless old age until one Wentworth Chance publishes his tell-all biography of Arthur, with its pitiless revelations of his alcoholic past, his outrageous behaviour, and his courtroom triumphs. Arthur cannot stop himself from reading and re-reading it and in the end, it drags him back to his earliest days as a lawyer, before he'd become a drunk, and the case that might just have set him on that particular path. In 1962, when he was twenty-five, Beauchamp had only just decided to pass on a classics fellowship at Cambridge to pursue a career in law. And then his revered mentor and Classics professor, Dermot Mulligan, disappeared and Gabriel Swift, a young Aboriginal man whom Mulligan and his wife had all but adopted, is charged with his murder, which then carried the death penalty. Beauchamp is persuaded into taking on the case pro bono. What Beauchamp expected to find in Gabriel was the stereotype he brought with him to the prison where he first interviews him - drunken Indian, no self-control, and so on and so on. What he finds is an articulate, radical, thoughtful, and extremely intelligent young man who was, he says, as devoted to Mulligan as Beauchamp himself. Before he knows it, Arthur is committed to his cause, though in the climate of the Vancouver of the early sixties, it would take something of a miracle to get Gabriel off. There is a mystery at the heart of this book, and some of the splendid courtroom scenes that Deverell does so well, but this is a book that goes beyond the confines of the legal thriller to provide a portrait of Vancouver before it was cool, an uptight, buttoned-down place that was, nonetheless, quivering on the brink of seismic social change. Gabriel is ahead of his time, Arthur behind it and both will be profoundly altered by their association with one another. For Arthur, the case reveals to him what he can only see as serious moral failures, failures of character, for which he cannot forgive himself and, if Wentworth Chance is to be believed, drove him to drink. Nor is it merely Vancouver's past that is evoked, but Canada's as well. The memory of Steven Truscott, wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to hang at the age of fourteen, broods over these pages. So do the horrors of the residential schools, with all their brutality and abuse. Racial prejudice is so endemic that it is not even noticed by anyone who is not an object of it. The young Arthur is in thrall to The Chief, John Diefenbaker and wonders what people are hearing in the rough voices of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. But this novel is not just an exercise in national mea culpa. Because of the framing narrative, set in the present moment, the reader is able to measure the immense social difference between then and now and now is looking pretty good. And Beauchamp's commitment to repairing his terrible error, even after fifty years, suggests that it is never too late to say sorry and never too late to make amends. This novel has been shortlisted for the CWA Arthur Ellis award for best novel. I cannot imagine a more worthy candidate, especially as the award is named after the pseudonym of Canada's hangman, as it is his shadow that falls across this story and shapes the choices that the characters make. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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