WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER by Howard Norman

I found this novel both unique and interesting.  It is different, and I enjoyed reading it.  There is quite a bit of dialogue, the characters reveal themselves through their words. Those words are blunt and plain.  The setting is a small town in Nova Scotia.  I am not familiar with the regional dialect of the outlying areas of Halifax, but these characters sound a lot like the plain speaking folk of Maine.  They do not waste words, and are thrifty and hard working.

The narrator is Wyatt Hillyer who is writing a letter to his 21 year old daughter, Marlais, who lives in Denmark where she moved with her mother when she was two years old.  Wyatt, a lonely man, has had no contact with her, and it is important to him that she know the story of his life and what her mother meant to him.

There are many deaths in this novel, yet it is not a sad book.  The author is adept at finding the humor in otherwise tragic circumstances. The book opens with the deaths of Wyatt's parents who both jump to their deaths on separate bridges on the same night.  There is a tongue in cheek humor in their story.  They were both in love with the same woman, a neighbor who strangely shows up later on in the book.

Possessing regional stoicism, the teenaged Wyatt is bundled off to the home of his Aunt Constance and Uncle Donald in the aptly named town of Middle Economy. The dialogue is priceless and so are the foibles of its citizens. It so happens that their adopted daughter, Tilda, is the love of Wyatt's life.  Unfortunately for Wyatt, Tilda becomes enamored of a young German student who is attending university in Halifax.  Hans Mohring is studying Philology and he is equally smitten with Tilda.  This would have been no problem, but the time is right in the middle of World War 2, and Middle Economy is a hotbed of small town prejudice and paranoid suspicion. Never mind that Hans is from a Jewish family that has fled to Denmark.  In the eyes of the townies, he is the enemy, perhaps a spy!

People make choices in war that might not be made otherwise.  For lack of other opportunities, Wyatt becomes apprenticed to his Uncle who is a master designer and builder of toboggans with clients form all over the world.  Tilda becomes a professional mourner, a strange profession I have never heard of.  Somehow it fits in with the other droll oddities in the book.  Music also plays a part in moving the plot along.

Wyatt, whose life takes a very odd and tragic turn, tells his daughter as he sets down his life on paper: " I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven't told you."  Thus we learn his story.

I enjoyed this book, it was different from any other book I have recently read.  The author nails it with his authentic picture of plain spoken rural people and Canadian life during World War 2.