Krishna
This is my first book by this Canadian author. I was not sure what to expect, but what I got was not what I expected! (I am not talking in any negative sense here).
Let us dive right into the story.
An old man named Professor Colin Dobbs wakes up in a hospital, his body creaking all over. Velvet Bews, the nurse, is looking after him, along with a crew and a doctor. He was mauled by a female grizzly bear.
Now he had a difficult time with his wife Sarah who accuses him of bringing up their daughter Annie ‘not as a girl’. He goes with her to teach her fishing and other ‘manly arts’. She also hates his way of ringing the doorbell, leaving clothes all over the house for washing etc etc. She thinks that he is deliberately plotting to turn Annie against her mother.
Annie hates her mother and when a child did not want to even acknowledge the notion that ‘she could have been at least partly responsible for the formation of her brain’!
Meanwhile, when he goes back to work, he finds that totally inept people have been selected for promotions while he was away. In addition, he remembers, after briefly being tempted, fobbing off Liz when she threw herself at him and earning her undying enmity. Mostly “office” politics in the University where he went back to work.
His marriage to Sarah was rocky from start. He was ‘born’ to be a teacher but Sarah was not cut out to be a teacher’s wife. She hated his friends, their intellectual discussions, everything.
When Colin agrees to look after a colleague’s old dog, Sarah is furious that Colin never consulted her first. Then she asks him to leave it outside. He is forced to build a heated kennel and on the first (?) night, the dog gets electrocuted. Since Colin couldn’t bury it in the special place his friend wanted him to bury it (the ground, in winter, was too hard), he puts it in his freezer in the garage and Sarah discovers it and freaks out! More and more trouble. The friend asks Colin to put the body in his freezer and says that he will have the dog mounted taxidermically instead.
The dialogs are fun and crisp; yes. Undoubtedly. But the story? It stalls and bickers and full of University Politics. The story hardly moves.
He learns that the skin of the grizzly who mauled him was switched by ‘Frankie’ the owner’s son and he got a tiny bear skin. There was another person the same day with another bear and Dobbs suspects that money had changed hands. He confronts the owner but the owner offers his own grizzly in exchange which Dobbs rejects. He decides to litigate for fraud. The problem? Archie, who is their sole witness and is trusted by Dobbs, has multiple criminal records!
The court case is towards the end of the book. The great plus for this book are the dialogs. I have not seen many books with better dialogs. A comic sense runs through the story, and even portions of the court scenes are funny.
Just don’t expect a lot of tense moments, or twists, or action beyond what is described. The author succeeds in bringing to life the events in a college professor’s life and also the ambience of a small town in Canada. Those are nice.
The court case decision is not a surprise with Colin insisting on handicapping his own lawyer to stop it from descending into ugliness. However, the final scene is absolutely terrific and lifts the book from being mediocre to sort of interesting!
7/10
— Krishna