of a talker and nobody in his family ever seems to have anything useful to say to him, so it is the author’s voice we hear, describing the teeter-totter of Tom’s mental state as he struggles to control his rage, to ignore the whispering voices that intrude upon his reality. Walking alone on a beach or a back road seems to be the only way Tom is able to bring balance or equilibrium back into his life, but even nature turns her back on him at a critical moment, so that the evergreens in his yard look like “bent-backed refugees from some borderland wracked by armed conflict.” The conflict is, of course, all in Tom’s head, a head that he can’t see into or understand. Human communication, or lack of it, seems to be the major impediment to Tom’s mental well being. He not only can’t talk to people, he can’t look them in the eye, can’t see behind the misery of their lives. His institutionalized mother serves as a mirror for him, her slow deterioration and death acting as Perfect World a prefiguring of his own probable end. Ian Colford When on a rare occasion he does look Broadview Press into her eyes, it is “like looking through a doorway into an empty room.” Ian Colford’s short novel Perfect World The closest Tom comes to finding will be too short for some readers and consolation, and to being heard by the too long for others. It’s beautifully written but the subject matter is so hor- reader, is when he speaks at his mothrific that it is a hard book to finish. Tom er’s funeral. One old neighbour and three staff from the mental institution Brackett, abandoned by his schizoshe lived in show up and he addresses phrenic mother and alcoholic father them briefly, expressing the wish that at age thirteen, is left in the care of a he had known her better. For a fleeting demented grandmother, yet somehow moment, he catches a glimpse of “a life manages to survive, apparently intact. He has a generous and positive nature, that could have been,” the perfect world that is beyond his grasp. gets a good job as a mechanic, and This is not a book for the faint of eventually acquires a loving wife, two heart. Colford’s is a bleak and dark kids, a house and a dog. vision of a life doomed by heredity, Tom’s world is ideal, until he slowly geography, bad luck and poor access to succumbs to paranoia, depression and medical and social services. Tom’s jouranger that finally explodes into a fullney through the world of severe mental blown episode of psychotic collapse. illness is entirely devoid of humour or In the grip of his demons, he commits consolation. However it is a reflection of an act of unspeakable violence against some people’s reality. Everyone knows a member of his family, a crime that someone who has gone down that road. causes him to lose everything he loves. Michelle Butler Hallett has quite acThere is little in the way of dialogue in this rather dire tale. Tom is not much curately called Perfect World “a haunting REVIEW
A Dark Journey Into Psychosis
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It is Colford’s compassion and his ability to identify with his mentally ill protagonist that carries the reader into a similar comprehension. study in empathy,” which is probably as good an explanation for why the novel deserves an audience as any. Haunting it certainly is, to the point where it made this reader actually lose sleep. But the empathy is there also. The pivotal moment when you realize that Tom is coming unstuck is jarring: he wakes up with a headache that he attributes to his young son’s “deceitful manner ... whiny tone and ... sneaky furtiveness.” Somehow, Colford takes that warped observation about a perfectly normal little boy and forces you to see that it is simply not Tom’s fault. He achieves this partly through his characterization of Tom’s wife, who cannot tolerate the sin but still loves the sinner. Again, though, it is the author’s voice that is the dominant one here, and it is Colford’s compassion and his ability to identify with his mentally ill protagonist that carries the reader into a similar comprehension of the man’s dilemma. It is this empathy that provides a minute glimmer of hope at the end. Despite his horrible crime, you close the book wishing Tom some measure of love in the future. Robin McGrath is the author or editor of 15 books and has published more than 200 articles in magazines such as Beaver, Inuit Art Quarterly, Fiddlehead and Room of One’s Own. She lives in Labrador and reviews regularly for The Telegram in St. John’s.