WHATS on
WINNIPEG
A Winnipeg Free Press Web site
THE GOOD LIE: Characters, atmosphere fuel well-paced
thriller
Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston
LITERARY thrillers, compared to popular thrillers, tend to
take their time getting to plot denouement. But not so
Victoria writer D.F. Bailey's third novel. It doesn't rush,
but nor does it drag.
The story begins on a clear Saturday morning with Victoria
civil servant Paul Wakefield and his fellow novice kayaking
students paddling across Mouat Channel off Vancouver
Island. But then the fog rolls in. And suddenly, out of the
fog, a yacht barrels down on Paul and another kayaker,
14-year-old Jenny Jensen. It swamps them, and they're
pitched into ice-cold water. Paul—following survival
protocol—tries to right his overturned kayak and help Jenny
do likewise. But Jenny panics. She climbs on Paul's back
and repeatedly pulls him off his kayak. In desperation, he
whacks her in the head with his kayak paddle.
Paul and Jenny are eventually rescued. When he recovers
from hypothermia, Paul learns his blow to Jenny's head has
put her in a coma. And that's where the lie begins: Paul
denies striking Jenny with his paddle. His official version
of events is that her head trauma is the result of hitting
her head against either her kayak or the yacht.
The lie morphs into the "good lie" of the title because of
the financial ramifications of who's liable for Jenny's
comatose condition. It's a good lie for Paul and his family
because it prevents them losing their home and all their
assets in a civil judgment. But paradoxically, it's also a
good lie for Jenny and her parents.
If Paul was held solely responsible for her condition, his
assets would soon be exhausted without being sufficient to
provide long-term care for the girl. But if civil liability
isn't pinned on Paul, it'll be shared by the kayaking
school and kayak manufacturer, or more properly their
deep-pocketed insurers, who have the big bucks necessary
for the kind of expensive chronic care Jenny requires. (The
yacht disappeared, never to be identified.)
Paul's steadfastness in his lie is challenged—morally and
physically—by the girl's bereaved, but also
psychopathically brutal, father. Wakefield's own
six-year-old son becomes a target of a maddened parent, one
who, Paul learns, had a nasty bent for violence long before
his daughter's injury.
Both Wakefield and his empathetic wife, Valerie, are
compelling characters. And the Oak Bay area of Victoria
where they live and work is finely rendered. Sometimes
Wakefield's more rarefied intellectual musings about Marcus
Aurelius's Meditations, mandalas and "universal
consciousness" seem a tad contrived, but on the whole the
story ambles to its conclusion at a nice clip.
Bailey knows how to employ atmosphere, characters and mood
to steadily build a story. And the story he so carefully
constructs is a good one.
Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.
Reproduced from Whats on Winnipeg
10 December, 2007
