David Watmough (1926–2017)

The novel billed as the concluding part of Watmough’s semi-autobiographical series about the gay writer Dave Bryant sees Davey, in his seventies, returning from British Columbia to Cornwall — where he spent much of his childhood — for the funeral of an elderly relative. There’s a lot of the usual kind of thing that happens in this sort of book — Davey tries to make adult sense of the things he observed as a child, and inevitably finds out things he had never understood about the show more family; he bonds in unexpected ways with his surviving relatives and he also finds himself disconcerted by the way Cornwall has changed since he left half a century ago. There’s some nice observation along the way, but the plot seems to deliver a lot less than it promises — Watmough seems to have got a bit bored with all the intrigues and hints of the supernatural on the bleak moors, and wraps it all up a bit too hurriedly. Perhaps the nicest things about the book are the portrayals of Davey’s single-mother cousin and of the strong, warm bond between Davey and his life-partner Ken. show less

David Watmough writes about his own life as a kind of collage of friendships and acquaintances with interesting people. This could be a kind of modest withdrawal of the ego from the autobiography, but of course it also risks turning into a catalogue of dropped names, a danger Watmough recognises but doesn’t entirely avoid. We don’t really learn anything about him by knowing that as a student in London he would regularly pass Clement Attlee in the street and exchange “good mornings” show more with him, for example. Presumably his real reason for steering clear of a straight autobiography is that he had already written a whole bunch of novels that drew on his own life, and he didn’t want to risk rewriting the whole thing.

We do get quite an interesting account of (bits of) his childhood in Cornwall and London, his time as a theological student and later a journalist and writer in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and finally Vancouver, where we get quite a few portraits of people in the (West-Coast) Canadian arts world, some I knew about (like Carol Shields and Margaret Laurence), others quite new to me. show less

For the most part this is your typical "death in the family = return to one's roots" kind of introspective study. Problem is the book isn't all that introspective. I found Davey to be a rather crotchety septuagenarian and I had troubles coming to terms with a character that on one hand was enjoying manipulating situations while at the same time weakly finding himself subject to some unusual time shifts of memory. It also didn't help when Davey would come across as a petulant school boy when show more the facts being discovered - remember, there is a family mystery of sorts to be uncovered here - didn't meet with his understanding of the situation. From a settings perspective, Watmough does a good job conveying the dichotomy of a Cornwall that has never changed in hundreds of years with the Cornwall that is unrecognizable to its returning son. The ending left me unsatisfied.... pieces were still not adding up in a clean manner, but like life, maybe it isn't supposed to add up. Some things tend to remain a mystery, no matter how hard we try to uncover the truth.

Watmough has a solid biography as a writer in Canada for five decades with 20 books to his credit. He was even the first president of the Federation of B.C. Writers. Having grown up mainly in Cornwall, the setting for this story - and the trip home Davey makes after decades of living on Canada's west coast - has a hint of autobiography to it, even though Watmough clearly states in his author's statement at the end of the book that he did not conceive of this book as any kind of swan song. He admits that this novel was written to address some unfinished business and approached it with no preconceived notions... he just let the story write itself. I will probably try and track down a couple of the first Davey Bryant books, as it was probably wrong of me to start with the 'last book', so take this review with the grain of salt that there is probably a lot more to this story that might make sense if all the books in the series have been read first. show less

Modestly interesting literary memoir by a gay Canadian novelist, arranged in the form of reminiscences of far more famous people that he has encountered. This creates an inevitable feeling of piggybacking on the celebrity of others, and the gossipy tone only reinforces that. But if you want to know about W.H. Auden's penis size, you've come to the right place.