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Eye Lake by Tristan Hughes
Coach House Books ($17.95; 200 pages)
Review by Deborah de Bakker
Eye Lake, Tristan Hughes’s new novel, arises straight out of the landscape and history of Atikokan, which Hughes calls Crooked River.
In the 1940s a massive engineering project drained 125 billion gallons of water out of Steep Rock Lake to create an open-pit iron ore mine on the former lake bed. The Seine River was diverted, flooding a large area Hughes calls Eye Lake.
As we know all too well, sooner or later mines close. When this one did, the town was left to fend for itself.
As the novel opens, nature is beginning to reassert itself. Eye Lake is receding and the water is “find[ing] its way home, back where it belongs.”
But, as the water goes down, the past re-emerges for Eli O’Callaghan, the narrator of the story.
Tristan Hughes
The voice of Eli is one of the best things about this book. Eli is regarded as not too bright by the people of Crooked River. But he has fewer preconceived notions about the world than most of us and his observations of people and nature are fresh and detailed. Eli takes life as it comes, but lives with persistent melancholy related to the unresolved disappearances of eccentric childhood friend George McKenzie and of his grandfather Clarence O’Callaghan.
.JPG)
