Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
Who Murdered the Minister?
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Delicate Storm
by Giles Blunt
Marian Wood/Putnam, 301 pp., $24.95
'Murder is a rare event in Canada': so it's remarked in Giles Blunt's harrowing first novel, Forty Words for Sorrow (2001). Both that novel and the new The Delicate Storm are set in a meticu-lously rendered fictitious small northern Ontario town called Algonquin Bay, and both are notable for their subtly nuanced, mordantly poetic images in which what you might call the formerly human has been transmogrified by violence into a part of this natural setting. In Forty Words for Sorrow, the badly mutilated corpse of a missing thirteen-year-old Chippewa Indian girl is discovered in an abandoned mineshaft on an ice-locked Manitou island:
Review, 2324 words
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