by Glen Huser, Newest Press, 2021/$19.95/272 pp.
A new Glen Huser book is always welcome, whatever its subject. Huser is one of the steady, quiet lights of Alberta’s writing world—an excellent author who is often underappreciated, which I hope changes with this novel.
Burning the Night is both easy and hard to describe. Repressed gay man Curtis comes to Edmonton to attend university and befriends his eccentric aunt Harriet, an accomplished violinist blinded by an accident in her youth, and her loyal companion and housekeeper, Jean. As he reads to Harriet, particularly from the diary and sketchbook that her husband-to-be, Phillip, wrote during the First World War, Curtis becomes obsessed with the hidden stories that have been untold by Harriet and all the family since she married his uncle Hartley. From this deceptively simple weave comes Curtis’s obsession with their differences, their similarities and the strange parallels of their lives and interests. “Like Aunt Harriet,” says Curtis plainly on the first page of chapter one, “I had spent a good deal of my life in blindness,” qualifying it by adding “but a blindness of my own selection.” We are warned right at the outset that we can expect Curtis to use Harriet’s story both as a disguise and as a detection tool to understand his own repression.
Huser is a master of subtle buildups, slow reveals and the reluctant insights that characterize people such as Curtis, a person who can deny themselves anything if it mitigates risk. Huser shows us, subtly but clearly, how Curtis’s best friend is wiser than he—and even Curtis’s mother, unfriendly to Harriet and critical of Curtis, contributes to the final insights.
Remains of the Day-type stories with their laconic, repressed narrators often fail to make me care, yet I accompanied Curtis on his excruciatingly slow coming-of-age journey, a process that takes much of Curtis’s adult life, without complaint and strongly invested in the outcome. Partly that is Huser’s deft, unsentimental prose, but partly also the unusual, unique and disparate elements of Harriet’s and Curtis’s lives, which made them interesting to know, even if temperamentally unfamiliar. This is of course the same reason that eccentric and vivid Aunt Harriet fills Curtis’s quiet, limited life with questions and stories he cannot avoid any more than he can avoid the final, interior reckoning that shows him what his own path has to be. In his atypical coming-out, as so often happens, no-one is surprised at the outcome but Curtis.
Probably no one but Huser could, or would think to, combine the Group of Seven, the Halifax explosion, classical music and small-town Alberta to create a symphony of the whole. That he does so in this readable, kind, loving novel is proof of his mastery.
—Candas Jane Dorsey is a writer and artist in Edmonton.
