Quill &
Quire
12 September,
1992
Turnstone Press, 256 pp., $19.95
The Good
Lie
by D.F. Bailey
Had Crime and Punishment been set in contemporary Victoria,
B.C., it might very well have ended up as The Good Lie. And
while D.F. Bailey’s prose may not match Dostoevsky’s, he
does exceedingly well at mining – in a modern Canadian
context – the moral dilemmas and mental despair experienced
by a person of conscience who commits a crime.
Paul Wakefield is on a group kayaking expedition in the
stunning but unpredictable waters off Vancouver Island. The
paddlers’ newly honed skills are put to the test when a
thick fog rolls in just as night is falling. Separated from
the rest of the group, Paul and a teenage girl, Jenny
Jensen, are struck by a yacht and thrown into the freezing
ocean waters. In the ensuing panic, Jenny grabs onto Paul,
pulling him down with her. Acting on instinct, Paul strikes
her with his paddle, knocking her unconscious. The other
paddlers, who do not see the incident, assume it was the
yacht that hit Jenny.
Paul’s return to daily life is the start of his slow mental
unravelling. Jenny is in a coma and unlikely to revive.
Plagued by tinnitus and insomnia, Paul takes leave of his
otherwise satisfying government job. Despite his intense
desire to unload the burden of guilt that is his constant
companion, he is unable to tell the truth about what
happened, even to his sympathetic wife.
Matters get worse when Paul learns he is named in an
insurance lawsuit launched by Jenny’s family. More
worrisome still, the whole experience completely unhinges
Jenny’s already volatile and potentially violent father,
who takes to threatening Paul and stalking Paul’s young
son.
Bailey’s masterstroke is in creating a situation for his
protagonist that is so believable the reader cannot help
but feel complicit in the guilt and anguish of it all. With
compelling, measured prose, he stakes out precious
territory in a genre – located somewhere between thriller
and psychodrama – that he makes completely his own.
Reviewed by Emily Donaldson (from the December 2007
issue)
