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Advocate
When Jacob is called back to Advocate, he is not only returning home again, something he knows he cannot really do; he is going to face his dying grandmother and the people of the town who turned on one of their own.
Twenty years earlier, when his uncle David came home, it was to die. The response in Advocate was typical of most towns, large and small, in 1984: when his disease became known, Jacob, his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt, were shunned, turned out from school and their jobs, out of fear of an until-then unknown virus.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel beloved of one of the main characters, Advocate is elegiac, written by a first-rate author, about overcoming ignorance and prejudice. With wit and emotional depth, Greer describes the formation of one boy’s social conscience and takes us to a resolution that is truly satisfying.
Twenty years earlier, when his uncle David came home, it was to die. The response in Advocate was typical of most towns, large and small, in 1984: when his disease became known, Jacob, his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt, were shunned, turned out from school and their jobs, out of fear of an until-then unknown virus.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel beloved of one of the main characters, Advocate is elegiac, written by a first-rate author, about overcoming ignorance and prejudice. With wit and emotional depth, Greer describes the formation of one boy’s social conscience and takes us to a resolution that is truly satisfying.
335 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2016
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Darren Greer
9 books26 followersDarren Greer is the author of five novels and a book of essays. His novel Still Life With June was the winner of the 2004 Relit Award in Canada, a top three finalist for the Ferro-Grumley award in Manhattan, and was nominated for the Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Award.
His novel, Just Beneath My Skin, was short-listed for the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, the 2015 ReLit award, and won the 2015 Thomas H Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. His novel Advocate was short-listed for the 2017 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the 2017 Ferro-Grumley Award and won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award. His latest novel Outcast was released October 1st, 2018.
His novel, Just Beneath My Skin, was short-listed for the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, the 2015 ReLit award, and won the 2015 Thomas H Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. His novel Advocate was short-listed for the 2017 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the 2017 Ferro-Grumley Award and won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award. His latest novel Outcast was released October 1st, 2018.
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July 30, 2018
Jacob McNeil is a thirty six year old gay man living in Toronto. He has a degree in mathematics but has chosen to work as a counsellor at an outreach center for men living with AIDS. He enjoys his work but is consumed by it. Jacob had originally thought that by learning everything about the AIDS virus he would conquer his fear of the disease but it has only crystalized that fear and his knowledge has undone him. By day he works to help others and at night he comes home and tries to make sense of his life. He allows his job to keep him too busy to date and contents himself with books, drinks with friends and an occasional movie or play. It is not a bad life but it is not an easy one.
Jacob receives a call from his mother Caroline in Advocate Nova Scotia, telling him his grandmother is dying and it is time for him to come and say his final good-byes. He is reluctant to leave the city for the home and small town where he grew up and even more reluctant to face his grandmother. She is a difficult women and he has never been able to let go of the deep resentment he holds against her. The thought of returning home and facing a past that has marked his entire life fills him with anger. But he must go.
Jacob, his mother Caroline and her sister Jeanette live in Millicent McNeil’s large mansion in the small town where his grandfather was a respected physician before his death. His grandmother ruled her grand Victorian home as a matriarch, insisting that by sheltering and providing a roof over the head of her two daughters and her grandson that she had a right to know everything about them and dictate every facet of their lives. She was a caustic woman without an ounce of sentimentality who criticized them for every action or word she could not condone. Millicent McNeil had definite opinions about every one and every thing and even when she was wrong, she would never admit to a mistake. She was the walking, breathing stereotype of the average elderly woman of her time, a mix of biblical philosophy and racial stereotypes.
As Jacob prepares for his reluctant return to Advocate, the narrative takes readers back to 1984 when Jacob’s Uncle David returned home for a visit. Jacob knew nothing about his Uncle and had never met him, but it was clear as his mother and aunt prepared for their brother’s return to the home he had not visited for over a decade, that David’s mother did not welcome him. She did not meet the train and made it clear she was not happy to have him stay in her home.
David came home that spring to die. A schoolteacher, he had lived and worked in Toronto since he left home after his mother threw him out of the house because she did not approve of his lifestyle. He never returned and she had not spoken to him since, although his sisters Caroline and Jeanette had maintained telephone contact with him and were thrilled he was back. When David came back to Advocate his mother maintained an emotional distance from him and did not show him any affection.
That spring and summer of 1984, Jacob was eleven going on twelve, on the cusp of his adolescent years. He knew little about sex and nothing about homosexuality. It was a time when AIDS was not well known or understood and fear about spread of the disease was rampant. There was no treatment and the inevitable resolution was a difficult and painful death.
When people in the town learn of David’s diagnosis they react quickly and cruelly, fueled by their ignorance, intolerance and their fear of catching the disease. Panic spreads quickly through the town. Jacob loses his childhood friend Cameron, is barred from the library and eventually his school so his mother and aunt are forced to home school him. Caroline and Jeanette both lose their jobs and his grandmother loses her revered position in the town as her friends shun her and bar her from town meetings and functions. Millicent who was so active in the church, is shocked when her beloved Catholic priest also deserts her. Even those who were educated, like Cameron’s mother who taught biology, proved they could be smart and ignorant at the same time. Friends and neighbours quickly turned away from one of the most respected families in town.
The only people who support the family were the outcasts -- Henry Hennessey a quiet, intelligent and articulate man from the only black family in town, the indigenous people living on the outskirts and Jacob’s new friend Deanny, a fearless, unpredictable and scrappy young girl from the wrong side of town who wore colorful clothes and swore like a trooper.
As David’s health deteriorated, Jacob established a close friendship with the man he came to love and respect. David never cried or fell into despair. Instead he accepted things as they came, negotiated each day as it arrived and avoided talk about the future. Jacob began to see something in David beyond his intelligence, it was genuine integrity.
That summer had a serious effect on Jacob as his home became a somber place filled with despair despite his mother and aunt’s efforts to maintain a pretense of hope. He watched as his family was shamed, his grandmother retreated to her bedroom never to visit her dying son and his mother and aunt struggled to provide care for their dying brother. Jacob’s resentment for Millicent McNeil grew as the hand she played in creating some of the trials against her own son continued. It is for this fury directed against her own child that he cannot forgive her.
After David’s death, his grandmother blended back into the town as if nothing had happened. Jake went back to school and his mother and aunt gradually became part of the life of the town again although they never married. But Jacob had been seriously marked by the experience.
This story replicates the experience of many who came from small towns in Canada during the early years of the AIDS crisis. There was little information available and even doctors and nurses were not always well informed. Some even refused to care for those with the disease and doctors who accepted them often lost other patients in their practice. Those who look back can remember the fear, hysteria, hypocrisy and “holier than thou” criticisms based on life style choices. It was a time when the disease was proclaimed a judgement from God, when some restaurants would not serve those with the disease for fear of contagion and funeral homes refused to prepare their bodies for burial.
Greer continually switches time periods from Jacob’s childhood to the present day, but manages it well, with Jacob the strong voice that securely holds the narrative thread. He tells a story about the disease that is not often told, the one that emerged in small, tradition bound, provincial towns where there were no secrets, where lives were divided strictly on religious affiliation, where regrets for the moral failings and actions of townspeople in the past were seldom articulated and history held a long and storied life for years after the events.
Jacob carries the memories of that time every day in his present life. It takes both his mother and his friend Deanny, now a smart, educated and sophisticated woman, to challenge him to reconsider how he lives. His mother points out how his rigid and dogmatic approach to his present life makes him so much like his grandmother and cautions him not to repeat the behavior of the woman he came to resent so thoroughly. And Deanny reminds him that his future can only be affected by his past if he allows it. She knows her past affects her present legal work but it doesn’t cripple her. She asks Jacob what his David would think of his behavior, of making his life a protest in the name of a man who did not believe in protest, who was instead a man of forgiveness. She challenges him to forgive his grandmother and himself. It is a reminder of just how difficult it can be to see what is important when you are so close to it.
This is a touching, beautiful and sensitive book about forgiveness. Although Jacob is steeped in anger, Greer has managed to create a sympathetic tone to the narrative, a balancing act not easy to achieve. He tells a story about the drama that consumes all families when there is a crisis, how various members react, approach problems, support each other and how time gradually helps build healing bridges.
I found the narrative prolonged as it reached a conclusion, but that is a small criticism for this touching story which has been so well written.
Jacob receives a call from his mother Caroline in Advocate Nova Scotia, telling him his grandmother is dying and it is time for him to come and say his final good-byes. He is reluctant to leave the city for the home and small town where he grew up and even more reluctant to face his grandmother. She is a difficult women and he has never been able to let go of the deep resentment he holds against her. The thought of returning home and facing a past that has marked his entire life fills him with anger. But he must go.
Jacob, his mother Caroline and her sister Jeanette live in Millicent McNeil’s large mansion in the small town where his grandfather was a respected physician before his death. His grandmother ruled her grand Victorian home as a matriarch, insisting that by sheltering and providing a roof over the head of her two daughters and her grandson that she had a right to know everything about them and dictate every facet of their lives. She was a caustic woman without an ounce of sentimentality who criticized them for every action or word she could not condone. Millicent McNeil had definite opinions about every one and every thing and even when she was wrong, she would never admit to a mistake. She was the walking, breathing stereotype of the average elderly woman of her time, a mix of biblical philosophy and racial stereotypes.
As Jacob prepares for his reluctant return to Advocate, the narrative takes readers back to 1984 when Jacob’s Uncle David returned home for a visit. Jacob knew nothing about his Uncle and had never met him, but it was clear as his mother and aunt prepared for their brother’s return to the home he had not visited for over a decade, that David’s mother did not welcome him. She did not meet the train and made it clear she was not happy to have him stay in her home.
David came home that spring to die. A schoolteacher, he had lived and worked in Toronto since he left home after his mother threw him out of the house because she did not approve of his lifestyle. He never returned and she had not spoken to him since, although his sisters Caroline and Jeanette had maintained telephone contact with him and were thrilled he was back. When David came back to Advocate his mother maintained an emotional distance from him and did not show him any affection.
That spring and summer of 1984, Jacob was eleven going on twelve, on the cusp of his adolescent years. He knew little about sex and nothing about homosexuality. It was a time when AIDS was not well known or understood and fear about spread of the disease was rampant. There was no treatment and the inevitable resolution was a difficult and painful death.
When people in the town learn of David’s diagnosis they react quickly and cruelly, fueled by their ignorance, intolerance and their fear of catching the disease. Panic spreads quickly through the town. Jacob loses his childhood friend Cameron, is barred from the library and eventually his school so his mother and aunt are forced to home school him. Caroline and Jeanette both lose their jobs and his grandmother loses her revered position in the town as her friends shun her and bar her from town meetings and functions. Millicent who was so active in the church, is shocked when her beloved Catholic priest also deserts her. Even those who were educated, like Cameron’s mother who taught biology, proved they could be smart and ignorant at the same time. Friends and neighbours quickly turned away from one of the most respected families in town.
The only people who support the family were the outcasts -- Henry Hennessey a quiet, intelligent and articulate man from the only black family in town, the indigenous people living on the outskirts and Jacob’s new friend Deanny, a fearless, unpredictable and scrappy young girl from the wrong side of town who wore colorful clothes and swore like a trooper.
As David’s health deteriorated, Jacob established a close friendship with the man he came to love and respect. David never cried or fell into despair. Instead he accepted things as they came, negotiated each day as it arrived and avoided talk about the future. Jacob began to see something in David beyond his intelligence, it was genuine integrity.
That summer had a serious effect on Jacob as his home became a somber place filled with despair despite his mother and aunt’s efforts to maintain a pretense of hope. He watched as his family was shamed, his grandmother retreated to her bedroom never to visit her dying son and his mother and aunt struggled to provide care for their dying brother. Jacob’s resentment for Millicent McNeil grew as the hand she played in creating some of the trials against her own son continued. It is for this fury directed against her own child that he cannot forgive her.
After David’s death, his grandmother blended back into the town as if nothing had happened. Jake went back to school and his mother and aunt gradually became part of the life of the town again although they never married. But Jacob had been seriously marked by the experience.
This story replicates the experience of many who came from small towns in Canada during the early years of the AIDS crisis. There was little information available and even doctors and nurses were not always well informed. Some even refused to care for those with the disease and doctors who accepted them often lost other patients in their practice. Those who look back can remember the fear, hysteria, hypocrisy and “holier than thou” criticisms based on life style choices. It was a time when the disease was proclaimed a judgement from God, when some restaurants would not serve those with the disease for fear of contagion and funeral homes refused to prepare their bodies for burial.
Greer continually switches time periods from Jacob’s childhood to the present day, but manages it well, with Jacob the strong voice that securely holds the narrative thread. He tells a story about the disease that is not often told, the one that emerged in small, tradition bound, provincial towns where there were no secrets, where lives were divided strictly on religious affiliation, where regrets for the moral failings and actions of townspeople in the past were seldom articulated and history held a long and storied life for years after the events.
Jacob carries the memories of that time every day in his present life. It takes both his mother and his friend Deanny, now a smart, educated and sophisticated woman, to challenge him to reconsider how he lives. His mother points out how his rigid and dogmatic approach to his present life makes him so much like his grandmother and cautions him not to repeat the behavior of the woman he came to resent so thoroughly. And Deanny reminds him that his future can only be affected by his past if he allows it. She knows her past affects her present legal work but it doesn’t cripple her. She asks Jacob what his David would think of his behavior, of making his life a protest in the name of a man who did not believe in protest, who was instead a man of forgiveness. She challenges him to forgive his grandmother and himself. It is a reminder of just how difficult it can be to see what is important when you are so close to it.
This is a touching, beautiful and sensitive book about forgiveness. Although Jacob is steeped in anger, Greer has managed to create a sympathetic tone to the narrative, a balancing act not easy to achieve. He tells a story about the drama that consumes all families when there is a crisis, how various members react, approach problems, support each other and how time gradually helps build healing bridges.
I found the narrative prolonged as it reached a conclusion, but that is a small criticism for this touching story which has been so well written.
July 17, 2017
Powerful, moving story told with a great deal of heart. As one of the jacket blurbs said, every sentence rang with honesty. Beautiful storytelling.
May 23, 2020
The lack of understanding, mindless prejudice and fear of the early years of the AIDS crisis are recalled in vivid and infuriating detail in Darren Greer’s gut-wrenching novel Advocate. Jacob McNeil lives in Toronto and works as a counsellor at a gay men’s health centre. Born and raised in the Nova Scotia town of Advocate, it is to his childhood home that he must return when he learns that his grandmother is dying. Jacob’s reluctant return to Advocate is fraught with deep-seated and lingering resentments that centre on the town’s treatment of his uncle David, a gay man who also returned to Advocate from Toronto some twenty years earlier, but under vastly different circumstances. Born in 1973, Jacob grew up in his grandmother’s house with his grandmother, Millicent McNeil, his mother Caroline and his aunt Jeanette. He is eleven when his uncle David, a teacher and a man whom Jacob has never met, returns home for reasons that for a long time remain vague. All Jacob knows is that David’s return results in a great deal of tension and whispering behind closed doors among the women of the house: his mother and aunt on one side of the argument, his grandmother on the other. The bulk of the novel is given over to Jacob’s recollections of his uncle’s presence in the house and gradual and horrifying physical deterioration from AIDS. David’s return coincides with Jacob’s awakening to his own true nature—his suspicion that he too is gay, though at the time he hardly knows what this means. At first distrustful of and circumspect around his uncle, Jacob eventually forms a closely sympathetic bond with the dying man. But aside from Jacob’s budding awareness of himself and of complex events taking place in the world at large, Greer’s novel takes aim at small-town attitudes that have nothing to do with truth or fact and everything to do with ignorance and self-righteous adherence to inflexible religious doctrine. With David in the house infected with the mysterious AIDS virus, the McNeil’s are ostracized by the majority of the town and vilified for harboring a contagion that will surely spread. Jacob’s best friend cuts him off and pretends he doesn’t exist. But more than anything else, Jacob is distressed by his grandmother’s emotional frigidity toward her own son, her refusal to enter the sickroom, her flippant assurances that David will recover, that all will be well. Throughout Jacob’s adult life, his grandmother’s response to David’s illness has fed his resentment and twenty years later makes it impossible for him to feel anything as she approaches her own death. Though we know the outcome, Advocate is suspenseful and something of a page-turner. It is also written with great compassion and courage. It approaches a shameful period in history with open eyes and it doesn’t spare those who, through their words, or through action or inaction, contributed to making a human tragedy more painful and devastating than it had to be.
November 21, 2016
Although we have never met, I knew I liked Darren Greer from the moment I started reading his essay collection, “Strange Ghosts” (Cormorant Books, 2006), particularly the opening piece entitled “Remembering Felix Partz” in which he writes about gaining an appreciation for contemporary art while wandering through the National Gallery of Canada as a patient in a drug addiction treatment program, later diagnosed with HIV.
The experience in the NGC was an inspiration for his compelling novel, “Still Life with June” (Cormorant Books, 2003). Although I read the book some time ago, I remember loving the character of June, the woman with Down’s Syndrome. What I have always liked about Darren’s work, aside from the fact that the stories are always engrossing, is that he writes about Salvation Army workers, drug addicts, criminals, people in the margins, but he doesn’t turn them into caricatures or standard bearers, he just has them try to deal with whatever’s going on. He makes them real and he makes their dilemmas plausible. I went on to read and enjoy all his novels and am currently rereading “Strange Ghosts” and if I can figure out where I’ve shelved “Still Life with June,” I’m going to reread that too. If I loaned it to you, please return it.
“Advocate” (Cormorant Books, 2016) is the story of Jacob McNeil who works as a counsellor in Toronto at a men’s outreach centre. He returns to his small town of Advocate, Nova Scotia to see his dying grandmother, with whom he has a complicated history. The story is also about the treatment his Uncle David received from his family and the town when he returned to Advocate in 1984. In the course of the novel, we learn that David has AIDS. Certainly he is the first person to have AIDS in that small town. Their reaction is to shun him and his family. Political and religious authority figures ban him and his family, including a twelve-year-old Jake, from taking part in any activities or entering any public buildings. . In Jake’s case, he is first told he can’t enter the school library and then he is not allowed to attend school. When his uncle dies, no undertaker in the town will bury him, nor will any religious institution give him a funeral. Compassion comes from outside the town and from the Indigenous community. It’s interesting that compassion in this book comes from those who are not part of the status quo. The people of Advocate, divided on Catholic and Protestant lines, but religious, are afraid of contagion and believe that the disease is God’s punishment for homosexuality.
When the young Jake first encounters his Uncle David, he is resentful of his presence, but as time goes on, he gets to know him and comes to love him. David is intelligent, has been a teacher and is well-read. He befriends, Henry, fellow bibliophile and the town’s only black person, who Jake also gets to know. Henry is one of the people to spend time with David. We see the terrible scourge of the disease through Jake’s eyes. The portrait of David is drawn with compassion and accuracy.
It is easy to treat human suffering as abstract. The talent of Darren Greer is that he doesn’t let us do that. He gives us a close up view of suffering and shows how intolerance causes heartbreak and sorrow, in addition to the horror of AIDS, particularly when it was first discovered and diagnosed.
The grandmother is the matriarch of the family after the death of her husband, the town’s doctor. She is used to getting respect and she expects to be treated with the same. When David comes back to live in the family home, his grandmother is not pleased. She never accepted the fact that he was gay. When the town begins to treat her and the rest of the family badly because of David, we see some cracks in her armour, but she never yields in her lifetime and by the time she is dying, it is too late.
On her deathbed, she asks something surprising of Jake. In order to do what she asks, Jake has to sift through his feelings for his grandmother and the way she treated his uncle and decide if he can acquiesce.
The grandmother is controlling and judgemental. The townspeople are superstitious and ignorant but they are also afraid and we see that fear when the water supply is tainted and the population sickens. They assume that the sick have come down with AIDS, given to them by David, the only person in the town with the disease.
I particularly enjoyed the character of Bernadette, or Deanny, who first appears as a young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who causes Jake to get dirty for the first time in his life, much to the horror of his grandmother. Deanny goes on to be an influence in Jake’s life, always pushing him to date a new man. She is also one of the few people to show compassion to David. I think Deanny could have a book of her own. I’d love to read it.
Jake, the main character, is well-rendered. We see his struggle as someone who likes order, who is put in a situation where there can be no order; his uncle is dying, his grandmother and the town are acting in ways he doesn’t understand. He likes to line up his fingers “perfectly on the paper, so large equations could be distilled magically down to one final and irrevocable number equal to a variable of x or y.” He starts to discover his own sexuality when his uncle is dying of AIDS. He is afraid of the ramifications of his attraction to males and not females. He is confused when his grandmother forbids him to play with the Easy Bake Oven he finds in the attic. He takes a biology class in order to learn about the virus so that he won’t be frightened of it.
He decides to abandon a potential career in mathematics in favour of working as a counselor, after seeing what his uncle has gone through. Perhaps it is that intimate knowledge of his uncle’s suffering that makes it difficult for him to treat clients clinically, taking their difficulties too much to heart, but he also has issues with personal intimacy, with forming relationships with other men. Jake struggles throughout the book and my heart goes out to him as it does to David.
I haven’t spoken of Jake’s mother or his Aunt Jeannette, but they also play important roles in the book, acting as foils to his grandmother’s strict and narrow-minded attitudes. They also take care of David with love and compassion.
I wouldn’t be an appreciator of poetry, if I didn’t mention the vivid imagery in this book. Early on, in Jake’s biology class, the virus is described as “shaped like a dodecahedron…coloured green, with small barnacles all over it. It looked like a child’s toy, or a badly made Christmas ornament.” The descriptions of the family homes are fascinating and deliberate: the depression era glass bowl, the statue of a black boy with a fishing pole on the lawn, the garden gnomes. There’s poetry and humour in the descriptions of the Orange and Lemon parades given by the Irish Protestants and Catholics. There’s symbolism in David’s St. Jude medallion.
The book shows how intolerance and fear can take hold and lead to inhumanity and lack of compassion. In this post-truth era, the book seems particularly relevant.
Darren Greer is one of several Canadian writers who I admire and read extensively in the fields of poetry, fiction and nonfiction/autobiography. He, along with Amber Dawn, bill bissett, Michael V. Smith, Heather O’Neill, Bill Brown, Marcus McCann, Daniel Allen Cox, Lynn Crosbie, Nelly Arcan, Tom Walmsley, Tamara Faith Berger, Billeh Nickerson, and Zoe Whittall, to name a few, write strongly, with humour and compassion, and deal with issues of estrangement and intolerance based on sex and sexuality, poverty, family dysfunction, gender and orientation, managing to make the issues real and personal. These are subjects that I am concerned with, obsessed with. These are my people.
I will end with a quote from “Strange Ghosts,” which epitomizes why I like this man and his writing:
“Artists are also canaries in the mineshaft of the world—they, we, are people who have never learned to express in socially acceptable ways our anxiety for the state of the world.
So here I am, thirty-seven years of age, and my teacher’s prediction has, thankfully, not come true. I have never learned, for better or for worse, to live with things simply as they are. I am still that hopelessly inarticulate, socially awkward boy, standing in front of my audience and crying out for everyone to listen, for everyone to open their eyes and try just for a minute to honestly and truly see.” “Elugelab: Canaries in the Mindshaft of the World.” (Strange Ghosts)
Please note that any inaccuracies, errors and spelling errors are my own. -- AE
The experience in the NGC was an inspiration for his compelling novel, “Still Life with June” (Cormorant Books, 2003). Although I read the book some time ago, I remember loving the character of June, the woman with Down’s Syndrome. What I have always liked about Darren’s work, aside from the fact that the stories are always engrossing, is that he writes about Salvation Army workers, drug addicts, criminals, people in the margins, but he doesn’t turn them into caricatures or standard bearers, he just has them try to deal with whatever’s going on. He makes them real and he makes their dilemmas plausible. I went on to read and enjoy all his novels and am currently rereading “Strange Ghosts” and if I can figure out where I’ve shelved “Still Life with June,” I’m going to reread that too. If I loaned it to you, please return it.
“Advocate” (Cormorant Books, 2016) is the story of Jacob McNeil who works as a counsellor in Toronto at a men’s outreach centre. He returns to his small town of Advocate, Nova Scotia to see his dying grandmother, with whom he has a complicated history. The story is also about the treatment his Uncle David received from his family and the town when he returned to Advocate in 1984. In the course of the novel, we learn that David has AIDS. Certainly he is the first person to have AIDS in that small town. Their reaction is to shun him and his family. Political and religious authority figures ban him and his family, including a twelve-year-old Jake, from taking part in any activities or entering any public buildings. . In Jake’s case, he is first told he can’t enter the school library and then he is not allowed to attend school. When his uncle dies, no undertaker in the town will bury him, nor will any religious institution give him a funeral. Compassion comes from outside the town and from the Indigenous community. It’s interesting that compassion in this book comes from those who are not part of the status quo. The people of Advocate, divided on Catholic and Protestant lines, but religious, are afraid of contagion and believe that the disease is God’s punishment for homosexuality.
When the young Jake first encounters his Uncle David, he is resentful of his presence, but as time goes on, he gets to know him and comes to love him. David is intelligent, has been a teacher and is well-read. He befriends, Henry, fellow bibliophile and the town’s only black person, who Jake also gets to know. Henry is one of the people to spend time with David. We see the terrible scourge of the disease through Jake’s eyes. The portrait of David is drawn with compassion and accuracy.
It is easy to treat human suffering as abstract. The talent of Darren Greer is that he doesn’t let us do that. He gives us a close up view of suffering and shows how intolerance causes heartbreak and sorrow, in addition to the horror of AIDS, particularly when it was first discovered and diagnosed.
The grandmother is the matriarch of the family after the death of her husband, the town’s doctor. She is used to getting respect and she expects to be treated with the same. When David comes back to live in the family home, his grandmother is not pleased. She never accepted the fact that he was gay. When the town begins to treat her and the rest of the family badly because of David, we see some cracks in her armour, but she never yields in her lifetime and by the time she is dying, it is too late.
On her deathbed, she asks something surprising of Jake. In order to do what she asks, Jake has to sift through his feelings for his grandmother and the way she treated his uncle and decide if he can acquiesce.
The grandmother is controlling and judgemental. The townspeople are superstitious and ignorant but they are also afraid and we see that fear when the water supply is tainted and the population sickens. They assume that the sick have come down with AIDS, given to them by David, the only person in the town with the disease.
I particularly enjoyed the character of Bernadette, or Deanny, who first appears as a young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who causes Jake to get dirty for the first time in his life, much to the horror of his grandmother. Deanny goes on to be an influence in Jake’s life, always pushing him to date a new man. She is also one of the few people to show compassion to David. I think Deanny could have a book of her own. I’d love to read it.
Jake, the main character, is well-rendered. We see his struggle as someone who likes order, who is put in a situation where there can be no order; his uncle is dying, his grandmother and the town are acting in ways he doesn’t understand. He likes to line up his fingers “perfectly on the paper, so large equations could be distilled magically down to one final and irrevocable number equal to a variable of x or y.” He starts to discover his own sexuality when his uncle is dying of AIDS. He is afraid of the ramifications of his attraction to males and not females. He is confused when his grandmother forbids him to play with the Easy Bake Oven he finds in the attic. He takes a biology class in order to learn about the virus so that he won’t be frightened of it.
He decides to abandon a potential career in mathematics in favour of working as a counselor, after seeing what his uncle has gone through. Perhaps it is that intimate knowledge of his uncle’s suffering that makes it difficult for him to treat clients clinically, taking their difficulties too much to heart, but he also has issues with personal intimacy, with forming relationships with other men. Jake struggles throughout the book and my heart goes out to him as it does to David.
I haven’t spoken of Jake’s mother or his Aunt Jeannette, but they also play important roles in the book, acting as foils to his grandmother’s strict and narrow-minded attitudes. They also take care of David with love and compassion.
I wouldn’t be an appreciator of poetry, if I didn’t mention the vivid imagery in this book. Early on, in Jake’s biology class, the virus is described as “shaped like a dodecahedron…coloured green, with small barnacles all over it. It looked like a child’s toy, or a badly made Christmas ornament.” The descriptions of the family homes are fascinating and deliberate: the depression era glass bowl, the statue of a black boy with a fishing pole on the lawn, the garden gnomes. There’s poetry and humour in the descriptions of the Orange and Lemon parades given by the Irish Protestants and Catholics. There’s symbolism in David’s St. Jude medallion.
The book shows how intolerance and fear can take hold and lead to inhumanity and lack of compassion. In this post-truth era, the book seems particularly relevant.
Darren Greer is one of several Canadian writers who I admire and read extensively in the fields of poetry, fiction and nonfiction/autobiography. He, along with Amber Dawn, bill bissett, Michael V. Smith, Heather O’Neill, Bill Brown, Marcus McCann, Daniel Allen Cox, Lynn Crosbie, Nelly Arcan, Tom Walmsley, Tamara Faith Berger, Billeh Nickerson, and Zoe Whittall, to name a few, write strongly, with humour and compassion, and deal with issues of estrangement and intolerance based on sex and sexuality, poverty, family dysfunction, gender and orientation, managing to make the issues real and personal. These are subjects that I am concerned with, obsessed with. These are my people.
I will end with a quote from “Strange Ghosts,” which epitomizes why I like this man and his writing:
“Artists are also canaries in the mineshaft of the world—they, we, are people who have never learned to express in socially acceptable ways our anxiety for the state of the world.
So here I am, thirty-seven years of age, and my teacher’s prediction has, thankfully, not come true. I have never learned, for better or for worse, to live with things simply as they are. I am still that hopelessly inarticulate, socially awkward boy, standing in front of my audience and crying out for everyone to listen, for everyone to open their eyes and try just for a minute to honestly and truly see.” “Elugelab: Canaries in the Mindshaft of the World.” (Strange Ghosts)
Please note that any inaccuracies, errors and spelling errors are my own. -- AE
March 17, 2017
Four stars is a bit generous, but this is a well written book using a simple prose style that is very readable (but not a beach book). The story about an early (1984) gay guy dying of Aids in a small town, well illustrates the hysteria surrounding Aids in those early days. The hero/narrator is a very interesting guy - returning to Advocate as an adult to be present for his grandmother's imminent death. He's also gay and has a lot of angst as an adult after witnessing his uncle's protracted death when he was 12, and the lack of humanity in the community about their dying "native son". Unfortunately, after making the narrator so interesting, the author doesn't resolve his hangups - that's a major weakness in the book. Still it was a good read!
January 9, 2020
An excellent reminder of the ignorance and prejudice in the 80s and how people who contracted AIDS were ostracized, feared and presecuted. Although set in a small town in Nova Scotia, it could have been a small town anywhere in the 80s. A compelling story!
Although not part of this novel, it reminded me of how Eric Smith was treated when the community discovered he had contracted HIV and lost his teaching job. (Link provided)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s...
Although not part of this novel, it reminded me of how Eric Smith was treated when the community discovered he had contracted HIV and lost his teaching job. (Link provided)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s...
March 30, 2021
Excellent writing pulling me in from the beginning as it unravels the life of a family dominated by a strong willed matriarch. The author skillfully builds the characters of the 12 year old and his current adult self through a skillful blending of history and the present.
I need to check out Greer's other works.
I need to check out Greer's other works.
October 27, 2016
Jacob lives in Toronto and is a counsellor, giving comfort and guidance to men living with AIDS. He was born and raised in Advocate, a small town in Nova Scotia. He has to head home when his mother informs him that his grandmother is dying. He isn't close to his grandmother because of things that had happened in the past but his mother makes him go.
In 1984, Jacob was about ten and living with his mother, aunt and grandmother in Advocate. His uncle, David, who had been living in Toronto, went home for a visit. It turns out that David was sick and had returned home to die. He had AIDS, a disease no one knew much about back then. When the town discovered David's illness and fearing that they would be contaminated, David and his family were ostracized. Until this point, Jacob's grandmother, the wife of a deceased doctor, had held a prominent position in the community. She was old-school and rather than side with her family, she too had the same views as the town, which caused extreme tension within the house. In addition, she refused to acknowledge the severity of David's illness.
This is the third book I've read by this author and I enjoyed it. I liked the writing style. It is written in first person perspective in Jacob's voice. It's definitely not an upbeat story and I think the author did a excellent job in capturing the terror, confusion and misunderstanding of the unknown disease back in the 1980s when it was becoming known.
I liked the characters. The events of 1984 scarred Jacob and still influence who he is today. His mother and aunt were more open and with it and did all they can to take care of their big brother. Their mother is a good representation of her generation in a small town. She was a God-fearing Catholic and respected in her community. She didn't understand why David couldn't have become a doctor or a lawyer and settled down with a wife and children ... it was against her beliefs that he would instead like other men.
I'm originally from Nova Scotia ... I lived in a small Catholic town in the 1980s about a half hour from "Advocate" so I could relate to the mentality and the people at that time. I've known people who were similar in temperament, outspokenness, keeping their emotions hidden inside and worrying about what others would think. Looking back, I know I would have been more open and non-judgmental as David's sisters were.
Blog review post: http://www.teenaintoronto.com/2016/10...
In 1984, Jacob was about ten and living with his mother, aunt and grandmother in Advocate. His uncle, David, who had been living in Toronto, went home for a visit. It turns out that David was sick and had returned home to die. He had AIDS, a disease no one knew much about back then. When the town discovered David's illness and fearing that they would be contaminated, David and his family were ostracized. Until this point, Jacob's grandmother, the wife of a deceased doctor, had held a prominent position in the community. She was old-school and rather than side with her family, she too had the same views as the town, which caused extreme tension within the house. In addition, she refused to acknowledge the severity of David's illness.
This is the third book I've read by this author and I enjoyed it. I liked the writing style. It is written in first person perspective in Jacob's voice. It's definitely not an upbeat story and I think the author did a excellent job in capturing the terror, confusion and misunderstanding of the unknown disease back in the 1980s when it was becoming known.
I liked the characters. The events of 1984 scarred Jacob and still influence who he is today. His mother and aunt were more open and with it and did all they can to take care of their big brother. Their mother is a good representation of her generation in a small town. She was a God-fearing Catholic and respected in her community. She didn't understand why David couldn't have become a doctor or a lawyer and settled down with a wife and children ... it was against her beliefs that he would instead like other men.
I'm originally from Nova Scotia ... I lived in a small Catholic town in the 1980s about a half hour from "Advocate" so I could relate to the mentality and the people at that time. I've known people who were similar in temperament, outspokenness, keeping their emotions hidden inside and worrying about what others would think. Looking back, I know I would have been more open and non-judgmental as David's sisters were.
Blog review post: http://www.teenaintoronto.com/2016/10...
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