TRANSGRESSION

by James W. Nichol (McArthur & Company, 343 pages, $24.95 softcover)

Irrespective of discipline, all good artists learn from the masters. This is certainly true of Stratford writer James W. Nichol.

The first work of Nichol's I saw was his stage adaptation of Margaret Laurence's masterwork novel The Stone Angel. The play followed her narrative structure of flowing between past and present to tell the story of Hagar Shipley's long life.

Nichol employed a similar, though more complex, structure in his 2002 debut mystery novel Midnight Cab, which won an Arthur Ellis Award for Canadian crime fiction, in the Best First Novel category.

Transgression adopts a similar structure. Alternating between past and present, Nichol tells two seemingly parallel stories, initially separated by five years, that eventually converge in the same time frame.

The foreground story opens in 1941 and takes place in France during Nazi Occupation in Second World War. It's a love story that crosses enemy lines when a young French girl, Adele Georges, falls for a German soldier.

Although the soldier, Manfred, is a caring, gentle clerk, Adele is tortured as a "horizontal collaborator" when her forbidden, clandestine affair is discovered by her family and by her co-workers at a textile factory.

When it appears Manfred is killed, Adele subsequently meets a Canadian soldier, Alex Wells, who brings her home as a war bride to Paris, Ont. The irony is lost on no one.

The background story, which opens in 1946, is a murder mystery revolving around Jack Cullen, police chief in Alex's hometown.

Cullen is investigating after an unidentified man is found dead and partially buried in the vicinity of a "DP" camp (referring to displaced persons, which European immigrants were commonly called after the war).

A difficult, taciturn man who has lost his estranged son in the war, Cullen feels compelled to solve the crime before the Ontario Provincial Police can solve it.

The stories converge when Adele and Alex become prime suspects in the murder investigation. Both are engaging in their own right.

Adele's story under the shadow of the Vichy government reflects a recurring theme in recent fiction as writers wrestle with the consequences of foreign invasion on the lives of ordinary citizens. One can only speculate that the invasion of Iraq and military intervention in Afghanistan have something to do with the theme's topical popularization.

Cullen's story is a conventional small-town, murder mystery and it is intriguing enough to hold our interest.

However, there are two minor problems with the novel.

First, telling two stories alternately does tax the reader in that narrative momentum is sacrificed, at least initially, by continually switching from one to another. Second, Nichol relies too heavily on coincidence when he eventually weaves the two stories together.

Nonetheless, Transgression is difficult to put down once a reader gets immersed in the bifocal stories and it's ultimately satisfying and rewarding in its totality.

Robert Reid is a Record staff writer.

JAMES W. NICHOL

Transgression author James W. Nichol (above) had his first novel, Midnight Cab, published in 2002 by Knopf Canada. Based on dramas he wrote for CBC Radio's The Mystery Project program (Nichol also wrote the Peggy Delaney radio series about a hard-drinking Toronto newspaper columnist), Midnight Cab initially won some praise and sold a few thousand copies. Then, in 2004, it was published in Germany and became a hit there -- selling 400,000-plus copies. McArthur & Company released a new paperback edition last year.