[.ca] Opium Dreams (ISBN 0771033281)

Amazon.ca:
Her family warned Maggie Glass never to tell the truth about them, but she does so anyway in narrating Opium Dreams, the lyrical debut novel by award-winning short story writer Margaret Gibson. Filled with imagery and insight, the novel movingly recounts an eccentric daughter's attempt to understand her estranged father. Maggie, a young writer plagued with psychological scars and prone to epileptic seizures, returns with her son to Toronto to help care for her father, Timothy, who is quickly slipping into the netherworlds of Alzheimer's disease. She tries to reconcile with her father, who had abandoned her when her life hit a crisis, by reconstructing the story of his life and her own as if they were a jigsaw puzzle of photographs and memories. Meanwhile, her father, separated from his daughter by an Alzheimer's coma, falls deeper into the tender and violent flashes of his memory, dreaming of his opium-smoking, fly-boy days in World War II. Gibson masterfully evokes Timothy's complicated, dreamlike state of non-existence using simple prose. "Timothy Glass is traveling underwater. Black grottos. Glassy caverns. The water is murky and a deep, deep green. It is like looking through green smoke. Here and there he sees openings--flashes of his own life. Someone's life. Like snapshots. Rippling celluloid. Like a sleeping eye opening. A shutter lifted. Then closed again." By recalling the litany of hurts, events, and regrets that make a lifetime of experiences, Gibson carefully demonstrates one man's complexity and one daughter's unfaltering love for a parent. --Leah Eichler