From: David Macfarlane <macf@interlog.com>

To: Stuart Brannan <stuart@brannan.com>

Date: 25 April 2000 10:42 AM

Subject: Re: Questions about Summer Gone

Thanks for your letter. Actually, it's great to have people raise these things. It makes it seem like the book has a life of its own -- which is very exciting.

The novel -- or at least the narrator's telling of the novel -- is actually set in the future. Not the distant future, but Bay's death takes place at the end of the 90's, not the 80's -- which means your sense of his age is quite correct. If you add up the clues, which you have done, you find the narration taking place at some vague point a decade and a half (or so) into the 21st century. I wanted to do this because so much of SG has to do with prophecy, and glimpsing the future, and so it felt necessary to me to set the book in a slightly more advanced environmental crisis -- hence the heat, the smoke over the city, etc.

I started writing SG with the story of Abraham and Isaac very much in mind. In fact, the book has this story as its foundation, sort of. Abraham and Isaac go off into the wilderness, toward Moriah, for three days. Bay and Caz (Abe, Zac) go for three days toward Moriah Island. (The narrator, following the biblical story, is Bay's (Abraham's) son by Kathleen (Hagar, the handmaiden) -- making the narrator Caz's (Isaac's) half brother (the narrator is unnamed in the novel but is Ishmael, in the bible.) For me, the book is about faith and faithlessness and loss of faith, and so I very much had in mind the emptiness that Abraham must have felt as he walked for three days with his son knowing that he was going to sacrifice him. In order to conjure this sense of emptiness I chose to leave the drowing episode hanging from the book's beginning to its end.

This is a rather potted explanation. I thought I'd pass it on though not to impress you with all the biblical allusions, but to let you know what was going on in my mind while going through the rather mysterious process of writing a work of fiction.

Thanks so much for asking, though.

With best wishes,

David Macfarlane

>I just finished reading your novel, Summer Gone, and found it an exquisitely

>crafted and challenging read. Congratulations.

>

>Maybe it was the disjointed way that I read the book, but I had a great deal

>of trouble figuring out the timeline. I also think your choice of telling

>the story in a non-linear fashion contributed to my confusion. The way I

>see it is this:

>

>The narrator meets with Caz at the start of the novel. I see the narrator

>being at least 18 because the voice is too mature to be any younger. Right?

>

>Now since Bay and Caz went on their canoe trip 6 years after the summer at

>Larkin's cottage, that means that that Bay died 12 years before the novel

>begins, in the late 1980's (Larkins cottage 18 years before the novel

>begins, canoe trip 6 years later). Since Bay was 12 years old in 1964, the

>summer he went to camp, that means that he would have been in his late 30's

>at the time of his death.

>

>Is that right? I pictured him as being older than that, at least 10, maybe

>15 years older.

>

>Maybe I missed something; no, I must have missed something. What was it?

>

>One more thought. I don't know why you held back the complete description

>of Bay and Caz dumping the canoe until the end. I found it to be an

>excruciating episode, perhaps because I (41) hope to take my son (9)

>canoeing in the near future. I think that the Bay's terror at that moment

>would have become more poignant if the reader knew the details of the

>accident, and was then led through the rest of the story to understand just

>how much Bay hoped to accomplish on this trip, and how, for a moment he

>imagined that he had destroyed everything. Anyway, you reveal enough about

>the accident early on, that holding back on the details until the very end

>seemed unnecessary.

>

>I don't know whether you care to hear this sort of reaction to your book,

>but since you put your email address in the Globe every week, I suppose you

>are kinda' askin' fer it.

>

>It is a very good book.

>

>Stuart Brannan

>http://stuart.brannan.com

>

>