The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan (Henry Holt Publisher $15.50)
Reviewed by Mary Wolfe

The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan is beautifully written; a tender, heart-wrenching 207 pages. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, its images develop somewhat like the photography of that age: “There were things that I had thought were shadows, or maybe flaws in the plate or bath … but he told me that a picture taken that long ago, before modern processes, would have needed a very long exposure … anyone who was moving, anyone walking or bending … driving a wagon down the center of the road, would not be captured, would leave only a faint shadow, a ghostly trace of themselves … he said that there were probably others, other people who had been moving more quickly and left no mark at all.”

Told from varying perspectives, The Boys in the Trees, moves from 1871 England to Montreal to Toronto, eventually ending in a small southwestern Ontario town, with the aging memories of one whose life was forever changed by being one of the boys in the trees that fateful day.

To what extent does a grown man’s childhood nightmares affect his judgment as a husband, a parent? How much can desires and expectations drive a man to commit devious acts? “Think what you remember, Jenny said. What do you really remember, of when you were five, or eight, or ten. Would it be what your parents thought you would remember? What they wanted you to? And in the paper-strewn kitchen in the middle of the night they talked about how strange it was, that the person you were was perhaps formed most by all that you had forgotten.”

It’s no good telling you what this book is about. You must let it develop in its own way – chillingly, agonizingly, little by little. You are in the hands of a supremely gifted writer, who is acutely adept at observing human behaviour.

In Alice Munro’s words, “This is a mesmerizing novel – it can truly claim to be filled with a ‘terrible beauty.’”