Review — Safe Haven: The Possibility of Sanctuary in an Unsafe World

Safe Haven: The Possibility of
Sanctuary in an Unsafe World
by Larry Gaudet
Random House Canada (2007), 288 pp.

In 2004, novelist Larry Gaudet moved with his wife and two sons from Toronto to a house he had built in Foggy Cove, a village by the sea in Nova Scotia. “So this is where we’d arrived: a personal sanctuary, as I had ideally imagined it, constructed as an escape hatch from urban stress and corporate disaffection,” Gaudet writes in Safe Haven, an idiosyncratic work that combines personal memoir, history, and philosophical rumination. Words like “safe haven” and “sanctuary” hold political resonances for us — the failed safe havens of Bosnia, for instance — but for Gaudet the concept does not refer just to peace and safety. “Entering the sanctuary,” Gaudet writes, “you must be prepared for the confusion and panic that come with confronting who you are, or might be.”

Much of Safe Haven is occupied by a self-deprecating account of domestic life in Foggy Cove: the pelting rain and fog, the trips to the train museum with the boys, Gaudet’s wife’s vague disgruntlement at living in isolation. Safe Haven really hits its stride in its second part, where Gaudet recounts his honeymoon in Greece and meets Tony (Antoine Baptiste Savoie), a fellow Acadian from Louisiana. “What does a godless man do for protection? ” Savoie asks in one of the imaginary journal entries that provide some of Safe Haven’s finest writing.

In “The Journals of Antoine Baptiste Savoie” we get an elaborate tour through temple architecture from the bronze age to the archaic Greeks to Chartres Cathedral, and it is perhaps this reach in time that inspires Gaudet to explore his own Acadian history. “In many sanctuaries of my acquaintance, I’ve often walked the labyrinth,” Savoie writes, “veering toward the heart of the sacred story, then veering away, only to return again through a different avenue to the moment of revelation.” In the end, for Gaudet, sanctuary is less about physical protection than about self-knowledge and inner freedom, and it is a process, an ongoing revelation, that takes place equally in sublime ancient temples and chaotic Nova Scotia households.