Review: The Retreat

“You like fishing, Raymond?” asks Constable Hart, a character of spectacular malice, of the 18-year-old Ojibway boy sitting in the back of his cruiser. “Sure you do. I can see that. You like fishing for white girls.” Then he ushers Raymond Seymour onto a boat, takes him to a secluded island, tells him he never should have touched his niece, and leaves the kid for dead. You like suspense? Sure you do. And in the first thirty pages of his new novel, David Bergen puts on a clinic.

The narrative skips to the following summer, and the rest unfolds during the 1974 Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario. Norma Byrd — indifferent mother, grade A narcissist — has brought her large family to the Retreat, a haphazard commune she believes holds the key to salvation. There, elder son Everett begins a tentative friendship with Nelson Seymour, who has returned to his brother after the government sent him to live with a white family ten years earlier. Daughter Lizzy pursues a damaged Raymond in the hope that her love might provide him with a little salvation of his own. Of course, Constable Hart hovers in the background, poised to disrupt their budding romance.

He needn’t have bothered. The Retreat isn’t simply a title or the name of a hippie collective — it’s the book’s governing principle. Bergen’s characters try to slip on new identities but are constantly pulled back by the world they inhabit, forced to retreat to their inescapable selves. That’s why a young Nelson, enamoured of his new family and keen to adopt their ways, would still wake “from a dream in which someone was calling him by the wrong name, and he would sit up and say, ‘My name is Nelson Seymour.’”

Although Bergen never quite duplicates the tremendous intensity of his opening section, the novel speeds along in his characteristically exquisite prose. There isn’t an adverb out of place; in fact, there’s hardly an adverb to be found at all. The remarkable feat here is that language this spare can say so much.