Alison Watt

Reviewed from advance reading copy.

Alison Watt's moving and elegantly written novel, Dazzle Patterns, is set at the time of the Halifax Explosion, which took place on the morning of December 6, 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another ship in Halifax Harbour, killing and injuring thousands and completely obliterating the city’s northern district. Clare Holmes, a young woman working in the glassworks, is injured—as were countless others—by a window shattered by the blast. A co-worker and master glassmaker, Fred Baker (a German immigrant who anglicized his name), is commandeered to help the injured and takes Clare to the hospital. Clare, alone in the city, longs for her fiancé, Leo, who is fighting in France. Clare and Leo grew up together in rural Grafton, in the heart of Nova Scotia farm country, which is where her family still lives. Clare returns home to recover, but quickly tires of her mother’s smothering attention and anxious solicitude and, seeking independence, returns to the devastated city at the first opportunity. In the meantime, Watt takes us to France, where Leo is dealing with trauma of his own, narrowly surviving the darkest days of a brutal war, toiling in pervasive damp and filth. When he is captured by the Germans, and then escapes and finds refuge on a farm outside the occupied zone, his life changes forever. Back in Halifax, another thread of the story follows Fred Baker, whom some suspect unreasonably of harbouring German sympathies, as his life becomes closely intertwined with Clare’s. With the glassworks closed, Clare and Fred sign up for art classes, and over several months of frequent interaction a relationship that was always mutually supportive deepens, and a tentative and trusting intimacy springs up between them. Alison Watt, an artist, is a careful and observant writer who brings her interest in the visual experience to her debut novel. The writing is filled with memorable phrases and stirring moments of great beauty, particularly regarding the interplay of light and dark and the affect of the natural world on her characters’ moods and emotions. Her three main characters—Fred, Clare and Leo—are full-blooded, multi-dimensional individuals whose fates and struggles matter. The writing is understated. Watt the author has a light touch, evoking the historical setting with the subtle and effective deployment of period detail. Despite the tragic detonation that sets the story into motion, Dazzle Patterns does not attempt to blow the reader away. Instead it quietly seduces, drawing you into its world until you realize that there is nowhere else you would rather be.… (altro)