I heard good things about Dave Margoshes’s novel A Simple Carpenter when it came out last year, and although I meant to get a copy, for whatever reason I didn’t. Then I traded John Kennedy, one of the principals at Radiant Press, the Regina publisher that put out A Simple Carpenter, a pair of rain pants for a selection of books, and lucky me! A Simple Carpenter was part of the group.
This novel is a page-turner! I found it hard to put down, and I read it quickly. The picaresque (sort of) plot carries us along as the main character tries on different professions and identities; there are lots of surprises and odd foreshadowings of things that may or may not happen. The book is courageous, too: I’m not sure I’d dare, in the current geopolitical climate, to send a book in which a Palestinian or perhaps Jewish protagonist, perhaps born in Gaza and perhaps not, who has lost his memory and might or might not be the second coming of Jesus Christ, wanders around in Lebanon and Israel. The book’s magic realist aesthetic is imaginative and charmingly strange. For instance, the main character–because his name shifts as he moves from place to place, I’m not going to bother telling you what he’s called–is able to speak and understand every language, from Aramaic and ancient Greek to English and French, even though he has amnesia. I was particularly struck by the characters he meets during his week-long walk from Acre to the Sea of Galilee: a village where the young men become elderly in early adolescence, another inhabited by giant women, a third where every family supports its own synagogue or mosque. There’s so much more invention in A Simple Carpenter than I’ve given as examples here; it’s a lot of fun.
I must say I didn’t quite understand the somewhat abrupt ending. The writer Sharon Butala, who provides a blurb on the novel’s back cover, refers to that ending as “startling,” which is accurate. I wanted to know more about what the character discovers, but that desire is destined to remain unfulfilled. Because I was confused, I checked online to see what reviewers had to say–something I don’t usually do when I write these little posts. Steven Mayoff, in his review, suggests that the protagonist’s journey, and the revelations the ending of that journey provide us, “raise serious questions about the role each of us plays in the story of our lives and the interchangeable perspectives between who are the villains and who are the heroes.” Mayoff’s argument about the book, which I think might be correct, is that A Simple Carpenter asks us to consider whether its protagonist is in fact at the centre of his own story, or whether he’s a bit player in the larger dramas that surround him. In that case, the ending’s openness might demand that we continue asking ourselves that question–about the protagonist and, perhaps, about ourselves as well. If so, this playful novel is also a deeply philosophical one.