Similar, but very different

Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976.  But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which won him the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and Lay of The Land, completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy.

Canada, his seventh novel, begins in Montana in 1960. It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva, are sent to jail for robbing a bank, leaving him and his twin- sister, Berner, to fend for themselves. Dell eventually travels to the town of Fort Royal, in Canada, where he gets a job as a cleaner in a hotel. He spends his days talking with the owner, Arthur Remlinger — who we subsequently learn has a mysterious past — and his peculiar friend, Charlie Quarters, an odd man with a keen interest in fascism.