Principles To Live By by David Adams Richards
When David Adams Richards most recent novel was released – Darkness – the 3rd in a series, I realized I’d not read the two that come before. The Delano series is comprised of Principles To Live By, Mary Cyr, and Darkness. Time to get with it!
Principles To Live By, like so many of David Adams Richards books is both very dark and, for lack of a better word, redemptive. It is peopled with characters who are kind, and characters who are cruel. Those who have compassion and those who are truly evil. It is also peopled with characters who are real – though they may or may not have played the role in life that they do in fiction. There are those who have “principles to live by” “as fruitless as it all seemed”.
What is very real is the conflict in Rwanda and the brutality of that time and place – and the Canadians caught up in it. The war in Rwanda is something I have avoided reading about – and perhaps why I did not read this novel when it was published in 2016. And, it was the scenes that take place in Rwanda that are the most difficult and savage in this novel. What happened there, especially to one idealistic Canadian family, and to RCMP officer John Delano, is fundamental to the novel.
Richards has left the Miramichi in this novel, it is set in Saint John, New Brunswick. That Saint John and St. John’s can so easily be confused in the minds of people with no knowledge of Canada, is a player in the tragedy of one young boy’s life. So often in this novel it is the happenstance, the chance encounter, the chance mistake, that results in tragedy, too often involving a vulnerable child.
David Adams Richards is an extraordinary – and brave – writer. The pleasure of reading tempers the difficult events that are revealed. The action takes place in New Brunswick, in Rwanda, in New York City, and in Toronto as John Delano perseveres in his attempt to find not only a missing child who may, or may not have, accidentally arrived in Saint John instead of St. John’s.
He is also haunted by the loss of another child – whose disappearance he feels he is responsible.
Principles To Live By is not an easy book to read, but it is one I could not set aside. The writing is superior and the story one that offered so much more than most novels. I can’t wait to read the next in the Delano trilogy.