The ‘strange forms’ of grief

Rufous and Calliope 
by Sarah Louise Butler

Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2025
$24.95 / 9781771624572

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

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Sarah Louise Butler’s Rufous and Calliope excavates the unstable ground between remembrance and forgetting, charting the precarious territory where family bonds intersect with cognitive decline. Set in BC’s Southern Interior, Butler’s novel follows Rufous Flanagan, a middle-aged cartographer whose professional expertise in mapping terrain becomes a cruel irony as he struggles to navigate the increasingly unreliable landscape of his own consciousness.

The novel’s dual timeline structure reflects the fractured nature of Rufous’s mind, alternating between his solitary wilderness trek toward a long-awaited family reunion and his vivid recollections of childhood spent evading authorities with his siblings—twin sister Calliope, Sliv, Fletch, and Fawn. West Kootenay author Butler (The Wild Heavens) employs this temporal fragmentation as an embodiment of how the past infiltrates and reshapes present experience, particularly when memory itself becomes suspect.

When a dangerous fever forces Rufous’s siblings to seek help, they leave him with Aoife and Sennagh, a couple whose relationship exists outside the social conventions of their era—unable to marry but committed to building a life together. These women become Rufous’s caregivers and eventually his chosen family, providing him with the stability that had been absent from his early years.

Rufous’s relationship with his siblings operates as both anchor and wound—these are the children who taught him survival, who shared the burden of their mother’s abandonment and their grandmother’s death, yet who were ultimately forced to leave him behind. These children functioned as each other’s parents, protectors, and conspirators, developing an intense interdependence that makes their eventual separation all the more catastrophic. The letters from Rufous’s siblings that arrive without return addresses become symbols of their enduring connection and insurmountable distance, representing the love that persists despite the impossibility of reunion in that moment.

One of the highlights of Rufous and Calliope stems from Butler’s ability to extract profound meaning from mundane moments, such as in Rufous’s recollections of life with Aiofe, Sennagh, and their temperamental cat Ginger: 

Sometimes Ginger let me pet her and sometimes she scratched me just for stepping over her. Sometimes there were wildflowers or willow branches in a milk jar on the kitchen table and sometimes there weren’t. There was a tin in the cupboard that sometimes had cookies, and an identical tin in the living room that, however often I checked, only ever had a disappointing array of sewing supplies.

This passage captures the unpredictable cadences of a home where small gestures of care exist alongside minor disappointments, creating a portrait of domestic life marked by its very ordinariness—a stark contrast to the survival-focused existence that defined Rufous’s years on the run.

The novel’s central conflict emerges from Rufous’s deteriorating cognitive abilities, which Butler renders with startling physicality. Rufous’s mental decline is clearly articulated: 

The over-the-counter meds aren’t working. My brain is wet cement, oozing heavily down onto my forehead, spreading over my eyes. It encases my eyeballs, slowly crushing them as it hardens and shrinks. Everything—the sky, the trees, the trail—pulses in time with the pounding in my head.

This metaphor of concrete encasing consciousness brilliantly captures the gradual imprisonment that memory loss represents, transforming an internal experience into something tangible and terrifying.

Butler’s exploration of pain—both physical and emotional—demonstrates remarkable sophistication. Through Rufous’s grandmother’s understanding of the migraines—“They aren’t like regular headaches. They are grief trapped in your brain, twisting into strange shapes as it tries to break free”—the author establishes pain as transformed sorrow seeking release. This concept finds reinforcement in the reminder that “when grief tries to escape, it takes on strange forms,” suggesting that the suffering represents loss attempting to manifest itself through available channels.

Environmental consciousness saturates Butler’s narrative, particularly in her portrayal of BC’s threatened wilderness. One example of such environmental commentary appears in an exchange between Rufous and his tree-planting supervisor, who responds to his questions about their work’s futility with brutal pragmatism: “Plant ‘em straight, two metres apart and exactly to the root collar…. After that, just walk away. Don’t even look back at the doomed little fuckers.” This moment crystallizes the novel’s broader examination of persistence despite inevitable loss, whether ecological, familial, or neurological.

The narrative grows increasingly complex as the story unfolds, with Rufous’s unreliable perspective creating interpretive layers that reward attentive readers. The author seeds subtle details throughout that encourage questioning the nature of memory and the narratives we construct about our histories. Butler’s psychological acuity regarding trauma’s impact on perception becomes particularly in Rufous’s childhood insight: “It occurred to me, then, that a child’s fear of the dark place beneath the bed might be a universal, primal sort of fear, maybe a once-removed premonition of the grave.” That moment of youthful philosophical awareness reveals how early experiences of terror and abandonment can fundamentally shape our comprehension of mortality and security.

The novel’s structure mirrors its thematic preoccupations, with past and present bleeding together much as memories intrude upon Rufous’s contemporary awareness. Butler’s mastery of temporal transitions never allows readers to feel disoriented, even as Rufous himself becomes increasingly confused. The approaching family reunion functions as both goal and deadline, generating narrative momentum while raising questions about whether reconciliation with the past remains possible when memory proves itself unreliable.

Butler’s portrayal of the treehouse as both destination and memory reveals the complex relationship between physical space and emotional truth. Throughout Rufous’s arduous journey to reunite with his siblings, the treehouse exists simultaneously as a concrete location he must reach and as a symbol of childhood unity that may no longer correspond to present reality.

The physical structure itself—elevated, temporary, built from salvaged materials—mirrors the precarious nature of the family bonds it housed. Butler uses this architectural metaphor to examine how the places that shape us in childhood can become both magnets and mirages, drawing us back not to what actually was, but to what we need those experiences to mean. The treehouse represents the last moment when the siblings functioned as a complete unit, making Rufous’s pilgrimage toward it both an act of faith and a confrontation with the possibility that some losses cannot be reversed through sheer determination.

Butler presents a more complex truth than typical family reunion stories: that survival sometimes requires accepting fundamental uncertainty about our own stories. Rufous’s journey toward reunion occurs against the backdrop of his increasing inability to trust his own recollections, creating a tension between hope and doubt that drives the narrative to its conclusion. The novel suggests that courage may not lie in remembering correctly, but in continuing to seek connection despite the knowledge that our understanding of ourselves and others remains perpetually incomplete, much like Rufous’s maps that can chart terrain but cannot predict the weather that will transform it.

Selena Mercuri is Reviews Editor at The New Quarterly, a publicist at River Street, and a social media associate at The Rights Factory. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and The Ampersand Review, among others. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Find her on Instagram: @selenamercuriwriter. [Editor’s note: the above review is Selena’s first for BCR. Welcome ahoy, Selena!]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster