Doing, then undoing
The Atoner of Alberni
by Edward Cepka
Vancouver: Granville Island Publishing, 2025
$23.95 / 9781989467770
Reviewed by Logan Macnair
*
Ancient old-growth forests, rugged mountain ranges, unmolested beaches, and abundant wildlife characterize Vancouver Island and help make it a beautiful place. That’s no secret to locals. In some ways The Atoner of Alberni, the debut novel from Port Alberni-born writer Edward Cepka, serves as something of a love letter to the places where he grew up.
Narratively, the story alternates between two primary characters and time periods. The first is Henry Cox, an English remittance man who settles on Vancouver Island during the early twentieth century. As with other ambitious settlers who immigrated to North America then, Henry is quick to identify the economic potential of the land before him and its vast natural resources (the forests in particular).
Through a combination of European industrialization, capitalist opportunism, a general disregard for the natural world and indigenous people, and his own enterprising spirit, Henry eventually becomes a wealthy and influential man in the community of Alberni, making his fortune in logging and then establishing the town’s pulp mill.
Henry’s trajectory is a familiar one of an ambitious (though generally good-hearted) man who becomes increasingly corrupted by his own successes. Starting as a sympathetic figure trying to make his way through a new and difficult world, Henry’s actions soon cross into the outright villainous as greed and opportunities seduce him. These include, among other nefarious plots, stealing a boat (from a man of the cloth no less), and introducing alcohol to an indigenous community with the explicit purpose of creating enough social disorganization to eventually displace them from the land he covets as the ideal site for his pulp mill.
Henry’s transformation is succinctly summed up several decades later by his grandson Larry, the second of the novel’s primary characters, who remarks how that, “sweet, mild-mannered man changed into a grade-A bastard.”
That said, Larry has his own issues to worry about. Introduced in the book’s first chapter, he tells his story under constant surveillance while in a padded cell—himself seemingly convicted of a crime extreme enough to warrant such precautions. Larry alternates between telling his grandfather’s story and recounting the events from his own life that led to his incarceration; the latter he does with a heightened manner of speaking and sense of self-importance.
There are immediate questions about how reliable of a narrator Larry is here. He claims to vividly remember not only his own birth but even the moments in the womb leading up to it. He attests that he has certain powers of the mind that allow him to mentally manipulate objects and the natural world around him and he shares several examples of this throughout his childhood and adolescence. He sees his psychiatric handler as a sort of rival, albeit a mentally inferior one who he deliberately misleads and strings along as if they were playing a game of mental chess.
Larry’s actions caused me to question whether Larry’s words and stories were made up of truths or delusions. The uncertainty serves as a compelling invitation to read on.
Compared with Henry’s more historically grounded story, it is through the events in Larry’s life that we are introduced to elements of the novel that are more in line with the literary style of magical realism. Among these more fantastical elements are characters’ mental manipulation of the physical world, levitation (of both people and objects), and an especially unique encounter with a talking salmon who, through rhyming verse, recalls and laments how the runoff from the pulp mill has polluted the river water and made it almost inhospitable.
Still, not all of Larry’s experiences are of the magical or borderline-psychosis variety, there are some grounded moments he recalls that serve to humanize him as a character and portray him in a gradually more sympathetic way. He recalls, for instance, how as a teenager his latent homosexuality made navigating the very heteronormative small town high school environment difficult for him, and the various ways in which he attempted to overcorrect for this (often with permanent consequences). After working just long enough in his grandfather’s pulp mill to realize he hates it, Larry also expresses a growing affinity for nature and meditation. He sees the pulp mill and what it represents as antithetical to both of these things.
Suffice it to say that it is this dipping of his toes into the world of meditation, and eventually Buddhism, that serves as the inciting incident that eventually culminates in the novel’s climax (and the events that land Larry in his padded cell).
While the summary and synopsis of this novel may make it sound particularly serious, it should be pointed out how the story manages to incorporate a pervasive dark humour. Despite often turning to inherently weighty and important issues, the novel (and Cepka’s prose) is never itself too self-serious. Cepka always leaves just enough room for a clever wink or moment of comedic irony. I’m reminded of one moment where, after a massive event that levels an entire compound, the safety billboard proclaims that “one hundred and three accident-free days” is the only structure left standing.
There are, in my view, two ways to approach this novel. The first is literally, in which case this is a relatively straightforward story about a multi-generational forestry family on Vancouver Island where the moments of magical realism are meant to be accepted as they are, a sort of less ambitious and narrower-in-scope cross between Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The second, and I think vastly more interesting way to read this, is as a collection of extended metaphors, where levitation and talking fish and psychic powers are simply tools used to explore substantial themes and topics including environmentalism, colonization and indigenous reconciliation, generational trauma, capitalistic greed, and Buddhism. Viewed this way, the climactic event toward the end of the novel that has rendered Larry incarcerated in his padded cell carries an incendiary catharsis. Taken strictly as described on the page, the impact isn’t as meaningful.
Cepka, a retired architect, has no doubt found many influences for this, his debut novel, from his own memories and experiences growing up in and around the Alberni Valley. That’s not to presume that the novel is necessarily autobiographical, only to suggest that he clearly holds a great fondness for the people and places of Vancouver Island, a fondness that is capably demonstrated through this curious and entertaining story of Tibetan Buddhism, talking fish, and the weight of familial legacy.
*
Logan Macnair is a novelist and college instructor based in Burnaby. His academic research is primarily focused on the online narrative, recruitment, and propaganda campaigns of various political extremist movements. His second novel Troll (Now Or Never Publishing, 2023) is a fictionalized account based on his many years of studying online extremist groups. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon reviewed Logan’s Troll in BRC. Logan has reviewed Ann Rosenberg, Matthieu Caron, Taryn Hubbard, Tamas Dobozy, Andrew Battershill, Kate Black, Kawika Guillermo, and James Hoggan with Grania Litwin for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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.
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