Broken Pencil commends Chase and Haven

Chase and Haven is Oxford Mills resident Michael Blouin's first novel, published last fall – exactly a year after the publication of his poetry collection I'm not going to lie to you (Pedlar Press 2007). One can sense the seasoned poet lurking behind the lines of this careful, measured work of fiction. Blouin's writing is a case-study of balance; while the majority of the novel unfolds via short, direct sentences – creating quiet, meditative intensity – the rhythm is continually cranked into high-gear with poetic torrents of vivid stream-of-consciousness. In the balance struck between the wild and the restrained, one can sense Blouin's confidence and maturity as a stylist. Chase and Haven tells the story of the abused childhood and shattered lives of its titular characters. It is a book resounding with echo and repetition (think of Gertrude Stein's use of 'insistence'), building a resonance that dismantles linearity in favour of a dawn, day, and night superstructure: events jigsawed together according to the time of day in which they occurred, regardless of chronology.

Just as memory shifts from hurt to joy, scars to tiny moments of grace, so too does Blouin's narrative eye, mingling his main characters' vicious childhoods with their haunted, crippled maturity. While the work succeeds marvelously at evoking atmosphere and pity, its ending rings somewhat flat, as if the book's emotional intensity is left dangling or deferred. This is a small point, as it's otherwise very good. Expect no happy endings, but no nihilistic doom, either; the lesson is somewhere in the murky in-between. Chase and Haven is, above all, the love story between a brother and sister: two halves of a fractured whole, who learn (along with the reader) that despite the pain and the scars, sometimes the most profound act of heroism is to endure: if not for ourselves, then for each other.