Northern Exposure

THE CUSTODIAN OF PARADISE

A Novel

By Wayne Johnston

Norton. 510 pp. $25.95

Meet Fielding. The heroine of Wayne Johnston's sensitive, beautifully written new novel is far too self-aware for her own good and, for that matter, far too tall for it. The proud, limping Fielding is desperately alcoholic, insistently self-sufficient and armed with a scabrous, lacerating wit that is as likely to sink her as to save her.

When we first see her, she is looking for a lonely spot in Newfoundland, which is rather like searching for a sandy spot in Yemen. But Fielding isn't craving just the stark, bracing austerity of the Canadian landscape familiar to fans of Annie Proulx; she's searching for the utter solitude she finds off the Newfoundland coast in the desolate island of Loreburn, a place listed in the census ledger as having a population of zero, an island so bereft of human interference that she'll be able to embark upon the painful task of scouring her past.

Many readers will already have a sense of that past; Sheilagh Fielding was the captivatingly unlikely love interest in Johnston's luminous, sprawling 1998 masterpiece about Newfoundland, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. There she grew from a wisecracking schoolgirl into a tough, damaged but shrewd newspaper columnist. Throughout the novel, her touching journal entries and witty "Condensed History of Newfoundland" provided a brisk counterpoint to the story of the rise of her beloved, Joe Smallwood, who became the province of Newfoundland's first premier after he led the former colony into confederation with Canada in 1948-49.

Smallwood (fictionalized by Johnston, but a very real historical figure) drifts in and out of the new novel, as do some other characters from the previous book, but Johnston's focus here is squarely on Fielding. We meet her father, a respectable doctor obsessed with his reputation and tortured by the suspicion that the towering Fielding (a "galoot of a girl," he calls her) was the product of his estranged wife's infidelity; we revisit the affection-starved Fielding's school days and see her being used, impregnated and spurned by a talented brute of a boy; and we spend time in New York, where Fielding's relentless mother has designs on her suffering daughter's unborn progeny.

Hovering over all this is the enigmatic figure known only as "Your Provider," who helps stoke Fielding's addiction to callabogus -- Newfoundland's ferociously strong, Prohibition-era "mixture of spruce beer, rum and molasses" -- even as his letters help unravel her agonizing family history.

Johnston gives Fielding some fine lines here. When confronted by her father about her growing drinking problem, she replies, "Acquiring a taste for it was easy. The hard part was acquiring the Scotch." But this is a far more somber novel than The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and a less satisfying one, too. The earlier book had the sweep, ambition and narrative drive of Robertson Davies, the great Canadian master who clearly influenced its plot; The Custodian of Paradise is lyrical to the point of languor, and the revelations take their good time in unfolding. Those who have long adored Fielding, of course, will be unable to resist this stately, flawed book; those who have not yet met her should rush to pick up The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and let its riches warm them in ways no hooch ever could.

-- Warren Bass is a senior editor of Book World.