Why Men Lie
By Linden MacIntyre
Random House Canada
First there was The Long Stretch, then the Bishop’s Man. This book, Why Men Lie, completes the trilogy which takes place in Toronto, and on Cape Breton.
The title is not a question and no answer is given. That men lie is taken as a given.
They just do . . . at least the men in this book tell nothing but lies, but they may not be representative.
The story follows the life of Dr Effie MacAskill Gillis, sister to the Priest (Fr. Duncan) of the second book Bishop’s Man.
Effie has been lied to by men her whole life long, and the best line in the book comes from an older female friend.
“How do you know when a boy is telling a lie?” young Effie asks. “When there’s a sound coming out of the mouth of one of them, that’ll be a sign,” is the reply.
Effie has been married to a couple of liars, boys she’d known all her life.
The third and present husband Sextus, with whom she has a daughter, has been having an affair.
So what’s new, even the name “Sextus” means mischievous.
But Effie went to School and became a professor of Gaelic studies, and is employed in Toronto. When this story opens, she has met another old friend from home, JC Campbell, a Newsman and world traveller.
He has a daughter he’s never met, and maybe a grandaughter. Regrets all around.
The whole story is about relationships past and present, and there are flashbacks to heavy drama back home, family history and loss, and hints that Effie has secrets she will never tell.
The Bishop’s Man covered a lot of this same ground. Though there are reunions and murders and an unbelievable stalker, the story seems to be more angst than progress. There is the obvious thing about growing older and less powerful, life passing by and all that, the discussions always lubricated by whiskey. Not much is changed.
There is celebration when Cassie, Ellie’s daughter brings home a man who wishes to marry her. The joy is a bit tempered when the wanna be husband turns out to be older than her dad, but the man is a doctor and apparently doesn’t share the “powerless” feeling shared by the others.
Ellie has told the whole true story of her life to Sextus, and he has committed it to paper. Only Sextus knows what he wrote and he passes it on to Ellie, warning her that “its all there.”
Don’t get excited, we’ll never read it. One night with whiskey in hand (natch) the script is burned page by page in the fireplace.
There is a cat in this story who is badly neglected, forgotten by all in their rush to untangle their lives. He runs away many times, who can blame him?
Linden MacIntyre is a fine writer (The Bishops Man won the Giller prize) but there’s too much drama here for me.
Peggy Freeman is a freelance writer living in Red Deer.