Reviewed by Jonathan Valelly
Try as he might, Tom Brackett can’t shake the shadow of his family.
As far as he’s concerned, they’re a bunch of lowlifes — an alcoholic father, a heroin addicted sister, and a severely depressed mother, all shattered and scattered around since Tom was a child. But as the only responsible adult in the Brackett clan, Tom does what he must. He sends money, makes short phone calls to catch-up and even occasionally hopes one of them might overcome the startling, unpredictable weight of generations of trauma and grueling mental health–related failures.
Even as a late teenager, he realizes “he can’t escape them. Even if he got on a bus this afternoon and didn’t get off for a week, or a month, or a year. Each moment he would be reminded, simply by the act of running, of what he was running from.”
Ian Colford’s Perfect World follows Tom as he grows into a stable career as a car mechanic, marries and has kids, hardly noticing that his own grip on things begins to loosen around the same time that most of his family finally disappears for good. Chronic drinking, voices in his head and bouts of rage and gloom make up more and more of his reality, until one day he commits a horrifying act of violence. From then on, the road to recovery is lonely, quiet, grave.
Perfect World comes packaged as fourteen tight chapters. It’s a focused, almost step-by-step look at the interior world of a Nova Scotia man struggling to unlearn and undermine the illnesses he may have been destined to inherit. Yet there’s an unusual synchronicity of scale going on here. The book is written in the present tense, and each chapter is intimate, episodic. Pages are delicately consumed by Tom’s real-time train of thought while visiting his dying, silent mother or while arguing with the new, younger manager at work. But the short novel also uses these episodes to carry you through decades of his life, from childhood through to the aftermath of divorce. Colford skillfully tells this story across several timeframes, a feat which might have become dizzying in less apt hands.
The internal monologue of Brackett’s slow, unknowing mental deterioration would also have suffered if the writing wasn’t very careful. But Colford is mindful to keep the erosion of judgement and the deepening emotional incapacity specific to his protagonist. Perfect World is one man’s story of mental health, and Colford strives to make this clear, even writing in his acknowledgements, “people of all ages and in every walk of life face similar struggles everyday. I do not mean to trivialize these struggles by depicting them in a work of fiction.”
And he succeeds. Colford is careful to frame, for instance, the responsibility for Tom’s sudden act of violence as inextricable from his illness. And although there is something fatalist about the notion of intergenerational inheritance crucial to the story (suggesting that you can try, but you’ll never avoid, say, being an alcoholic like your dad or schizophrenic like your mom), Tom’s recovery changes the script. Although his relationship to his medication is strained and blurred by side-effects, there is a quiet wisdom to Tom’s acceptance of treatment and counseling. He’s surprised to find that, “of the many forms of therapy on offer, talking helped the most. When it dawned on him that the blame for what happened was not necessarily a burden he had to shoulder alone, survival became an option.”
Indeed, Tom’s long-time inability to simply speak, combined with a detached and self-centred sense of total responsibility, betray the shortcomings of the stoic masculinity humming underneath the novel and quietly stoking his illness. Tom moves from small Nova Scotia towns to the city of Halifax and then to the suburbs, all the while finding most of his comfort in hard work and hiding from people. In each of these settings, you see the failure of his parents and the alienation of society materializing in Tom’s discomfort with socializing and a fear of getting close to people, even his wife Kathleen.
But the book mostly shies away from being a social critique. Perfect World isn’t a manifesto against stigma, and it isn’t really a plea for help. Rather, it’s a carefully written, sometimes painful tour through one man’s trauma and resilience, his greatest falls and ultimately, his acceptance of a difficult reality. And it is wholly worthy of applause.
Freehand | 192 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1-55481-286-8
‘Perfect World’ by Ian Colford
Book Reviews
Try as he might, Tom Brackett can’t shake the shadow of his family.
As far as he’s concerned, they’re a bunch of lowlifes — an alcoholic father, a heroin addicted sister, and a severely depressed mother, all shattered and scattered around since Tom was a child. But as the only responsible adult in the Brackett clan, Tom does what he must. He sends money, makes short phone calls to catch-up and even occasionally hopes one of them might overcome the startling, unpredictable weight of generations of trauma and grueling mental health–related failures.
Even as a late teenager, he realizes “he can’t escape them. Even if he got on a bus this afternoon and didn’t get off for a week, or a month, or a year. Each moment he would be reminded, simply by the act of running, of what he was running from.”
Ian Colford’s Perfect World follows Tom as he grows into a stable career as a car mechanic, marries and has kids, hardly noticing that his own grip on things begins to loosen around the same time that most of his family finally disappears for good. Chronic drinking, voices in his head and bouts of rage and gloom make up more and more of his reality, until one day he commits a horrifying act of violence. From then on, the road to recovery is lonely, quiet, grave.
Perfect World comes packaged as fourteen tight chapters. It’s a focused, almost step-by-step look at the interior world of a Nova Scotia man struggling to unlearn and undermine the illnesses he may have been destined to inherit. Yet there’s an unusual synchronicity of scale going on here. The book is written in the present tense, and each chapter is intimate, episodic. Pages are delicately consumed by Tom’s real-time train of thought while visiting his dying, silent mother or while arguing with the new, younger manager at work. But the short novel also uses these episodes to carry you through decades of his life, from childhood through to the aftermath of divorce. Colford skillfully tells this story across several timeframes, a feat which might have become dizzying in less apt hands.
The internal monologue of Brackett’s slow, unknowing mental deterioration would also have suffered if the writing wasn’t very careful. But Colford is mindful to keep the erosion of judgement and the deepening emotional incapacity specific to his protagonist. Perfect World is one man’s story of mental health, and Colford strives to make this clear, even writing in his acknowledgements, “people of all ages and in every walk of life face similar struggles everyday. I do not mean to trivialize these struggles by depicting them in a work of fiction.”
And he succeeds. Colford is careful to frame, for instance, the responsibility for Tom’s sudden act of violence as inextricable from his illness. And although there is something fatalist about the notion of intergenerational inheritance crucial to the story (suggesting that you can try, but you’ll never avoid, say, being an alcoholic like your dad or schizophrenic like your mom), Tom’s recovery changes the script. Although his relationship to his medication is strained and blurred by side-effects, there is a quiet wisdom to Tom’s acceptance of treatment and counseling. He’s surprised to find that, “of the many forms of therapy on offer, talking helped the most. When it dawned on him that the blame for what happened was not necessarily a burden he had to shoulder alone, survival became an option.”
Indeed, Tom’s long-time inability to simply speak, combined with a detached and self-centred sense of total responsibility, betray the shortcomings of the stoic masculinity humming underneath the novel and quietly stoking his illness. Tom moves from small Nova Scotia towns to the city of Halifax and then to the suburbs, all the while finding most of his comfort in hard work and hiding from people. In each of these settings, you see the failure of his parents and the alienation of society materializing in Tom’s discomfort with socializing and a fear of getting close to people, even his wife Kathleen.
But the book mostly shies away from being a social critique. Perfect World isn’t a manifesto against stigma, and it isn’t really a plea for help. Rather, it’s a carefully written, sometimes painful tour through one man’s trauma and resilience, his greatest falls and ultimately, his acceptance of a difficult reality. And it is wholly worthy of applause.
Freehand | 192 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1-55481-286-8