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As Downhill Chance unfolded before me, I realized I was slipping back into a small eastern community, into the people, places and culture that had shaped my early years. "'If ye wants,' said Luke. 'Meet Bunga and the boys.'" Luke and his friends are playing characters from a grade IV geography text commonly used in eastern Canada during the early half of the past century. And immediately, in my imagination, I was in the woods again, out behind my house with Sandra Morrison fashioning straw headdresses and other grass paraphernalia suitable for Bunga-style Cape Breton jungle wear. Now any Newfoundlander would tell you that anywhere in Cape Breton is a poor substitute for a Newfoundland outport. However, all small, remote communities have similarities. And Donna Morrissey has provided a literary ticket of return to those communities of the 1940s. Price of the fare: snuggle back in your easy-chair and read.

They appear like beads on a necklace separated by knots of the same string that binds them together: Harbour Deep, Cat Arm, Gold Cove, Lower Head, Rocky Head, Copy-cat Cove, The Basin - small isolated communities held together, and held apart, by the same rugged Newfoundland coastline. Rocky Head, where Clair at the tender age of sixteen goes to teach school, consists of "six half-painted houses standing resolute to the wind ... the houses and woodsheds ... forming a communal backyard that was webbed with well-scuffed pathways, and criss-crossed above with tiers of clotheslines ...." However, isolation definitely does not ensure privacy: far from it. This communal space, known as "the patch," renders "each soul that strolled across" its tight confines "as bare as the yellow staining the seat of their underwear as it flapped over their heads on the clotheslines." The essence of any small community is captured right here in these lines. Isolation from the world, coupled with an almost overpowering lack of privacy, is the hallmark of hamlets everywhere.

However, if the setting is local, the ideas are global, speaking directly to our time. It is in the prologue that we get our first jolt, our first clue as to what this novel is really about, when young Luke notices "the beginnings of a bruise purpling the skin beneath Gid's right eye." And we cringe along with Luke as he innocently asks, "How come your da hit you?" We learn that violence is an all-too-familiar part of Gid O'Mara's home life when his mother stands on Luke's doorstep: "her dress torn, baring a bruised breast, her eye already swollen shut, a harsh burn marking the side of one cheek, and the blood spurting from her bottom lip." However, it is in the first chapter, (the beginning of Clair's story) that violence in its most virulent form reaches into these young lives: and then and there, this powerful anti-war novel truly begins.

When Job Gale leaves for war, the security and peace of the Gale household is shattered. Wrenched from the family are those wonderful carefree days spent at Cat Arm, with the "crackling of the fire and the creaking of the cabin beneath its snow-banked roof" where a gentle mother "gathered" her daughters "around her lap as she always did before bedtime, ... and listened as they said their prayers." Instead, with the advent of separation, we are as "stunned ... into wide eyed silence" as Clair and her little sister when a "grimace distorted Sare's features, and reaching out, she smacked Missy across the face." It is this new and previously unthinkable harshness that drives Clair's little sister to their Uncle Sim, seeking the comfort and solace that their distraught mother can no longer provide. Between her father's absence, her mother's depression, and her little sister's estrangement, Clair is left feeling perfectly alone. War, it seems, is to be responsible for pure hell on the home front as well as on the battlefield.

However, if Job's absence is difficult, his return proves even worse. "Jolting awake, Clair sat up in her bed ... horrified" by the "guttural rawness" of her father's "screams." Racked by shrapnel pain and suffering from the phenomenon we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Job's agony has truly begun. It is an agony that is not only physical and mental, it is spiritual as well. For what has become of Job Gale's faith in the God to Whom he had "whispered, so slow, so beautifully slow ..." beneath that "snow-banked roof" so long ago? It has been shattered: ripped apart like the church pew this deranged veteran dragged home and "hacked into pieces," ripping the pew apart as the war has torn him body and soul, building "a single seat" for himself - "the pew-chair." And it is from this "pew-chair" he stares "vacantly past the faces outside his window, lighting his pipe." Perhaps this father, turned old soldier, expressed it best: "War ain't no place for a thinking man."

However, is Job Gale really courageous for leaving his family and going off to fight in a distant war? Not so, according to the loggers and fishers congregated about the wharf at the Basin. "Hard enough to stay alive on our own shores with things the way they is - let alone going the frig over to foreign shores and offering yourself up to be shot at," they argue. "Good family men" would stay home and look after their wives and children, instead of leaving this task to others. There is little empathy for those who sign up and run the risk of "getting killed in somebody else's dirty business." Offered as gossip, these are not sentiments we are invited to accept: at least not on first inspection. However, as we see Job Gale's family torn apart, first by separation, and later by the anguish of some terrible secret upon his return, this line of argument begins to take on greater credibility.

Downhill Chance is driven by three separate yet linked layers of narrative that, like the skin of an onion, are slowly and carefully peeled away. There is Clair's story, as she moves from a difficult childhood into a more emotionally comfortable adult life. There is Job Gale's dark secret concerning a horrific incident of friendly fire that causes him to thrash and scream through sleepless nights after his return from war. And there is Luke's long-kept childhood secret about what really happened when he and two other young friends went off on an adventure with a loaded gun. Violence links all three. Violence in the home, violence on the battlefield, and accidental violence in childhood. Violence tucked seamlessly into the otherwise ordinary lives of innocent people living in the necklace of hamlets along the Newfoundland shore.

Which brings us to the title of this novel and what it means. A "downhill chance," we are told by Job Gale at the very beginning of the novel, is that time after an arduous climb up a very steep hill when you are able "to catch your breath on the way down." One way or another, all of the characters in this novel struggle until they at last find their "downhill chance." Clair finds a new life in Rocky Head, Luke finds the courage to forgive, and Job finds the peace that awaits us all.

Sheldon Currie once said that "a novel is a big book that has something wrong with it." And I would be remiss if I did not say that I found the use of the authorial voice, when it does occasionally intrude, rather jarring. Early in the novel, describing a moment of clarity when Luke looks into his friend's eyes, Morrissey lapses into her own voice, telling us that Luke "would remember this moment, and think mostly to himself that surely it is in the light of the eyes that the soul shines forth, and that despite the previous three weeks of racing and playing about, it wasn't till this moment, staring through those two narrowly opened pathways, did he hold court with his friend Gid." From the story's own development, we should be able to get the gist of the idea. Showing would have seamlessly given the reader the rewarding experience of sharing in the discovery, whereas telling is disruptive and robs the reader of the fun of feeling insightful.

Nevertheless, Downhill Chance is a marvelous read. Donna Morrissey has painted the essence of a handful of humble lives lived in isolated villages along the rugged coast of Newfoundland and placed them on a gigantic canvas condemning violence in the home, in international conflict, and in the careless use of firearms. She speaks clearly and she speaks directly to the turmoil of our place and time.