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It's an inescapable question: What does George Elliott Clarke's George & Rue add to the story he told about his murderous cousins in Execution Poems (2001)? The earlier work confronted the hard-scramble life and illegitimate times of George and Rufus Hamilton. It was stark, sharp, succinct, and stunning, and won a Governor General's Award for poetry. What more could it offer on the inexcusable state of black folks in 1949 Canada? What was left unsaid by the condemned men? Execution Poems felt complete, and still does.

George & Rue, then, may be something of an ongoing exorcism. George and Rufus Hamilton, according to Clarke, are "encompassed" in this novel "only by unrestrained imagination. That is the only truth in this novel, whose English ain't broken, but 'blackened.'" George & Rue is less about two very wayward brothers who hanged for a murder committed by the light of a "white devil moon" than its predecessor, and more about the social forces, ideas and words that gave birth to them.

The point of view from the outset is that of a community consciousness - the community of Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia. It is worth noting the language used isn't Black Caribbean Creole or Black American speak, rather a language all its own and maybe even on its own.

George & Rue, Clarke's first novel, is reminiscent of David Nandi Odhiambo's diss/ed banded nation and, in a different way, Alice Walker's The Color Purple. If your taste in novels doesn't run to the lyrical, the writing may be off-putting. On the other hand, Clarke's imagery is sweetly insistent:

"Cynthy's not said no when he'd up and asked her to dance. So he took her up - small as she was, light, well, light like light - and twirled her about the impromptu dance floor, some planks flung down among the stacked hay, some lamps for light, some beer for flavour, and some apple blossoms for scent. His hand on her waist, ah, it was like holding a plate of petals. They danced. They got all hugged up in a corner. Cynthy was sheathed in light: her skin was sheer copper-brass-gold."

In the above scene, Cynthy Croxen ("part Mi'kmaq Negress") and Asa Hamilton (a fifth-generation Nova Scotian) meet. Theirs is a fateful - and fatal - union. "It takes a lovin woman to make a lovin man." The reverse may also be true. But what does it take to make loving children?

George and Rufus are born a year apart, in 1925 and 1926, respectively. Alisha, the medicine woman/midwife who delivers them, warns their father, "If you don't hang God in your heart, Asa, you - or these boys - is gonna hang." Part of the problem with Asa's and Cynthy's existence is that they have no proper sense of themselves. "They were so poor, they supposedly didn't even have history."

Montreal represents salvation to many Nova Scotia blacks. Cynthy considers it "Harlem, her Heaven…frontier Paris, a Habitant Manhattan." Unfortunately, "Asa ain't got no drive"; "he didn't dream about porterin on the trains and goin on up to Montreal." And forget about Halifax, which Clarke limns as a disgusting, desperate, filthy, forsaken place: "Indeed, the raw sewage pipe into the harbour was Halifax's concrete answer to the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Great Wall of China, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa."

So the jagged rift between Asa and Cynthy grows. The self-loathing among the members of the Hamilton household is so deep it's a toxic dump running under the foundation of their lives. How can a woman call her husband "so ugly" that there aren't enough words in the dictionary to describe just how ugly? How can a man call his own wife an "inky bitch?" The boys steal from and lie to their parents before they are old enough for school.

Cynthy's daydreaming and sense of entitlement do little to improve her sons' characters, but it's Asa we're meant to watch. When he brutalizes Cynthy in front the boys, the reader can't help but hate him - the word, the emotion, can't be emphasized enough - for being lower than his own father, more despicable than any slave owner, and maybe the one man responsible for their beastly lives.

Asa treats George and Rufus as "niggers, not engineers." What's most sad about this is that Rufus, the more intellectually inclined of the brothers, has artistic talent, and George, "truly the 'country' one," is inclined to make "an honest living" working the land.

Of course, Rufus also excels at thieving, George, at bootlegging. The English in George & Rue is not the only thing that is blackened. Although the motive of Asa's murderer, Reverend Simon Dixon, is not entirely clear, "Asa was, despite all his filth, somehow cleanly gone." Cynthy instead expires scrubbing toilets for a pimp, "dreaming of a dazzling red silk dress. She died with her eyes open. She died on her knees."

There is plenty of humourous punning in the novel, and perhaps an overabundance of adverbs and adjectives. What there could have been more of is Clarke's stylish dialogue. The reader yearns to hear from Rufus and George directly, even if it is clear how little the brothers consider the consequences of their actions the night of January 9, 1949, when they kill the taxi driver Nacre Pearly "Silver" Burgundy. "Hittin Silver will be just like blowin my nose - cept much easier," thinks the sociopathic Rufus. George is hesitant from the moment the plan is proposed to him - Silver is a friend - but still takes part. Without a past and no prospect of a future, they live strictly in the moment, perceiving little beyond their immediate, selfish, drunken, or lustful needs.

What's made no less frighteningly obvious, however, are Canada's racial politics … it's tempting to add "of the period," but there is something in Clarke's recovery of his cousins' story that suggests there is still a distinction to be made between who Canadians truly are and who they pretend to be as a "people of peoples." In his final days alive, George develops a religious resolve that sustains him. No less admirable is Rufus' bitter stoicism during their farce of a trial. "There was no point to feeling ill used or hard done by…. As soon as the sun'd first shone on them, it'd been shining on their graves. They knew it…."

Does anyone else? Does anyone care? If their guilt is not in question, shouldn't their punishment be - especially in today's Canada? When they meet their deaths, there is a sad sense that George and Rufus Hamilton have paid for all the sins of their world, and many times over.