Cloud

This, McCormack's fifth novel, is his first in 12 years, is worth the wait. The story is told by Harry Steen, a Scottish-Canadian businessman, who retrospectively narrates the events of his life. He recounts his impoverished childhood in a Scottish tenement called the Tollgate, where violence is commonplace and the ground is littered with unexploded bombs left over from the war. While still a young man, Harry leaves the Tollgate to take up a teaching post in Duncairn. It is there that he endures a heartbreak so devastating that he abandons his teaching post and sets off on a series of peripatetic journeys to Africa, Venezuela, and eventually Canada. The novel abounds with colorful grotesques%E2%80%94Harry's miner father, who delights in cracking bleak jokes; Charles Dupont, a French-Canadian doctor who has mended his own broken heart by escaping to tribal Africa. McCormack imbues the novel with a great deal of intertextuality%E2%80%94books within books, abundant epigraphs, and even at one point an amusing nod towards his own bibliography. But the novel's true greatness comes its portrait of Harry, the lovesick traveller and memory artist. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years for the next McCormack offering. Agent: Ron Eckel, The Cooke Agency. (Aug.)