High Water Chants is a new edition of the first novel by one of the greatest living writers in Canada, Trevor Ferguson. It tells of a murderous chase between the funny and exuberant Henry Scowcroft and the Duff brothers, powerful beast-like brutes who have a murder on their conscience. As Flood-like rain pours down on British Columbia's (imaginary) Skincuttle Island, Henry and his friends and enemies suffer wounds and beatings that hardly anyone should in reality survive. But the chase has strong mythological underpinnings to it, as if the characters were incarnations of some native spirits, rather than "ordinary" folk.

Ambitious and filled with strongly-worded prose, this is a novel that shows where Ferguson was headed when he started out as a writer: his talent is already clear, even though you can see some of the problems of any first novel lurking around.

High Water Chants is also an example of one of two distinct styles through which Ferguson has distinguished himself on the Canadian literary scene - with inroads now being made for him in France as well. It is a heroic, saga-like novel set in the powerful wilderness of Northwestern Canada, a style that is also at the heart of other novels like The Fire Line and The Timekeeper, and which could be remindful of Cormac McCarthy.

Ferguson has another distinctive style, however, that brings him closer to John Irving or a Robertson Davies gone wild in the 70s. Comedic and adventurous, this style has made Onyx John and The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater some of the most enjoyable books I've ever read in my life. It's a shame that most of his books are marked as out of print, but it's worth hunting them down that way - or looking for them in Canada, where they're still in print.

I picked this book up from a bargain bin somewhere, and tried several times, unsuccesfully to actually read the entire thing. I felt that the descriptions by the author were interesting and provided some good visualization, but had a very hard time discerning dream sequences, flashbacks, memories, current time, etc. The net effect is that I often found myself reading, not knowing what I was being told. Don't get me wrong, I love a book with lots of turns and perhaps convoluted plot lines, but this one went too far for me.

Ferguson is a superb storyteller, and a magician with words. A coming of age story, which is uniquely idiosyncratic, replete with one of a kind fictional characters. A tale of a child and his schizophrenic mother, that reveals truths we all need to come to terms with.