An Incoming Tide
Review by Deanna Mason Ph.D
Within its first three pages, t wilton dale’s suspenseful novel An Incoming Tide plunges readers into the drama and dysfunction of the Caylie-Horvath clan, who are later described as a “family of secrets and pretense.” Tightly narrated over the course of two and a half weeks—with two highly significant flashbacks—the story begins with an elegantly terse account of Jackson Horvath’s premeditated murder of his wife Izzy. The following chapters pick up the family’s story twenty-five years later, reintroducing Jackson, now a Calgary psychiatrist, and, even more importantly, Estelle Caylie, Izzy and Jackson’s youngest daughter, now a psychologist herself. Over the next two weeks, readers meet the extended Caylie-Horvath family, which, like most families, consists of an array of characters: in this case, they range from an artist to a cowboy, a musician to an exotic dancer. Izzy’s death is soon not the only demise that marks the family, and the next death, which may or may not be accidental, compels Estelle to begin to grapple with her family’s past and with “emotions . . . coming from some deep, seeping sewer within her.”
More than a straightforward family drama or even an exploration of intergenerational trauma, An Incoming Tide crosses into the genres of mystery and suspense—even managing to offer a critique of Big Pharma along the way. The narrative quickly moves back and forth among its large cast of characters, effortlessly maintaining the propulsive momentum of the opening chapter and giving readers little opportunity for boredom or complacency. Throughout, dale’s keen eye for not just the words and actions but also the gestures and expressions of his characters renders them, and especially Estelle, sharp and credible. Even such small details as the coffee cup Estelle holds early on that “is starting to tip, is in danger of spilling on the floor” provide insight into her mental state and a hint of what is in store for the protagonist as she comes to terms with her family’s past and present. This awareness of the psychology of the characters leads to some dark humour at times, such as when we learn of suspicious figure Pierre Bolton’s compulsive need for order and clean laundry in his Calgary hotel room while he travels the city spying, threatening, and breaking into other characters’ homes.
Like Estelle’s coffee cup, symbols are deftly scattered throughout the book, lifting it above a simple page turner. The title’s tidal imagery, which at first seems to relate just to Izzy’s murder on the BC coast, reappears throughout the narrative to describe Estelle’s gradually surfacing childhood memories, subtly indicating how so much of the family’s present-day dysfunction is inextricably entwined with the murder a quarter century in the past.
One particularly strong aspect of the novel is the way it weds verbal and visual art, using painting and sculpture to lend insight into characters. Immediately on the heels of the startling opening chapter, readers meet the extended family not directly but through an ingenious plot device: Aunt Leanne, an artist, gives Estelle a sneak peek at her upcoming gallery show, a series of portraits of her own family. For careful readers, Leanne’s techniques and stylistic decisions provide clues to the characters who populate later parts of the novel. A later striking passage describes Jackson’s encounter with Bill Reid’s sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe, which greets visitors to Vancouver International Airport (and also once appeared on Canadian twenty-dollar bills). For Jackson, the sculpture’s “animal spirits and mythical monsters” embody “emotions he works so hard to suppress . . . it is a depiction of human nature”—a surprisingly unsettling experience for this psychiatrist.
Doubling is one of the novel’s central motifs: readers are reminded in ways both subtle and explicit of the parallels between different generations of the family, and Estelle and her two siblings have all changed their childhood names in adulthood, a fact that, while initially confusing to readers, points to the breaks these characters have tried to make with their past. This motif of doubling is used to especially strong effect in the second flashback, two-thirds of the way into the story, a disturbing and memorably narrated scene that merits a trigger warning.
At times, the narration teeters from realism into a superfluity of detail. Do readers need to know, for example, that the vehicle speeding dangerously towards Estelle’s brother has a “V8 engine and high-performance powertrain,” or the precise layout of Estelle’s counselling centre? On a related note, because two of the central characters are mental-health professionals, it feels almost inevitable that the discipline’s jargon surfaces from time to time, but when NSRI antidepressant, normalizing, and titrate appear not in the dialogue but as part of the omniscient narration, the story momentarily feels more like a case study than a novel.
And, while the narrative is well paced to mirror Estelle’s disintegration, there are a few elements that strain credibility. At the start of the novel, Estelle and her siblings have been estranged for years. What then are the odds that all three, as it turns out, still live in Calgary, the city where they grew up? Specific details about Jackson’s research also undermine the novel’s realism. In years of delivering and hearing papers at academic conferences, I have never seen one of these relatively ephemeral pieces of research bound in leather, as Jackson’s colleagues do as a memento, or known a conference paper to include lengthy acknowledgments, which in the novel play a role in allowing Pierre Bolton to track down a former patient of Jackson’s clinic who committed suicide.
Still, An Incoming Tide is a vivid, carefully plotted, and memorably imaginative novel that will appeal to many readers—not just those interested in family sagas or mysteries but anyone who appreciates how a well-drawn character can help us to better understand the living, breathing people around us.
--Deanna V. Mason, PhD
Review by Deanna Mason Ph.D
Within its first three pages, t wilton dale’s suspenseful novel An Incoming Tide plunges readers into the drama and dysfunction of the Caylie-Horvath clan, who are later described as a “family of secrets and pretense.” Tightly narrated over the course of two and a half weeks—with two highly significant flashbacks—the story begins with an elegantly terse account of Jackson Horvath’s premeditated murder of his wife Izzy. The following chapters pick up the family’s story twenty-five years later, reintroducing Jackson, now a Calgary psychiatrist, and, even more importantly, Estelle Caylie, Izzy and Jackson’s youngest daughter, now a psychologist herself. Over the next two weeks, readers meet the extended Caylie-Horvath family, which, like most families, consists of an array of characters: in this case, they range from an artist to a cowboy, a musician to an exotic dancer. Izzy’s death is soon not the only demise that marks the family, and the next death, which may or may not be accidental, compels Estelle to begin to grapple with her family’s past and with “emotions . . . coming from some deep, seeping sewer within her.”
More than a straightforward family drama or even an exploration of intergenerational trauma, An Incoming Tide crosses into the genres of mystery and suspense—even managing to offer a critique of Big Pharma along the way. The narrative quickly moves back and forth among its large cast of characters, effortlessly maintaining the propulsive momentum of the opening chapter and giving readers little opportunity for boredom or complacency. Throughout, dale’s keen eye for not just the words and actions but also the gestures and expressions of his characters renders them, and especially Estelle, sharp and credible. Even such small details as the coffee cup Estelle holds early on that “is starting to tip, is in danger of spilling on the floor” provide insight into her mental state and a hint of what is in store for the protagonist as she comes to terms with her family’s past and present. This awareness of the psychology of the characters leads to some dark humour at times, such as when we learn of suspicious figure Pierre Bolton’s compulsive need for order and clean laundry in his Calgary hotel room while he travels the city spying, threatening, and breaking into other characters’ homes.
Like Estelle’s coffee cup, symbols are deftly scattered throughout the book, lifting it above a simple page turner. The title’s tidal imagery, which at first seems to relate just to Izzy’s murder on the BC coast, reappears throughout the narrative to describe Estelle’s gradually surfacing childhood memories, subtly indicating how so much of the family’s present-day dysfunction is inextricably entwined with the murder a quarter century in the past.
One particularly strong aspect of the novel is the way it weds verbal and visual art, using painting and sculpture to lend insight into characters. Immediately on the heels of the startling opening chapter, readers meet the extended family not directly but through an ingenious plot device: Aunt Leanne, an artist, gives Estelle a sneak peek at her upcoming gallery show, a series of portraits of her own family. For careful readers, Leanne’s techniques and stylistic decisions provide clues to the characters who populate later parts of the novel. A later striking passage describes Jackson’s encounter with Bill Reid’s sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe, which greets visitors to Vancouver International Airport (and also once appeared on Canadian twenty-dollar bills). For Jackson, the sculpture’s “animal spirits and mythical monsters” embody “emotions he works so hard to suppress . . . it is a depiction of human nature”—a surprisingly unsettling experience for this psychiatrist.
Doubling is one of the novel’s central motifs: readers are reminded in ways both subtle and explicit of the parallels between different generations of the family, and Estelle and her two siblings have all changed their childhood names in adulthood, a fact that, while initially confusing to readers, points to the breaks these characters have tried to make with their past. This motif of doubling is used to especially strong effect in the second flashback, two-thirds of the way into the story, a disturbing and memorably narrated scene that merits a trigger warning.
At times, the narration teeters from realism into a superfluity of detail. Do readers need to know, for example, that the vehicle speeding dangerously towards Estelle’s brother has a “V8 engine and high-performance powertrain,” or the precise layout of Estelle’s counselling centre? On a related note, because two of the central characters are mental-health professionals, it feels almost inevitable that the discipline’s jargon surfaces from time to time, but when NSRI antidepressant, normalizing, and titrate appear not in the dialogue but as part of the omniscient narration, the story momentarily feels more like a case study than a novel.
And, while the narrative is well paced to mirror Estelle’s disintegration, there are a few elements that strain credibility. At the start of the novel, Estelle and her siblings have been estranged for years. What then are the odds that all three, as it turns out, still live in Calgary, the city where they grew up? Specific details about Jackson’s research also undermine the novel’s realism. In years of delivering and hearing papers at academic conferences, I have never seen one of these relatively ephemeral pieces of research bound in leather, as Jackson’s colleagues do as a memento, or known a conference paper to include lengthy acknowledgments, which in the novel play a role in allowing Pierre Bolton to track down a former patient of Jackson’s clinic who committed suicide.
Still, An Incoming Tide is a vivid, carefully plotted, and memorably imaginative novel that will appeal to many readers—not just those interested in family sagas or mysteries but anyone who appreciates how a well-drawn character can help us to better understand the living, breathing people around us.
--Deanna V. Mason, PhD