Repeat Offenders: Trauma and Abuse in Brian Doyle’s Fiction

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt from this article: Brian Doyle is one of Canada’s most honoured children’s writers. Celebrated as a novelist sensitive to issues of class, race, and disability, he is rightly praised by Michele Landsberg for “combin[ing] a sort of Celtic plangency with Ottawa Valley tall tale, Canadian colloquialism, and working-class deadpan” (33). What his Ottawa Valley tall tales repeatedly respond to are issues of trauma and abuse. However, his last three novels—Uncle Ronald (1996), Mary Ann Alice (2001) and Boy O’Boy (2003)—signal a major shift in his representational practice. The structure is still comic but the tone darkens; abuse is no longer, as it often is in the earlier fiction, a joking matter. While this shift undoubtedly reflects changing cultural notions regarding the representation of trauma and abuse in children’s literature, this does not fully explain the way that Mary Ann Alice expands upon and Boy O’Boy rewrites Doyle’s earlier fiction.