Literary Fiction

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Book Review: Ellen Kramer-MacDonald 2009:

Reflections From Shadow is a novel I'm grateful to have come across. After buying a copy on an impulse, I was absorbed after the first chapter and finished the rest in a few short sittings. Possessing many different levels and means of interpretation, Reflections is a rich, thought-enticing human story: disturbing, often sad, occasionally funny and ultimately uplifting.
Most of the novel takes place in the 1960s. Our third-person narrator is a young man named Jared Clarkson, admitted to the psychiatric ward of a Toronto hospital following an overdose. During recovery, he reflects on the events of his life – the defining moments and the mundane alike, all of which led up to a bizarre experience he suffered while visiting Dachau.
From the earliest flashback, when Jared recalls the day his adoptive parents welcomed his younger brother into their home, he pulls the reader into his story. We witness the lighthearted family times of Jared's childhood, his buoyant nature as a little boy. These scenes help us get to know him, and most everyone can relate to Jared on at least some level, mostly in the warmth and humour of his early years – universally nostalgic.
But there is a darker side to Jared's life. His perpetual self-loathing begins at an early age, when some other children at school ridicule and bully him due to a conspicuous birthmark on his face. The cards seem stacked against him: he is subject to violent punishments by his mother, and even sexual abuse by an older male storeowner. Jared is also a mysterious figure, child of a birth mother whom he can hardly remember, and prone to strange dreams of prisons and soldiers. Occasionally he does something he cannot explain (momentarily leaving his body, or going instantaneously from one place to the next, with no idea how he arrived there), and even hears voices while locked in his bedroom for a week. We might question his sanity if he didn't seem so perceptive of this strangeness himself.
He reaches adolescence an intelligent young man, a talented writer, ever questioning the validity of his religious upbringing, but almost socially disabled and quickly becoming dependent on marijuana. After he is caught stealing money from his family's church ("taxing the church", he calls it) Jared runs away in the company of his friend Clarence.
After a failed romance with a girl named Patsy, and a subsequent falling out with Clarence, Jared spends the next two years working in downtown Toronto. Just when things are as bad as they've ever been, he flees to Europe, where, at Dachau concentration camp, he has the experience which, of all those in his life, will harm him the most deeply, and yet open his eyes and change him.
The scene at Dachau is detailed, vivid, and disturbing. In short: beautifully frightening. It's best if I don't reveal any more, except to say that the scene leaves us with a tremendous number of questions. Did Jared's experience have to do with reincarnation? Some connection to his distant past, his birth mother, his early identity? Merely a twisted alter-ego, or a dark metaphor for his own existence?
There are no simple answers to any of these questions. Jared's paranormal experience at Dachau is one which might, at some level, have a literal explanation, but doesn't need one. The novel is neither horror nor science fiction; its focus on the internal struggles of the central character make it in fact a literary story, and as such, the Dachau scene can be interpreted as Jared's personal battle with himself.
Perhaps the most notable trait of Reflections is author Malcolm Watts' exploration of morality – or, more specifically, the complicated natures of good and evil, and how they co-exist in humans and are sometimes indistinguishable. This is shown not only in Jared, but in many of the other characters, and namely in Elizabeth, his adoptive mother. Although she beats Jared and at one time locks him in his room for several days, there is never any question that she loves her son. Flawed by fervent religious beliefs, in addition to her own personal anger, she's a character of many sides, and one of the most compelling in the novel.
It's easy to pity Jared, and to see the brilliance in him that he can't see himself. Jared is such a well-developed, convincingly human character that I stayed with him from beginning to end. I found his trials all the more moving because I identified with many of them. As is important for all main characters in fiction, there's something in Jared which will appeal to everyone. And by the end of the novel, he has reconciled himself with the fact that his future is uncertain and will be wrought with the same joys and heartaches as anyone's, and these will help make him who he is.
An early scene illustrates this, when Elizabeth Clarkson tells her son some of the most memorable words in the novel: "Sometimes God sends trials to make us better people."
No matter which God she's referring to, it's certain Jared will remember these words.





Jared Clarkson is a complicated character, a young man tormented by a sense of self-loathing, as well as visions and lapses in time that he can in no way explain. As he comes of age during the turbulent 60’s, an era marked by anti-war protests, hippies, Rock & Roll, and psychedelics, Jared embarks upon a journey to find the missing pieces of the puzzle of his life. Although unsure of his final destination, he knows he must find the answers; and find them he does, but in the most unlikely of places - Dachau concentration camp in Germany. He finds answers that ultimately threaten not only Jared’s sanity but also his very existence.
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