The sins of the father

Wayne Johnstons A World Elsewhere (the place you inhabit when you have been rejected by your father) is a serio-comic picaresque tale set in the late nineteenth century and told in the third person, largely from the point of view of Landish Druken, the only son of the captain of the Gilbert, the most successful sealer in St. John's, Newfoundland. What follows is a string of incidents, often comic, often poignant - such is the storytelling art of Wayne Johnston - that build up the image of Landish as a man who affects a disinterested attitude toward his own fate, but who fails in the process to disguise his concern for others. Added to that is the subtext of anger at others whom Rank perceives as responsible for the disasters in his life, most notably his father Gord.\n She had taken a twelve-month lease on a oneroom furnished cottage behind the Dharma house, a house the Dharma grandfather had built in a remote mining town in the interior of British Columbia, "on a road that goes nowhere, in a place where nobody cares what happens behind the closed doors of a house.