A Simple Carpenter by Dave Margoshes

A Review by Ian Colford

In this enormously entertaining and thought-provoking novel, Dave Margoshes tells the story of a man whose quest for his own identity places him at odds with a world that is constantly seeking to label him, often in ways that cause him great discomfort.

At its heart, A Simple Carpenter is an adventure story, one with sizable ambitions and many surprising twists. As we begin, the shape-shifting narrator, who goes by several names in the book, is a crew member on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea. Engine problems have set the boat adrift, and he is recovering from an illness that has wiped his memory clean and left him with no idea who he is or where he came from: he only knows he’s a carpenter because the first mate informs him of this while he’s bedridden with fever. Then a storm sinks the vessel, and the narrator ends up the last man alive stranded on a remote island.

After his rescue from the island, the narrator awakens in a clinic run by nuns in a city on the Lebanese coast. Here, he is treated for malnutrition. Gradually he recovers his strength.

The world that Margoshes has conjured for the novel is a magical, fantastical version of our own world, one that is easily recognizable but which differs in significant ways from our own experience. For instance, on the island the narrator encounters a large shaggy haired “creature” that speaks to him with a human voice, offering advice and guidance. Initially alarming, the creature becomes for the narrator a comforting presence that appears to him from time to time throughout the story. And after recovering from the illness that took his memory, the narrator realizes he can understand everything being said by the crew members on the fishing boat, even though they are of various ethnicities and speak a dizzying array of languages.

After leaving the clinic, the narrator toils at several odd jobs, but when his facility with languages is noticed by a member of a local United Nations peacekeeping office, he’s hired as a translator. This work brings him into contact with people on both sides of the conflict raging in the region, Arabs and Israelis, some of whom are sincerely seeking peace, others whose agendas are less clear. Then, while still with the UN, he is recruited as a messenger for a shadowy Palestinian collective whose coded communications make no sense to him but, as time goes by, carry increasingly sinister undertones. Later, disillusioned by a peacekeeping role that no longer gives him hope, and regretting his decision to ally himself with the Palestinians, whose behaviour has become threatening, he travels to Israel in search of personal serenity and chasing the possibility that clues to his own origins are there to be found.

In equal measures enthralling and puzzling, A Simple Carpenter is a novel that leaves conclusions up to the reader, conclusions that will depend in large part upon what the reader brings to the act of reading it. It is a book written with restraint and great respect for the ineffable nature of religious experience. But it is also a compulsively readable page-turner, a novel that, while gleefully defying convention on almost every page, is artfully constructed and endlessly inventive.

The reader will notice as well that the story it tells is one of great relevance to our troubled and troubling modern world.

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About the Author

Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer. Most of his adult life has been spent in western Canada, for 35 years, in Saskatchewan. Dave lives on an acreage near Saskatoon.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Radiant Press (May 14 2024)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 333 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1998926095

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1998926091