Hired to teach in a junior college, Will Franklyn has come to Montreal expecting a life to proceed much as it had in Nova Scotia where he grew up, or in Edmonton or Edinburgh where he studied. But ‘in Quebec everything -- all law, all logic, all human behaviour -- is topsy-turvy.’ Trusting and bemused, Will manages -- just -- to stay sane in the midst of lunacy.
In this novel, a companion to his sombre The Man Who Loved Jane Austen, Ray Smith demonstrates once again that he is a master of comic fiction, leading us a merry chase round the mountain. The familiar places are there -- Schwartz’s, the St. Viateur Bagel Shop, the Big O -- but lurking behind every familiar certainty is the unexpected, the bizarre, the topsy-turvy.