A Beautiful Truth
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: February 8, 2017 9:53 PM | Last Updated: July 11, 2017
Colin McAdam
Walt and Judy are deeply in love, but Judy longs for a child. Walt measures all beauty against that of Judy and doesn't want her eyes to get any sadder. They stay side by side and search for distractions, realizing they may never have a family — when Walt finds an unexpected opportunity in the pages of Life magazine. Soon they are welcoming Looee, born in Sierra Leone, into their home in the hills of Vermont, where they come to regard him as their son. The three of them eventually find their rhythm and settle into their own version of love and life between four walls. Until the night their unique family is changed forever.
Hundreds of miles away, at the Girdish Institute in Florida, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. There is proof that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends. They are political, altruistic; they get angry and forgive. Among them is Mr. Ghoul, who has grown up in a world of rivals, sex and unpredictable loss. As Looee and Mr. Ghoul's distant but parallel paths through childhood, adolescence and early middle age converge, a new experience of family is formed. (From Hamish Hamilton)
A Beautiful Truth won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2013.
From the book
She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear.
She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today.
He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation.
It's what solitude does to a social animal he says.
People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation.
Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.
From A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam ©2013. Published by Hamish Hamilton.