Ten Books Everyone Should Read

Rich with language and atmosphere, this tale pulls the reader into a world strange as fable, yet reflective of our own.

Why read The Double Hook by Sheila Watson? Because it’s a gripping story told in an utterly original voice. And because, like only the finest of novels, it succeeds brilliantly at mirroring the world around us, while simultaneously giving rise to a world of its very own.

What makes a world? Atmosphere and terrain? Inhabitants to enliven the scene? Certainly language. Any world worth knowing possesses a tongue of its own.

The world of The Double Hook has an unmistakable atmosphere. The elements may be familiar – dust and horse sweat, sun and shadow, repression and redemptive love – but the formula is unique. The reader breathes deeply, gratefully, from the first to the final word.

The novel’s terrain is unforgiving: “Overhead the sky was tight as rawhide. About them the bars of the earth darkened.” The nameless creek-bed settlement is too meagre to attract the Lord’s regard. It lies instead “[i]n the folds of the hills under Coyote’s eye.”

It’s clear from the beginning who lives there, as Watson offers a poetic dramatis personae by way of an opening line. We come to know the valley’s inhabitants in descriptive flashes akin to cognitive leaps: Ara “lifted her chin to unseat the thought”; Felix “stood with a fish spine in his hand. Flesh mountainous contemplating”; Angel “walked across the yard like a mink trailing her young behind her.” We glimpse their internal selves too, as when the boy, Heinrich, “stood thinking of the light he’d known. Of pitch fires lit on the hills. Of leaning out of the black wind into the light of a small flame.”

Much occurs within the space of the book’s hundred or so pages: matricide and self-immolation; illicit couplings and their inevitable results; a descent to the underworld followed by a return tantamount to a rebirth. All of it strange as fable. All of it ringing profoundly true.

It’s a veracity born of language – each word belonging, finding its rightful place. Consider William, speaking of his wayward brother, James: “He’s not one to throw himself into a pit, though he might stand on the edge looking in.” Consider James, making his way back from that edge: “Whatever the world said, whatever the girl said, he’d find her. Out of his corruption life had leafed, and he’d stepped on it carelessly as a man steps on spring shoots.” Consider the book’s final passage, cried down from the surrounding hills by Coyote upon the safe delivery of James’s son:

I have set his feet on soft ground;
I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders of the world.