A Simple Carpenter
“A Simple Carpenter,” by Dave Margoshes sunk me into a narrative hinting of a hero’s journey grounded in a realist setting and timeline. The story centers around a carpenter who succumbs with the crew on a ship to an invasive insect attack that leaves many perishing when they visit a remote island. Upon recovering, the carpenter finds that he has lost all memory of who he is and where he came from. Compellingly, despite his loss of identity, the carpenter finds himself able to understand a multitude of languages that will serve him throughout the novel. He is shipwrecked with his crew and finds himself the sole survivor clinging to life on a raft. When the raft is taken from him, he is washed ashore on an island, alone, except for a mythical creature who begins to visit him and convey knowledge, direction of being, almost a testing who will come to exist as a spiritual checkpoint and guide throughout his journey.
The carpenter recuperates next with a group of nuns who come to see the miracles that unfurl in his presence as divine. The carpenter had kept a journal of his time on the island and his encounter with the beast. The head nun takes this journal and sends it to Rome to be translated. The return of the original journal and the translation confirm their beliefs. In reading the journal he had kept on the island and mention of the supernatural beast; the nuns revere the carpenter as the next coming of Christ. When the carpenter is given access to the translated journal later on in the novel, he sees the manipulation and turning of his words to support a polemic of a second coming narrative. He leaves the nuns, maintaining his humility and rejecting all godly classifications and returns to a job he had taken as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Allowing himself to become embroiled between a Palestinian terrorist group and Jewish fronts, the carpenter abandons his post.
There is much moving on and letting go in this novel as the carpenter encounters strange and almost unbelievable groups of people, like a fable, “A Simple Carpenter,” braids together biblical fiction, magic realism and thriller plot components. I read through wanting to know the one hanging element of the novel for me, would he recover his memory and know who he is? This suspense lead me to realize that knowing oneself is not always so straightforward, what I was seeking for was overlooking that the quest itself was more important.
Dave Margoshes is a poet and fiction writer from Saskatchewan where he has spent thirty-five years of his life. His writings have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. He has published twenty books, fiction, nonfiction and poetry and was a finalist for the Journey Prize and the ReLit Prize. His book, “Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories,” won Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2007, A Book of Great Worth and Amazon.ca’s top hundred books for 2012. Margoshes earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Saskatchewan Arts Board in 2022. He resides near Saskatoon.
“A Simple Carpenter” is a novel that will leave the reader in contemplation and want more from the ending in knowing what will unfold for the carpenter when the prose has ceased. That longing and turning of the reader into inquiry is reflective of a well-written story. Other reviewers have shared that they want discussion questions on the novel’s ending and seek connection with other readers. The purpose of the story is just that, to push the reader to contemplate, reflect and grapple with their own understanding of the sacred amongst the mundane.
The plotline plays on society’s reaction to religious interpretations and holy phenomena and what we seek from these layers to apply meaning in our own lives. The political dynamics engaged with in this novel are timely and could offend, and that is the point. The manuscript was finished before Oct 7, 2023, making the immersion of this text into the world all the more poignant, unintentionally. How would different pockets of the world comprehend the sublime and divine? Would we identify if our own meanings are projected back on to the narrative? How much do we influence the story? How much does the story affect us?
Thank you to Dave Margoshes, Radiant Press and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
