Seven Oaks Magazine.

With a vibrant, multifaceted narrator and strong plot, Dennis Bock’s second novel, The Communist’s Daughter, has the framework for a great read. Getting under the skin and into the head of Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor whose political passion took him into the heart of China’s Communist Revolution, Bock breathes life into the medical inventor, and communist champion. To be sure, it is a novel – the cover and spine explicitly bear that label, and Bock’s acknowledgements clarify that, though based roughly on Bethune and some of his real acquaintances and cohorts, other characters and plot details are strictly literary inventions. Writes Bock, “the aesthetic concerns of storytelling often outweighed the more standard historical versions of the Bethune story.” Freeing himself from factual confines, The Communist’s Daughter has full room to blossom as a creative work. Does it?

Coming after the award-winning The Ash Garden, Bock’s second novel unravels an intricate storyline. Framed as a letter from Bethune to an estranged daughter, the novel authentically captures the voice of a man labouring for his ideals with limited supplies and declining health. Bethune lays out his past and the path that brought him from small-town Ontario to the Great War, into Spain’s Civil War, and eventually to China, where, between near round-the-clock front-line surgeries with Mao’s Eighth Route Army, he writes to his abandoned child. The details of Bethune’s relationship with the girl’s mother, Kajsa von Rothman, a real-life Swedish woman who piqued government suspicions during Spain’s Civil War, and the driving reveal of why Bethune left them both, effectively pull readers through the story.

These two driving narratives are skillfully interwoven, creating the effect that the fictionalized doctor is eager to tell both, turning to one when the memories of the other are temporarily too painful to relive. Bethune is dynamic and humanely self-contradictory: an atheist who frequently (and not altogether sarcastically) references scripture, he loathes his father, a tyrannical Presbyterian preacher, yet grows into a hot-tempered man given to his own bouts of violence. In his work in China’s northern hills, he is as a political comrade but cultural outsider, simultaneously admiring the sacrifice soldiers make and abhorring the local taboo on giving blood.

Less effective is Bock’s handling of certain secondary characters. Kajsa is effectively portrayed as a feisty woman who disregards mores on a woman’s place in war-torn Spain, but other major players remain shadowy. Bethune’s potentially complex parents prove to be frustrating characters with flashes of fascinating details that are never fully realized. Bethune’s mother bursts into life in the novel’s early pages – a gentle, softspoken, God-fearing woman whom he first remembers attacking an old man with a bag of cinnamon buns while she cradles the young boy in her other arm. Rather than gaining additional texture and depth, she shadows unmemorably in and out of his childhood recollections, apparently devoid of an opinion of her husband’s abusive reign over Bethune, the household, and his parishioners. And we never learn why the young mother might have attacked an elderly gent with fresh bread, making her most intriguing moment as fulfilling as a promised dessert that never quite arrives.

Similarly, hints are dropped that Bethune’s father is a tyrant of such epic proportions that the family must frequently move when parishioners grow intolerant of his fury. Yet Bock lets his narrator off the hook too easily, allowing Bethune to get away with only one substantial childhood recollection of this father. Such a man would have been larger than life for a young Bethune, but on the page, lack of detail makes him smaller than he should be.

Even Bethune’s generally frank treatment of himself occasionally lacks depth. Painstaking in his detail of time spent in Spain, his previous relationship, and the trauma of the Great War’s trenches, Bethune fails to fully deliver in the matter of his own temper. Though he recounts a few incidents in his past, the narrator generally shies away from the details of his current tyranny. He fails to illustrate any real cruelty in his medical work, instead summarizing how he is feared by his underqualified medical staff.

In contrast, Bethune’s depiction of Ho, the Chinese youth who accompanies him as a self-appointed assistant, is consistently touching. Perhaps Bock’s Bethune looks at Ho as a substitute for the child he is estranged from, for Bethune writes of him with tender, gentle detail, recalling how Ho provides lavender-and-mint-scented motor oil as makeshift ink when the typewriter’s cartridge runs out, and Ho’s pride at perfecting Bethune’s ideal boiled egg. Perhaps because Ho’s story is present, rather than a flashback, perhaps because the boy is Bethune’s last meaningful human relationship, perhaps because Ho adopts Bethune in a reversal of Bethune’s abandonment of his biological daughter – this character leaps off the page and into life.

The Communist’s Daughter might be a stronger text if more characters in Bethune’s periphery – and Bethune himself – were consistently handled with similarly telling, if spare, details. Still, the mystery of Bethune’s failed relationship and fatherhood, and the unfolding of his adventurous life, help bolster the book’s less successful elements, providing a somewhat satisfying literary journey.