A Long Walk With Fate by Liz Torlée

Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin

Torlée’s third and latest novel offers glimpses into the art world, exotic locales (decor, culture, and cuisines), philosophical concepts, and the interweaving of lives and histories to illustrate one universal theme: the complexity of motherhood.

Part One introduces several disparate characters who revolve around each other like planets in the night sky. At times, it’s hard to keep them straight. Twenty-six-year-old Aiden Quinn, the protagonist, is a despondent artist. His aunt, the woman who raised him when his mother couldn’t, has just died and, in his grief, he’s kicked out his girlfriend. A photograph in a magazine inspires a meeting in Vancouver with a man with an uncanny resemblance to Aiden’s long-deceased father. Turns out Uncle Stephen is “one of Canada’s best-known painters.” When Stephen realizes his nephew’s artistic potential, he offers him a chance at a new life and Aiden accepts, moving from gritty Downtown Eastside Vancouver to the glamour and glitz of life working with the El Hassans.

This is Torlée’s third book and, although it’s not described as a series, each of these character-driven books builds on another. Stephen was introduced in her first book, The Way Things Fall: a novel. We also meet Gabrielle Mazhar, an unhinged horsewoman who’s inherited an Egyptian stud farm; along with the perfect family, rich, hotelier Dominic El Hassan, his beautiful wife Amina, and their adorable children. Amina is the centre of Book Two, In Love With The Night. I’ve not read the first two books and was able to follow the story, but it would have been richer and simpler to digest if I had, due to the number of characters and detailed backstories. However, a few chapters in, things gel as we begin to travel between countries and locations.

In Part Two, we find ourselves in South America. Dominic’s in Patagonia with his perfect family. He takes his rather psychic son, Luka, to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to view the night sky, and on their return, they meet up with Gabrielle who’s flown to Patagonia to check on horses. This chance meeting inspires a diabolical plan that propels us into Part Three. Now, we’re in Morocco, where we glimpse the true natures of our flawed characters and the lengths they’re willing to go to get what they desire. Here too, we meet Fate: “A living, breathing force out there orchestrating the details of our lives. It separates people and it brings them together.”

Dominic, who feels like a second protagonist, has an ethereal quality and is able to articulate this concept of Fate perfectly. “Through the weaving of the countless paths of fate, the lives of the three of them under the stars tonight, the lives of people they loved in the past and would love in the future—all were meant to intersect, fuse inextricably together.”

It is the desire to be a mother that fuels Gabrielle’s criminality, and the natural force of motherhood that propels pregnant Amina to save her daughter. Aiden cannot forgive his mother for disappearing and leaving her sister to mother him, even though she’s still alive and has been desperately trying to reconnect.

To summarize this story does it an injustice. Torlée’s a masterful writer and her rich and rhythmic, cinematic prose propels us through art galleries and exotic locations into these dramatically twisted lives. The book is like a living photograph—the reader becomes immersed in the intrinsic beauty of the far landscape then zooms into the quiet closeness of a character’s soul in an intimate moment. Through photographs and paintings we are drawn in. For example, take this description of Italy, drawn from a photograph: “Here was the house itself, a fading creamy yellow, caper flowers growing tenaciously in cracks of stone, frothing mounds of wild lavender in the gardens at the side. The pictures showed terraced vineyards and lilac skies, the medieval towers of the walled city in the distance.”

Torlée loves stars, the concept of fate, travel and the desert—motifs that define her books. In fact, she met her husband Jürgen in Cairo, on the edge of the desert with the pyramids in sight. They now live in midtown Toronto.

Lovers of travel and culture will become immersed; in fact, this would be a good book to pack on your journeys. Armchair travellers will love the tangible sketches of Chile, Egypt, Morocco, even Toronto and Vancouver, and the in-depth emotional journeys of these divergent, yet intimately connected souls, as they take A Long Walk With Fate.

A Long Walk With Fate is published by Blue Denim Press.

*****

W.L. Hawkin writes “myth, magic, and mayhem” into her mystery/thrillers and small-town romantic suspense novels. Like Torlée, she loves to walk in the footsteps of her characters.