My doubts [about The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne] come from a feeling that, while Hodgins sustains the vividness of his writing and the surreal wildness of his humour, he seems already to be settling into a kind of high-grade fictional formula. In a disquieting way, The Resurrection reads like The Invention's non-identical twin or—paying due attention to Hodgins' choice of titles—its reincarnation in another year and place.

The echoes from one book to the other depend on far more than the fact that Jack Hodgins has chosen to place his novel once again in the Vancouver Island world of frontier eccentrics whose feeling and spirit he renders so well. They are echoes of structure, of plot, of mythology, even of character; the similarities are not exact, but they are strong enough to haunt one through the reading of The Resurrection and to make one constantly...