From a distance Nelson, British Columbia is an idyllic community of new agers and aging hippies, folded away in the Selkirk Mountains. People move to Nelson to escape frenetic city life and to live their own way; when they leave, they remember the place fondly. No town, however, is idyllic to the children born and raised there. No town is immune to tragedy. In Never Going Back, Antonia Banyard’s atmospheric tale, estranged friends return to Nelson to observe the ten-year anniversary of a layered tragedy that still entangles them all.
Never Going Back is as much a mediation on memory and guilt as it is a novel. It examines a community’s responsibility for the happiness and well-being of its outcasts, and mourns the personal cost of the cruelties we commit to save ourselves. I think you will enjoy it, so long as you don’t expect sweeping drama or large epiphanies. The book begins with the death of a culprit and ends with a birth, but these are bookends of a diffuse narrative driven more by ideas than by plot. The tragedy, after all took place ten years before the story begins, so the drama comes to us as memories that, while still raw, are incapable of causing further harm. You’d be hard pressed to assign the role of main character. Siobhan’s perspective begins the book; we then meet Evan and Lance. But none of these characters is any more capable of taking hold of the story than they are of taking hold of their lives. Banyard describes Nelson as “not a backwoods town, so much as an eddy in a stream.” These characters might well be leaves stuck in that eddy and the resolution, satisfying, though small, is that by the last page all three will be able, finally, to free themselves and move on.