Hallowed hall

In this extremely Catholic novel, veteran Newfoundland writer Wayne Johnston takes aim at the repressive religious environment that formed — or deformed — his home province.

The title character and first-person narrator, Vivian Holloway, is a “novice” in the Catholic meaning of the term — a member of a religious order who has yet to take his or her vows.

It is 1947, and “Vivvy,” at age 28, has just returned to her family home, “the largest private residence in Newfoundland,” after eight years in a convent, failing to become a nun.

Apparently, belief in a Christian god is a prerequisite of the job.

Highly irreverent by nature if not nurture, Vivvy takes more pleasure in logic and language than she does in theology. A better title for S. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, she jokes, would be “I Guess You’ll Have to Take My Word for It.”

Her parents having died, Vivian is the youngest of 12 siblings, 10 of them male. One of Newfoundland’s most prominent families, the Holloways made their fortune in the cod fishery in the mid-19th century.

This generation of boys were all dispatched to the priesthood. Vivvy’s oldest sister, Freda, became a missionary doctor in Africa. But she returned home after her husband and his pregnant mistress died in a car crash. She came back with the illicit fruit of that union, a now-five-year-old boy, Ivan.

In exchange for her keep, Vivian will serve as Ivan’s tutor. It is thematically apt that Vivian and Ivan’s names are composed of the same letters.

When Vivian was Ivan’s age, she suffered a terrible experience that stunted her growth — she and Ivan are the same height — and left her facially disfigured.

She hides her injuries, even from herself, behind veils of different colours and fabrics, earning her the nickname Salomé after the veiled heroine of Oscar Wilde’s biblically themed 1891 play.

Johnston’s novel takes place over a week in Holloway Hall as Vivvy learns to love Ivan and pushes back against the authoritarian rule of Freda and her brothers.

Johnston devotes most of his 300 pages to an excavation of the past and the various characters associated with the Holloways.

We learn of Vivvy’s lonely childhood, Freda’s years in Africa and the influence of their various brothers, friends and servants.

This all leads to a revelation of the dark secrets that resulted in the long-buried Holloway family shame. Sex plays a big role in a novel that is, on some levels, about sexual repression.

The pre-Confederation Newfoundland setting will be familiar to readers of Johnston’s best-known novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), and its companion sequels, The Custodian of Paradise (2012) and First Snow, Last Light (2023).

With its reliance on mythic symbolism, the novel might remind Canadian readers of Robertson Davies’ 1970s Deptford Trilogy. Vivvy’s girlhood tragedy carries similar weight to the snowball thrown in the early pages of Davies’ Fifth Business.

Johnston, the author of 13 previous titles, among them a couple of memoirs, has long been a master of mellifluous prose (though his countless uses of the non-standard variant “alright” instead of “all right” seems anachronistic). Vivvy’s witty punning and ironic commentary give the book its primary zing.

But the fact that all the action takes place in the past — a common failing of literary novels — does make The Novice of Holloway Hall feel more tedious than it needs to be.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.