With James’ fate still unclear for the reader, the novel flashes back in time, detailing the twins’ personalities and the family dynamic they grew up with, rife with silence, tension, and bad dreams. 

Weekly letters from the battle fields, which “James would carry […]  around with him in his pocket until […] dirty and thin as a moth’s wing along the folds,” allow the reader to experience the war through Dave’s eyes  in all its gruesome inhumanity:

“The bomb had killed his whole family. The kid’s leg was fucked up, he couldn’t walk. Eric and I went to package him up and take him back to the hospital on base…you’ve never seen a kid’s face like that before…white with fear and blood loss and whatever else…you see that a lot. Shock turns people into a bunch of fucking ghosts.”

Ghosts are prominent throughout The Crane, a title that spawns from a wooden crane that Dave’s friend, Eric, carved to give to the injured boy in the letter. The boy rejects the gift, staring vacantly ahead, ghostlike, which prompts Eric to vow to search for his estranged mother in Newfoundland, if he gets out alive. James, upon receiving this news and learning of Eric’s death, decides to carry on the intention. Frequent bird symbolism in the book can be read as a metaphor for the entrapment that James carries with him, and highlights  the freedom he yearns for. 

James has been plagued with dreams of fire throughout his life. One morning, after going to the kitchen after one such nightmare, Mrs. Chafe asks him if the hag got him. James is flummoxed.

 “‘You don’t have the hag wherever it is you come from?’ writes Kidd.

“He looked at her face to see if she was joking…things that came out of people’s mouths here made it clear the past hadn’t gone anywhere. Here the past reclined in a smoking jacket, pointing out where the flowers should go and asking for the evening paper and a bourbon.”

The novel, despite grappling with serious and heavy themes, is peppered with humour and astute observations of the unique nuances about Newfoundlanders’ perceptions of newcomers and vice versa, and with rough and tumble, loving characters.

It is also a crash course in American war history and the light trail of generational trauma leading to the over-the-top patriotism that has plagued the United States for centuries. President Nixon, described as “an illiterate arsehole…clever as a puppet master…so hated on campuses that the secret service wouldn’t let him make appearances…Hunter S. Thompson said Nixon has the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad, and I’d have to agree,” sounds all too familiar today.

This is an epic read, ripe with heartache, healing, and hard lessons.