Audrey Thomas's Coming Down from Wa begins with its protagonist's recollection of a childhood gift: when William Kwame MacKenzie turned six he received a box of 64 crayons from his paternal grandparents in Montreal. Marvelling at the colours suddenly available to him, he made his first forays into art, only to be stifled by a Sunday school teacher who insisted that trees must be green and little boys must colour inside the lines.

MacKenzie recalls his box of colours and the abortion of his early art career as he makes his faltering way through the intense heat and equally intense hues of Africa's Gold Coast, ostensibly researching a master's degree thesis on lost-wax casting; the frustrated artist, now in his early 20s, has fallen back on a career in art history. But William's real agenda in Africa is to unearth the guilty secret that caused his once optimistic and open-hearted parents to become the cringing and brittle pair of shades he left behind him in Victoria.

As young volunteer educators with an organization called Canadian Overseas Workers in the mid-1960s, William's parents were stationed at St. Claire's, a Catholic girls' school, in an isolated town called Wa. William himself was conceived there, though his mother returned to Montreal for the delivery. But shortly after she and her new son arrived back in Africa, something happened. The family returned to Canada, but fled to the West coast where they existed in a state of self-imposed exile, cut off from friends and relatives alike for the next two decades. Now, as a young man, William searches out the sins of his parents in a bid to understand his past and therefore himself.

That plot summary should make clear why Thomas's novel often reads like Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man meets Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like those classics, Coming Down from Wa's narrative is often long on imagery and short on drama. Indeed, William's trials on the road to Wa are at times so loaded with imagery, one wonders if the tale should be read as allegory rather than the coming-of-age story it purports to be. One could make the case that the novel's disguised theme is Canada's loss of innocence vis à vis foreign aid to the Third World—what seemed possible and even noble in the 1960s has proven enormously complicated from both pragmatic and ethical points of view.

Luckily, though, Thomas's talent for producing the telling image is what also keeps her tale, allegorical or not, compelling. Her Africa is one experienced first-hand, and the authenticity of her portrait informs every sentence. Those crayons—their colours, their smells, and even their names—weave their way throughout the tale in intriguing ways, as does the lost-wax casting process—an inspired echo of the change in William's parents. What was once warm and pliable is gone, replaced by a steely, unforgiving duplicate.