[In the following excerpt, Early criticizes Ferron's The Juneberry Tree for containing too many details, but states that "it has beauties enough."]

"I am called Tinamer de Portanqueu. I am not the daughter of nomads or gypsies." So begins Jacques Ferron's brief novel of childhood and childhood's end. First published in French in 1970, it now appears in the "French Writers of Canada" series undertaken by Harvest House to make more Quebec fiction available in English translation. The Juneberry Tree is not self-consciously a story of Quebec: there are no priests, revolutionaries, swarming mulots or families of emaciated urchins, though there is a burning cathedral, attesting perhaps to the vitality of cultural archetypes. The novel is a curious hybrid of fable, dream and monograph.

While Tinamer is no Ishmael, she does survive terrors and voids which threaten to whelm her under. From the viewpoint of her twentieth year she evokes and analyzes her experience as a six-year-old when the wood behind her home was an enchanted world presided over by a benign thaumaturge, her father, Leon de Portanqueu. Their relationship is the heart of the tale. Their wonderland, "the good side of things" according to the myth they cherish, is set over against "the bad side of things," the mundane world of asphalt streets as yet unexplored by Tinamer, into which her father ventures daily to maintain his wife and child. The fairy-tale richness of Tinamer's earliest vision of life is conveyed with unsentimental delicacy:

When night had fallen and my father had set up his telescope in the yard, he said to me, "Tinamer, do you see the moon?" It was emerging fully round from behind the leaves, amazed to be larger than the sun. Certainly I saw it. It was rising noiselessly in the sky before our eyes. I said nothing. Why would I have answered such a question? The higher it rose the smaller it grew. My father said to me, "When the moon is full, can you believe that you only see half of it?" I remained silent. He had finished adjusting his lens and was now looking at the Sea of Tranquility, the wood, the yard, and at his side, his little daughter standing quietly with dew on her feet.

For the child, the wood is inhabited by marvellous presences—a phantom, a compass, a Juneberry tree—which glide in and out of the tale, glowing with a mysterious significance destined to vanish as childhood passes. While Ferron reworks the familiar story of the Little Girl Lost, with its echoes of Goldilocks, Alice and others, he generally avoids triteness. Upon "the bad side of things," the fabulous shapes of centaurs and villains are superimposed by the father's words and the child's imagination. Ferron's theme is the value of our parents' love in our gropings for identity, and he stresses the ambiguous nature of our human minds, to which we become both heirs and victims.

The greater part of The Juneberry Tree proceeds with verve and a prodigality of incidental detail which distinguishes it from Ferron's fine collection, Tales from the Uncertain Country, where economy and precision impart tension and point to his narration. Nevertheless, the episodic development in the novel recalls his virtuosity in the shorter form, and at times it seems to me that Ferron includes fragments which should be more effectively burnished, and published elsewhere. A whole chapter on the Portanqueu lineage remains flat and vaguely rendered, even if intended as a parody of earnest genealogy or of mythmaking. Ferron's verbal wit may be enough to sustain the French version, but as the translator's footnotes indicate, this quality is diminished in the English text.

Toward the end of the novel, Ferron suddenly brings in a bitter indictment of the soul-wrecking machinery established by society for orphans and cast-off children. We learn that Tinamer's father works as a "jailer" at Mont-Thabor, a psychiatric hospital where his compassion is especially focussed on a youth whose potential has been devastated by confinement to institutions since infancy. This revelation of Leon as an entrenched idealist perpetually saddened by contemporary life, coincides with the inevitable rupture of Tinamer's enchanted world and her disillusionment with her father when she begins school and acquires a first-hand impression of "the bad side of things." A few pages report the deaths of her father and mother, and at the very end we return to Tinamer at twenty, studying "psycho-pedagogy" and summarizing for herself and for us the meaning of her Proustian reveries. Here the language becomes clotted and pretentious, an irritation even if intended as a measure of her exile from the magic realms.

Jacques Ferron obviously shares the revulsion of the Portanqueus, father and daughter, from the atrocities wrought and impending among us. The Juneberry Tree, like Tales from the Uncertain Country, is in some ways a pessimistic book, but its pessimism is limited. Tinamer's final recognition is of the incalculable value of her fortunate childhood to her perplexed humanity and her personal equilibrium. The art of the story is similarly mixed. Ferron seeks to graft upon the fragile perspectives of tale and fable the ponderous formulations of theoretical prose. Though The Juneberry Tree splinters under this weight, it has beauties enough.