I migrated to Australia some 15 years ago, but have continued to return home three or four times a year — invariably in winter. It's ironic, perhaps, that it should have been from this extraordinarily hot island continent that I began to negotiate my way through my semi-autobiographical novel, Flying in Silence, set in Montreal. Why is it that we so often need not just separation, but a radical change of scenery, in order to see where we've come from? And how was it that an English country like Australia should have been so useful to me in my quest to look at language issues in Quebec — and especially, to tell the story of a child caught between landscapes, languages and allegiances?

In many ways it makes perfect sense. The sub-tropical climate has had the effect of making me long for the clear, crisp cold of Montreal, when blizzards could turn the landscape white in seconds. The remembrance has been visceral, and I have used this greedily in my book. Just as we are often attracted to opposites, so it's been with Australia, opening a door to memory.

We often need exile to talk about landscapes that are too close. And certainly this was the case with the subject of Flying in Silence. For close to 15 years now I have struggled to talk about the distance that language and travel can produce on memory. My novel is autobiographical in many key dimensions, though it is also fiction in important ways. But the autobiographical component, ironically, was given voice by my migrant status in Australia, where subtle differences in language, and the process of thinking, for so many years, about how we are understood — or not — helped me, finally, to shape the story of a son who abandons — betrays? — his roots, his language, his heritage.
Flying in Silence, a novel about a child whose father doesn't speak English and whose mother doesn't speak French, is in my view, a novel about mistranslations. In both comic and darker moments, characters speak but aren't necessarily heard. Confessions are made but aren't grasped until it's too late. And one of the metaphors for this is the father's continual building of structures which he never completes. Modelled on my own father, the fictional character is continuously knocking together temporary walls, balconies, roofs, only to tire of the effort and move on to other things, leaving incompletion in his wake. The store he builds as a four foot by four foot shack in an empty field on the edge of town, grows monstrously, developing tentacles and appendages: a basement, a second storey, a balcony which becomes a bedroom, a veranda that becomes a living room. But nothing is stable, and as the family struggles to survive, the house and store are sub-divided, rented out, transformed or abandoned. This, it seems to me, is how so many live their lives. We branch out in different directions, change our minds, err in our decisions or lose interest altogether. And the struc