The Water Tower

About the Book

About fifty years ago, on a cold morning at the end of winter, a heavy man about forty arrives in a small town on the Canadian prairies, and declares his intention to build a water tower in the town. He lodges in the house of the old matriarch and principal landowner of the town, for years now confined to a wheel chair by arthritis; with whom he develops a closeness no one else can understand. Harry, her son, a bachelor pushing forty, lives in the same house. He runs the general store which his dead father established, and is the mayor of the town, to whom people come with their problems; new problems, many of them, caused by the stranger, who..as the tower, built with the hired help of the young men of the town,rises into the sky..breaks roughly, destructively through the boundaries of the lives of many people in the town.. Harry is opposed to the stranger; but only in his head; doing nothing to restrain him, only observing him and all whom he bumps against, including himself, with ironic melancholy, as has been his way for years. Slowly the townspeople come to sense that the stranger is building the water tower for some unorthodox reason, which is not to do with them. But, angry and suspicious though they are, they all come for the 'celebration' of the completion of the tower on a hot night in June under the full moon

About the Author

Born in Winnipeg and lived there for twenty years. Not often since. After university in Britain, and some European wandering, he lived in Greece for some years, on an island, writing. Returned to Canada, to live on the west coast, where he began to write plays. THE WATER TOWER is his first novel.