Move Over, Viola

Christopher Dainton, an emergency room physician and author of THE EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICAL MISSION, THE SALSA PROJECT, and the novel DEEP RAPTURE, tries something a little different in MOVE OVER, VIOLA, about his mother’s discrimination battle with Bell Canada which ended up in front of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 1987. Dainton calls it a “fanciful hybrid of fiction and memoir” stylistically inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s CAT’S CRADLE. Told in short chapters in sections alternating from his point of view, a bi-racial man in modern Canada, and his mother’s point of view, a Black woman whose brains got her out of Trinidad and away from a difficult father, to Prince Edward Island, and later Toronto, it explores both their journeys, remembrances, and questions with nuance and detail. Dainton’s writing is strong, and the detail and exploration of the conflicting positions compelling, engaging, and thought-provoking. Trial arguments are re-created into scenes from the transcripts into scenes, embellished by Dainton’s imagination. The ending is abrupt, reminding the reader that life doesn’t tie up in neat little bows the way fiction often does, providing no easy conclusions.