The Atoner of Alberni by Ed Cepka

“I started this story many years ago intending it to be a pioneer saga much like The Living by Annie Dillard or the novels of our Newfoundland authors,” debut novelist and retired west coast architect Ed Cepka writes in the Afterword of The Atoner of Alberni. “But then Larry showed up and reality shifted and things progressed from there.”

“I started this story many years ago intending it to be a pioneer saga much like The Living by Annie Dillard or the novels of our Newfoundland authors…But then Larry showed up and reality shifted and things progressed from there.”

The first utterance by Larry, the raucous novel’s restless narrator, indicates just how far things did progress from the book’s early days as a sturdy pioneer saga: “I’m grateful for this cell and its vinyl padded walls and floor that they laughably justify so that I don’t harm myself.”

Cepka also calls his novel a black comedy. And, well, I dunno. For me, the novel is too warmhearted and generous to fit the definition comfortably: comedy, yes; black, not so much.

For me, the novel is too warmhearted and generous to fit the definition comfortably: comedy, yes; black, not so much.

As the story unfolded, I caught traces of comic modes with long literary roots in Canada (Leacock, Davies, Richler, Kroetsch, Atwood); and the telltales of that genre, to paraphrase Northrop Frye, are the ridiculing of a lack of self-knowledge and a pointing to freedom from enslavement to a predictable, self-imposed pattern of behaviour. Cepka’s key characters are folly-prone. They’re deluded egotists. They’re conniving and exploitative. Yet the telling of the tale is often wittily lighthearted; and Larry’s personal evolution suggests a guy who is gradually—very gradually—attaining some degree of enlightenment.

Anyhow, back to the cell and the vinyl padded wall. Shortly after that first statement, Larry, who describes himself as “living on a higher plane” and “a metaphysician,” poses the obvious question: “Why am I in padded cell?” He adds: “We’ll get to that later. I have a story to tell.” And what a story it is. (From the horse’s mouth too: Larry claims to have direct access to the memories of the story’s subject, a man long dead.)

Larry’s only other concern is the cat-and-mouse he plays with his bumbling psychiatrist. He has time to kill.

But first, he recalls his own birth in the ‘50s—an “unpredictable world of shifting foundations and variable certainties.” Larry, “a poster-boy for normality” with a “fertile imagination” who is also a “victim of intergenerational trauma,” soon learned the he possesses a deep kinship with “powerful forces that transcended the mundane.” He has powers, in short. Such as causing an earthquake when he was born. “It wasn’t an elegant earthquake but it was my first,” Cepka writes, with a grin. Larry’s self-portraiture and the reader’s belief in it tussle throughout the novel. A superman, a chronic liar, psychotic: weighing the options is part of the fun of the reading experience.

Such as causing an earthquake when he was born. “It wasn’t an elegant earthquake but it was my first,” Cepka writes, with a grin.

Larry’s other story begins with “the third son of an English country gentleman,” Henry Cox, his grandfather—a “rich and varied morass of compulsions and meanness” and “classic mean old bugger.” Cox lands in Victoria circa 1910 and quickly learns the “real game there was land.” He buys ten acres of bog on the “wild side of Vancouver Island,” better known now as Port Alberni, a mill town with a mill town’s reputation. Cox finds towering trees (“cathedral-like” and “mysterious, sublime and otherworldly”); soon after, he develops a “manic desire” to mow them down and a megalomania that turned “a mild-mannered man … into a grade-A bastard.” The “art of the deal,” in his case, is to con anyone—rich, poor, white, Indigenous.

The titular atoner is of course Larry, who like any highly privileged individual with a conscience, wants to undo historical damages. His path is circuitous (including a decade spent in meditation half the world away); clear courses of action and wisdom continue to elude him.

The titular atoner is of course Larry, who like any highly privileged individual with a conscience, wants to undo historical damages.

Told with a propulsive confidence, the novel’s only missteps involve brevity. Larry’s parents, for example, are practically apparitions. Similarly, Larry briefly struggles with his sexual identity. He comes out and from then on, the novel studiously avoids the topic.

Clever, funny, and agreeably odd, The Atoner of Alberni has much to recommend it. I was glad for Larry too, not least because his character led Ed Cepka on a path the arrived far, far from the pioneer saga he’d once envisioned.

Edward Cepka was raised In Port Alberni and while at university worked summers in the Alberni Valley’s sawmill, plywood mill, pulp mill and logging operations. As he pursued a career in architecture in Vancouver and latterly at the University of British Columbia, the stories, legends and tall tales of the place he grew up in never left him. Cepka retains a soft spot in his heart for the actual Alberni Valley, fictionalized in his novel. Cepka wrote many drafts of The Atoner of Alberni over the years but only completed it upon his retirement. Retaining a home in Vancouver, he now lives mostly on Vancouver Island at the mouth of the Chemainus River, in a house he designed, and dreams of the glory days of his hometown that both did and didn’t happen.

Publisher: Granville Island Publishing (October 30, 2025)
Paperback 5.5″ x 7.75″ | 256 pages
ISBN: 9781989467770

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.