Anyone interested in French Canadian literature will want to read Gaétan Soucy’s The Immaculate Conception. Not only does it deal with many of the themes that preoccupied Quebec writers during the second half of the 20th century – Montreal slums, sexual repression, and symbolically charged fires that sweep away the past – it is a road map indicating where the prize-winning Soucy was headed from the beginning. The novel, published in French in 1994, was Soucy’s first, but it is the last of his four works to be translated into English.

The complicated story begins with a letter written by an undertaker to a friend in New York, detailing a massive fire that swept through a bar in Montreal’s riverfront industrial area, killing at least 30 people. The next morning a bank clerk takes his paraplegic father to see the ruins and is observed by three boys and then a teacher, Clémentine Clément. She is sure that the boys are up to no good, and warns her school’s principal, a handsome priest whom she has loved for years. The novel ends a week or so later, on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Clément is pregnant, possibly by the brother of the undertaker or perhaps by one of the boys or maybe (who knows in a novel like this?) by the Holy Spirit.

Soucy used many elements of this story in his later novels, including fires, snowstorms, males who may be females, wraith-like little girls, and young men mistaken about their origins. Two bit players in The Immaculate Conception – Rogatien W. and Justine Vilbroquais – are even at the centre of Vaudeville!, Soucy’s most recent novel.

The Immaculate Conception lacks the splendid wordplay, lyrical observations, and convincing weirdness of Soucy’s later books, though. It is as if he were learning his trade here. In fact, he gives some of the best descriptions – the fire victims die with “cackles of agony” and red-hot building stones are “glaciers of blood” – to an undertaker’s helper named Soucy. No doubt someone will use this fact in a future academic analysis of Soucy’s work. In the meantime, the novel gives his fans much to puzzle over, which is part of the pleasure of reading him.