The press release for Gail Robinson’s God of the Plains says that its main character is Emma, a girl born in Saskatchewan in the 1930s. That isn’t true, and therein lies both the strength and the weakness of this first novel.

The book’s real main character is a windmill, the tallest around, which pumps not only water but also some strange energy that might be evil (or so Emma and others think). The expense of drilling it ruined a Scottish immigrant who blocked its works when he walked away from the land in 1893. But in 1910 the mill starts turning – and moaning – again. (“If Satan could be heard singing, he’d sing like that,” says one of the characters.) The water it pumps runs red during times of war. Emma, quixotically, believes that she can stop the Second World War if only she can jump from the mill’s topmost rung.

The date the windmill starts up again surely was chosen with care: Virginia Woolf famously said that human nature changed in 1910, and Robinson clearly has read Woolf. She uses sentence fragments to hurry her story along, so that at times it seems as though characters’ thoughts are blown away by the wind. Her descriptions of the beauty and the impersonality of the landscape are also rife with Woolfian images. Like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, the book is crowded with characters briefly sketched, whom we follow over decades.

The book is a pleasure to read, but it would have been much better had Robinson included fewer news flashes about the progress of the war. That way the symbols and the images would stand out in greater relief, and she would have succeeded brilliantly in combining the particular and the familiar with the mythic. – Mary Soderstrom, a writer in Montreal.