Victorian Vicar Meets Baby Boomer's Gen Y Offspring

Kyle Welland becomes the focal point between the staunch Victorian outlook of his Great-grandfather Christopher Dryden and the moral relativism of his Gen Y son Andrew. Caught in this no-man's-land, he struggles with his own vacillating sense of purpose and identity, coming to see himself as a point on the graph of Western Civilization's decline.

His son is addicted to pot and video games. He's flunking high school, unemployed, and seemingly prepared to live at home indefinitely. Surly, slovenly, undisciplined, he seems determined to do everything he can not to live up to any of Kyle and Doreen Wellands' expectations.

The Wellands' relationship, which was strained to begin with, is pushed to the breaking point by their different approaches to their disastrous, wayward son. She wants Kyle to take a 'tough love' approach; he wants her to stop her 'incessant nagging', which he feels is damaging their relationship with Andrew. They fight constantly with each other and with their son.

Life is hell.

Given the task of revising his Great-grandfather's memoir, which must be completed before his aging mother passes away or loses her mental faculties, Kyle decides - somewhat resentfully - to take a holiday trip to Barkerville to do some research and experience the setting where Reverend Dryden proved his missionary metal and met his future bride.

At Doreen's very strong behest - she insists she's going to suffer a breakdown unless she gets some time to herself - he forces Andrew to join him on this genealogical quest, which Doreen characterizes as a 'father son thing' while Kyle feels it is certain to be an ordeal.

Throughout the novel Kyle will be trying to trace the lines of social history from Christopher Dryden to Andrew Welland - unconsciously at first, but more and more pointedly. As he begins to flesh out Christopher's religious idealism, his romanticism, his courage, and almost irrational optimism, Kyle finds himself regretting some of the values he and his son never had; even as he sees quite clearly that Christopher's Victorian mode would be utterly unfeasible in the 21st Century.

Kyle discovers that the real quest is for him to love his son, and see the spirit of Christopher Dryden living on four generations removed.

Christopher Dryden's Great Grandson

The structure of Stained Glass is beginning to take shape. I had been considering a straight historical novel, written in the First Person from Reverend Christopher Dryden's Point of View. Two problems presented themselves:

• Modern readers, who are impatient and quick to judge, might not see the relevance of the novel to their own fast paced lives;
• I would have been confined to the present tense and Christopher's Victorian perspective, which would be narrowed not only by his world view, but also by his experience and the technology of the times.

My solution - a device that has a long literary tradition - will be to have Christopher's correspondence inherited by his great-grandson Kyle Welland, a reporter in his mid 50s, who works in Vancouver. Kyle's aging mother, Christopher's granddaughter, summons him to the family home in Penticton, BC. She hands him a metal tin, which contains a packet of papers and photographs, along with what looks like a manuscript.

He has just inherited the never published autobiography and correspondence of Reverend Christopher Dryden. On top of the stack is a note from Christopher, explaining the materials and letting his descendants know he decided against publishing the work because he considered it a vanity to do so, and because he wanted to protect the reputations of 'many who have attained happiness and status in the world, and would be injured by my scribbling'.

Kyle's role, and the express wishes of his mother, will be to understand this history and make it relevant to his own life and times. She wants him to write a book based upon the 'fantastic life story' of his great-grandfather. Really she wants him to get a grip on his own life, which is teetering on the brink of collapse, even as he enters his retirement years.

I'm thinking Stained Glass will be written in the First Person from Kyle Welland's Point of View. But liberal excerpts from Christopher Dryden's never-published manuscript will give the novel a second Point of View, that of a 19th Century Anglican missionary to the Cariboo. Other Points of View will also be developed by taking quotes from the stack of correspondence in the tin Maggie Welland bequeaths to Kyle.

His personal connection to this forgotten ancestor will deepen as Kyle researches, contextualizes and writes about the life and times of Reverend Christopher Dryden. Kyle will begin to develop a vision of the long-forgotten, shattered stained glass window that had been installed in St. Saviour's for so brief a time during his great-grandfather's period as vicar.