Book Review: Echoes of Attrition by James Wm Anderson

Echoes of Attrition by James Wm Anderson is a quiet, weathered, and surprisingly tender novel about two broken men, the sea, and the long erosion that a life in uniform leaves behind.

It opens with one of the more memorable character introductions in recent indie fiction: Kery Ferguson, seventy-two years old, standing on the deck of his run-down 42-foot Whitby sailboat off the coast of Playa del Carmen, swirling rum in a stainless travel mug stamped with the logo of his old police force, already drunk and aware it’s far too early. A retired Canadian cop and widower who fled to Mexico after his wife’s death and proceeded to drink and gamble his entire pension away in nine years, Kery is now broke, technically homeless, and carrying a secret bulge under his right rib that the oncologist warned him about a year ago. His estranged son Clay is flying in that afternoon, and Kery has rehearsed a pitch: a snorkel-and-scuba charter business, six passengers a trip, enough to refit the boat and finally get his life together. He knows in his heart he won’t.

The novel’s title does double work, and Anderson earns both meanings. “Attrition” is the slow grinding-down of a career spent absorbing other people’s worst days; “echoes” is the way that damage repeats itself down a generation. Because Clay, arriving stiff and weary at the Cancún airport, is his father rebuilt a generation later.

Fifty years old, newly pensioned out of the Edmonton Police Service as a deputy inspector, Clay is in the wreckage of his own life: untreated PTSD that turned him into a man perpetually spoiling for a fight, a marriage to Lynne that collapsed when she finally packed two suitcases and left, and a son — Buggy, who now prefers to be called John — who isn’t speaking to him. Anderson stages their reunion with a beautifully bleak piece of dramatic irony: Clay strides out of the terminal, scans the crowd, sees no sign of his father, and walks straight past a snoring “homeless bum” on a bench without a second glance. The reader understands what Clay does not. These are two men so hollowed out by the same profession that a son can look directly at his own father and fail to recognize him.

What makes the book work is that Anderson resists the easy version of this story. There is no tidy redemptive montage. Instead, the middle section finds the two men cautiously, almost accidentally, building something together — “Ferguson and Son Adventure Sailing,” a charter operation centered on a wildlife-rich cove they christen the Laguna Secreta. For a stretch it actually works: the first charter posts a glowing review with twenty photos, Kery learns to field bookings on a laptop, the nightmares recede, and both men feel themselves landing on their feet in a life neither knew they wanted. Anderson is honest enough to undercut it with the thing they can’t outrun — they drink themselves stupid celebrating, and Kery keeps his shirt on now to hide the jaundice and the swelling.

The moment Clay finally understands the scale of it isn’t a speech; it’s physical. Kery, who never relinquishes the oars, who is always the rower and the helmsman, lets his son take them. That small surrender of control tells Clay everything before Kery says the words: stage four, spread to the spine and aorta, inoperable.

The death scene is the novel’s emotional center and its finest piece of writing. Clay sits up with his father through the final hours, holding his hand, listening to the breathing go shallow, and — because there’s nothing else to do — pulls a book off the shelf. It’s The Old Man and the Sea, one of his favorites, and he notes that his father actually resembles the Hemingway photo on the cover; Kery, who had spent the whole novel cultivating exactly that grizzled-sailor mystique, would have loved the comparison.

When the breathing simply stops around eleven o’clock, Clay’s goodbye is four plain words. Anderson handles the whole sequence with admirable restraint — the wet cheeks, the joint rolled in his father’s deck chair under the Milky Way, the practical mental checklist of who to call. He later spreads half the ashes over the side of the boat in the cove where the business began and flies the other half home to a Celebration of Life he doesn’t want to attend.

The novel’s back half belongs to Clay alone, and it becomes something closer to a meditation on recovery. Inheriting the Hopeless Romantic, he sails it north — across the Gulf, toward Key West and back — and the long solitary passages become the arena where he finally does the work he refused to do in Edmonton. Anderson’s portrait of trauma processing is genuinely thoughtful: rather than suppressing the intrusive memories of the calls, the assaults, the times he drew his Glock, Clay learns to let them surface, give them the attention they seem to want, and watch them evaporate.

It’s a credible, hard-won depiction of healing, threaded with grace notes — his father’s twenty-year service mug as a talisman, his ambivalent trust in the old mechanical wind-vane self-steering gear, and a stray cat he eventually names Gilligan after a waitress who reminds him of Mary-Ann. The ending lands exactly where it should: Clay returns to Playa, realizes he has fallen completely in love with the boat and the life, orders a new mast he intends to install himself, and offers the loyal beach boy Jaime a job — quietly resurrecting the dream that foundered “in the hands of two broken down drunks,” this time as a man who has decided it’s okay to not be okay and simply owns it.

The book is not without rough edges, and most of them are the kind a final copyedit pass would catch. The protagonist’s name slips between “Kery” and “Kerry,” a few sentences carry doubled words or comma splices, and the front-matter content note about PTSD contains a garbled line that muddies an important and clearly heartfelt warning. The structure — fifty-two very short chapters — keeps the pages turning but can feel choppy, and the back-half sailing sections, lovely as they are, occasionally circle the same reflective territory and lose some of the propulsion that the father-son first half generates so effortlessly. These are the marks of a manuscript that is nearly there rather than fully polished. They are also, notably, cosmetic; none of them touches the emotional truth of the thing.

That emotional truth is considerable. Anderson, who thanks a friend for vetting the sailing terms and writes with the specificity of someone who knows both boats and the world of first responders, has produced a moving and unpretentious novel about the cost of the job, the inheritance of trauma between fathers and sons, and the possibility of repair arriving late but not too late. It treats PTSD, alcoholism, estrangement, and a slow death with seriousness and without melodrama, and it earns its hard-won note of hope. For readers drawn to character-driven literary fiction — and for first responders and their families in particular, with the author’s own gentle caveat that it may cut close — Echoes of Attrition is well worth the crossing.

Rating: ★★★★½

Verdict: Echoes of Attrition by James Wm Anderson is a moving, salt-stained novel about two broken cops, a dying father, and a son learning to live with what the job left behind. Held back only by a manuscript that needs a final proofread and a slightly meandering back half, it succeeds where it counts most — as an honest, tender, and quietly hopeful portrait of trauma, reconciliation, and the long road back to oneself.