The lack of understanding, mindless prejudice and fear of the early years of the AIDS crisis are recalled in vivid and infuriating detail in Darren Greer’s gut-wrenching novel Advocate. Jacob McNeil lives in Toronto and works as a counsellor at a gay men’s health centre. Born and raised in the Nova Scotia town of Advocate, it is to his childhood home that he must return when he learns that his grandmother is dying. Jacob’s reluctant return to Advocate is fraught with deep-seated and lingering resentments that centre on the town’s treatment of his uncle David, a gay man who also returned to Advocate from Toronto some twenty years earlier, but under vastly different circumstances. Born in 1973, Jacob grew up in his grandmother’s house with his grandmother, Millicent McNeil, his mother Caroline and his aunt Jeanette. He is eleven when his uncle David, a teacher and a man whom Jacob has never met, returns home for reasons that for a long time remain vague. All Jacob knows is that David’s return results in a great deal of tension and whispering behind closed doors among the women of the house: his mother and aunt on one side of the argument, his grandmother on the other. The bulk of the novel is given over to Jacob’s recollections of his uncle’s presence in the house and gradual and horrifying physical deterioration from AIDS. David’s return coincides with Jacob’s awakening to his own true nature—his suspicion that he too is gay, though at the time he hardly knows what this means. At first distrustful of and circumspect around his uncle, Jacob eventually forms a closely sympathetic bond with the dying man. But aside from Jacob’s budding awareness of himself and of complex events taking place in the world at large, Greer’s novel takes aim at small-town attitudes that have nothing to do with truth or fact and everything to do with ignorance and self-righteous adherence to inflexible religious doctrine. With David in the house infected with the mysterious AIDS virus, the McNeil’s are ostracized by the majority of the town and vilified for harboring a contagion that will surely spread. Jacob’s best friend cuts him off and pretends he doesn’t exist. But more than anything else, Jacob is distressed by his grandmother’s emotional frigidity toward her own son, her refusal to enter the sickroom, her flippant assurances that David will recover, that all will be well. Throughout Jacob’s adult life, his grandmother’s response to David’s illness has fed his resentment and twenty years later makes it impossible for him to feel anything as she approaches her own death. Though we know the outcome, Advocate is suspenseful and something of a page-turner. It is also written with great compassion and courage. It approaches a shameful period in history with open eyes and it doesn’t spare those who, through their words, or through action or inaction, contributed to making a human tragedy more painful and devastating than it had to be. ( )