September 5, 2025

Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler

When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.

The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.

What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.

Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.