The Deserter

A new edition of the classic novel by Douglas LePan.

Returned from the ravages of war, met with a city that offers him only despair, a young man finds himself caught between two opposing worlds — the ordered but empty everyday life of “schedules and obligations,” and the hellish chaos of the city’s underside, a dark world of brutality and vice. Gripped with a restless passion for perfection, haunted by a brief and idealized experience of love, the hero of this poetic, experimental novel lives out in a modern context that most universal of myths: the descent into the underworld to experience initiations and ordeals, and the return with new understanding to the upper world.

Douglas LePan was a veteran of the Second World War, a distinguished diplomat, and the principal of University College, University of Toronto. He won Governor General’s Awards for poetry for his collection The Net and the Sword (1953) and for fiction for his only novel, The Deserter (1964). He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1998.

Scott Rayter is an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Department of English and the Sexual Diversity Studies program at the University of Toronto. He is the co-author of Queer CanLit: Canadian LGBT Literature in English and the co-editor of Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies. He lives in Toronto.