Denial

By Beverley McLachlin

Simon & Schuster, 2021

Review by Anthony Wilson-Smith

A smart, no-nonsense woman with an abiding love of law – and a level of knowledge to match that passion. An exploration of a contemporary issue with far-reaching consequences. A backdrop of one of Canada’s great cities limned with elegance, deep familiarity and obvious affection.

Add up those elements, and friends and acquaintances will quickly identify the subject as Beverley McLachlin, and the location as her beloved Vancouver. But in this case, the protagonist of Denial is not the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court herself, or a specific case over which she presided in her years on the bench. Instead, it’s her literary creation, Jilly Truitt, the crime-solving defence lawyer we first met in McLachlin’s previous novel, 2019’s Full Disclosure. The result of this second outing is another briskly-paced, neatly-plotted read that provides a clear-eyed view of the complex machinations of our legal system – for better and sometimes worse.

This time out, the story revolves around what’s known as MAID, short for Medical Assistance in Dying. Against her best instincts, Truitt is persuaded to represent the wife of a prominent fellow lawyer who is accused of killing her terminally ill mother. Even though she appears to have done so out of love and in conjunction with her parent’s often-expressed wishes, the killing violated the very specific conditions in which euthanasia is legally acceptable. 

There’s also the not-insignificant fact that the accused vehemently denies having done so; she refuses pressure from all sides to plead guilty to a reduced charge in return for a relatively minor sentence. Add in a significant bequest at risk, a family life not quite as advertised, and the defendant’s mental health challenges, and a ground-breaking case takes on additional shades of grey.

McLachlin’s first novel leapt smartly up to the top of bestseller lists in Canada. The publishers clearly think this new offering can pull in an international audience. It comes replete with blurbs from mega-selling crime authors James Patterson and Kathy Reichs as well as fellow Canadian Robert Rotenberg. There’s a very engaging exchange at the back of the book with the ubiquitous John Grisham (that first ran in the Globe and Mail) in which he and McLachlin swap thoughts about how and why they write books in which much of the drama is based in courtrooms. (One of a number of shared conclusions: neither ever watch legal dramas on television: the “legal stuff”, notes Grisham, “is not always plausible”.)

An obvious question with McLachlin’s books is the degree to which her protagonist, Truitt, is a reflection of herself. The answer, in essence, is that there are obvious similarities – but others in which author and character have little or nothing in common. 

In person, Beverley (a member of the Board of Historica Canada, the non-profit organization where I am president) is crisp and focused; one of those people who command attention and inspire confidence without apparent effort. Those qualities belie – or perhaps reflect – her remarkable rise from her beginnings as the child of a family of very modest means in Pincher Creek, Alberta, to her present status as one of the most revered jurists in the country’s history – and held in similar regard beyond.

Those who have lived in Ottawa for any period of time may be familiar with the bubble in which Supreme Court judges have traditionally been expected to confine themselves. Through much of the country’s history,  they had to be wary of almost any social contact outside their immediate circle for fear of being accused of favouritism in their rulings. In my Ottawa days, I recall several times when cars pulled up outside a restaurant where I was having dinner and decanted judges who then headed immediately into private rooms booked for them to dine together.

Those strictures make sense at one level, but at another, they can be smothering. Before McLachlin’s ascension, a popular story in Montreal legal circles concerned a judge who stepped down from the court well before retirement, telling associates the reason was that “I only ever got two calls a day; one from the Chief Justice and one from (their life partner) – and I didn’t want to talk to either of them.” To her credit, Beverley – whose rise took place in a legal world still heavily weighted against women – encouraged judges to break out of that bubble and, most importantly, to consider the real-world effect of the decisions alongside legal precedents and other factors in front of them. 

She became one of the leading proponents of the “living tree” doctrine, which essentially holds that the law should evolve to reflect changing societal norms. Among others, she presided over ground-breaking decisions on safe injection sites for drugs users, greater acknowledgement of aboriginal rights and title, and assisted suicide legislation, the premise of Denial.

In fact, McLachlin has a personal stake in MAID. Her first husband, Rory McLachlin, died of cancer in 1988 after the couple had been married 21 years. Near the end, in pain and with the outcome clear, he expressed his wish that it be made possible for people in his situation to have an assisted end. 

McLachlin, in her 2019 memoir, Truth be Told: My Journey through Life and Law, acknowledged that experience helped guide her thinking when the issue later came before the court. (She has been married since 1992 to Frank McArdle, who she thanks on the title page for “his love and unfailing support that makes everything possible.”)

For the rest, only McLachlin can know whether she has experienced the doubts, anguish and uncertainties that plague Jilly Truitt behind her outward aura of confidence. Whatever the case, with the freedom every author has, Beverley has built a life for her character that she might well have enjoyed herself had she followed a different path within the law. 

She has acknowledged that, while on the bench, she found criminal cases particularly compelling because of the wide range of issues and human drama involved, so the jump to a novel based on those elements is a relatively short one. Then, the setting in Vancouver, a city she adores and where she spent her early academic and judicial career, functions as a sort of character on its own in the book. It opens, in fact, with lunch at Cardero’s Restaurant, the waterfront seafood joint that has been an institution for decades. 

With all of those elements – as well as some impossible-to-anticipate plot twists, Denial neatly manages the difficult trick of being both entertaining and educational. As a measure of her expertise in reflecting real life in fiction, the courtroom scenes in Full Disclosure are now used by some Canadian law professors to show their students how trials work, and some of the ethical issues that come into play. Denial may well be used in the same way.

At 78, Beverley, now four years removed from her position on the country’s highest court, seems to revel in looking at her former world with an outsider’s – but still expert – eye. On the one hand, her shift from a life as one of our greatest jurists to a career as a novelist is not an outcome that many might have seen coming. On the other, the confounding of expectations and overcoming of long odds has been pretty much the story of her remarkable life.

We can be grateful for that, both as readers and as Canadians.    

Contributing Writer Anthony Wilson-Smith, President and CEO of  Historica Canada, is a former Editor of  Maclean’s Magazine.