[The] themes that occupy Hodgins are [not] specifically Canadian: the question of identity, the isolation of the individual and the seeming impossibility of communication, the initiation into reality….

If Hodgins concentrates on a seemingly narrow field, his own people and place, his fertile imagination and his technical dexterity present these materials in an impressive variety of forms. Spit Delaney's Island is, in itself, a fine collection of stories, and an illuminating introduction to Hodgins' two novels.

The Invention of the World … seems the result of a long period of organizing and writing. Once more, except for two sections set in southwestern Ireland, Hodgins writes about his own place, the central east coast of Vancouver Island. It is place, the location of the Revelations Colony of Truth here, that binds the novel's variegated materials together. Three different time blocks—the birth of the "prophet" of the colony in Ireland...