“On a day in the spring of 1956, my parents dressed my brother and me in brand new outfits, my mother put on make-up and her best camel-hair coat, and we all went for a drive in the countryside near Montreal.” In a photograph of the occasion, Anne’s mother “is smiling, as if this were a particularly auspicious day in our lives.”

A charming scene – but knowing the subject of the story, the reader is immediately seized with dark foreboding. Ann Diamond’s new book is gripping in its drama and its poignancy. It tells the story of Anne McAllister, a little girl handed over by her parents – driven by combined self-interest and “patriotism” – in the mid-1950s to become a subject of psychological experiments connected with those performed at the Allan Memorial Institute. Ms. Diamond’s writing is by turns lyrical and engaging, brutally direct, sinister and unsettling.  

During the Second World War, Nazi scientists and physicians performed bizarre experiments upon concentration camp prisoners. After the war, many Nazi engineers were brought to the US to work at NASA. Throughout the Cold War, extra-legal and cynically immoral activities were undertaken by Western governments to outpace the Soviets in intelligence gathering. In Montreal, the “mental hygiene” and “psychic-driving” experiments of Dr. D. Ewen Cameron were funded by the CIA. And across Canada, children were taken from their homes and made victims of terrible abuse in residential schools. These varied abuses, of individuals and of the public trust, occurred with government complicity — all justified by “the national interest,” and all of it documented. This is the large context of “A Certain Girl.”

The problem with “A Certain Girl” is not a lack of artistry, but in the presentation of the book itself. To begin, it is listed in its publication information under “Biographies and Memoirs.” Yet the notes on the back imply speculation. Is this, then, Ann Diamond’s own story? No statement is made to that effect, nor is there an explanation, as in Elizabeth Nickson’s “The Monkey Puzzle Tree” (an acknowledged novel), that this is “fiction based in fact.” The reader is entitled to more clarity.

Read as historical fiction, the book works well. The narrative is elliptical, vague and sometimes confusing, coming from a protagonist who has been beaten, subjected to sensory deprivation and fed hallucinogens. The very fact that we don’t know exactly what is happening, nor always what to believe, drags us viscerally into the story. By the end, we don’t merely empathize with little Anne McAllister’s suffering and outrage: it has become our own. As history (or memoir) however, Ann Diamond’s book is seriously flawed: she gathers together documented facts and conjecture in such a way as to imply that it is all provable truth.

Perhaps the venom she directs at the Duplessis government, the Catholic Church, the Anglo-Montreal establishment and McGill University is meant to create the measure of skepticism that should inspire her readers to further investigation. If so, then that works. Regardless, having read “A Certain Girl,” it would seem impossible to walk past the Royal Victoria Hospital and look up the mountain at Ravenscrag without being washed over by a bitter chill.

Neil MacRae is a poet and musician recently moved to Montreal.