James Piper is a pedophile who is drawn sexually to prepubescent girls. This sexual appetite drives his pursuit of the young Materia, whom he marries when she is 12 years old, and then his sexual assault of his daughter Kathleen. Every element of James’s character, from his professional life to his position as the emotional core of his family, reflects his psychological disorder, corruption, and dysfunction. He is opportunistic, predatory, and selfish. He is given to sudden anger and sees violence and physical domination as ways to assert rightness. Everything he touches he corrodes—including Kathleen’s once-in-a-generation voice. The single noble gesture James makes—joining the Canadian army to head overseas to fight the Kaiser in WWI—he only does to avoid giving in to his sexual obsession with his own daughter.

James’s rape of Kathleen and the lies he contrives to hide this event shape the toxic environment of the Piper family. The novel delays portraying the rape scene, the revelation of which becomes the climactic moment in the plot. Because of the secrecy forced on multiple generations of Piper women by the monstrous James, and the fact that he only confesses to the rape before he dies, peacefully, after being nursed by the very daughters he terrorized, James is never held accountable for this violation.