July 23, 2024
We Are Already Ghosts, by Kit Dobson
Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes. Except, of course, the children are growing, and parents get older, marriages end and new loves begin, and babies are born, and people die, and all of this flurry of action—in Kit Dobson’s cerebral and tremendously moving first novel WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS—takes place in the “corridors” between the narrative’s main sections, each corridor spanning a five year gap that brings us back again to the cabin that once belonged to Clare’s parents, where now she comes with her own family and those of her husband’s brothers. The novel begins in 1996 and returns us—at five year intervals—to the family at this place so removed from the world, and yet part of it enough that the world creeps in, and I’m thinking about the attraction of summer places like these, the places we return to, the illusion that anything can ever stay the same, or that any of us might outwit the human condition of being mortal, and how the reality of the matter can shock us every time. GHOSTS is an enveloping story of love and family, of parenthood, and also time, and CanLit tropes, and war, and history, and bears at the dump, and what it means to live on stolen land, and everything that’s eternal, and everything that isn’t, and I loved it all so much.
