January 3, 2012
A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny
Coming to detective fiction via Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie is a bit like being the kind of person who only goes to church on Christmas Eve. And sure, I’ve tried to make up for it since– I’ve since gotten into PD James and Dorothy Sayers, but I’ll never feel like I’ve got quite enough cred. I’m not a real detective fiction fan anyway– I seem to like the stories in spite of the detection, and though I know this is an unpopular point of view, I’ll tell you that if Atkinson forgot to put Jackson Brodie in her next novel, I’m not sure I’d notice. What I like about murder mysteries is that they bring to the forefront what I like best about novels in general: atmosphere, surprising relationships, back story and plot.
And yes, I like my novels English, and the mysteries in particular. For me, Midsomer Murders is less about the murders than whatever is happening on the village green (which, as it happens, is usually murder, so it all comes out in the wash). And somehow in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in her Armand Gamache series, Louise Penny has managed to thoroughly infuse a village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships with the English essence I so love in my fiction.
The village is Three Pines, so isolated it does not appear on any maps, but also a hotbed for murder. In this latest installment, a body has been discovered in the garden of Clara Morrow, an artist who has just launched her first solo show at the Musee in Montreal. The dead woman turns out to be a ghost from Clara’s past whose connections to the people in her present are numerous and surprising. Chief Inspector Gamache must untangle the web of intrigue, all the while dealing with his own trauma from a recent incident in which he was seriously wounded and officers working under him were killed.
For two days last week, I was more devoted to this book that anything else in the universe. It was the perfect book to curl up in against the winter darkness, I found Gamache and his second-in-command so compelling as characters, the vicious and incestuous art world served as a sparkling backdrop, and Three Pines was a perfect idyll, even with all the murder going on. Though yes, this books really wants for an edit. Penny writes in short stilted non-sentences that make for breezy reading but don’t completely make sense when you look at them closely. And there were too many slips– how did Clara notice the expression on her husband’s face when he was walking a few paces ahead of her, and the misused “begging the question” twice in five pages was a bit agonizing. The essential bit of Englishness that we’re really missing here is the genre writer with serious command of the language.
But I’m happy to forgive the book for all its flaws, because it made my holiday, and I look forward to acquainting myself with more Gamache in the future.
January 1, 2012
Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures by Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly (eds)
That Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts has been sitting on my shelf at all is because it marries two subjects that fascinate me: contemporary literature and ideas about motherhood. That it’s been sitting on my shelf for a year or so is because I was intimidated by its academic approach, and had opened it up one day a while ago when the time was not right. The time being righter, I returned to it shortly before Christmas, and was glad I did. Though my enjoyment of the book and success with it is due to me abandoning my usual rule of reading cover-to-cover, and employing that old cliche about some books existing to be dipped in and out of. But I suspect if there’s any such book, this is one of them. Some of the essays were immediately accessible due to my familiarity with the works involved, but I became unabashed about skipping those rendered impenetrable by jargon, theory and/or books I’d never heard of.
Which is not to say that I had to know the books under discussion in order to appreciate these essays in this collection. Quite the contrary, I was surprised to have so many essays pique my interest in literature that is new to me. In “That Was Her Punishment,” Ruth Panoksky’s examination of prostitute mothers in Jewish communities left me wanting to read Adele Wiseman’s Crackpot; my friend Nathalie Foy’s essay on Eden Robinson’s story “Dogs in Winter” was evocative and gorgeously written; I’ve never read the poems of Minnie Bruce Pratt, but Susan Driver’s “I had to make a future willful, voluble, lascivious” brought the poems (and the poet) to life on the page; and I really enjoyed Rita Jones’ “But She’s a Mom! Sex, Motherhood, and the Poetry of Sharon Olds.”
So the book broadened my understanding of how motherhood is represented in contemporary literature, but also deepened my understanding of the works I was familiar with, whose discussions attracted me to this book in the first place. Nancy Peled draws connections between several of Margaret Atwood’s novels to show how each is informed by the roles of absent or powerless mothers. Emily Jeremiah’s “We Need to Talk About Gender: Mothering and Masculinity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin” managed to bring something new to a novel that has been discussed over and over again, but also preserves the ambiguity and complexity of Shriver’s novel in its arguments. I also appreciated Joanne S. Frye’s and Andrea O’Reilly’s essays on motherhood memoirs (and in particular, the way that these essays spoke to and contradicted one another). And then into another over-studied book is breathed new life with Di Brandt’s “(Grand)mothering Children of the Apocalypse”: A Post post-modern Ecopoetic Reading of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners” (and it may not show from the essay’s title, but oh, how wonderful prose stands out in an academic text).
Even with the skipped essays, however, others would prove challenging in different ways. It was due to my own experience that I was exasperated by the simplistic reduction of Denys Landry’s “Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovett as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child.” Similarly, I resisted the conclusions of Andrea O’Reilly’s essays on motherhood memoirs, and found what is termed “new-momism” (see The Mommy Myth by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels) to be a too-simplified version of most women’s reality. And of course, I would think that, and this is the same argument I have with second-wave feminists every time I identify as a housewife. Anyway, perhaps “new-momism” is over-represented in literature (though I’m convinced much nuance is being overlooked here), but the experiences of most women I know are much closer to what Rita Jones presents as so revelatory in the poetry of Sharon Olds:
This woman determined her own sense of proper womanhood and mothering, but, importantly, she does not do so in some kind of isolation. Instead, she responds to and sometimes imitates contemporary notions of intensive mothering and the new momism. Certainly, she cannot possibly attempt to live her life “off the grid” of mothering. Like the bees, she too tries different arcs of narratives of womanhood and mothering, and we see how tempting she finds the narrative of intensive mothering as she alternates between subsuming her identity beneath that of her children’s and remaking her identity on her own terms… The woman… finds pleasure in her roles as both mother and lover, and she experiences no conflicts in performing both roles.”
But then responding to these essays based on my own experiences would prove to be a very narrow way to read them (or to read anything, for that matter). It’s as necessary as it is difficult to have one’s ideas and sense of relational self properly challenged, and in her essay, Susan Driver provides a wonderful quote from Minnie Bruce Pratt to frame how to rise to this challenge: “I try to say: To acknowledge the complexity of another’s existence is not to deny my own.”
Acknowledging the complexity of existence is what these essays do so well, the complex existence of living, breathing women, and also of the characters in our literature. And the power of this book is found in its acknowledgement of the symbiotic connection between the two, how each one can inform and be empowered by the other.
December 19, 2011
I read The Spoiler and Osprey Island
Without actually intending to, I’ve gone on vacation, mostly thanks to the last two books I’ve read, both big, fat, enveloping novels. The first was The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee, which was published this year in the UK and will be out in Canada in April. McAfee is a veteran newspaper journalist, as well as (less interestingly) the spouse of Ian McEwan. The Spoiler is her first novel, something of a roman-a-clef, which takes on the UK newspaper business, whose own business has been creating its own press for last six months with the News of the World Scandal. Though McAfee sets her book in early 1997, not so long ago that the fundamentals were so different (or at least the sleazy, illegal tabloid tactic side), it was certainly a different time– John Major was at the end of his power, Spice Girls were only in the ascent, Princess Diana was still campaigning for landmines, and Liam Gallagher was married to Patsy Kensit. And notably, in the newsroom, expense accounts were limitless, and the internet was only going to be a fad.
The problem is that McAfee’s narrative is all too aware of itself, conspicuously placed on a pivot point, and when her protagonist Tamara Sim references Princess Diana and Jill Dando in the same chapter (who’d both be dead not before long, we know), or dismisses the internet as a fad, we’re taken out of the story, and placed above her. Though perhaps such a vantage point is appropriate, because we’re clearly expected to find Tamara something of an idiot. And it it is curious why she, glossy celebrity gossip scribe, has been enlisted with the task of interviewing formidable journalist legend Honor Tait, now aged 80 and doing publicity for a new collection of her articles and essays.
Fallout is to be expected as these two very different characters collide, and the effect is uncomfortable, amusing. As the novel proceeds, both characters become better developed, though Tamara mostly remains a caricature. Fortunately, the plot itself so picks up in the novel’s second half that such a flaw is forgiven. The book’s ending is surprising, absorbing, and serves to strengthen all that came before it. It’s a good old read, and quite devourable in its light touch. Comparisons to Nancy Mitford and Helen Fielding are apt, though I’d probably lean more to the latter. Perhaps like Helen Fielding equipped with a thesaurus is how you’d sum it up just right.
And then there’s Thisbe Nissen’s Osprey Island, which I bought from a clearance bin in 2009 and never got around to reading. And I 
picked the wrong season within which to finally get to it, because this book is Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters meets Dirty Dancing. You’ve got the island lodge with the townies, a crop of Irish chambermaids on working holiday visas, and the preppy waiters (“You just put your pickle on everybody’s plate, college boy, and leave the hard stuff to me.” The thing you might not know about me is that I reviewed Patrick Swayze’s autobiography last year. But I digress.)
Plot hinges on a troubled couple, a fiery death, and battle for custody of a vulnerable boy, with sideplots involving chambermaiding, summer love, the Vietnam War and hotel life. Nissen’s a really good writer, which heightens the novel’s more trashy elements, and many of the characters are startlingly evoked. It’s a beach read for the thinking woman, and I enjoyed it even though I don’t even have a beach.
December 15, 2011
Terroryaki by Jennifer K. Chung
Inside the realm of too much information, you should probably know that I spent a good hour and a bit in the bath last night enjoying Jennifer K. Chung’s novel Terroryaki. And yes, this novel was the winner of the 2010 3-Day Novel Contest, which probably explains its frenetic pacing and shamelessly surfacey plotline, but it’s also about $10 cheaper than your average paperback, its smart design compact enough to fit into your back pocket, and shameless good fun. And perhaps its just the suggestion of its cover, but I came away feeling as though I’d just read a comic book without the pictures (right down to the demon showdown at the end).
Daisy’s sister’s wedding is only 3 months away, but her parents are still disapproving of her fiance for not being Asian enough, or rather for not being Asian at all. ( I enjoyed Daisy’s ever-shrieking mother, and Daisy’s description of her: “She wasn’t a Tiger Mom. She was more like a squirrel”). The family dramas are, at least, taking the heat off Daisy for her lack of drive– she works part time in a teriyaki restaurant, and is a passionless student at the community college. Certainly, Daisy does have her passions though: art and food (and food blogging). She becomes obsessed with a food truck she begins to spot around town with a skull and crossbones painted on it, and the promise, “The Best Teriyaki in Seattle.” The teriyaki is indeed delicious, but the truck has a ghostly aura. It keeps appearing and disappearing mysteriously, and it soon becomes clear that something sinister is afoot (possibly connected with Daisy’s sister’s Fascist wedding planner).
It’s rare to read a novel about a blogger, and Chung has done well in incorporating Daisy’s blog posts into the text, adding an additional layer of meaning. The other thing about Terroryaki was that it was all about food, and so evocatively so that the book left me starving, which, being in the bathtub, I could really do very little about. But apart from this complaint, I liked the book completely.
December 12, 2011
Mnemonic: A Book of Trees by Theresa Kishkan
“And how many people could write so interestingly about filbert catkins?” asks Theresa Kishkin in her essay collection Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, and it’s a very interesting question, made no less interesting by my not knowing my catkins from my filberts anyway. Which is to say that there is a gap between Theresa Kishkan’s world and mine, between Theresa Kishkan’s brain and mine. This is a woman who keeps the bone of her dead dog’s pelvis on her desk; she writes, “This is not as macabre as it sounds (or maybe it is).”
Kishkan’s essays are very different from others I’ve delighted in during the past year, Kyran Pittman’s, Susan Olding’s, Ray Robertson’s, even Joan Didion’s, all of whom write essays whose points of access were profound moments of identification with my own experience, whose prose illuminated my own experience. But Theresa Kishkan’s essays have nothing to do with my own experience, or when they do, identification is far from the point. Her essays are the epitome of what Susan Olding described in her own esssay, “That Trying Genre”:
Partaking of the story, the poem, and the philosophical investigation in equal measure, the essay unsettles our accustomed ideas and takes us places we hadn’t expected to go. Places we may not want to go. We start out learning about embroidery stitches and pages later find ourselves knee-deep in somebody’s grave. That’s the risk we take when we pick up an essay.
Though the essays in Mnemonic: A Book of Trees are less unsettling than enchanting, and they’ve been echoing in my head in the days since I’ve finished reading, as I encountered the woodsy picture book Singing Away the Dark on Friday, and as my house was filled with the scent of balsam fir when we fetched our Christmas tree on Saturday. I may not live in the woods on the edge of the continent, but clearly I know something of trees- how could I not when this is the view from my bed?
And then Theresa sent me her Canadian Bookshelf reading list, and Singing Away the Dark was actually on it, and so maybe the gap between us is not so wide after all.
Whatever I know about trees though, I’ve got nothing on Kishkan who built her own house from felled logs, is an ever-avid student of dendrology, who wove a bowl from pine needles, remembers reading Nancy Drew under oaks when she was ten, who makes her home in the tree-rich province of British Columbia, spent a season inhaling the scent of Greek olive groves, and connects the beech tree to the homeland of the grandfather she barely knew. Trees are what bind this collection together, however loosely, as Kishkan shares stories from her life, the places she has been, the books she’s read, the music she’s loved, and the people she has known. She uses various trees as mnemonic devices to awaken the past and illuminate the present.
Not since I first read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek have I encountered anything like this, any mind like this. These essays are challenging, rich and surprising, and well worth the close attention they demand from their reader. And lack of knowledge of about filbert catkins ceases to matter anyway, though Kishkan leaves you curious, but the point is to follow where she leads, her path through the woods, and there’s no doubt you’re in the hands of a most capable guide.
December 5, 2011
Kalila by Rosemary Nixon
Earlier this year when I read Charlene Diehl’s memoir Out of Grief, Singing, I marvelled at the way that fiction holds writers to certain constraints, on the way we have to bend life and draw out connections to build a story. And Rosemary Nixon is aware of this in her novel Kalila, the story of a couple whose daughter is born with inexplicable complications and spends her life in an isolette in the NICU. A novel like this refuses to conform to narrative expectations; as Nixon’s protagonist Maggie tells us, “Stories are meant to lead somewhere. To rising action. Climax. Closure. And they lived Happily Ever After.” Of course, a story like Kalila’s takes on a different shape.
Which means that as a novel, Kalila is not immediately satisfying, that the narrative is set up in a way that puts the reader at a distance, that the approach is clinical, but this was never a story that was going to satisfy. And Nixon knows exactly what she’s doing here: if Maggie appears to be a protagonist in a trance, it’s because she is. If she and her husband Brodie appear to be disconnected from the world around them, from the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, even from the story they find themselves in the midst of, it’s because they’re meant to be. They feel like strangers in their own story, a story in which they never would have cast themselves, one so entirely different than everything they ever expected when they imagined their baby being born, and a reader’s experience is analogous.
Brodie is a high school physics teacher, and his classroom scenes are beautifully choreographed (and they reminded me of Monoceros in this respect, another Calgary book, and Nixon thanks Suzette Mayr as “my writing buddy”, which wasn’t actually a huge surprise). He keeps his mind off his wife’s pain and the plight of his tiny daughter by focusing on particles and waves, on the sound of his students’ happiness, and the strangely bending laws of the universe. And though as a scientist, he knows the way things fall apart, when he’s alone with his daughter, he resorts to fairy tale narratives, and he tells her a story of a tiny princess in a glass castle locked away.
Maggie doesn’t have the diversion of work, but rather the conspicuousness of being a mother without her baby. She struggles with her displacement as nurses and doctors assume care of her child, doctors and nurses who don’t even know what her name is. She longs to love her child in the proper way, but “it’s too late for love at first sight”, she says at one point, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Though she notes that the doctors and nurses don’t quite know what to do with her daughter either, whose problems are innumerable and indecipherable, and who isn’t getting any better.
The baby herself is at a remove from all of this, both literally and figuratively. In every sense, she is the unknown variable. There is a coldness to the parents’ approach to their child, a measuredness. They are wary, weary, heartbroken, and numb all at once. An actual acknowledgement of the workings of their hearts at this moment in time would cause either one to stop and break down, but breakdowns aren’t what Kalila is all about. This is a novel about going forward into the unknown, about how a new mother occupies herself at home during the day when her daughter has needles stuck into her head, and about remembering to put the dog out, to eat, to make small talk with acquaitances in the grocery store.
The novel’s restive pace shifts about 2/3 of the way through when Brodie and Maggie decide to bring their daughter home after five months in the hospital, to have the empty space in their lives finally filled. And though they don’t dare utter the word “miracle”, they’re both thinking it. But as Nixon, of course, has already told us, this rising action is never going to lead to closure, to happily ever after. This ending has always been an inevitable thing.
I’m attracted to stories like this for less than savoury reasons perhaps. There’s a voyeuristic element to it, and one with especially self-serving motives. To me, reading books like these is a way to stare down my very worst fears, to not look away for as long as I can, and imagine that somehow this staring might prepare me for all those things one can never be prepared for. Though I’m not fooling anyone, of course, let alone myself. Further, Nixon writes with a precision that doesn’t really tolerate such self-indulgence on my part. In Kalila, there is no such thing as indulgence– it’s all about the story, and the peculiar shape that lives take on when stories shift into such unimagined terrain.
December 1, 2011
Big Town: A Novel of Africville by Stephens Gerard Malone
I read Stephens Gerard Malone’s Big Town: A Novel of Africville this week as the story of the crisis of Attawapkiskat unfolded in the media, and each story so illuminated the other. The story of a Canadian community whose people live in unheated shacks with no running water, with no access to safe drinking water. A community of people treated as second-class citizens by the rest of the world– Malone writes about how hydro lines were down, Africville was always the last place the electric company came to, and usually when you called the police, they never came at all. A community for which the outside world purports to know what’s best, applying simple solutions to complicated problems, solving exactly nothing, and never mind all that gets lost.
Africville was a black settlement outside of Halifax Nova Scotia, razed during the 1960s by the city for reasons of public health and progress. Malone situates his novel in the community’s dying days, showing that social order had broken down by this time, as it had in so many communities during that turbulent decade. Africville had become conspicuous by its proximity to the town dump, and to the unsavoury characters attracted to its fringes, like Early Okander’s father.
However, Early himself, who is white, a white simple-minded teenager devoted to his young friend Toby, is embraced by the community, and cared for by its residents all the while his father beats him and prostitutes him to his poker buddies on Saturday nights. In contrast to the trailer where Early and his father lives, Toby’s home with his grandfather Aubrey is a domestic oasis, supplied with nourishing food by neighbouring Mrs. Aada who owns the local store, and the company of other neighbours who remember a better time when the community was strong and thriving. It is as a testament to this better time that Aubrey is building a concert hall out of used bottles as a performance space for the Miss Portia White, the world famous singer who’d once lived in Africville and who, according to Aubrey, would be making a pilgrimage home now any day to help restore the community to its former glory.
The novel is meant to be told from Early’s perspective, though Malone refrains from the Faulkner-esque challenge of letting such a limited perspective wholly take over. Which makes Big Town a less challenging read, albeit one less narratively interesting. Malone plays with the ambiguity of Early’s point of view at times, but never so ambitiously, and the read between the lines is more obvious than it would like to be.
In many ways, Malone’s novel has more in common with a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, complete with its own Scout Finch in Early and Toby’s friend Chub, a girl who wants to be a boy and cuts her own hair with paper scissors. Though the story being filtered through the children’s point of view lacks the weight and nuance of To Kill a Mockingbird, however much that’s a high standard to hold any book to. The bleakness is also unrelenting– both Toby and Chub engage in self-harm, Aubrey is battling his own demons, Early’s father’s acts of violence against him are devastating; whither art thou, Atticus Finch?
Though that Malone proposes no saviour is wholly understandable, because certainly Africville never managed to be saved. And though at times I felt that the children’s perspectives were so limited as to simplify the story behind them, that story held fast my attention. Malone has made vivid a time and place thought lost to history, broadening the range of stories that we call Canadian.
November 24, 2011
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse and My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is a collection of Diana Athill’s short stories from the 1950s to the 1970s, published in Britain by the fabulous Persephone Books, and now in Canada by the just as worthy House of Anansi Press. I read it this week, and just happened to follow it with Penelope Mortimer’s My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof, first published in 1967 and reissued by Virago Classics in the 1980s. The lone connection between the two, I thought, was that I’d bought another of Penelope Mortimer’s novels Daddy’s Gone a Hunting at the Persephone Shop when we were in England last winter. But then something in the tone of the Mortimer book served to be illuminating the Athill all the way through, and never was this more clear than when I came across the line, “But what? What shall I do? It will all happen. When it’s happened, you’ll know what you did. Not until then.”
Athill’s characters are similarly detached from their own experiences, lately set adrift in narratives beyond their control, and yet they are fascinated by the drifting, by where it’s taking them. They are aware of the growing gap between how they’re perceived by the world and who they actually are, or perhaps by how the former is shaping the latter, and their adriftness allows them to inhabit that liminal space. These are characters all on the threshold of something, and Athill holds them there, poised, right before it really happens and they find out what they’ll do.
In “The Real Thing”, a young girl attends a party and has her first kiss, viewing the entire evening as a rehearsal for something great to come, her faith in herself still wholly unshaken, and her naivete is startling, funny, and heartbreaking. In “No Laughing Matter”, a young woman is rejected by the lover in whom she’d invested so much, and is able to view herself from afar, as had the character in the first story; she begs her future self, “Whatever it may seem to you then, you must remember that now it is like this, that it couldn’t possibly be more terrible. Please, please promise that you will never laugh.”
These are characters who are trying on guises, playing at being the people they will one day become. In other stories, those who are already established in themselves are also playing at something: romances enacted by lovers aware there is no future, characters on vacation daring to become somebody else for a while, what a wife will do when her husband is away, or when she does the unexpected and storms drunkenly after an argument in the dark of night. These are characters toying with the possibilities of narrative, just as much as is the frustrated writer on retreat in the title story. And when she finally finds her inspiration, the story starts flowing, almost just out of her control, and she follows it where it leads her, which is what all these characters are doing anyway.
Some fifty years old, Athill’s stories read like they’re contemporary, as does the work of Penelope Mortimer, though this could be because so many issues that women writers were grappling with in the ’50s and ’60s are still unresolved. Or at least this seems to be the case when one considers Mortimer’s work, the frustrated suburban wife and mother in Daddy’s Gone a Hunting scheming to get her daughter an abortion, or Muriel Rowbridge in My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof who has just lost a breast to cancer and is trying come to terms with what has happened to her and her body in relation to her identity as a woman.
My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is The Golden Notebook meets The Edible Woman. Muriel is a columnist for a woman’s magazine in England, sent to Canada with a contingent of journalists for a cultural discovery tour. She’s the only woman in her group, and this is her first foray into the world since her surgery, and also since her breakup with her married lover. She is conscious of her status in the group, but more so of the prosthetic breast tucked inside her bra. She finds herself connecting on various levels with men she encounters on the trip, and finds that her missing breast and her experience with cancer renders no connection staightforward.
As with Athill’s characters, Muriel has been removed enough from her own context that she is free to experiment in looking at herself (which is also to be being seen) in new ways. New sexual experiences and an affair with a man who’s also known tragedy gives her a sense of renewal:
“She had found, after all this time of searching, an image: myself as I am. I prefer myself as I am. The implications came crowding in on her with the impact of light, air and sound after a long imprisonment. Boldness and freedom were both available. She could do anything she wanted to do.”
November 13, 2011
The Lightning Field by Heather Jessup
Knowing what I know now of Heather Jessup, it’s not altogether surprising that we had more than a few mutual friends. Heather Jessup is the sort who’s beloved by a lot of people, and the reason why was underlined to me the day she showed up at my door bearing a jar of pickles. Which was, sadly, only a few days before Halifax stole her away from Toronto, and though I was only just beginning to know her, I knew enough to be sorry to see her go. But it was consoling to know I had her first novel The Lightning Field to look forward to, and it’s doubly nice now that the book is read to know it forever has a place in my library.
Partly because it’s a Gaspereau Book. Oh, just to hold one of these! And this one in particular, the dust jacket illustrated with diagrams of the Avro Arrow. Remove the dust jacket itself, and the book itself is patterned with the planes, triangles fashioned together into lines. The book’s typeface is a brand new one called Goluska (“used in advance of… commercial release”), and the note goes on to explain, “Also making brief appearances are Courier New and Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro.” Beautiful thick paper, such considered design– a Gaspereau book is always something wonderful to behold. And to hold. Except that I always feel like I should wash my hands before I touch one, which makes picking up the books a little difficult.
But I managed to cast aside thoughts of my mucky mitts, and start reading The Lightning Field late last week, and it read as something apart, like nothing I could directly compare it to. It’s the story of a couple, Lucy and Peter Jacobs who meet at the end of WWII, and get married, because it’s what you do. And because they love each other, and because they’ve got dreams. Peter is working as an engineer with the A.V. Roe Company, working on the Avro Arrow’s wing’s, and they’ve built a brand new house on Maple Street in Malton. The children arrive, the years go by, Lucy looks around the cul-du-sac of her life, and imagines, “Is this it?”
And then one day– on the day the Arrow is revealed to the world for the very first time– on her way to the bakery to pick up a cake, Lucy is found unconscious in a field, struck by lightning, burned and comatose. The space between the couple becomes broader through the struggles of her recovery, and the damage become irrevocable when Peter’s dreams are smashed with the cancelling of the Arrow project. The years that follow fail to realign their lives, so spun out by loss of promise.
The Years is the book that this book put me in mind of, structurally speaking. Though The Lightning Field spans more than forty years, nothing is epic in its presentation. As Woolf did, rather than years, Jessup hones in on the moments, and the culimination of these moments into something that is life. And it is very much like life, the novel that she makes. The way the people talk in particular, and the moments themselves with their details– it’s as if Jessup has infused her novel with the essence of the short story in this way. And I’ve never read a historical novel that felt so contemporary, which is all in the prose, of course– Jessup’s writing is charged with energy, and vision, the whole way though.
The whole way through is not a journey without its bumps, of course, though the problems are less remarkable than its strengths. At times it felt as though these characters were so contained in themselves that it was difficult to understand who they were, which was certainly the case in their relations with one another, but as a reader, I wanted more privileged access. And the other problem, which I try to forget because the spell wasn’t otherwise broken, but I can’t– there would have been no CN Tower to see from Andy’s window as his plane departed from the city in 1971 (but then maybe I’d fixate more on this than the average person due to my background in CN Tower fiction).
However, The Lightning Field is not one of those books in which such detail makes or breaks, because the novel is constructed upon something more abstract and true than historical fact. And in this, the book succeeds, and also mesmerizes. Yes, with the detail, even (or especially?) removed from its context– all the bits about flight, and the engineering of a plane’s wing, and Toronto geography, and the music, and the orange colour of a suburban living room wall– so much that Jessup gets totally right. But truly, the effect comes of nothing of what this book is really about having to do with plot exactly, or with character. Context was never the point anyway, and not so simple in this way, the novel is almost a poem. A story of love, and family, and broken dreams, but it transcends that, and becomes about more and less at once, universal and specific, and absolutely transporting.
November 9, 2011
Still Reading Through the Alphabet: Under Covers
Though I’m drowning in new releases, I am still making my way through the TBR alphabet, currently mired in the unending Ms. And finally got to Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier (who probably doesn’t belong in the Ms, but who’s to say?). I do love that I have a hideous old paperback with Jane Seymour on its cover– Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman! And that my paperback is a TV mini-series tie-in– how often does that happen these days? Who could ever have imagined that the cover would ever be dated too, hmm? Though I supposed that datedness is the object of a trade paperback, to be read to shreds, battered, and relegated to the dustbin. Except that mine overcame the odds and I scooped it up at a used book sale once upon a time. Must say that it’s my least favourite of the DuMaurier’s I’ve read so far– though the ending surprised me, the main character and the backstory had much less substance than Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel. The plot was less compelling, but there were good bits. 
I also read Joyce Maynard’s Labor Day, which everyone is except me has read already. And which everyone has told me is so very, very good, but I didn’t believe them. Partly it was the gross peaches cover (and those hands are all wrong!), the Jodi Picoult blurb (I am not only a snob, but one who once read a book by Jodi Picoult, so I’ve got cred), and the title, which made think that this was a book all about birthing. But it turned out to be completely different than I expected, including really, really good. And perhaps it’s the New England thing, but it read like a book a less-weird John Irving might have written, and someone would have slapped an altogether different cover on that one, don’t you think? Does this look like a book that’s narrated by a teenage boy? But it is, and it’s great, and I’m glad I finally read it, and I’m just sorry that so many other people as prejudiced as I am never will.
