Tag Archives: family

Eriksson’s characters achingly genuine

 High Clear Bell of Morning

By Ann Eriksson

Douglas and McIntyre

256 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Few books make me cry. So I was genuinely surprised when I found myself crying when I finished reading High Clear Bell of Morning.  To be honest, I cried half way through too — well, I had tears in my eyes.  Of course, this is a terrifyingly sad story about a family’s struggle to come to terms with the mental illness that overtakes their daughter, Ruby, just as she enters university.  Ruby, it turns out, has schizophrenia – a painful twist in any family’s life.

The reader witnesses the undoing of Ruby through the eyes of her sympathetic father, Glen, who tries over and over to save her from her decline into addictions and deprivation.  We are with him through his initial disbelief, through his slow realization that life will never be the same, through his desperation to save Ruby.  From his perspective, there is no reason why he can’t help her overcome her illness and return to being the Ruby she once was.

Part of Eriksson’s brilliance in this, her fourth novel, springs from her choice to tell this story from two points of view: Glen’s, with whom many readers will identify, and Ruby’s as well.  We sympathize with both.  Ruby has her own reasons to feel unsafe, even if those reasons are not reasonable.  She articulates them, describing her impossible situation.  She tries to manage the voices that interfere with her family life, university courses and friends.  Of course, she can’t.   And because Ruby describes the problems, the haunting seriousness of them, the reader begins to understand too.  Eriksson balances these two points of view, Glen’s and Ruby’s, with respect and considerable neutrality, which leaves the reader aching for Ruby and for the knot that has become the family, the conundrum at the heart of serious mental illness.

At the same time, whales are dying.  Glen is a marine biologist who studies killer whales in the Salish Sea.  He collects data that suggests toxic waste in the oceans off the west coast of Canada is endangering whale habitat and whale populations.  Glen has two problems: Ruby and the whales — and he believes they might be related.

Eriksson is a novelist and an ecologist.  Both interests serve to create this very fine book.  She details the lives of killer whales and their habitat, as well as the lives of their researchers, with convincing authority.  Her descriptions of mental illness and its effects are believable.

High Clear Bell of Morning is not overwritten; it is to the point. All the details — emotional, scientific, medical, social — are presented with a credible, eponymous clarity.  But it is Eriksson’s ability to draw character with care and compassion that most successfully sustains this novel.  That is what made me cry.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria writer; her new book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains, is published by Brick Books.

Love thy grandmother, says memoirist

The Truth About Luck

By Iain Reid

Published by Anansi

254 pages, $18.95

By Richel Donaldson

The Truth About Luck is Ontario author Iain Reid’s second memoir. Reid, whose first book was about moving back home after university, was recently named as one of five up-and-coming Canadian authors by the Globe and Mail. In The Truth About Luck, Reid invites his grandmother, 92, on a five-day vacation. When it turns out that the vacation is really a stay-cation in Reid’s apartment, his grandmother takes the opportunity to share some of her life story with her grandson. What ensues is a charming and bumbling dialogue between two people getting to know each other.

Reid’s writing is honest and self-deprecating, full of humor and detail.  Readers can easily put themselves in his shoes when he describes waking up in the morning, his fear of house centipedes, or his nightly insomnia: “I might start thinking of all the moments in a day when it’s possible to choke on food or catch a foot and fall down some stairs. Other nights I think about something completely arbitrary.” The way he so carefully describes his grandmother brings her to life in the same way: “Her hands have held on to elegant toughness, apart from the odd liver spot or new freckle  . . . they’re strong, womanly hands.”

The narrative starts almost too slowly. It takes a while for Reid and his grandmother to warm up to one another, and the awkward silences become monotonous.  Only when Grandma starts telling her stories does the memoir become engaging. The actual events of the story exist in a confined environment – mostly the apartment – and a brief time span. Reid’s grandmother’s memories about her little brother Donald are some of the most powerful in the book:  “There at the bottom of the stairs was this lanky figure, a few feet away, a boy. I never would have thought I could recognize his posture, but I could . . .I knew it was him.” Grandmother tells stories about her experience in the war and childhood memories with such vivid sensual experience that when she stops, and the focus returns to the vacation, it is almost a letdown. Reid’s attempts to entertain his grandmother and make her comfortable are heartwarming, but they pale in comparison to the richness of his grandmother’s recollections.

Even though some parts of the memoir may be monotonous, the read is worthwhile. Reid’s realizations about his grandmother are incredibly powerful. She teaches him a great deal in the course of five days — about what it means to be alive and how to approach death. The ending of this book will make you want to grab your grandmother and listen to her with the dedication and interest that Reid did.

Richel Donaldson is a political science student at UVic. She grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by family. She enjoys writing about indigenous culture and has learned a great deal from her own two grandmas.