review view

Hey all,

This especially long review - for the Winnipeg Free Press, that is, not for me, given my tendency towards excess - appeared today as the cover story of the new books section.

I was very pleased A) to have more room to spread out in and B) to be the cover story of what appears to be a revitalized books section.

I've still got another book in the hopper, but given that I'm currently in Alberta with the in-laws, the baby, and a car load of baby crap, I'm not sure how quickly I'm going to get the review to the books editor.

(Did I mention it took several days and an in-house babysit to get the first one off?)

Anyways, I hope you're all well.

Yours,

A.

* * *

The Other Side of the Bridge
By Mary Lawson
Knopf Canada, 355 pages, $35

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

SOON after Mary Lawson's first novel was published in 2002, she joined an elite group that includes Mavis Gallant and Margaret Laurence: female Canadian expatriate writers whose work is as popular with critics as it is with readers.

Crow Lake won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Moreover, it was -- and still is -- a Canadian bestseller.

The Ontario-born Lawson, who moved to England in 1968 and now lives in a suburb of London, even shares some fictional preoccupations with Gallant and Laurence, writing about bereft children in fictional versions of the community she grew up in.

In many ways, however, she's unique. A university-educated woman who lives in one of the world's largest cities, Lawson is somehow compelled to write stories that extol the virtues of farming, small towns and the North.

Psychological underpinnings aside, both Crow Lake and the newly released The Other Side of the Bridge (long-listed for the 2006 British Booker Prize even before it was published in Canada) succeed because of the emotional wallop they deliver.

Lawson is an expert manipulator of family dynamics. She orphans her main characters and then pits them against each other in heated sibling rivalries.

Like Crow Lake, The Other Side of the Bridge is told in two timelines, concerning itself with the intertwined stories of two men of different backgrounds and aspirations.

In 1957, Ian Christopherson is the teenage son of the doctor in the fictional town of Struan, Ont. Like his father before him, he's expected to venture south, study medicine, and return to Struan, hopefully with a nurse/wife in tow.

Ian is grappling with this community compulsion when his mother leaves them, as much for the big city she missed so much as for the love of her new beau, a geography teacher at Ian's high school.

Around the same time, Ian develops a crush on the wife of Arthur Dunn, a farmer in the area. So when his father suggests he gets a job to help pay for his education, Ian cycles out to the Dunn farm and asks for work.

Arthur's story begins earlier, with the 1925 birth of his brother Jake, who grows up to succeed everywhere Arthur fails -- excelling at school and charming girls and women alike.

Jake's quickness isn't without its downside, however. He's easily bored, and his boredom makes him cruel.

As the two grow to adulthood, Jake relies on Arthur to rescue him from boredom (and from the results of his cruelties) until the day Arthur ignores Jake's cries for help -- and Jake nearly dies.

But it isn't until half a lifetime later that the brothers reach "the other side of the bridge." As you might expect from an author that winds her stories so tight they nearly groan with the strain, the moment when Arthur finally decides to fight back is explosive and raw.

In addition to its family dramas, The Other Side of the Bridge is also a war novel that bears similarities to Frances Itani's Deafening (2003) in that it tells the story of non-combatants. While deafness (and gender) keeps Itani's characters on the home front, flat feet keep Arthur on the farm.

These perspectives on wartime are highly interesting, perhaps because the authors who conceived them are female (the first death of a female Canadian soldier in active combat, after all, only happened earlier this year).

We feel the anguish of the characters, both in being left behind but also at having to wait for friends and family to return so that life can begin again.

Another noteworthy aspect of the novel is the way that it addresses the pressure to leave -- and to stay -- in small northern communities.

This fictional imperative is backed up by facts. The 1951 census revealed that 62 per cent of Canadians lived in urban centres. By 2001, when Lawson was writing her novel, that number had increased to 80 per cent.

As Lawson knows, this doesn't bode well for towns like Struan and Crow Lake.

"I reckon the communities up here are doomed. They're being drained of their life blood," Jake tells Ian. "Meaning the likes of you and your friends... which will mean even fewer jobs, so even more young people will leave, and so on. A slow decline."

As always, it is impossible to tell if Jake approves of this trend or not, especially as he'd offered Ian the following advice earlier: "Just get out of here, that's the important thing. Out of Struan! Out of the North! Out of the goddamned bush!"

Though Lawson obviously respects the desire for all that the larger southern cities can offer, she holds up those characters who "know their place" (i.e. stay in the North) as the ones that are worthy of her readers' admiration -- a strange moral from someone with Lawson's background.

Another oddity is the fact that in Lawson's fictional universe women are weak, unreliable creatures. Even Arthur's wife, whose devoted care of her three children and role as sole caregiver to her elderly father attracts Ian as much as her blond hair and gentle demeanour, proves unreliable.

In addition, Arthur and Jake are such polar opposites -- one solid and silent, the other handsome and eloquent, one uneducated but noble, the other clever but vicious -- that it strains believability.

The two-dimensionality of Lawson's main characters, taken alongside her tendency to tie off and cut the loose ends of her complex narrative threads in the last chapter, robs The Other Side of the Bridge of some of its power.

Fortunately, Lawson's northern Gothic is fascinating enough that all but the most demanding reader will forgive Lawson her trespasses and surrender him or herself completely to the story.


Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.