Just beyond the middle of this incredible novel, the central character, Helen, is part of a yoga class. And it serves as the perfect metaphor for the theme of the novel. The yoga instructor, as they do, is uttering those ¡§yoga¡clicheVs about finding inner peace, blah, blah, blah. And Helen thinks, ¡§I am supposed to achieve balance.¡ This might well have been the opening of the novel.
In 1982 The Ocean Ranger, a vessel owned by an oil company, sinks in the North Atlantic. And everyone aboard drowns, including Cal, Helen's husband, leaving her with three young children and, unknown to her at the time, another on the way. In 2008 Helen has yet been unable to come to any resolution about his death and the impact it has had upon her life while she waits for her oldest and only son, John, to arrive from his world travels with a woman who is pregnant with his first baby, a woman with whom he had a one-week affair in Iceland seven months earlier. So in a sense this novel is about that one moment in time except, of course, it isn't.
We are provided with up-close and personal grief and what it has done to the central character and, in turn, her four children, most especially the older three. It is very powerful and so artistically handled in the hands of Lisa Moore, the author of Alligator. (I had been ill-informed about February being a sequel to Alligator. If it is¡Xand I read Alligator before getting into this one¡XI certainly don't see any connections except they both take place in Newfoundland.) Alligator is very well written, very engaging. This one is even more so.
Helen has spent her adult life being ¡§grateful for all the brief escapes¡ offered her, often escapes she creates by allowing her mind to imagine what happened and how others responded and thought. If ever there was a postmodern existential novel that reaches out and grabs, this is it. There is no end to grief. None.
Lisa Moore is a master at point of view, skillfully allowing us into Helen's head (and occasionally other characters' heads, especially her son John's) with what essentially are scattered thoughts that all of us have, seemingly disconnected ones. She bounces back and forth in time, giving us little pieces, almost like doing a picture puzzle but without the package cover to guide us. And that is the beauty of the writing; it is so lacking in a linear plot line. So as a reader you say, ¡§Wow. So that is what happened back...¡
The style fascinates me. But it could take some ¡§getting used to¡ for readers who have not experienced what I will call a collage style, one in which thoughts from the present and past exist together, often in the same paragraph. But it is a wonderful style if the reader gives the first few pages a chance. There are no quotation marks for dialogue, not even question marks when a question is ask. But it works brilliantly and makes this such a unique reading experience.
Helen's has been a rudderless life. She is clearly depressed, a woman who refuses any of the drugs suggested to her, a woman who parents with a because I told you to attitude. Now in her mid-fifties she wonders if she might find love somehow, somewhere. I will not disclose how she goes about doing so. But we know nothing will work out because it is a world where essentially love seems not to exist much, at least not for Helen who truly did love Cal. And he apparently loved her as well.
I can honestly say this is one of the most moving novels I have ever read.