SIBLING SHADOWS
Cordelia Strube’s latest novel finds beauty and pain in the story of a child orphaned of attention by her brother’s illness
‘ YOU’VE BECOME SO SULLEN. A DARK LITTLE CLOUD. WHAT’S THE MATTER, BABY?’
What happens in a family when one child has a devastating, life- threatening illness that consumes the parents’ attention? What becomes of the healthy sibling, who finds herself left with little affection, and is expected to fend for herself? These questions are at the heart of Cordelia Strube’s haunting new novel, On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light.
Eleven-year-old Harriet has a younger brother who suffers from hydrocephalus, which causes headbanging seizures and hospitalization on a regular basis. On one of the rare occasions their mother Lynne isn’t fretting over and nursing Irwin, she notices Harriet doesn’t seem her old self. “You’ve become so sullen. A dark little cloud. What’s the matter, baby? Where’s my bright little girl?” What Lynne mistakes as an aberration from her daughter’s sunny, resilient personality is, in fact, the new norm. It’s easy to envision Harriet — a funny, precociously smart, offbeat kid with artistic talents — thriving in another family, under different circumstances. Instead, she seeks attention wherever she can find it, such as by walking the dogs and fixing the computers of the eccentric seniors who hang out in the lobby of their shabby, subsidized apartment building in downtown Toronto.
The novel offers a moving portrait of Harriet’s isolation and despair as Strube examines the injustice of her plight. Harriet’s divorced parents and their new partners expect her to behave like a mini adult and show compassion at all times for Irwin’s suffering — never mind the fact that his illness has robbed her of a childhood as well. Unable to understand that Harriet, too, is suffering, her mother’s boyfriend becomes verbally and physically abusive. Occasionally, adults in the novel do reach out to her, but their attempts always miss the mark. When her father’s girlfriend Uma tries to win her trust by confiding that her own life has been filled with tragedy, Harriet has little patience, deftly shifting the conversation to her father’s inability to meet his child support payments while funding Uma’s costly fertility treatments.
Harriet does, however, have compassion and love for her brother Irwin, despite her occasional claims to hate him. She sneaks him chocolate pudding when it’s the only thing he can manage to swallow, and comforts him while their mother and her boyfriend fight in the next room. But this doesn’t preclude Harriet from wishing Irwin dead, and while sometimes this sentiment springs from pure frustration, other times she thinks it would be a mercy: “A challenge would have been to let Irwin die when the doctors said they should, to let nature take its course instead of dragging him through earthly torment.” After one of the seniors tells Harriet about the “transmigration of souls,” she comes to believe that “during seizures the real Irwin was trying to free himself of Irwin’s body.” Tired of inhabiting the body, his soul “wants another chance in a bird or deepsea creature.”
At its best, the novel has a disturbing ability to present such darkness and sadness through the whimsical, strangely hopeful perspective of a child who has lived for so long in proximity to death. But On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light isn’t without flaws. At times, in representing the cast of seniors, Strube relies on stereotypes that seem quaint and outdated: the “poker-faced” Chinese convenience store owner, for instance, who confirms Harriet’s suspicion — perhaps jokingly — that the Chinese eat cat meat, and the Riveras, who “have either a crucifix or a Virgin Mary in every room.” The large number of minor characters that step forth for brief appearances, as she searches for a surrogate family, doesn’t help. Since Harriet’s interactions with these characters are fleeting, it’s difficult for her to come to know them on more complex, realistic terms. In the novel’s final section, time jumps ahead by several years ( after an unexpected turn that isn’t spoiled here) and the coming-ofage story shifts to Irwin, now a teenager, as he struggles to make sense of his fractured family. Addicted to the Internet, he ditches his liquid Prozac meds because they interfere with his only comfort, masturbation. The problem is that he isn’t nearly as compelling a character as Harriet, and is harder to root for; by contrast he seems so passive and defeated. Strube tries to bring Irwin to a place where he can find a glimmer of redemption and light — making good on the title of her novel — but this ending is contrived, as if the only thing averting tragedy and darkness was the author’s intervening hand.
Those who loved Strube’s earlier novel Lemon, with its vulnerable teenage protagonist’s acerbic observations and yearnings, will find much to enjoy here. Despite its shortcomings, this novel continues to prove Strube’s skill in representing unique, defiant young women at crisis points, and it will be interesting to see what she writes next.