Cast of curiosities tackle love, hate and journey home
One cold November morning in 1967, Bette Parsons leaves Fraser Arm, B.C., walking out on her husband Wally and their five kids. Her neighbour, Alice McFee, disappears the very the same day. Rumours fly, folks are panicked, but the police are stumped.
Strangeness abounds in Christine Higdon’s fast-paced debut novel, “The Very Marrow of Our Bones,” about loss, guilt and abandonment. Among the “gutted” Parsons kids, we’re closest to 10-year-old Lulu. Hurt, fiercely protective of her big brother Geordie — labelled “retarded” in 1967 — Lulu is a born rebel, headed for trouble from page one.
Forty years on, Lulu gets together with her scapegrace brother, Trevor, the boy who’d infuriated her by placing a cross for their “dead” mother on the same spot where Lulu had buried her pet hamster. Comic touches blend with classical references, when Trevor warns Lulu about the “Aeolian winds” that blew Odysseus off course on his voyage home. “Like mother like daughter” is Trevor’s verdict on his wandering sister.
Among Higdon’s cast of curiosities is Doris Tenpenny, the town’s mute egg-seller. Privy to her customers’ deepest secrets, this preacher’s daughter evolves into a wise woman, an earthy devotee of Rachel Carson — whose warnings about toxic pesticides lend the book its title. Yet even Doris cannot solve the mystery of Bette’s disappearance.
Doris does know, however, about the town creep, Aloysius McFee, a master of disguise, who embodies enough evil and intrigue to blow young Lulu onto a very dangerous path.
When, at 50, road-battered Lulu finally limps home, the narrative grows brighter, sunnier. Suburban encroachment notwithstanding, the small town where kids scoured ditches for bottles to trade for candy at Mr. Chen’s store — a memory freighted with its own enchantment — has blossomed into a place where something very much like happiness seems possible.
Yet secrets remain buried, some eerily close, while others are thousands of miles away. Mysteries get solved. Truths tumble out. But this wondrous book concerns more than mere detective work, expanding instead on the grander mysteries of love and hate, survival and destruction — and most powerfully, perhaps, of decades-long journeys home.
Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer in Toronto.