Swan’s strong voice trumps all the rules
My Ghosts impresses grumpy reader
I have certain pet peeves when it comes to literature, especially Canadian literature. It bothers me when characters, especially young, relatively uneducated characters, develop a poetic fascination with such machinery as timepieces or telegraph machines. I am wary of too many references to tightrope walking or other circus arts.
I can be quite mean about it: “This kind of thing might have felt fresh when Robertson Davies released the Deptford Trilogy or Fellini, La Strada, but now?”
I will not tolerate any mention, no matter how fleeting, of unidentified burnt men recovering in improvised war hospitals. I already read The English Patient, and I liked it very much, at the time — with “at the time” being the operative words.
But even I — grumpy, demanding reader that I am — can admit that there are exceptions. There are books that may on the surface seem to do everything wrong, that break all “my” rules, and yet I like them. I just do. My Ghosts by Mary Swan is one such book.
If I had to give just one reason why, it would probably have to be purity of voice. Swan, of Guelph, Ont., writes like her name sounds, delicate and pretty. Her voice is strong — by which I mean consistently recognizable as being her own — and a strong voice trumps all.
When I read a book, I want to feel as though I am reading something that no one other than the author could have written. This is the case with Swan, who was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her first novel, The Boys in the Trees, a fictionalization of a horrific but little-known 19th-century Canadian familicide.
To describe Swan’s voice, I am going to have to break one of my rules for reviewing and make use of one of my least favourite reviewing tropes, which is to compare an author’s style to that of a visual artist. Please know I am tempted to use such words as “sketch,” “brush strokes” and “painting.” I want to say that her style is “impressionistic,” especially in the very beginning where we encounter a teenage Clare recovering from an unnamed illness in Toronto in 1879.
Clare uses this time to grieve the many losses that she has already faced in her young life: the loss of her biological parents; the loss of her adoptive parents’ Scottish homeland; the loss, before her arrival on the scene, of an older brother, “Wee Alan,” as an infant during a difficult crossing to Canada. Swan draws Clare with a light hand, trusting us to read closely and to fill in any missing details ourselves.
I appreciate Swan’s restraint. If she had fleshed out these scenes, it might have drained them of their power. Instead, in a nice instance of metaphor matching style, she relies on the literary equivalent of “persistence of vision,” a phenomenon that several generations of her characters refer to, whereby “the eye sees what it expects to see and fills in the gaps.”
I loved Clare even though she had one of my least favourite pastimes in all of literature: tinkering with timepieces: “Each job a little puzzle to solve, a series of small satisfactions.” I searched eagerly for more references to her as the story progressed through subsequent generations of her adoptive family.
The same names, stories and physical characteristics kept popping up. Clare. Alan. Edith. Scottish folk tales about changelings. Ears that stick out. At times, I was confused, unclear on what generation a certain Isabella belonged to, or which war we were at now.
Usually, when that kind of confusion occurs in a novel, I become angry with the author for not having included a family tree at the front of the book. I felt this with My Ghosts, but only briefly. The more I read, the more convinced I became that this confusion had been a deliberate and wise choice on Swan’s part, an attempt to replicate some of the confusion we can have about our own family histories. Could it really be that so-and-so died by fire or drowning or suicide? When was that again, and how could anyone have ever forgotten in the first place?
As far as I’m concerned, Swan can write about whatever she wants. Timepieces. Tightropes. Perhaps even bandaged invalids. For her, I lay down my rule book.