Textured novel on fate often elegant
Wonder probes metaphorical meaning of lives
In London, a mathematician sits on the cusp of a breakthrough in his theory of wave propagation as the smoke from a volcanic eruption that killed all but a single resident of faraway Martinique wafts overhead. A century later, two strangers communicate through the stones they arrange on the slopes of Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.
What, pray tell, will tie these remote events and characters together? The structural riddle posed by Dominique Fortier’s new novel Wonder, (published in French in 2010 as Les Larmes de saint Laurent) is a textured and often elegant novel.
In this, it benefits from a limber translation by Sheila Fischman, whose skill and ubiquity have made her English Canada’s dominant lens into Quebec’s literature. Fortier, too, is a translator who has handled CanLit heavyweights like Margaret Laurence and Anne Michaels.
As a result, Fortier’s writing comes to us for the most part unfettered by metaphorical or terminological awkwardness.
“On flat ground the tent was visible for kilometres around, like a glittering ocean liner on the plain or some monstrous star fallen to earth,” is about as vivid and unaccented a description as you’d ever want.
The first of the novel’s three parts is based on the true story of Baptiste Cyparis — his actual first name was August—an-Afro-Caribbean man recruited by the Barnum & Bailey Circus after surviving the apocalyptic 1902 eruption of Martinique’s Mt. Pelée.
Ironically, Cyparis owed his good fortune to the fact that he was the island’s only inmate of a thick-walled dungeon that insulated him from the volcano’s heat and ash. In Fortier’s telling he’s a decent enough sort, his arrest the result of his defending the honour of a local prostitute.
Wonder begins on a foreshadowyAshWednesday.As the island’s annual carnival comes to a close, the servants of the wealthy de La Chevrotière household — Baptiste among them — are being waited on by their masters (like many carnivals, this one acts as a societal pressure valve by briefly upending social roles).
The servants, however, seem to be enduring rather than revelling in their proverbial day at the spa. The laundress flinches as drops of wine stain the tablecloth; an awkward exchange with the valet leaves a plate shattered on the mahogany floor.
Later, while travelling America by rail with the circus, Baptiste meets and marries Alice, who cares for its animals. After taking the fall for another disaster, this one the direct but preventable result of his affair with the circus’s stunt rider, he ends up back behind bars.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the (real) British mathematician Augustus Edward Love is pondering the invisible forces that lie beneath Earth’s surface. He and his musician wife are, in essence, a couple of happy geeks.
In their travels, Love notes curious similarities in the sulphurous hot springs found in newly accessible Pompeii and Bath.
Tragedy is soon to strike, however. Garance dies in childbirth and a heartbroken Edward lives just long enough to see his mathematical theory of elasticity published.
Though Fortier carefully avoids naming the man and woman who appear in the novel’s third part, there’s a lot of stage whispering going on. The woman — a former circus acrobat — encounters the man who spends his days outside poring over books on earthquakes and volcanoes — he’s about to go on a dig of Pompeii — while walking her dog at Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.
If you’re a fan of symbolism and circularity, then you won’t take issue with a scene where the pair take overnight refuge in a thick-walled mausoleum during a storm.
Though Fortier succeeds in bringing Cyparis and Love’s stories to life, Wonder would arguably have been a more interesting book had she approached this last part with greater transparency. Instead, she opts for a drum roll ending that suggests not only that we’re all replicas of our forebears, but that we may inherit their fates as well.