Astray is full of great stories
Astray is being billed as fact-inspired fiction, a label that could also be applied to author Emma Donoghue’s best-known book, the novel Room, which won the 2010 Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for both the Man Booker and the Orange Prizes.
Whereas Room was based on real-life contemporary child-in-the-cellar horror stories such as the Josef Fritzl case in Austria, Astray looks back in time, to P.T. Barnum, Redcoats in New Jersey and Pilgrims in Cape Cod — a historical hodgepodge that brings to mind Gordon Johnston’s It Happened in Canada cartoon series, which held a treasured place on my childhood bookshelf and has since been passed down to my own children.
For those who weren’t around in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, It Happened in Canada was based on little-known historical facts, the quirkier the better, such as The Yukon Ice Worm Cocktail, The Coffin That Came Home, and The Soldier Who Was a Woman. “Incredible … but true,” exclaims the back cover of one of the books, copy that could just as easily adorn Astray. It tackles many of the same topics as the cartoon, including the Klondike Gold Rush and 19th-century cross-dressing, although via a different medium, the short story.
Donoghue was born in 1969, but did not likely encounter the It Happened in Canada series — or many of the historical events that it, or her new book, refers to — while growing up in her native Ireland. As she explains in the afterword, her knowledge of this country was limited: “The Canadian city of 300,000 people that I live in is not one I ever heard about, growing up in Dublin.” With a PhD in English — from Cambridge, no less — the London, Ont.based Donoghue is an accomplished playwright who has also written seven novels, four short-story collections and three works of literary history. She has the research skills to more than compensate for any gaps, such as they may be, in her education — and ours.
Each story in Astray is appended with a short note citing a bibliographic source ranging from Pierre Berton’s Klondike to a single line from an 18th-century newspaper: “We hear that the wife of a certain Merchant of this city, while her husband was in the country … took out his will … and went in widow’s weeds to Doctor’s Commons, under a pretence that he was dead … and … receiv’d all his money in the stocks, and is gone over sea.”
Widows abound in these stories, where so many of the characters are also trying to make their fortunes quickly, usually to their folly, as in the case of a lawyer who plans to marry a client for her money, only to realize that he is the one being played. And quite a few of the characters could qualify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. (It should be noted that at least one of Donoghue’s non-fiction titles, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801, lends considerable credibility to her authorial vision in such matters.)
In the afterword, Donoghue muses, with her usual eloquence, on what unites these characters. “Immigrants, adventurers, and runaways — they fascinate me because they loiter on the margins, stripped of the markers of family and nation; they’re out of place, out of their depth,” a comment that influenced my understanding of this book, perhaps more than I’d like. I’m not sure that I would have arrived at the same interpretation without the author’s explicit prodding. Why not let us arrive at our own conclusions? At the same time, I can see the utility of the afterword for stories published in at least nine different publications over a period of 11 years. By naming a theme — of migration or exile — Donoghue helps them adhere to one another a little better.
Even so, readers would be well advised to tackle each story one at a time, giving themselves the freedom to linger over the account, for example, of a slave running away with his mistress in Civil War Texas before diving into a description — tragic, romantic and sparse — of life aboard an Irish immigrant ship en route for Quebec City: “What has appalled … the most on this little floating world is not the squalor, nor the hunger, but the dearth of news. No one has left their company, except for that old man who died of dysentery last week. No one has arrived, unless you count a stillbirth down in steerage.”
I could imagine these stories being published serially in a newspaper (with illustrations), as their wackybut-true predecessor, the It Happened in Canada cartoons, originally were. The format would give the reader a chance to digest each piece, every single one of which contains enough fodder for a novel. Great story ideas, but an odd fit somehow for a collection.