Many shades of adolescent Gray
How to describe the title character in Belinda’s Rings? Let’s ask her daughter.
The precis comes early on in Corinna Chong’s debut novel, when Gray, the book’s teenage hero (and a budding marine biologist) shows her mother a picture of a spookfish.
This is a particularly unsettling deepsea species that has “these huge balloon eyes that stick right out of its head like gum bubbles ready to pop.” The fish’s skin is transparent, and its body contains naturally occurring mirrors to aid its vision.
Belinda’s first reaction: “It looks like an alien.”
This is a reasonable enough response — I checked on Google Images, and the fish is, indeed, super gross. But her mother’s answer gets right under Gray’s skin.
“I’ve told her a million times I’m sick of hearing about aliens,” she complains. “Mum is the opposite of those people who don’t believe in things until they see them. Mum only believes in things she doesn’t see.”
In a way, this conversation illustrates the kinds of tensions that are at the heart of Belinda’s Rings. It’s a novel about family members who, despite some wildly different frames of reference, keep searching for common ground.
This is harder than it sounds, however, since Belinda spends nearly the entire novel a continent away from her second husband and three children (Gray and her older sister Jess are from a previous marriage; little Squid is the son of Belinda and her new spouse Wiley).
The family matriarch has aliens on the brain, and more specifically, crop circles. So, as the book opens, Belinda is on a plane to Wiltshire, an English county that — coincidentally enough — is home to Stonehenge, the world’s largest concentration of crop circles, and Belinda’s estranged sister and mother. Her journey is thus equal parts exile and homecoming. And the question is not whether she’ll find what she’s looking for, but whether she’ll return to Canada at all.
Meanwhile, back in Calgary, Gray regales the reader with various tidbits she’s picked up over the years about all things aquatic. The lost city of Atlantis is really a chain of underwater volcanoes. Squids (the non-stepbrother kind) have three hearts. Yet we quickly peg this constant chatter as a coping mechanism, a way for Gray to distract herself from her real problems.
Belinda’s Rings is an amiable debut novel, with a sweetness and generosity in Gray’s narrative voice that carries it for much of its length. But the story contorts itself into several unnecessary knots.
Ultimately, Belinda’s Rings is about the intersection between personal ambition and domestic responsibility. While sitting on the plane, Belinda justifies leaving her family behind thusly: “The trip to England was as much for her children as it was for herself. She was setting an example: decide what you want from life, and don’t be afraid to pursue it … A passionate mother was better than a wholly disinterested mother.”
But that’s not how her kids at home see it — possibly because Belinda never explains it to them, or anyone else, in those terms. Back in Calgary, Gray and her siblings feel completely adrift, abandoned in a filthy house with a disinterested, possibly unstable stepfather.
Belinda’s Rings
By Corinna Chong NeWest Press 248 pages, $19.95