The quest for peace of mind amid girl’s family struggles
Novel traces hope, pain through eyes of 11-year-old
Eleven-year-old Harriet is struggling and she’s not even aware of just how much.
The main character in Toronto writer Cordelia Strube’s powerful new novel On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light, Harriet is dealing with enough to incapacitate most people.
She has divorced parents, each in a new relationship, each with accompanying issues. Gennedy, “the only criminal lawyer in history that’s broke,” lives surreptitiously with Harriet’s mother, Harriet, and her brother, at the Shangrila apartments, while her cycling-obsessed father has a younger girlfriend, Uma, who is determined to get pregnant, by whatever means necessary. Aside from the worldly-seeming Darcy, who is a year older and lives in the same building, Harriet is alienated from most of her peers and spends much of her time alone, feeling unloved, watching her mother’s affection and attention going to her younger brother Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus and requires near constant care.
In response, Harriet pours herself into her art projects, scavenging materials from dumpsters, and runs errands for the aging Shangrila residents to fund her dream of fleeing to Algonquin Park in the footsteps of her idol, Tom Thomson. She also dreams of a world without her brother, a better life and wonders how she could make that happen.
Harriet is a richly complicated character, at the centre of a similarly complicated novel. Strube, whose novel Lemon was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2010, deftly captures the complications and complexities of contemporary families.
One of Harriet’s closest relationships, for example, is with her Gran. It’s complicated by her Gran’s estrangement from Harriet’s mother and the limitations of age which have Harriet acting as a caregiver when she visits, witnessing her grandmother’s decline.
Traditional family structures are largely absent, with Strube tracing the ad hoc nature of relationships between parents, children, lovers and siblings with a keen eye, an empathic care and what seems like a genuine curiosity. There are no paragons here, no authority figures, and the characters, including Harriet, may not always be likeable, but by revealing them in their contradictions and at their worst, Strube creates an entire world of love and loss, humour and heartbreak.
On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light is a novel which defies easy categorization and one which surprises at every turn. One can see traces of writers such as John Green ( The Fault In Our Stars) in the way Strube approaches her storytelling, but the writing, on a line-by-line basis, serves as a reminder that Strube is one of Canada’s more expressive and creative prose stylists.
It is, at heart, a uniquely intimate exploration of the perilous fragility of the human body and the indomitable strength of the human soul. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.