Mary Lawson on her new novel
Characters reveal themselves one page at a time
I didn't know what the ending of this book would be until I was very near the ending. Part of writing is creating and developing the characters.
I've tried to plan things out, but my books are character-driven and the stories evolve as the characters and the relationships between the characters do. Mary Lawson
The processes of creativity often demand patience. Award-winning Canadian writer Mary Lawson is quietly matter-of-fact about this, saying she waited more than a year before the seed for her new novel took root. It came in the form of a sudden, powerful image.
“The image I had was of a little girl standing at her window, looking at the boxes in the living room of the house next door,” Lawson remembers. And from this moment, her new book, A Town Called Solace, began taking shape. “I had no idea where that image came from, but it was intriguing,” she says from her home in England. “What was in the boxes and who did they belong to? And why was this child always standing at the window? It kind of grew from there.”
The child is seven-year-old Clara, one of the novel's three pivotal characters. Her family is in crisis because of the disappearance of her beloved teenage sister after a stormy confrontation with their parents. Unhappy and not fully comprehending the implications of what is happening, Clara finds an anchor of reassurance in the house next door and her job of caring for a cat named Moses, whose elderly owner, Mrs. Orchard, has still not returned from hospital. But then Clara's certainties suffer another blow when she sees those strange boxes through the window and a stranger in the house.
Since the publication of her bestselling debut novel, Crow Lake, in 2002, Lawson has been repeatedly drawn to the complexities of family relationships and a troubled past rearing up to haunt the present.
A Town Called Solace is no exception. But what gives all four of her novels their unique texture is their setting. This is a Canadian author who emigrated to England at 22 and has lived there for more than half a century. She and her husband live in an attractive riverside town near London, a setting far removed from the defiant, elemental ruggedness of the northern Ontario landscape that defines Lawson's books.
“I love the landscape of the Canadian Shield,” she says. “I think it is without equal. So I like to spend time there in my head. And I still spend a lot of real time in (that region), particularly the Temiskaming area, doing research.”
She has carved her own compelling fictional world out of that landscape, as William Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha, Thomas Hardy with Wessex and Alice Tyler does with Baltimore.
“Where you live has a profound effect on who you are,” Lawson told Postmedia in 2006. “And I think the north has huge benefits and huge problems for all who live there. The sense of isolation increases everything.”
Lawson, now 75, experienced isolation growing up in a rural community in southern Ontario. She felt it even more strongly spending summers at the Muskoka cottage that has been in the family since 1917. But when she wrote her first novel, she wanted an even more isolated culture. “So I combined my memories of southern Ontario and Muskoka and shifted the whole thing several hundred miles further north.”
A Town Called Solace, mainly set in the 1970s, contains a revealing passage in which the town handyman confesses that he's never been to Toronto.
Lawson questions whether the culture has changed that much since then.
“I remember talking to a 16-yearold girl who lived in Elk Lake, which is very remote. She said she had been to New Liskeard (population about 4,500) once and wasn't going back because it was too big and noisy.”
Lawson's new novel unfolds through three shifting perspectives. There's the child Clara. There's the hospitalized Mrs. Orchard, contemplating her own mortality and still haunted by a long-ago loss. Finally there's Liam, the troubled young man to whom she has mysteriously bequeathed her house because of events from his own childhood and who is now trying to negotiate his own salvation.
“I found him a very interesting character,” Lawson says. “There's this question I've always wondered about — what happens to children in their early childhood who suffer a trauma and grow up without love? I decided that he has never experienced it — or thinks he has never experienced it.”
A self-deprecating quality surfaces when Lawson talks about her success. She's quick to point out that she was 55 when her first novel finally appeared — and only after having been rejected repeatedly. “I didn't think it would ever be published,” she says now, and there remains a touch of wonder in her voice. Yet Crow Lake went on to be published in nearly two dozen countries and in 19 languages, while collecting a bundle of honours along the way.
She was certain there would be no successor — but there was. The Other Side of the Bridge made the Booker long list in 2006. “My reaction was complete disbelief,” she said at the time. “I don't consider my books highly literary. I think they are quite simple.”
A Town Called Solace is only her fourth novel in 20 years.
“Time flies, especially when it comes to producing a book,” she says with cheerful resignation. “It takes me forever. I'm a very slow writer because I have no technique. It's all trial and error. I've tried to plan things out, but my books are character-driven and the stories evolve as the characters and the relationships between the characters do. I didn't know what the ending of this book would be until I was very near the ending.
“Part of writing is creating and developing the characters. You can never know another person as well as the thing you have created.”
She hopes her readers will get to know the characters and understand the importance of relationships.
“The older I get, the more I value the people around me,” she says. “COVID has really pointed this out. Take our neighbours — we rely on each other, we actually need each other. And the younger people on the street are looking after us oldies — checking up on us, ensuring that we're OK!”
She returns to a theme of her new novel: “Our actions can make a big difference to other people.”