Vigil, by Susie Taylor

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When I found out that Susie Taylor, author of the wonderful Even Weirder Than Before, had a new book coming out, I was naturally excited. Then I saw the subtitle: “Stories.” Will I like this? I wondered — because, as regular readers of this blog might know, while I admire the short story as an art form and have the greatest respect for those who write it well, I would always rather pick up a novel than a short-story collection. If someone is going to brilliantly sketch characters and setting for me, I want to immerse myself with those characters in that setting for 250-300 pages or more, not get torn away every 30 pages or so to a new place with new people.

(I absolutely recognize this is a shortcoming with me as a reader, not with the short story as a form).

Vigil is actually a collection of linked short stories, the type of book that sits gently in that space between novel and short-story collection. All the stories deal with a common cast of characters in the fictional town of Bay Mal Verde, Newfoundland (pretty obviously based on Harbour Grace for anyone who knows the region). All the stories relate, in some way or another, to a single event: the death of a young man named Stevie, the latest victim in the epidemic of drug-related deaths in this quiet outport an hour’s drive from St. John’s.

This was enough like a novel to draw me in and keep me engaged — the setting, the characters, the central problem that would stay with me throughout the whole book. Unlike a novel, the story doesn’t unfold chronologically or even in flashbacks, or stick with one or a handful of viewpoint characters. Rather, it tells the story of Stevie’s tragedy, of the town’s tragedy, like a mosaic or a stained-glass window — selecting individuals, moments, scenes from past and present to show how the influx of hard drugs has impacted young people and old from all corners of this community.

Taylor’s gaze on the people of Bay Mal Verde is both generous and unsparing. The same character can be — and often is — both hero and villain, or perhaps neither. A drug dealer who is both directly and indirectly responsible for so many deaths can also be kind and generous to his own family and to those he sees as vulnerable. But there’s no sentimental “heart of gold” whitewashing here: neither good or evil in a person’s character cancel each other out. Rather, each character in this book, whether a recurring one who appears in several of the stories or one who takes centre stage only in a single story, makes beautiful and terrible decisions. Everyone is fragile; everyone is needy; everyone is cruel. There is black, and white, and all shades of gray, but no simple answers.

Contemporary outport Newfoundland life, with ATVs and gas-station convenience stores, and scratch tickets and alcohol and hard drugs and all the rest, is depicted here in vivid detail, as are the rhythms of speech and language that bring the characters to life. This is not your Nan’s Newfoundland outport kitchen, except that it probably is, if your Nan is currently under 70 and living in an outport. By which I mean it’s not an idyllic and idealized version of outport life: it’s thirty-years-post moratorium outport life, with economic hardship laid alongside flashy displays of Alberta oil money and, increasingly, drug money, keeping the economic engines ticking over. It’s not a tourism commercial: it’s the litter in the streets that the tourism commercials won’t show, that we want to look away from.

Don’t look away.

Vigil feels so organic to the community where it’s set that it can be jarring to remember that the author is not “from here” but moved here from elsewhere in Canada. However, Taylor herself doesn’t want us to forget this, and foregrounds here “away-ness” in the bold decision to include a character who has moved to Bay Mal Verde from outside Newfoundland: a character named Susie. Susie is a queer woman, an artist, an outsider, a woman living alone since her partner left her, a runner who covers miles of Bay Mal Verde’s roads daily but will never be viewed as “one of us.” Some key moments in these stories are told through Susie’s point of view; in some stories, we see other characters observing, judging, and commenting on her just as she observes and judges them.

In other words, Susie the character both is and is not like Susie the author; she is a constant reminder that this is a story filtered through an observer’s perception, as all stories are. And yet, in drawing attention to the outside observer, Taylor also draws attention to how transparent she has made these stories feel, how the reader has been brought to ride along in a character’s truck cab, into a crowded bar, up to the counter of the gas station store. We are there and not there, experiencing and observing, judging and accepting.

All this to say: did I like it? “Like” is not the word for a book as exquisitely rendered as this one, treating such difficult and painful topics. I loved it. I devoured it. It hurt. Maybe it even helped.

You should read Vigil.

North Woods, by Daniel Mason

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North Woods is such a strange and fascinating book. The premise sounds much more straightforward than the book itself turns out to be: it is a fictional history of a particular piece of land, and the house built upon it, in Massachusetts: a story of the land and the people who live on it over four centuries.

But the book is so much stranger than that. For one thing, when I hear that a novel is going to centre around a particular location over several centuries, I expect that it will also be to some degree a family story, tracing the descendants of the original inhabitants through generations. But (probably more realistically, for most land and old homes) almost everyone who lives on this particular land dies childless; the property passes through dozens of unrelated owners, so that the continuous memory of who has lived there and how the land has been used exists, for the most part, only in the narrative itself, not in the memories of the characters.

It’s almost much more experimental than a straightforward historical novel: as well as telling different stories through time, the author employs striking different narrative voices and literary genres. It’s also very much a ghost story; characters don’t cease to be active within the story after their deaths. The writing is as haunting as the ghosts themselves, and in general I found this a compelling and beautiful book from start to finish.

Beholden, by Lesley Crewe

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Set in Cape Breton and spanning the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, Beholden is a story of family secrets, lies, and their impact on several characters, particularly three women and one man whose lives are indelibly impacted by these secrets. I found the writing here easy to get into, the characters engaging and the plot twists interesting. Best of all was the Cape Breton setting which felt so vivid and real. This was an enjoyable summer read.

The Adversary, by Michael Crummey

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The Adversary is not a sequel, but a companion volume, to Crummey’s The Innocents. The titular innocents in the earlier novel, an orphaned brother and sister, have to decide whether to move from their isolated home to the nearest community of Mockbeggar; this novel takes place in Mockbeggar during the same time period. (“Mockbeggar” is a fictional town, but in trying to place it in the geography and history of Newfoundland it might not hurt to remember that there was a real fishing plantation called Mockbeggar, now a national historical site, in the town of Bonavista).

I’ve heard Michael Crummey read from this book twice, and talk about the fact that if The Innocents is an Adam-and-Eve type of story, The Innocents is the matching Cain-and-Abel story. Once again we have two siblings, a brother and a sister, but instead of being bound by love and fidelity as the children in The Innocents are, Abe Strapp and his sister, whose first name we never learn (she becomes known as “The Widow Caines” later in life, and this is how she is referred to throughout the book) loathe each other from childhood. When they grow up to control the two powerful merchant firms in Mockbeggar — Abe through inheritance and The Widow through marriage — their personal enmity becomes amplified to the point where the town is torn apart by their feuding.

It’s common, in historical fiction set in outport Newfoundland (and I would put some of my own work in this category) to balance the harshness of the external environment — weather, shipwreck, disease — with the warmth of human community: while many novels portray difficult and tangled human relationships, there is usually an underlying theme of people who will pull together and support one another through the hard times. What makes The Adversary so stark and unyielding in its portrayal of the past is the absence of that warmth and support. While there are good people in Mockbeggar, the cruelty and hate between its most powerful people permeates everything, making this not just a powerful historical but a sobering and timeless reflection on what happens when evil is given power.

Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes

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A few years ago, I was somewhere other than home — I can’t remember where now, but possibly Halifax, as that’s the place I’ve been most in the last few years. Or it could have been Toronto, which would be appropriate for this post. Anyway, I passed a person on the street collecting recyclable cans and bottles in a grocery cart, as many people do here at home, but was startled to see that the person was an older Asian woman. Here at home, I’ve only ever seen white men, usually older men, collecting recyclables to turn in for money; where I live, it’s generally a money-making activity pursued by men who are making a fairly marginal living, often on social assistance, and is not a job I would expect to see either a woman or a new Canadian doing. But the person I mentioned this to after seeing the woman that day said that in their area, it was quite common for Asian seniors, especially women, to collect recyclables.

That was the context I had when I started reading Dennison Avenue, a novel (or is it??) about a Chinese-Canadian woman, Wong Cho Sum, whose husband dies suddenly, leaving her alone in the house they have shared for decades. The story unfolds not in a traditional narrative, but in scenes, snippets, and poetry, as Wong Cho Sum navigates widowhood, old age, memories, and the changing neighbourhood around her. She has lived her life in Toronto’s Kensington Market/Chinatown area, which is being gentrified around the original residents, forcing many out. Wong Cho Sum is not destitute — and in fact could be very well off if she were willing to sell her house, sought-after by developers — but she is thrifty, and when a friend introduces her to the fine art of picking through recycling bins for returnable cans and bottles, it becomes not only a small source of income, but a new way for her to see the neighbourhood she has known for so long.

Daniel Innes’s beautiful illustrations are not sprinkled throughout the story — they are not, really, illustrations of the story at all — but rather grouped together at the back of the book (you flip the paperback to read the novel one way; the collection of drawings the other way). Like the story, the drawings are an evocative tribute to a fast-changing neighbourhood. There are two drawings on each page, and most (all?) the pages feature the same location at different time periods. I would have liked to see captions indicating where each drawing is, and the time periods depicted in each — but that’s just my usual desire for more information, and has no real bearing on the beautiful writing and drawing in this book that evokes not just a sense of place, but nostalgia for that place.

The Way of Chai, by Kevin Wilson

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This is an unusual book for me to have picked up, partly because it’s a book that grew out of an influencer’s popular TikTok channel, and partly because I am only just very gradually getting into drinking tea at all, and am certainly not at a chai-making level in my tea life. But because I knew of Kevin Wilson through other online channels and actually share a couple of real-life friends with him, I was curious about this young Seventh-day Adventist pastor who got popular posting online about tea-making and the lessons learned from his own multicultural background. So I picked up this book.

It’s a series of short reflective essays, each introduced with a chai recipe and a bit of history about chai and the author’s relationship with it, broadening into some simple, spiritual-but-not-overtly religious, life lessons. I liked the memoir aspects best — I always connect most deeply with a writer talking about their own personal experiences and family background rather than just giving general life advice, so those were the strongest aspects of this book for me. I took several months to read this, picking up a chapter a time on days when I felt like a cup of a tea and a few moments of reflection. While this book hasn’t yet inspired me to try making chai for myself, it did give me some lovely, thoughtful moments. It’s also a beautifully designed book; for someone like me who mostly reads e-books, this physical book was a pleasure to hold in my hands.

The Calm Place, by Jackie Kirkham

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This book had been on my radar for awhile, as I am acquainted with the author online and had seen her post about it. However, I didn’t make the move to buy it until someone challenged me to make a second attempt at reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book I had attempted before and failed at (more on that in another post). Mired deep in Dillard’s classic, intense, sometimes impenetrably philosophical book about closely observing nature, I remembered that I’d wanted to read A Calm Place, which I judged from what I knew of it would be a much easier, gentler, lighter book about closely observing nature — something a bit more accessible to someone like me, who knows the names of about four flowers and six birds, and can only grow potatoes (with uneven success).

And so it proved to be. I quickly finished and enjoyed A Calm Place; as for Tinker Creek, I’m still ploughing through it. (Can you plough through a creek? Not my best metaphor work). In A Calm Place, Jackie Kirkham decides at the beginning of the year to keep a journal of her observations of a very specific slice of nature — the garden of her urban house in Scotland. As it happens, the year she decides to do this is 2020, and the garden quickly becomes not just an exercise in observation and nature writing, but a retreat (and almost the only retreat available!) from the Covid pandemic and the associated stresses of hospital work, homeschooling, observing politics, and worrying. This was a lovely combination of memoir and nature writing, and as a city-dweller myself, I loved the idea of focusing on the tiny bit of nature right in our back (or front) yards. We don’t necessarily have to escape the city, live off the land, and think deep thoughts in order to learn from the natural world – we can start right were we are, as Kirkham beautifully demonstrates here.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World, by Douglas Westerbeke

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This book has all the ingredients I love — plucky heroine, historical setting, magic/fantasy elements — yet somehow it didn’t add up for me. It was disappointing, because it’s a great concept and I wanted to love it. The story begins in late-19th century France, where an encounter with a mysterious puzzle ball inexplicably leads to nine-year-old Aubry developing a mysterious disorder where she is in danger of bleeding to death if she stays in the same place for more than a few days. Once she figures out what’s happening, Aubry, first with her family and eventually on her own, begins travelling, and spends the rest of her life wandering the world, constantly moving from place to place to escape her fate. There’s also a mysterious underground library! And yet somehow, all these elements didn’t add up to a story that was compelling for me — things just kept happening, but with no strong sense of plot driving the book forward. Also, the storytelling was sometimes non-linear, with events happening out of chronological order — which I’m generally fine with, but in this case it added to my sense of there not being a plot with real cause-and-effect. Maybe this is just one of those books where there’s a disconnect between book and reader – it’s not a bad book by any means; it just wasn’t for me and didn’t live up to my expectations.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin

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This novel has such a great premise. Four siblings growing up in New York in the 1970s visit a fortune-teller, who tells each of them, privately, the date on which they’re going to die. Then, in four novellas, each sibling’s story is revealed, leading inevitably to the foretold end. We see the weight of knowing your destiny, as well as the impacts of each death on the remaining family members.

And yet … I’d have to say that for me, this book added up to a little less than the sum of its parts. I’m not sure what I was looking for … more of a sense of fate? Less randomness in the outcomes for each character? More of a sense that all these destinies were interconnected? All of that sounds vague, so maybe it’s enough to say that only one of the four was really emotionally engaging to me — the rest made me wonder if the prophecy really mattered, in the end, or if it even needed to. Enjoyable enough while I was reading it, but I don’t think this one has the emotional punch that will make it linger with me.

The Searcher, by Tana French

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The Searcher is a lovely, brooding, atmospheric mystery about a middle-aged, divorced American police officer who retires the force and buys an abandoned house in a small Irish village hoping for a more peaceful life. Of course, as anyone who’s ever lived in a village anywhere (or read a mystery novel) can tell you, the small town is as rife with secrets, crime, and shame as any big-city block, and despite his determination to keep apart from it all, Cal gets drawn into investigating a missing person that some people would rather stayed missing.

The cynical, divorced, middle-aged male detective who’s seen it all is a trope so well-worn its edges are rounded … and yet Tana French somehow manages to make Cal appealing (to me at least) rather than like a tired old cliche. There’s a basic sincerity and kindness to the man despite the obligatory “gruff exterior,” and the ways in which he’s a little old-fashioned and set in his ways feel believable even if the reader doesn’t always sympathize. I found this really engrossing to read — French is brilliant, I think, at delineating both setting and character with a few well-chosen words — and I will definitely read the sequel as soon as I can pick it up.