From Atlantic Books Today #98 fall 2023
This year’s Atlantic Canadian fall fiction lineup has come in with a bang — or make that a Roar. That’s the title of Shelley Thompson’s debut novel and it aptly sets the tone for the emotional high stakes and speed-readability of these three feature books. Each one of these novels digs deep.
First, they invite you in and put the kettle on, and then they promptly ask you the big questions. How do you leave home? Return home? Build yourself a home? How do you find safety in your community, identity, body? Especially when bodies are temporary — they get old, they die (or, in some cases, stubbornly do not, as in Lesley Choyce’s The Untimely Resurrection of John Alexander MacNeil). Bodies that conform to societal expectations are celebrated (more on that and motherhood in Willow Kean’s Eyes in Front When Running), while ones that don’t are in danger, as in Thompson’s Roar.
Shelley Thompson already has quite the repertoire as a celebrated actor, director, and screenwriter, but Roar is her first foray into fiction. Donald McInnes leaves home just shy of high school graduation, believing that she’ll never be able to express her truest self under the roof of her childhood home. A few years later, she returns home for her mother’s funeral, not as the son and brother she left as, but as the daughter and sister she is — to her family’s surprise.
Now as Dawn (like the rising sun), she and her family need to learn to navigate the loss of their matriarch and find new ways to relate to each other. In all this, breath, fire, love, anger, and a broken-down tractor play pivotal roles.
Roar is an adaptation of Thompson’s film Dawn, Her Dad & the Tractor. She felt compelled to revisit these characters in a new way because they still had more to say. “I wanted to write more deeply about the same family. I couldn’t let them go. I felt I hadn’t properly told their whole story, and that was important to me: to really get to know who these people were and what motivated them.”
The novel transitions between the perspective of several characters, giving the reader a global sense of the relational complexities at play. No character in this novel is close to perfect; each has their own bristles and burrs that family inevitably rubs up against. Thompson proves on the page her belief that “no person is just one thing; we are all made up of so many threads of being that to ignore them reduces life’s tapestry to a smothering blanket.”
It was intentional for Thompson that Roar “doesn’t focus on the physical changes, or the process of transition, or the things that are and should remain the purview of trans individuals. I hope this story of a family recovering from grief and bereavement and rebuilding to a different familial structure will be recognised by people outside the queer community, who will appreciate the shared experience from a different perspective.”
Whether you are already a fan of Thompson’s work or are about to be, you will find meaningful conversation starters and inspirations in her latest creative pursuit. “Everything I’ve tried in my life has, I think, taken me a baby step closer to who I am as a creative person. Writing this novel made me feel like — for now at least — I’ve arrived in a very happy and comfortable creative place,” she shared. She’s already at work on her second novel.
Willow Kean’s Eyes in Front When Running begins with a lyric from St. John’s singer-songwriter Ameila Curran: “I’ve got a million regrets and I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done sometimes, but it’s nowhere near sunset and, baby, we’ve got years yet.” The lines immediately ground the reader in a sense of place and also prepare them to meet Cleo Best, the novel’s fiery, quick-witted, and unconventional protagonist.
In her twenties, Cleo backpacked around the world and was open to adventure however it may have appeared — in a bar, a beer bottle, a handsome stranger, or otherwise. Now she’s in her late thirties and in love with her boyfriend, Jamie. The couple is ambivalent about becoming parents, but when Jamie decides he’s more interested in trying than not, Cleo must finally decide her stance on motherhood.
This novel explores motherhood in every way imaginable: those who want to conceive and can’t, who conceive and suffer losses, who don’t want to conceive but do, and those who are unsure whether parenthood is for them. What this story does best is position all these realities together, without favouring any as morally right or wrong.
Kean has an intimate relationship to the story’s subject matter. “I can’t lie, writing the book was a wild ride. I got pregnant two weeks into starting this story, then I had a miscarriage, followed six months later by another pregnancy which, thankfully, worked out. I didn’t get one of those ‘easy’ babies I keep hearing about.” The experience temporarily estranged her from writing, but when she was able to return to it, pregnancy and motherhood were at the front of her mind.
“In terms of the portrayal of early motherhood, I was pretty adamant about not sugarcoating anything; Instagram has done enough of that for us. It’s still this big taboo to admit that infant care can be thankless work that makes a lot of women really, really sad. My hope was that even just one woman who had a rough time with it would read it and think, ‘Oh, it wasn’t just me, this is normal.’”
Cleo is far from your typical female protagonist. “Cleo is such a flawed character, and I didn’t want to shy away from her flaws because, hey guess what, women can be jerks sometimes, too. I guess this was my way of creating a character I wanted to see more of.” For everyone craving a darkly humoured and grounded take on the reality of motherhood, Eyes in Front When Running is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
The Untimely Resurrection of John Alexander MacNeil is Lesley Choyce’s 103rd published book. In it he resurrects a cast of characters from his 2015 novel, The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil. John Alex has aged 10 years since we first met him at the age of 80, and as much as he resents being thought of as old, he’s constantly referring to himself as such.
The awareness of his age, however, doesn’t deter him from putting up a fight against death — literally. Willing himself back to life one night after dying in his sleep, he wakes to find Death sitting at his kitchen table. With a magical realism that is both playful and foreboding, Choyce shows John Alex living the next few weeks of his life trying to get back to normal, which proves difficult as Death turns out to enjoy his company.
“I always had a rule for myself to never, ever write a sequel of anything,” Choyce says over a crackling telephone in Lawrencetown, N.S.. But a broken rule is a wonderful thing when done right. The first book mystified Choyce by becoming a smash-hit on Almonte, Ont., population 6,000, where a local bookstore gifted a bottle of wine to the 500th person to buy the novel. That spurred Choyce to give himself the opportunity to revisit a character that captivated the attention of so many.
As Choyce ages, he’s found an interest in writing characters who are older. He admits he once might have dismissed them as “just old people.” “But someone like John Alex, who is 90, still very much has a rich life. He’s this unique, feisty, highly individualistic character who’s completely out of step with the times we live in now,” he says, noting that the old man’s friendships and community ties are key to his vitality.
Far from advocating for any single perspective of what death is, this story revels in multiple potential meanings. “What fiction should do is explore possibilities,” Choyce says. Destiny, choice, medicine, faith and spirituality are all given their breathing room in the story’s pages. Death itself is positioned as a home we must all eventually enter, but Choyce suggests there are many paths and ways to take that journey.
On a final note, Choyce shared, “it’s very hard for writers to know when the story really has finished and to let it go,” which seems to me a lesson in writing, and also perhaps the very lesson John Alexander is challenged with in his triumphant return to the page. Choyce is going on tour with the launch of his new book, and yes, he will be making a stop in Almonte.
My favourite thing about reading is talking. These books carve out a space for their readers to have frank conversations, lively debates, or healing heart-to-hearts about death, birth, and all the life that happens in between those seeming bookends. I’d suggest reading these books as I did, one after the other. Together they create a rich exploration of our times, while considering the eternal questions that mark up the margins of every human story.
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