Fiction Review
Amanda Tripp
The Time We All Went Marching
by Arley McNeney
Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2011
236 pp. $19.95
The Time We All Went Marching is, by far, the best and most satisfying read I’ve had all year. I fear that not nearly enough people will happen upon it, or have the sincerely good fortune of reading it, and this would be a real shame, because the novel deserves national and lasting recognition. Arley McNeney’s voice is true and her story is both tender and thrilling. Discovering the subtleties of the lives she slowly and carefully reveals is both a strange and familiar process: by the end, surely we are reading about ourselves in a life we never knew. Indeed, this is our history. McNeney’s narrative investigation of it is so honest and well-wrought that by the end of this incredible novel, the long-lasting and national psychological impact of the nearly cross-Canada On-To-Ottawa March, and of all the personal striving and struggling for empathy that are echoed in it, are abundantly clear. Moreover, by the end, the March seems suddenly crucial to remember, and to learn from, if we are going to move forward.
We meet Edie through her stories, as she wrestles with and justifies her escape from her ruined husband. Her stories about Slim are, like the man himself, a tumbled blend of fact and fiction, memory and what she seems to need to believe is true. With her two-year old son in her lap, Edie rides away from a life that is both a personal and intimate war, and an important, if difficult, slice of Canadiana. They journey by train across a frozen landscape, away from a life of alienation and despair, towards one that is even more uncertain.
The Time We All Went Marching is a rare and exciting blend of historical education and investigation, vibrant and compelling characters, important emotional excavation, and stylish and innovative poetics. Told largely from the perspective of a miner’s wife who is escaping a life destroyed by the ravages of labour and poverty, McNeney’s novel blends historical hardships with the intimacy of personal experience in a way that is rarely achieved with so much grace. This may only be Arley McNeney’s second novel, but it has all the makings of a timeless classic, and is as compelling and rich as any masterpiece I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this wonderful story is the multitude of legitimately interesting voices, and their sharp accuracy. McNeney’s control of language is such that not a word is wasted, and the effect is utterly organic. The novel’s emotional intelligence is surprising and delicate: McNeney never overstates the point, or waxes poetic beyond her characters’ scope. Her restraint is very perfect, and as such the world of the novel is absolutely absorbing – indeed, it’s very hard to leave.
As they across the snowy lands, Edie and her son Belly each glide in an out of storytelling and memory, so that we see them not only as they see themselves, and their worlds, but how they see each other. Though it is only one facet of this deep little novel, the extreme and conflicted intimacy of the relationship between mother and son is one of McNeney’s many successes in this powerful work. Despite the psychological and geographical distances that threaten to the characters’ opportunities for the escapes and connections they want to make, there is a real closeness in the humanity of the novel. Indeed, perhaps it’s in so acutely expressing the desire to run away, to be apart, and to not longer be indebted – to each other, and to histories both personal and national – that The Time We All Went Marching does its most important work
Arley McNeney is an author who absolutely deserves a national following, and whose name will no doubt start appearing in classrooms and graduate seminars, hopefully sooner rather than later. Upon finishing The Time We All Went Marching I immediately sought out her first novel, Post, and I will anxiously await her next piece of work.
