Fiction Reviews
No Safeguards
by H. Nigel Thomas
Toronto, ON: Guernica Editions, 2015
298 pp. $25
After overhearing Ma Kirton fighting with her daughter early on in No Safeguards (H. Nigel Thomas, Guernica Editions), a neighbour comes over and advises, “We the older heads know the cliff. We mustn’t let the young ones run carelessly and fall over it.” The daughter, Anna, has quit her education and fallen in with a deeply religious crowd. Her mother can see through their devotion; she knows the dangers that cult-like devotion to religion can lead to, but nothing she says can steer her daughter away. Some four decades later, Anna has lived her mistakes. She has fled her home in St. Grenadine and her marriage with an abusive zealot, claimed refugee status in Canada, and brought her two sons to live with her. She now lies dying, her oldest son Jay by her side, narrating the story, and willing his younger brother Paul to come back to his family.
No Safeguards deals with some big issues — religion, abuse, sexuality — but it is first and foremost a family story. Tolstoy famously said that families that are unhappy are all unhappy in their own way. There is truth to that, of course, but family unhappiness springs from the same sources — miscommunications, resentment, and the layers of guilt and blame that come with them. A grievance can be held a lifetime, some small slight from childhood, forgotten by the one who delivered it, can be held on by the victim and grow into a thing that defines them. H Nigel Thomas captures the intricate, multi-layered family relationship with sensitivity and a deep, honest understanding.
Ma Kirton was wise enough to know about long-held resentments, and she did all she could to avoid creating the grudges that can destroy a family. She takes no satisfaction in being proven right when Anna’s religion leads her into an abusive marriage. And when Anna at last flees, Ma Kirton doesn’t gloat, she sets about helping her, providing money, support, and pulling in the experience of others to ensure that Anna can get into Canada, and once there, stay. She takes in the boys, giving them a home until their mother can get Canadian citizenship.
By the time his mother leaves, Jay has been on the receiving end of his father’s brutality for most of his life. Anna leaves in large part so that another son does not have to live through the abuse that could be set off by anything; the father’s religious righteousness used to justify petty control. If Anna showed Jay affection, he was beaten, if he was too inquisitive, he was beaten. It turned him into a quiet child, one Ma Kirton knows has seen too much. But Paul, too young to know what he was spared, blossoms in his new home; taken care of by Jay, encouraged by his grandmother, he has become known as Ma Kirton’s genius, a precocious boy whose academic successes makes him a minor local celebrity.
You can never know the sacrifices someone makes for you, and this is especially true of the young. While Anna — in a chapter that is essential account of the immigrant experience in Canada — lied her way over the border, claimed refugee status, worked under the table enduring humiliation and sexual abuse at the hands of the sorts that take advantage, all to make a better life for her family, Paul had already found a better life. And when it comes time for the family to be reunited, Paul only knows that a woman he doesn’t remember has taken him from his good life to a new one that is much different, and ultimately, much worse. Paul falls deeper and deeper into trouble, beat down by the changes, by hormones, and by the North American school system. He becomes a sullen teenager, hurtling toward those cliffs Ma Kirton’s neighbour warned of, blaming the whole thing on his mother’s decisions.
In Canada Paul makes life for everyone around him difficult. Anna becomes incapable of dealing with her rebellious young son, his constant verbal abuse, his hatred of everything, and falls back on the only comfort she has ever known, religion. This only further sets off Paul; for five years, he is the angry teen, exasperating the family, taking all his anger out on Anna, mostly.
Jay, meanwhile, attends college and does what he can to keep the peace. But he is quiet, reactive. He explains Anna to Paul, and Paul to Anna, but it does little good and Paul spends as much time ragging on Jay as he does his mom. But amid Paul’s pose, bravado, and young arrogance, there is a small bit of crying out for help. What one person thinks they are making clear can be missed entirely by another. With all of Paul’s noise, Jay can’t be expected to pick up on those cries for help. But that doesn’t prevent Paul from resenting that they were not acknowledged.
In the end, Paul realizes he has to leave. Staying only perpetuates the relationships he has with his family; a new start is needed. He leaves to Latin America, trying one last time to open up to his brother. This is the one time that Jay clearly hears Paul’s desire to share something. But Jay, after five years of support — of putting up with it — has had enough. He rejects Paul, who leaves, his resentment, for the first time, justified.
Paul moves toward his cliffs and survives. Anna does not; her life of worry catches up when her son leaves without saying goodbye, she becomes ill and does not recover. Paul returns, months after his mother’s death, seemingly comfortable in his own skin for the first time since he was young. He does not see right away the worry he has caused, that his selfishness has caused his brother to drop out of grad school. But with Paul back, the brothers can get on with their lives; Jay no longer worried about Paul’s extended absence, and Paul, ready to live his life honestly, without pose.
The book ends with the reunited brothers, wiser for their experiences, talking over the things they could not before; the private experiences of life. The resentments all linger — in families there are some that never go away — but they seem to be learning to work around them. No Safeguards is meant to be the first book in a trilogy, and the end of it feels like a beginning. It is a testament to H. Nigel Thomas’s storytelling that the reader is left wanting to see where the brothers will go next.
