Writings / Reviews

Fiction Review

Amanda Tripp

Skywaves
by Michelle Butler Hallett
St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador: Killick Press, 2008
286 pp. $21.95

Michelle Butler Hallett’s Skywaves makes it clear from the outset that it will not be read like any ordinary novel. Indeed. Skywaves is a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling, which complicates oral/aural tradition. Much of the novel’s wry humor—and its tragedy—comes from this question of (mis)communication: the private histories mapped out by its various narrators' struggles over perspective and perception so that the impossible truth is obliterated by a myriad of voices. Characters fade in and out of time to give readers glimpses of their own particular experience of the past. Contrary to their public persona, the Wright family’s local mythology is contradicted by the very real experiences lived by the ancestors of this broadcasting-based cultural legend. Spanning the early 1900s to the present day, the novel’s episodes are held together initially by geographic and emotional ties to Newfoundland. Skywaves slowly reveals itself to be a complex family tree--an internally decaying trunk rooted deep in Newfoundland’s craggy coast, perpetually struggling for the nurture and support of its homeland.

Hallett’s “novel / a drew” (for this is how the jacket describes the experience) is both raucously funny and deeply troubling as it delves courageously into Newfoundland’s many-faced identity. Skywaves speaks to its charms without shying away from its serious social problems. There is more than this however, coming in and out of focus in Skywaves’ pages. Composed of 98 episodes that pay no heed to chronological time, Skywaves mobilizes the cinematic: we find ourselves investing personally in each character, trying to hold on to them in memory until they reappear, potentially in another time, another place. The elusive characters are nevertheless compelling, for their radio silences are punctuated with our developing relationship with them: we yearn for their return from the past or future, hoping that they might give us the key to the novel, a desire Skywaves intentionally never satisfies. When they do come to the fore, they are painfully bright and neurotic, sharp with wit and experience, and even malice. Others are cast in warm soft-focus, threatening to retreat into the past before we get what we want from them; dead before they can speak for themselves, their loss haunts us like a voice we can’t quite make out. When we do, Hallett’s characters come to life actively, fighting for air time. Their humor betrays generations of pain, and yet their pains are so incredibly human that frequently we can’t help but laugh.

A drew, as described in the epigraph, is a fishing net, which is itself composed of 98 meshes. Thus Hallett’s 98 episodes mimic these connecting tissues, suggesting that the jacketed text is a complete, encompassing body. This metaphor is multifaceted, and so suits Skywaves’ vignettes. The imagery suggests a wholeness, as it speaks perhaps to the organic nature of history expressed in the novel, wherein characters are drawn across space and time, both of which are collapsed here. The ethereal magic created by the perpetual presence of radio in the air bolsters this sensation as well: the air is live with the stories of the past. Indeed, the past ghosts the novel’s present, and yet is itself frequently more tangible than the more modern meshes, whose narrators remain at a distance in self-defense against the explanatory powers of this past. So, while Hallett helps us paint a series of pasts, the present, and the future is nowhere near as certain: it seems that part is up to us, and we might very well be on our own.

Which brings us to the darker side of the drew’s image: the knots of the net further suggest not only entrapment in this unifying structure, but also isolation in the individual compartments. And, surely, Skywaves’ characters are nothing if not lonely, despite their participation in the technological tapestry of time and inherited history. Even Nicole, the character most identifiable as Hallett’s potential doppelganger, remains at an untouchable remove from the reader and from her closest friends. A narrative coherence emerges perhaps at the expense of those who compose its very narrative, isolating its actors while tying them into a great patchwork experience. The radio’s intervention and occasional time-travel sometimes plays the part of a compassionate facilitator in this big net, encouraging introspection, and sometimes, communication against the tides of time and space, ebbing in and out like a beacon of hope. Hallett’s novel isn’t devoid of closure; it’s just not the artificial closure of traditional story-telling. We might be alone with our presents, but the past never really fades out—its stories live and change, providing both comfort and hurt, so that we might sometimes tune into ourselves just a little bit clearer, even if we might not like what we hear.

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About The Author

Author

Amanda Tripp is in the first year of her Masters of English at McGill University, having completed her undergraduate work in Cultural Studies where she specialized in genre and gender studies in cinema. She is currently working on suppressed Family Gothic narratives in contemporary American film.