{"id":232,"date":"2011-05-19T10:25:14","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T10:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=232"},"modified":"2012-05-14T02:30:07","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T02:30:07","slug":"andrew-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/writings\/reviews\/andrew-macdonald","title":{"rendered":"Andrew MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiction Review<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Andrew MacDonald<\/h6>\n

The Town That Drowned<\/h1>\n

By Riel Nason
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2011.
\n280 pp. $19.95<\/h6>\n

There is a lot to like about Riel Nason\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s debut novel, The Town That Drowned<\/em>. The premise, for example, is delicious: a little girl bashes her head and has a premonition of a town overcome by water, only to have circumstance conspire to bring the vision\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s content into being. And that girl, Ruby, becomes a companion we enjoy having, navigating girlhood, her small New Brunswick town, and life with a brother who seems to suffer from a kind of undiagnosed autism. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also a love interest, and an affecting, if not entirely unpredictable, ending that fits.<\/p>\n

Nason\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel takes place over the course of three years, in a different kind of Sixties, a small Canadian town far from the cultural stereotypes, the hippy-isms, the tuning in, turning off, and the like.\u00c2\u00a0 In the hands of Nason, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a bad place to be. Her cast of characters, too, make cozy company, particularly Mr. Cole, an endearing figure who functions as a kind of mentor for our saucer-eyed narrator. In terms of conflict, Ruby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s problems creep up on her with eerie portent: whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the impending flood, the jeers of classmates, or Percy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s escalating emotional fragility, Nason excels at generating suspense that builds silently. We wonder: when the town actually drowns, how many of its residents will suffer a similar fate, either literally or figuratively?<\/p>\n

And here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where this review takes a potentially dark turn. At times, the novel feels a bit familiar, the narrative accreting all the elements needed to be classified as a particular sort of Canadian coming of age narrative that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seeing a renaissance these days. For example, your main character needs to be a young outcast (check) with an odd interest or hobby (woodcarving, for example). She must recover a boon, bump heads with the values of her community, and experience a near-crippling loss that facilitates her transformation from tabula rasa<\/em> to adult (check in triplicate). And if we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re feeling particularly, you know, Atwoodian, all of the above will take place in a small town or some version of the Canadian hinterland, as per Survival<\/em>, her oft-cited survey study of Can-lit (check!).<\/p>\n

All of which makes it sound like I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like the novel. I did. What Nason does, she does well. The writing, for example, is finely polished, the locale evocative, and her dialogue rings true. In Ruby, she nails the voice of youth. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also clear that Nason knows where to find a story: the narrative of the novel echoes the real life flooding of a similar town in the Sixties.<\/p>\n

There are some really beautiful images going on here, too, like an injury Ruby suffers whilst carving one of her wooden figures: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Today I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m stating a brand-new figure, so I choose a piece of driftwood and begin the tough job of roughing out the shape. I start to remember Troy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kiss at work, but about three strokes in, and all in the matter of a second, my knife slips off the end of the wood and grazes my left wrist.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Later, the mark will be examined by others, commented upon, seen, in a jokingly serious way, as an attempt to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153do [herself] in.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Even without an inkling of the story\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trajectory, we know that Ruby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inching close to catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Percy, Ruby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enigmatic brother, might be my favourite part of the novel. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a quiet sadness in his struggle against change, in the way in which his relentless reaching out to the world gets misinterpreted by those around him. We learn that, as a child, Percy learned to speak at fourteen months, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but then somehow his little brain forgot.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ruby explains that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there were seventeen words my brother once spoke: ball, cup, dog, water, book, cow, baby, car, truck, milk, bird, boat, river, bear, cat, door, and deer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and while she can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember ever hearing him say those words back then, Ruby has seen them \u00e2\u20ac\u0153on a sheet of paper folded up in my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s jewellery box.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Implicit in that observation is a sense of ineffable loss that both Percy and Ruby will end up sharing by the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s end.<\/p>\n

The problem with reviewing books is that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the reviewer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s job to conflate opinion and objectivity. Put another way, it takes two to tango. It is such that if you change up one of the dancers, the dance looks radically different. Because this dancer enjoyed the way The Town that<\/em> Drowned <\/em>moved him, he felt as if he has met this partner before and have taken many of this particular dance steps in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiction Review Andrew MacDonald The Town That Drowned By Riel Nason Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2011. 280 pp. $19.95 There is a lot to like about Riel Nason\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s debut novel, The Town That Drowned. The premise, for example, is delicious: a little girl bashes her head and has a premonition of a town overcome by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-232","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/232\/revisions\/1193"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}