“Flying over here, after we’d been flying for about four hours, I got up, wandered around, and looked out the window.” Novelist Mary Lawson pauses momentarily, sighs, and makes a grand sweeping gesture with her arm that indicates the entire landscape from Labrador to Victoria is included in her next statement. Lawson recently returned to Canada from England to promote her first novel, Crow Lake. She sits across from me in the Consort Bar of the King Eddie Hotel, where we sip tea and talk about what it’s like for a Canadian novelist to imagine Canada.
“A thousand miles of white in either direction…and I asked the stewardess, ‘Do you have any idea where we are?’ not knowing what route we had taken. She said she didn’t know but would ask the pilot. She picked up the phone on the bulkhead and said, ‘A passenger wanted to know where we were,’ and then she said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell her,’ and hung up the phone. The stewardess turned to me and said: ‘He says we aren’t anywhere, really,’ and I thought: I’m home!”
And so it is. Canada, otherwise known as Nowhere. Yet it’s a nowhere that Canadian writers have been populating with mythical towns and people since this country found its own voice in literature. Margaret Laurence had Manawaka; George Elliott Clarke—Whylah Falls; Alice Munro—Anytown, Ontario. Now Lawson has Crow Lake, the mirage just northwest of New Liskeard, Ontario.
Crow Lake is the mythical hometown of Kate Morrison, the novel’s narrator. Kate, her younger sister Bo, older brothers Matt and Luke, and her solemn but loving parents live happily until a tragedy leaves the Morrison children orphaned. The events following the death of Kate’s parents are the meat of the novel.
Kate, now in her late twenties and an assistant professor of zoology, must re-examine her origins in order to locate herself in the present day.
Told retrospectively, Kate’s confessional manner is at first jarring, since she proclaims that she hates revealing details about her past, then proceeds to do just that. It soon becomes clear, however, that Kate has unwittingly undertaken a quest of self-discovery and we’re along for the ride.
Kate constantly refers to “The Pond,” a place for the Morrison children to escape to, which exists as a place of her own where no one can find her. More importantly, it has strong symbolic value to the novel. It is where Kate first witnesses the life cycle occurring and is the birthplace of her interest in biology.
At the pond, she encounters creatures that rely on the surface tension of water to exist, an idea that very subtly directs us to consider the surface tension between characters in the novel. Not only is it a place of regeneration, but it is the locus of Kate’s history, safe from the toxic world beyond the perimeter of Crow Lake. Its pure, healing quality is reminiscent of Eden or the forest in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
For her scientific research, Lawson spent time in the University of Toronto’s zoology department. Professors Deborah Mclennan and Hélène Cyr advised Lawson on details surrounding the academic life in that particular discipline, as well as allowing her to sit in on lectures and knock around the wet-labs.
“They were fantastic,” she says of the professors. “I could never have had the feeling of authenticity without looking around the zoology department, seeing the wet-labs, talking to them about how their days are made up.”
At its worst moments, Crow Lake suffers from weak characterization. Peripheral characters, for the most part, come off as types or clichés, rendering them and their dialogue a little hard to swallow. I’m thinking of Kate’s boyfriend’s parents, whose sitcom-quality performances are stilted and distracting, adding little or nothing to the story.
At its finest moments, however, Crow Lake successfully evokes the themes of knowledge of the self, the relationship between people and the land they inhabit, and, in true Canadian fashion, “the bush garden,” as Northrop Frye would have put it. Lawson also skilfully
renders tiny but important details about life in a small town, drawing on the experience of having grown up just outside Sarnia in a place called Blackwell, Ontario. Otherwise known as Nowhere.
