Crow Lake (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Crow Lake is a 2002 first novel written by Canadian author Mary Lawson. It won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in the same year and won the McKitterick Prize in 2003. It is set in a small farming community in Northern Ontario, the Crow Lake of the title, and centres on the Morrison family (Kate the narrator, her younger sister Bo and older brothers Matt and Luke) and the events following the tragic death of their parents. Kate's childhood story of the first year after their parents' death is intertwined with the story of Kate as an adult, now a successful young academic and planning a future with her partner, Daniel, but haunted by the events of the past. In among the narratives are set cameos of rural life in Northern Ontario, and of the farming families of the region.
The death of their parents, when Kate is about 8 years old, Bo a toddler, and her brothers in their late teens, threatens the family with dispersal and seems to spell the end of their parents' dream that they should all have a college education. Luke, the oldest but not the most academic, gives up a place at a teaching college in order to look after the younger two and allow Matthew, academically brilliant and idolised by Kate, to complete his schooling and compete for university scholarships. This sacrifice leads to much tension between the brothers. Both work intermittently for a neighbouring family, the Pyes, who for several generations have suffered from fierce conflicts between fathers and sons. In the final crisis, Matthew, after winning his scholarships, discovers that he has made the meek and distressed daughter of the Pye household, Marie, pregnant; she also reveals that her father, Calvin Pye, has murdered her brother, who was thought to have run away from home as several other Pye sons had done. Calvin Pye kills himself, and Matthew has to give up his plans for education to marry Marie. Kate sees the loss of Matthew's potential academic career as a terrible sacrifice, and is unable to come to terms with Marie or Matthew thereafter. The dénouement of the adult Kate's story comes when she returns to Crow Lake for Matthew and Marie's son's eighteenth birthday, introducing Daniel to her family for the first time. In the course of this visit, she is made to realise - first by Marie and then by Daniel - that Matthew's loss though real was not the total tragedy she had always considered it, and that it is her sense of it as tragic that has destroyed her relationship with him. The book ends with her struggling to come to terms with this view of their past and present relationships; the struggle is left unresolved but the final tone is optimistic.
The book is thus essentially a double Bildungsroman, in that the development of both Matthew and Kate is charted; but whereas we see the key events in Matthew's young adulthood more or less in sequence, the key events in Kate's are sketched in from both ends, towards a crisis that in terms of events is Matthew's but psychologically is more significant for Kate. The mixture of perspectives involved in Kate's story allows the author to relate violent events and highly charged emotions in a smooth and elegant style, a quality for which the book has been widely praised by reviewers.
