Crow Lake: FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED AUTHOR OF A TOWN CALLED SOLACE

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When they are boys, Jake is involved in a serious accident that Arthur blames himself for. Though he saves Jake's life, Arthur wishes, at the time, that Jake would die. Arthur carries this guilt with him like an albatross onto adulthood. As the novel opens Arthur is married to the beautiful Laura and Jake is nowhere in the picture. Lawson nails it with that tiny bit of dialog. Although it’s been 18 years since my parents’ car accident, some days it feels like yesterday—other days it feels like I never had parents. And I completely relate to Katherine’s numbness, the reluctance to feel anything about anyone—if you care, there’s a good chance that they will get yanked away from you. Not caring seems like your only defence against heart wrenching pain. The only problem is that is doesn’t work. People like Katherine’s boyfriend Daniel worm their way into your life and you reluctantly begin to care about them, all the while struggling to see them as temporary and frustrating the hell out of them, as they wonder what is wrong with you. Strange, the way the mind works. The way it protects itself from things that cannot face. Grief, for instance. Or regret. Guilt. It finds something else, anything, to draw between it and what cannot be looked at”.

Mary Lawson - Penguin Books UK Mary Lawson - Penguin Books UK

Days spent with Arthur consisted of vast rolling plains of silence with the odd half-dozen words dropped into them like stones, and the stones always took him by surprise."They had gone into town to buy a suitcase. The fact that the Morrison family didn't even own one reveals worlds about their isolation in Crow Lake, but the suitcase is a powerful symbol of the fact that one of them was about to get out. Kate's older brother Luke, 19 years old and a diligent student, has just won a scholarship for teacher's college -- a sort of miracle for a family in which finishing high school was a luxury only earned after generations of sacrifice and toil. Kate says that "understatement was the rule in our house. Emotions, even positive ones, were kept firmly under control." How would you say that this "rule" affected each member of the Morrison family? How did it influence their relationships with each other and with people outside their family? What are some examples? Centerstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt’s protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she’s outgrown her siblings—Luke, Matt, and Bo—who were once her entire world. Kate attended a conference in Edmonton to give a paper on the effect of pesticides on the life of still-water ponds.

Crow Lake - Penguin Books UK

I first went to Struan when I read her first novel, Crow Lake (2003). I returned when I recently read, her latest novel Road Ends (2013). I don’t know how I missed The Other Side of the Bridge which was written in between these two in 2006, but I am so glad that I found it. This is the story of two brothers, Arthur and Jake, at odds throughout their lives and the tragedies that be fall them. Lawson has so skillfully developed these characters and we come to know them so well that the events seem inevitable. It is also about the woman who tears them even further apart. In many ways, it is also a coming of age story of a young man, named Ian, the son of the town Doctor whose mother has just abandoned him and he carries burdens of his own. This novel opens our thinking and hearts - for sure- when disappointments happen, when the rug is pulled out from under us, and we bump up against ourselves (our own worse enemy) A.I think a lot of the tension between Luke and Matt stems from the fact that their balance of power has shifted. Until ‘the accident’, Luke was very much the lesser brother. He was a standard bored, sullen, resentful teenager, his deficiencies highlighted by comparison with his brilliant younger brother.

I have pursued your dream single-mindedly; I have become familiar with books and ideas you never even imagined, and somehow, in the process of acquiring all that knowledge, I have managed to learn nothing at all."