When heartbreak surfaces: Lisa Moore's February

Daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother, widow, grandmother, lover, wife – the phases of female life cycle rapidly in Lisa Moore’s February, the story of Helen O’Mara, whose husband Cal is killed when the offshore oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, leaving her with three children, pregnant with their fourth.

The novel weaves back and forth in time between 2008 and the late 1970s, from the time Helen first met and married Cal to her current life as a grandmother of two, running a dressmaking business and having finally achieved peace of a sort. There is still gnawing grief over what could have been, anger at the fact that she was denied closure since her husband’s body was never recovered, and a yearning for what could have been in an alternate universe, a universe in which men don’t leave home to take dangerous jobs to support their growing families, a world where unemployment isn’t systemic and the struggle to survive emotionally and economically doesn’t always seem epic.

Several years ago (I think it was in July 2002) I attended an amazing seminar that was part of Simon Fraser University’s Summer Publishing Workshop. Six authors and six critics formed the panel, talking mainly about the trend to – and redefinition of - historical fiction as a genre. No longer merely bodice rippers or period romance novels, authors like Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jack Hodgins had all recently published works of historical fiction.

That seminar was my introduction to Lisa Moore and her work. She told a charming story about the response she’d received to her second collection of short stories, Open. She said that one of the stories in the collection dealt with a philandering husband. And that after Open was published, her own husband had been upbraided on more than one occasion at the mall in St. John’s, Nfld., for being unfaithful to her, by readers who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe that art wasn’t thinly disguised life with only the names changed. So I leapt at the chance to read February when House of Anansi offered advance review copies (publication date is June 27, 2009) on Twitter.

Moore is a force to be reckoned with on the literary scene – a writer who has by no means reached the peak of her literary abilities and who continues to grow from book to book. I hear echoes of many other women writers in her work: A.S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields (Republic of Love and Unless), Anita Brookner, the two Janes (Hamilton and Smiley), a touch of Sue Miller (The Good Mother) and, if not Sylvia Plath, then certainly Anne Sexton. This passage immediately reminded me of Sexton’s poem “Clothes,” and its inimitable line about being still ‘sixteen in the pants.’

She watches Barry’s thumb press the caulking into the crack and she thinks again the thing every adult woman thinks of herself—that she is still her sixteen-year-old self.

It is not a thought. Helen becomes sixteen; she is sixteen: the shyness and wonder. It comes over her briefly. And then it is gone. She is forty-nine, fifty, she is fifty-two. Fifty-six. The world has betrayed her, arthritis in her wrists.

How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered, is more of the same—not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.

You forget, she thinks. You forget so deeply, desire is obliterated. A profound and altering chill befalls.

The only cure is to chant: I want, I want.

I also see Moore writing in very much the same vein as Roddy Doyle in his Barrytown Trilogy (The Snapper, The Van, The Commitments). One of the responses to her first novel, Alligator, was surprise that St. John’s was portrayed as a metropolis with its share of grit, including vandalism, eco-terrorism, and infiltration by the Russian mafia rather than the happenstance capital of a province that specializes in quaint. More than anything, Moore’s Helen O’Mara is a woman who endures. In the face of blinding, unexpected grief, she concludes her role is to be there for her children – and that part of being there means teaching them that life is tough. By the time she’s a grandparent, after the sheer routine of 25 years of getting on with it, putting one foot in front of the other whether she wants to or not – her style has changed, and she finds herself wanting to indulge and pamper her grandchildren.

Moore was interviewed briefly on Canada AM this morning. During the interview she spoke of how little had been written about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, what a closed and unknowable environment it was, particularly to women. There were no women working on the rig that was declared ‘unsinkable’ and few visits from anyone not working on the rig were allowed due to the potential for industrial espionage. Not many of the bodies were recovered, and the lack of closure that resulted means the event is still alive for Newfoundlanders who lost loved ones. “The heartbreak comes to the surface,” when it’s mentioned, Moore said.

As long ago as Open, Moore’s verbal dexterity was evident. (“A woman with a toddler in a convenience store during a hold-up. I am an obdurate subplot, stubbornly present. How did I get here?” from “Natural Parents.”)

She’s only getting better, as you can see from this passage from February:

England looked like England rolling past the tinted windows. It was lush and green and there was a field of sheep. It was as if Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence had written down exactly what they’d seen and it had all stayed that way, or as if everybody here had read those books and made the landscape look like it was in the novels. There were trees and hedges and stone walls and sheep. The sheep, scattered here and there on the green hills, were an authentic touch.

Moore’s an author who never disappoints and February is no exception. My only regret is that we’ll probably have to wait another year or two for her next novel.