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Anna from Away

by D.R. MacDonald

Readers can be forgiven for glancing at the cover image and title of D.R. MacDonald’s new novel and thinking, “Oh no, not another Canadian novel of austere landscapes and rural folk who don’t take to no fancy city ways.” MacDonald, however, is too good a writer to fall into that trap. Anna from Away transcends CanLit clichés in its depiction of an isolated community contending with a magnificent and at times overwhelming natural landscape. It also grapples with the global socioeconomic forces undermining communities of all sizes with far more subtlety and insight than most urban fiction.

The story focuses on two residents of Cape Seal, a Cape Breton village depopulated by the loss of its mining and fishing industries. What little money flows into the area is “money from away,” from tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of authentic Gaelic life (think tartans and fiddles) and strangers who summer in houses the locals still refer to by the surnames of the families that built them a century ago. The community’s isolation and proximity to the sea have also made it an ideal smuggling ground for the province’s burgeoning drug trade, or so a few ambitious and wrong-headed local young men have come to believe.

Red Murdock is the last member of his family to live year-round in Cape Seal. His relatives have either died off or moved elsewhere to find work, and Red has deepened his seclusion by taking to drink after the death from cancer of his long-time lover, Rosaire. When Anna Starling, a soon-to-be divorced artist from California, rents the house next door to Red’s cousin, the codes of hospitality force him to emerge from his boozy cocoon long enough to welcome her. Weeks later, after rescuing Anna from a fall through the ice, the desire Red thought (and half-hoped) had died with Rosaire begins to awaken.

MacDonald skilfully contrasts Red’s primal grief with Anna’s self-conscious world-weariness, without reducing either of them to simple emblems of traditional or modern sensibilities. They both share a natural inclination to solitude that sets them apart from whatever community they might inhabit and draws them closer to each other over time.

Anna acutely feels the gap between her irony-drenched worldview and the deep roots of history and personal association that bind Red to Cape Seal. That tension is especially strong in the kitchen where Red’s grandmother prepared decades of meals for a large family. “When Anna stood at the stove it was not to cook a meal as they’d done, the women of his granny’s house, Anna’s atmosphere was nothing like theirs. What had they thought good and right and appropriate, here, amid family, the sounds and smells? Of this Anna had but a glimmer.” Here, in prose reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence (an author Anna references later in the scene), MacDonald captures the almost hopeless struggle to comprehend the consciousness (or “atmosphere”) of another person and another time.

Red experiences his own version of cultural dislocation when he smokes his first joint with Anna in that same kitchen. “He studied the light bulb swaying at eye level and his mind seemed to sway as well, slowly, broadly, everything clear but demanding more attention than he would usually give it.”

Red is worldly enough not to be too “high-minded about this drug business,” as he puts it. His own father did a little bootlegging back in the day to make ends meet, but he rightly connects the drug trade to a broader societal decay undermining what remains of Cape Seal’s tight-knit community: “Drugs had seemed to come at them here from away, and that was part of the problem: tied into movies and the TV, and those caught up in it didn’t care anymore about their own people, they answered to criminals way off somewhere.” Here and throughout the novel Mac­Donald uses the violent drug economy as a microcosm for the market-driven globalization that is destroying enclaves both large and small across North America.

Anna from Away could do with fewer landscape descriptions and scenes of Anna and Red brooding in solitude. The overwhelming natural surroundings and melancholic cast of mind are no doubt indigenous to the locale, and Anna and Red are both scarred by their respective pasts, but the novel is most alive when its characters act and interact with each other. People will always trump landscape, at least where the novel is concerned.

 

Reviewer: James Grainger

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32.99

Page Count: 300 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-55468-071-9

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2012-9

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels