Sarah Leipciger, an expatriated Canadian who now lives in London, returns to her home country’s roots with the B.C.-set book The Mountain Can Wait.Amelia Troubridge
Sarah Leipciger's debut novel begins literally with a bang. A young man named Curtis climbs behind the wheel of his truck after a party – a decision, in any story, anywhere, that can only lead to tragedy. On the way home he hits a woman walking along a dark stretch of highway, and, in a moment of panic, he flees the scene. This initial flash of drama may seem at the outset like a gimmick, since the consequences of the hit-and-run don't come around for several chapters, two-thirds of the book later. But for patient readers, the payoff is worth the wait.
The real goods, the story's true centre of gravity, is largely a quiet affair. It's the story of a small and broken family. The novel's central character is Tom Berry, boss of a low-budget tree-planting company, proficient woodsman and reluctant single dad. Tom has two kids, a teen daughter, Erin, and a twentysomething son, Curtis. His troubled wife, Elka, abandoned the family when the children were very young. She was found dead in a snowbank years later and her loss haunts everyone still.
Leipciger is an expatriated Canadian who now lives in London. Despite her time away from the landscapes of home, the geographies of the West are rendered here with remarkable finesse. The forests, the lakes and even the mosquitoes come to life in vivid, three-dimensional detail. The Mountain Can Wait is set in a wide-ranging variety of British Columbian locations – Prince George, Whistler, the wilds of Nechako Country and an off-grid southern gulf island – with a misty, brooding quality that permeates nearly every page. Somehow it's the perfect natural habitat for Leipciger's characters, for fathers who take their children into the mountains to hunt wild goats and for sons who eat cold soup right out of the can.
Tom spends his summer at work in the forests of central B.C. supervising his tree-planting crews. Tree-planting life is accurately and entertainingly rendered in all its rainbows of vulgarity and absurd occupational twists, but some may find this a lengthy diversion in which Tom is left alone for too long. Erin is stowed with Tom's mother back in town, which is unfortunate, since she's an alluring character whose gentle toughness we glimpse but never really come to know. Instead of heading out into the bush with his dad, Curtis falls out with his girlfriend then hides in a buddy's basement lair, lost in a fog of pot smoke.
Tom is a calm, competent man who cleans a rifle with surgical precision. And yet he can't find the words to express his tender feelings for his children or girlfriend, all of whom express varying levels of displeasure with his reticence. Leipciger has set for herself an ambitious task with a protagonist like Tom.
If the narrative feels distant at times, it's because Tom is not the talking kind, nor the type of character to think on the page. When he speaks he betrays a fondness for philosophical platitudes.
"Things happen," he says. "You don't know what you'll do." Or, "Self-preservation is a powerful thing." In one scene, Tom puts on a pair of oven mitts to rescue an injured hawk. It's an apt metaphor for a man who approaches human emotions, his own feelings especially, as if they were radioactive.
For these choices the writer may be ultimately forgiven, since there is more going on beneath the surface than initially meets the eye. Leipciger reveals enough to show that she's in masterful control. The writing everywhere is crisp and elegant, studded with unexpected metaphors and keenly observed detail. A woman's ear protrudes from her hair like a "kitten's tongue," and a train rumbles over railroad ties like "the heartbeat of some sleeping bull moose."
Tom may be disconnected from his own psychological life, but nevertheless it burbles away, coming to light in the subtlest of gestures, in the way he strips pine needles, one by one, from a branch. In the way he gets lost in alien environments – an academic campus or the inner-city streets of Vancouver.
If the first half of the novel gets caught up in memory and rumination, it's never a dull side trip. Leipciger's tree-planting chapters pack plenty of trouble and adventure, and soon enough the story finds its footing again with worthy, satisfying results. When Curtis's crime catches up with him, both father and son must make weighty choices. They've got to prove to themselves – and each other – that they're built of stronger minerals. Pressure, as they say, makes diamonds.
Charlotte Gill's most recent book, Eating Dirt, won the BC National Award for Non-Fiction.