Ragged Islands
By Don Hannah
Knopf Canada,
350 pages, $32.95
Ragged Islands is Don Hannah's second novel, and it is a quietly wonderful account of the mental journey taken by an old woman in the final moments of her life. Similar in subject matter to such works as Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, Ambrose Bierce's short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder, all of which treat the last moments of a person's life as a kind of self-contained, secular pilgrimage, it is nonetheless an original and engaging piece of work that deserves to be recognized for its own merits.
Susan Ann Roberts is 85 on Sept. 11, 2001, and she lies dying in a Toronto hospital, suffering the triple indignities of diapers, catheters and restraints. Suddenly, she finds herself walking down the dirt road that leads to her summer home in New Brunswick, some 80 years in the past.
We are then escorted gently but firmly on a dreamlike exploration of Susan Ann's happiest and saddest memories, an emotional journey that, because of Hannah's temporal tricks, feels like it goes both upriver and downriver. The poetry of this natural cycle is explained to us in the plain but vivid language of a woman whose sole accomplishments in life were to live, love and grow old, yet who seems not mundane but heroic because of it. Her journey is also impossible; Susan Ann walks alone from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia in an unspecified amount of time, encountering no one on the way except people she once knew, and who seem to play the roles of both familiars and psychopomps.
Time continues to slip backward as she walks. When Susan Ann finally arrives at the place she called home for decades, Ragged Islands, N.S., the house where she lived with her husband and children hasn't been built. This doesn't bother Susan Ann in the slightest, as in fact almost nothing does. She sits on the rocks and looks out at the sea, remembering how she used to stand at the sink and look at this very same view, but in a time that has not yet come to pass.
Hannah excels at creating images like this that echo Susan Ann's discombobulation: Stars are in the wrong places, people sleep with their eyes open, her old dog Sally can talk. On top of this, Susan Ann appears to be getting smaller; at one point, she hops on Sally's back, and the little dog then carries her along -- over a beach covered with severed pigeon's wings. Strangeness abounds.
Back in Toronto, Susan Ann's son, Carl, is sorting through old letters, learning secrets about his mother's past that are not nearly as disturbing to us as they are to him. The novel feels lopsided in those moments when Carl and his sister, Lorraine, take the stage, for we are not as engaged in their struggles. Yet because Hannah succeeds in making us like his narrator so much that various revelations about the small secrets of other people's lives become significant for us, too.
Hannah writes in a voice that at first seems suspiciously chatty, but quickly becomes disarming and likeable. By page 10, we forget all about the author -- a gracious disappearing act that happens much less often than it should in modern literature -- and instead become absorbed in the story. His writing is unadorned, even unliterary, but in the best possible sense. He avoids 10-dollar words and overwrought metaphors, preferring to focus on the story itself -- which is, of course, one long, extended metaphor.
This is not to say that the book isn't a delight for the literary snob in all of us; Hannah, a distinguished playwright, enjoys playing with language -- "nudelyweds," "store teeth," "toot sweet" -- in a style that rarely, if ever, falters. Somehow, the feelings that arise from the not-inconsiderable tragedies chronicled in this book are not bitterness and regret, but a great deal of warmth and love.
Hannah refuses to rely on the standard Judeo-Christian interpretations of death and its meaning. Instead, he seems to want us to believe that the rules of death are our own. We are dealing with neither angels nor devils here; the characters Susan Ann meets are a mixture of the two, in unequal proportions. There is no fear of judgment in this version of the afterlife, either. Though we sense there are consequences, they seem to be of our own devising.
Ultimately, we come to feel just what we should at the end of such a journey: that Susan Ann's life had something in common with ours, and that her death is for her what ours might be for us, one last visit to the places we called home, and then an uplifting to the place to which we all must return.
William Kowalski is an American novelist living in Nova Scotia. He is the co-author of Icarus the Clown, a screenplay for a feature film based on the myth of Icarus, which is currently in development.