The River
By Tricia Wastvedt
Viking Canada, 343 pages, $34
A boy and a girl in a rowboat drift away from a riverbank in the Devon, England, village of Cameldip in 1958. They intend to go on a short adventure, but soon find themselves adrift, and they drown when the boat founders. For the next 30 years, their parents, Isabel and Robert MacKinnon, live in a grief-stricken purgatory.
These simple facts, like police-blotter notes, suggest the outline, but not the satisfying depth of Tricia Wastvedt's ambitious first novel, The River. I say ambitious because it seems to me that any effort to apply artistry to what must be one of the most painful of human experiences -- the loss of a child, let alone two -- must require at the very least enormous emotional ambition. Setting out on such a torturous journey, many writers would confine their scope. But Wastvedt, like Alice Sebold in her bestselling debut novel The Lovely Bones, has chosen to cast a wide net that goes beyond the immediate family. She has chosen to capture the Cameldip community as a whole, dipping episodically in and out of lives and years -- over decades -- fused by communal ties and the scar of a heart-wrenching tragedy.
Emotionally gutted and estranged from each other and the world, Isabel and Robert continue to live together, bound by a venomous knot. Isabel will not let go of her anger and grief. She blames everyone for the deaths of her children, and stands in withering judgment, entitled by her loss. Robert, a tall, taciturn Scot from St. Kilda, is forgiving, adaptive and capable of moving on, but chooses to stay with Isabel out of devotion and overwhelming guilt. His efforts to find something like the intimacy he once shared with his wife lead him into the arms of Sarah, a beautiful young woman whose own life is changed forever by their illicit affair.
Robert also finds peace in craft. Within a few years of his arrival in Cameldip, he transforms the village by building sturdy tree houses all over Cameldip, "at first for village children and then for the parents." The vitality of his eccentric creations is a fitting symbol for a marriage of any duration: "A tree would grow to embrace the house and the house warped and curved to fit inside the tree. Where once they had chafed and complained, they yielded and made peace. Not many years need pass before it was impossible to separate the two."
Isabel's and Robert's lives change when a young woman named Anna arrives in the village in 1986. Secretly pregnant with her lover's child, she is fleeing her own past in search of a new life. Isabel takes Anna in as a boarder, and the two form a practical but wary friendship. The birth of Anna's son, Matthew, reawakens long-dormant feelings in Isabel, and sets in motion yet another tragedy, and an unexpected redemption.
The stories of other Cameldip residents frame the novel. Most significant are Gatta, Sarah's troubled teenaged daughter, who watches events unfold like a cat, and Josef, a young man in his thirties who, as a boy, was the last person to see the MacKinnon children alive. Josef's loyalty to Cameldip is ironclad, despite haunting memories that might have driven him away. He captures the theme of the novel entirely by accident when his Parisian lover asks him, "If you must live in England, why do you not at least live somewhere civilized? Why not in London?" Joseph answers, "truthfully and unexpectedly, that he could not leave the people he loved."
Episodic works are a precarious undertaking. The sustained characterization and development required is a delicate matter, one at which Wastvedt sometimes fails. A few storylines -- such as one recalling the courtship of a musician and husband -- start strong but evaporate almost entirely. But her writing is captivating and evocative, summoning startling images out of lyrical prose and imagery. The River reminds us that though we can -- and often do -- fail under the burden of loss and heartbreak, we can be saved despite ourselves. Time, as the cliché goes, heals all wounds -- time and love and devotion.
Patrick Lohier, a Toronto-based writer, was recently awarded an Ontario Arts Council Works in Progress grant to complete his first novel.