Brothers under an evil spell

FictionIn the summer of 2002, an unsung debut novel from Canada was published.

Most readers are well aware by now that unsung novels from Canada often tend to be very good; at times, they prove remarkable, as did Mary Lawson's melancholic Crow Lake, a traditional novel which read as if the entire idea of fiction was something unexplored and far from being exhausted.

Its spell began with the opening sentence, "My great-grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes", and lingered long after the final line. Readers return to that book. It takes the theme of family and enlarges it in a tale that is both subtle an ordinary, and also Shakespearean.

Now, four year later, her second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, remains true to her meditative, conversational study of life as a relentless collection of random and deliberate events. Her prose is plain and direct, and her feel for characterisation and dialogue inspired. If Lawson, who is long resident in England yet retains her sense of Canada, has a literary master, it is not Alice Munro. No, the relaxed, rhythmic tones evoke instead the voice of the US master, Richard Ford. Lawson, like Ford, favours long, lingering sentences in which memory is summoned by a phrase or an image, or a moment recalled:

There was a summer back when they were kids, when Arthur Dunn was thirteen or fourteen and his brother Jake was eight or nine, when for weeks on end Jake pestered Arthur to play the game he called knives.

Jake had a great collection of knives at that time, everything from fancy little Swiss Army jack-knives with dozens of attachments to a big sleek hunting knife with a runnel down one side for blood.

Not surprisingly, this novel's appearance on the Man Booker longlist prior to publication caused readers to note that Lawson (pictured above right) had returned. She is remaining within her territory, that of family, yet with a difference. This time the focus is on the two brothers, Arthur and Jake, introduced in the hypnotic opening sentence above.

The narrative is as sombre and serene as its predecessor. It might even be a finer work. Lawson's genius is rooted in a quiet wisdom, the kind that develops through watching, listening and, above all, understanding the mistakes and regrets, the way a hasty action destroys life and love. Death and violence stalk the narrative. It becomes obvious through that apparently casual opening sequence that the brothers are opposites.

Arthur is the worker, slow and careful; Jake is mercurial, intent on getting what he wants - which he usually does. Sure, he succeeds in getting his brother to play with him and, as Lawson reports as early as page two, he wears Arthur down ("That was Jake's speciality - wearing people down)." Lawson uses this notion of contrasting personalities as her thesis. The pair live on the family farm. The father favours his elder boy, a natural farmer; the mother loves and protects the younger, the handsome, delicate one.

Whereas Crow Lake was told in the sympathetic first-person voice of Kate (a scientist who had escaped the family but is drawn back by tragedy), this new book is told in the third person and also makes effective use of several time-shifts. Time almost becomes a character in its own right, as does the farming landscape of northern Canada during and in the aftermath of war and other, more personal losses. The central characters move between youth and middle age, dreams and realities.

The brothers start out as rivals, and become enemies. This sounds predictable, but Lawson deflects the obvious by countering both characters with a stronger presence, that of Ian, the son of a local doctor. As a teenager Ian had begun to watch Laura Dunn, Arthur's wife. The boy is obsessed with this older woman, a mother whose world does not appear to extend beyond her children. When Ian begins working with Arthur on the farm, he observes this silent man (who still ploughs the land with horses) and also begins to unravel the individual histories of each player in his family.

Ian's own story is brilliantly handled. His father, the doctor, has had to endure the humiliation of his wife walking out on him. Lawson's characterisation of the brisk doctor, with his ready one-liners, is original and vivid. As for Ian, he has his own desires and dreams and anger. He engages with his father and his immediate world, yet all the while is banishing the mother who left him. He distances himself from her with clinical intent and delights in not having opened any of her "102 letters".

Meanwhile Arthur, hardworking and quiet, his father's son, continued to farm the family land. Rejected for military service, he feels guilty for having survived while his friends died at the front. There are a number of dramatic set- pieces, including a near-fatal accident on a bridge and a scene in which the father of Arthur and Jake sets off in his first attempt at driving a tractor. The stage is set for a charming interlude: "His father was out of sight already - he did seem to be driving kind of fast. But then, that was the thing about tractors: they were fast."

Not for the first time, Lawson dares fate, with powerful results. Later, an interlude with a giant eagle, which begins as a novelty sighting, ends in another tragedy.

Late in Crow Lake, Kate reflects: "I have become familiar with books and ideas you have never even imagined, and somehow, in the process of acquiring all that knowledge, I have managed to learn nothing at all." Although she is so unobtrusive and makes no pitch for the reader's love, Kate is oddly likeable and utterly human. She is also a truth-teller. None of the characters in The Other Side of the Bridge are given such liberty to give their side of the story. Ian is a multidimensional character, while Arthur and Jake are fascinating creations, almost two sides of one entity. Arthur never becomes a saint, while Jake remains plausible and never collapses into caricature.

At the heart of this eloquent, thoughtful book is a glance, a gesture, that betrays a history, which in itself achieves its final stab of destruction.

Not only has Lawson fulfilled the promise of her first novel, she has surpassed it in a layered, complex story about emotional power shifts. Storytelling, not showmanship, dictates the honest, serious art of Mary Lawson.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Other Side of the Bridge By Mary Lawson Chatto, 295pp. £12