Books

World Books Review: An Urgent “February”

Canadian writer Lisa Moore’s second novel solidifies her reputation as a gifted writer whose prose exhibits an urgency, precision, and sensitivity worthy of the legacy of Virginia Woolf.

February by Lisa Moore. Grove Press, Black Cat, 320 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Some of our best American fiction writers are Canadian — Robertson Davies, Alastair MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. And Saul Bellow and Mavis Gallant, who were both born in Montreal but who settled in Chicago and Paris. Into this esteemed company now comes Lisa Moore, who was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1964, and who is every bit as good as her compatriot forebears.

Already honored as a finalist in the Scotiabank Giller Prize contest for her story collection, “Open,” and her novel “Alligator,” which also won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize for the Caribbean and Canada region, Moore is a gifted writer whose prose has an urgency and precision rarely found in someone so young.

Her second novel “February” reveals how Helen O’Mara, a young mother of three and just pregnant with a fourth, deals with the terrible loss of her young husband, Cal who was drowned when the self-propelled oil rig, Ocean Ranger sunk in February of 1982. In using this real event as a lynchpin for her novel, Moore explores the devastation to the O’Maras and their extended family with enormous sympathy and intelligence without ever becoming maudlin.

Helen is already in her mid-50s when the novel begins – her three daughters and two grandchildren live in St. John’s, where she and Cal grew up and married when they were 20 and 21. They had just ten years before Cal’s body was one of the 22 bodies – out of 84 – found when the Ocean Ranger went down. Although Helen seems — to her family and friends — to have adjusted to her widowed existence, she lives a lot of her life in her mind, and in the past when she was bringing up the children alone and before that, with Cal, during the early years of their marriage when they were doing all the hard stuff and beginning to build a life together.

She is also fiercely proud. “Sherry had imagined her to be lonely. Helen was flooded with shame. The blood rushing to her head, making her ears ring. She would not be pitied.” And as she interacts with her children, her in-laws and her sister, both now and in the past, you learn not only to respect her, but to love her, as these finely drawn characters also do. Only Helen’s son, John, her eldest, is far away, and, surprisingly, it is he who changes Helen’s life with a phone call from the airport in Singapore:

His mother was groggy and panicked all at once….
John, his mother said.
She says she’s having a baby, John said.
Who says? his mother asked.
A woman, John said. Who I slept with.
Whom, his mother said. She was half asleep.

And then after John has gone over what happened with the woman carrying the baby, or maybe what he thought had happened:

John wanted his mother to dig deep into the secret womanly knowledge buried in the pheromones and cells and blood of that murky, heady thing he thought of as femininity, and to report back: John, you owe that woman nothing.
A baby, his mother said.

No quotation marks, no hesitations, just their hopes and flaws and prejudices, as well as their amazing ability not to gloss over anything.

One of the most remarkable things in “February” is how Moore erases time, how the past will come up and hit her characters in the face, as when Helen is getting her grandson’s skates sharpened, or when John is having a business lunch in New York. At one point John thinks: “The present is always dissolving into the past…It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds. And later Helen decides: “The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever. The future is unyielding. It is possible that the past has cracked off, the past has cluttered to the floor, and what remains is the future and there is not very much of that. The future is the short end of the stick.”

The novel also has a wonderful sense of place – its harsh weather, its severe beauty, and, perhaps most important, the peril constant in the waters of the northern Atlantic. Since the main event of Helen’s life was the sinking of that oil rig, she must somehow let go of what happened to her young husband on the day he drowned. All along there have been references to it – her trying to make sense of it, and just when you think that maybe Helen has achieved some peace, Moore has the courage to make her face it in all its brutality:

Cal is making his way up to the deck. He is hauling himself hand over hand up the stair rail. There is a monstrous crevasse in the concrete ocean and it inspires a terror that is full of calm.
They knew all along. It was decided…
The Royal Commission said there was a fatal chain of events that could have been avoided but for the inadequate training of personnel, lack of manuals and technical information. …
Cal is on the deck and he is almost gone. Please go, she thinks, Please go, let it be over.
Because his panic is in her skin, just as he has made love to her and just as she had his four children, and just as she has watched him sleep and cooked his meals and made up a notion of what love might be and followed through with it. . .
Helen knew Cal’s moods and the two of them gossiped and made up stories and held each other and fought and were careful about what they said, even in anger. And his panic is inside her. The panic of facing death.

As I re-read “February” for this review I realized how much it evoked another favorite book — Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” — in its finely drawn obsession with someone missing. How pleased Woolf would be to see her legacy so beautifully rendered by Lisa Moore.

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Roberta Silman is the author of “Blood Relations,” “Boundaries,” “The Dream Dredger” and “Beginning The World Again,” as well as the children’s book, “Somebody Else’s Child.” She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.