Mind Picker: Tell

He relaxed, leaned against the boards of the old barn and closed his good eye. His right hand made a sign, a word. A finger to his lips and back to his chest. Tell, it seemed to be saying, but the word was directed at himself. It was his private communication: Tell.

It is November of 1919 when we first meet Kenan Oak: Armistice has been declared, and although the injured young man has been home from WWI for a year, he is just taking his first tentative steps towards healing, supported by his wife and family in the tight-knit community of Deseronto, Ontario. The left side of his face is scarred and sightless, his left arm hangs dead and useless at his side, and shell-shocked, Kenan was literally unable to speak when he first returned from Europe. After spending a year locked away inside his home, most often looking out over the nearby bay from his veranda seat, Kenan begins to speak with the few visitors he will agree to see, and at night when he's sure the streets will be empty, Kenan begins to go for walks. Still haunted by his wartime experiences, and finding themselves unable to conceive a child, Kenan finds an unbridgeable rift growing between himself and his wife Tress.

Meanwhile, Tress' Aunt Maggie and Uncle Am -- who live in an apartment in the Post Office clock tower and act as the building's caretakers -- also find themselves growing farther apart as they approach middle age. It is eventually revealed that they have been suppressing secrets of their own, and when a handsome foreigner comes to town offering music lessons, more than a long-buried love of singing is reawakened in Maggie.

Tell is essentially about the harm that is caused by secrets and suppressed memories. It's unsurprising that author Frances Itani chose to explore these ideas in this time and place: a small town at the turn of the twentieth century put plenty of pressure on families to hide their shameful skeletons; put plenty of pressure on returning soldiers to deal with their problems alone. The very first scene of the book has a woman giving her baby up for adoption and we later learn that Kenan had been adopted as an infant himself, and because of the stern home atmosphere created by the single man (Uncle Oak) who had taken him in, Kenan had never dared to ask any questions about his birth mother.

Oddly, for a book about memory, characters are always questioning what they remember. Here's Kenan on the war:

And now in his Deseronto house, every inch of which he'd explored with his good eye opened and his good eye closed, he wondered if he had invented the memories of more than three and a half years of war. Memories of staring up into night skies, expecting the stars to explode. Waking up with dew dampening his uniform, puttees tightening around his lower legs. Standing in wisps of fog that rolled low along the ground in the mornings, so that in every direction, only heads and torsos could be seen above the mist, while legless men called back and forth to one another as they shaved and laughed and groused and swore, and prepared to fill their mess tins for breakfast.

He might have invented those memories, but he had not invented the war.

Here's Maggie on meeting a famous soprano (a story she never told to anyone):

Perhaps the encounter had never taken place. No, Maggie was certain it had.

And here's Am:

Memory. It whipped him around in all directions. And who was he to say whether his memories were accurate or not? He never knew what would be laid bare.

Secrets and memory could have been very interesting themes, but I found this book a little scattered; like the parts didn't hang together. Characters are always reminiscing -- about making grape jelly, or skating from Deseronto to Nappanee, or living on a chicken farm but only being allowed an egg once a year at Easter -- and while each little story was interesting, they felt like true anecdotes that Itani had collected about the time period that she wanted to cram in for authenticity; they were simply not revealed organically. Another example: There is a skating rink cleared on the ice behind Kenan's house, and although some action takes place there, it seems like it was used in the book solely because Itani includes excerpts from the archives of the Deseronto newspaper that described the skating rink (and suggest the action that should be placed there). Also, I thought that the apartment that Maggie and Am lived in in the Deseronto clock tower was a really fascinating detail until I learned that Itani's great-great-aunt and -uncle had once been its inhabitants -- Tell feels more like overwrought journalism than prose. And a final complaint: it felt so unbelievable that Am and Maggie, having kept a secret for 25 years -- a (totally not shameful) secret that all of Deseronto had apparently colluded in suppressing -- would both break down and tell it to someone, separately, on the same day. Adding improbability to slow and clunky writing resulted in a bit of a turkey for me, and a curious choice for this year's Giller Prize shortlist.