Moranna "Mad Mory" MacKenzie -- a middle-aged woman of "freewheeling aplomb" who lives alone in a deteriorating farmhouse outside a small village on Cape Breton Island -- reveals her nature (and the situation in which she finds herself) by small increments in An Audience of Chairs:
She has nothing but contempt for those who try to categorize what they think she is, and lecturing her audience of chairs, she'll say, "It's ridiculous for the so-called experts to think they can label me as bipolar or manic-depressive" -- she knows the terms. "As if the essence of who I am can be labelled or stuck into a file or a book." By now she may well be shouting. "The uniqueness of the self cannot be pigeonholed! The self is always changing, always in transit and it's preposterous to think it can be nailed down by definition. Only small minds would think so." She also rejects the idea that her emotional weather might have been passed on to her by her mother, because to admit it opens the possibility that she might have passed the same weather on to her daughters, who reside in her memory as perfect and unassailable children.While Moranna resisted diagnosis her entire life, her "emotional weather" is laid out for the reader: when she's on a high, Moranna is a creative genius, playing piano with perfect pitch, designing unique clothes, writing a novel, assembling a cookbook, painting pictures for a children's book, carving wooden likenesses of her ancestors; but when she's on a low, Moranna is incapable of getting out of bed for days at a time. Although she had been married young and her two daughters were the joys of her life, when Moranna's condition put those children at risk, her husband left with the girls, completely erasing themselves from her life.
As a study of mental illness, An Audience of Chairs is written with much empathy: by the time we meet Moranna, she has been living by herself for decades, and with the help of a group of allies (her brother, a minister, a neighbour, a lover who visits twice a year, and an understanding Mountie who smooths out her disputes), she has learned some measure of self control and (thanks to an inheritance from her father and the sales of her wooden carvings) is able to support herself. Although her behaviour is unusual -- she dresses in thrift store costumes and walks for hours, muttering to herself and sticking her tongue out at passing cars -- the case is made that hospitalising or medicating Moranna would destroy the essence of who she is. I do wonder, though, if this isn't the rosiest of pictures: if Moranna's creative genius isn't overplayed to make the reader resist her being "made normal". In a late scene in the book, Moranna is in Halifax and watches as a homeless woman walks by with her shopping cart full of belongings, and I suppose I'm meant to recognise that "there but for the grace of God…", but isn't the shopping cart the more likely outcome for Moranna? How many mentally ill people (to the degree that Moranna is described in this book) would have the ability to live alone without harming themselves (whether by intent or neglect)? Even real life geniuses -- I'm thinking Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh -- came to unhappy ends, so am I to agree that medicating (and possibly killing their creativity) would be the greater harm? And is it the quality of the output that determines whether madness should be left to run free? Moranna is talented at everything she tries, but the Unibomber was considered a genius, too…
I have a soft spot for books set in Cape Breton, and as author Joan Clark was born in the same small Nova Scotia town as my own father, she speaks a language that I understand. I was fascinated by the inclusion of Aunt Hettie's Gaelic legends -- Selkies, the Keeper of the Stones, Weeping Hill -- and it was pleasing to me that the two books mentioned in the text are favourites of mine; Cape Breton Road and The Diviners. This setting is all very familiar territory to me (which I like), but if I had a complaint, it would be that there was something simplistic about the writing style -- much information crammed in without lyricism; much telling instead of showing:
When she's finished cleaning, she takes her daughter's bridal bouquet apart and presses the wildflowers inside the worn copy of Shakespeare, scattering the petals among stories of betrayal and misplaced ambition, mistaken identity and mistaken love. The scattering of flowers isn't a sentimental or even a symbolic gesture, but the grand gesture of an aging prima donna.When I began reading An Audience of Chairs I thought, "Yes, yes, this is what I like", but it never fulfilled its early promise. In the end, Mad Mory gave me much to think about, though, and I'd rank this book somewhere between like and love on the enjoyment scale.
