The Fortunate Brother
You remember what I says. You're the fortunate one. You still gets to be with us for a bit longer. The other one – well, he's watching on, somewhere. But we gets to live the riddle a bit longer. Hey, b'y? That's good, isn't it?
Someone asked me the other day what I was reading and I answered that I was immersed in some great Newfie fiction. She looked at me bemusedly and said, “Are you saying that you think 'Newfie fiction' is a genre of its own?” Well, duh. Newfoundland is so removed from the rest of Canada – by geography, psychology, history; even their time zone is a curious half hour ahead of the rest of the Maritimes – that they have a unique perspective on the world, and a unique vocabulary for writing about it. I have long loved Newfie fiction, so it's odd that I've never before read Donna Morrisey; and what's saddest about that fact is that I hadn't realised that The Fortunate Brother is the third book in a series, and although it 100% stands on its own, I can't help the feeling that this reading experience would have been even richer had I already read the first two volumes. I can say: after finishing this book, and despite knowing how the whole saga ends, I am looking forward to going back and reading Morrissey's previous work.
She gave a dismissive shrug. But she was choking with words, he could tell. Just like Sylvie. Choking with words. Wanting to talk about things. Things about Chris and the accident. Things about him, Kyle. Things about themselves. And he never knew what things they wanted to tell him and have him tell them and he bloody didn’t care about them things. Just leave it alone, leave it the bloody hell alone. Christ, he was working on getting things out of his head, not shoving more in.
As The Fortunate Brother is the third in the series, it opens with a family being driven apart by previously disclosed grief: The father, Sylvanus, shakes and weeps and drinks to forget his losses; the daughter, Sylvie, has flown to the other side of the world to get herself back together; the son, Kyle, frequently runs into the woods crying, tries to take care of his father, shield his mother, and refuses to acknowledge his own pain; and the mother, Addy, reaches out to the others, only forcing them to flee in panic. Even without having read the first two books, the family dynamics are immediately made clear, and the grief and pain touched me from the start. Nearly immediately two new tragedies are introduced to the family: Addy is forced to reveal that she has breast cancer on the eve of her mastectomy; and the town bully (previously seen antagonising the family, his girlfriend, his devoted dog, and everyone else in this remote coastal community of a handful of homes) is found dead, floating in the cove off the family's wharf. Because both Sylvanus and Kyle had been blackout drunk the night of Clar's murder, the community concocts alibis for them, and after each of them recite the lies to the investigating police officers, they are forced to commit to the untruths even as the stories become ever more unlikely and increasingly self-incriminating in the face of new evidence. So, what begins as a character study of a family in pain becomes a murder mystery, and the two formats mesh together seamlessly.
Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned as he would a fresh dead mother. There's them who can't change with the times and those who won't, his mother told him. And your father's both kinds.
As for the writing, Morrissey not only captured the grief perfectly (I kept crying at the truth of it), but she also had me laughing every time a group of young men would get together at the local bar and tease and snipe at each other with that caustic Newfie wit I love so much. And like with all great Newfie fiction, Morrissey conveys her love of the harsh landscape with a unique sense of language:
Across the river, massive wooded hills of the northern peninsula sighed through the fog. A long flagging reached downriver and the water buckled against the northern cliff wall, pooling itself into dead black depths before elbowing out of sight through a thicket of still leafless alders and drowning itself into the sea just beyond.
Here's my only complaint: at the same time as the mystery was unravelling, extraneous characters were introduced (an aunt and uncle, the daughter's boyfriend, harsh and unloving fathers from generations past), and although they didn't really have anything to do with the current plot, I got the sense that they were brought in just to tie up loose ends from the overall trilogy. This muddled things for me – I'd rather a murder mystery pick up steam and charge to a conclusion once it starts rolling – and I can't tell if this would have been a more satisfying experience for people who read the books in the right order (and for that matter, I can't tell if the solution was earned from the entire trilogy; it didn't really satisfy me based on this book alone). Of course Newfie fiction is its own genre, and The Fortunate Brother is a worthy entry to the canon. I'd recommend this book as broadly appealing, and although it certainly does stand alone, I'll say again that I can't help but think that it would be most satisfying if one read these books in order.
