Crying for the Moon: A Novel
She read out from a book, “Still a child, she cries for the moon, but the moon, it seems, won't have her.” That's how she'd spent her life, she said: uselessly crying for the moon.
In various interviews, Mary Walsh explains that as a lifelong devourer of books, she had always dreamed of writing a novel herself. So when her other projects slowed down recently, the icon of Canadian comedy decided to turn a several hundred page treatment – interestingly, it was her private backstory for Warrior Princess, Marg Delahunty – into a full-length novel. Walsh is talented and accomplished at so many things, but she's not really a novelist. The plot of Crying for the Moon is both dull and trite, and the writing is just not...good. Plenty of shocking things happen to unrelatable characters – overlaid with a hackneyed whodunnit – and it simply doesn't hold together as an enjoyable, professional, piece of writing. An example of the amateurish:
That first Sunday and almost every Sunday after, Bo took Maureen out to his parents', out to Paradise, for dinner. Not real Paradise – they weren't dead, just living up in Conception Bay South, in the town of Paradise, which was not the least bit paradisal.
An example of the frequent and meandering telling-not-showing spiels:
She was drowning in misery, choking with unhappiness. She was only eighteen – what was wrong with her? Why didn't she leave Bo? She was no good – that had been proven to her finally and irrevocably. She was just no use; totally use-less, “a total waste of skin”, as the Sarge used to call her when she was little. She didn't like to think about that sort of stuff, because she didn't want to emotionally cash in on that whole “my mother was so mean to me blah blah blah” thing. She had no time for those dreary sob sisters. She was getting on with her life, not sobbing and complaining all the time about what her mom did to her. She was moving forward – well, when she wasn't staying in bed twenty-four hours a day, or picking herself up off the bottom of the staircase, or too beat up to do much of anything.
And there are so many weird writing choices: I appreciate trying to capture that great Newfie dialect, but there is no pronunciation difference that I can parse between “sure” and “shure” (no difference, certainly, that would warrant the distraction); there's nothing clever or ironic in having a criminal outfit refer to themselves as DAFT; and there's one character who, studying the great mid-century noir novels and films, talks in a nonsensically Chandleresque pastiche:
I don't know what you're so hinky about. You're putting the Chinese angle on me, and all I'm doing is trying to come into my own joint. No need to throw another ing-bing.
Even so, Walsh captures some nice bits about coming of age in the St John's of the late Sixties. She and my mother are about the same age, and I'd imagine that if my Charlottetown-born mother wrote a novel, it would also dwell on taking swipes at the hard-edged nuns who schooled her; at the hypocrisies and stranglehold of the local parish. (And as I have many relatives who sprinkle their dialogue with “jumpins”, I'm sure that would make it in, too.) Some nice colour doesn't redeem the whole, however; this feels like a vanity project that no one had the moxie to nix.
