Bondrée is a place where shadows defeat the harshest light, an enclave whose lush vegetation recalls the virgin forests that covered the North American continent three or four centuries ago. Its name derives from the deformation of the word “boundary”, or frontier. No borderline, however, is there to suggest that this place belongs to any country other than the temperate forests stretching from Maine, in the United States, to the southwest of the Beauce, in Quebec. Boundary is a stateless domain, a no-man's land harbouring a lake, Boundary Pond, and a mountain that hunters came to call Moose Trap, after observing that the moose venturing onto the lake's western shore were swiftly tripped up on the steep slope of this rocky mass that with the same dispassion engulfs the setting suns.Boundary is about several different hazy borderlands: Not just this forested setting that spans the Maine-Quebec border, but also the unseen limits that separate people by class and custom and gender, the numinous realm of ghosts and legend, and especially, the boundaries that mark a girl's passage into womanhood. On the surface, this book reads like a murder mystery, but it's much deeper than that. I'm unsurprised that it won the Governor General's Literary Award when it was first released in French, and am happy that its appearance on this year's Giller Prize longlist led me to pick it up. I'll give no more spoilers than what's on the book's cover, but it is a murder mystery, so reader beware from here.
Everyone knows that death stains, that it leaves marks everywhere it goes, big dirty tracks that make us lurch backwards when we're about to step right into them.The year is 1967 and the summer cottagers – an assortment of rich Americans and modest Quebeckers who don't intermingle – return to Boundary Lake. Two of the teenaged girls, Zaza and Sissy, have come into their own this summer, and as they strut along in their short shorts and tank tops, brazenly smoking stolen cigarettes and singing A Whiter Shade of Pale and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the women cluck their tongues and the men disavow their thoughts at the sight of their long, flowing hair and long, tanned legs. When Zaza goes missing one night when her family is away, Sissy has trouble raising the alarm among the other cottagers: Just what do you expect from that type of girl? But when Zaza is found dead – having apparently stumbled into an old bear trap and bled out in the forest – it's considered a horrible accident; maybe even the revenge of the ghost of the legendary Pete Landry who once trapped in these woods. Yet, when danger visits upon Zaza's friends, it becomes clear that there's nothing more vulnerable than a girl blooming into womanhood.
The narrative switches between several points-of-view, but feels primarily from that of Andrée – a twelve-year-old Québécoise tomboy who would rather catch frogs than paint her nails. Andrée likes the attention that Zaza and Sissy sometimes pay her (giving her sticks of “baby yum” and calling her “littoldolle”), but Andrée feels that there is more than just language acting as a barrier between them: these barely older girls feel like they're from a different world. As the summer progresses and Andrée spies on the adults around her and the ongoing police investigation, the evil that she witnesses takes away her childish innocence and pushes her over the boundary into that adult world. As the book progresses, Andrée goes from fighting growing up:
I didn't want a bra or nylon stockings or nail polish or blood between my legs. I wanted trees to climb, I wanted dirty running shoes that go a hundred times faster than new running shoes and girls' sandals, and I especially didn't want to feel that what up to then had got me out of bed every morning was going to leave me cold, while life went on without me. It hurt too much to think that old age planed down the mornings, and left slivers of new wood at your bedroom door.To acknowledging its inevitability:
Still lost in thought, mite, my father said, gently ruffling my hair, and that gesture made me want to cry, because soon my father wouldn’t dare pass his hand through my hair that way, for the simple reason that I was less and less of a mite, that I was unbugging at the speed of light, like all those girls who from one day to the next start saying no to their parents’ goodnight kisses.In the Acknowledgments at the end of the book, author Andrée A. Michaud notes that her family had a cottage in Bondrée for three years, and that made sense to me: this felt like a very personal narrative; made knock-over-the-head obvious by the main characters being a young girl named “Andrée” and a police detective named “Michaud”. Tying together the dichotomies represented (that of English/French and adult/child) is the character of Larue – a book-loving recluse whom Michaud engages as an interpreter for his investigation – and he would seem to be another aspect of the author herself:
Larue came from another world, that of books, which reflect reality with a different sort of acuity, taking a small sample of the real and weighing it against a whole that existed only in the sum of its parts.Even on the surface, this is a satisfying read: the nature writing is engaging, the characters are recognisable, the mystery is intriguing. But what I really liked was Andrée path into adulthood – would she become one of those frightening beauties who call danger down upon themselves; or one of the mothers who “forget themselves” once they have children; or one of the cops' wives who must take second place to the dead girls who haunt their husbands' dreams – and while Andrée tries to cling to her childish ways, her body outgrows her hiding places and events push her over that final boundary. Truly an enjoyable read on every level.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit
*Won by Bellevue Square - a surprise, to me, but not an unwelcome one. Congrats to Michael Redhill!
