Mary Cyr

“I have been guilty all my life,” Mary Cyr said. “But I am no longer guilty – I will not be guilty anymore. You see, I saw more and much deeper than other people, so I was often accused of their crimes, but now I will be free.”

I have to start by saying that I am a longtime David Adams Richards fan – I've read plenty more of his books than my Goodreads account would show – and with Mary Cyr he once again proves himself to be a writer of maturity, gravity, and unrivalled (for a Canadian public figure) iconoclasm. This wasn't a book to read quickly, and once again, Richards uses frequent coincidence to prove that we are fated towards tragedy, so I can understand its weakish reception on the Goodreads site. As for me, I savoured this read, beginning to breathtaking end.

It was all very strange how it happened, but in this world, nothing in fact was more natural. It seemed all very devious, but in this world, nothing was devious. It seemed very unbecoming, but in this world what was unbecoming? One knows that in this world, from the Peloponnesian Wars on, no deviousness was left unused.

Mary Cyr opens with the title character sitting in a Mexican prison, apparently charged with the murder of a young boy. When the local authorities realised that Mary was a member of the billionaire Canadian family that was part owner of the town's coal mine that recently collapsed, they felt the need to charge her with something, and even though it would seem that no one really believes that she killed this Victor, everyone from the local criminal element to the politically ambitious find it expeditious to pin the crime on her. Mary's old friend (and main character from Richards' last novel, Principles to Live By), retired police detective John Delano, is sent down to Mexico by her family to secure her release, and between their conversations and Delano's private ruminations, Mary's sad life is laid bare. The format of Mary Cyr can be challenging: Divided into fourteen parts, the first makes reference to events and people from Mary's life without much explanation. But as the novel goes along, these events and people are revisited and explained in greater detail, and every time you think you understand how something was for her, some new detail is layered on in a later part that shifts that understanding. Too, as the narrative proceeds, greater insight is given into the motivations of the local Mexican people, and it becomes obvious that events have been set in motion that will be nigh impossible to stop. As for the character of Mary: it was strange that this unloved orphan cousin from the unimportant branch of one of the Maritimes' richest families was described by her aunt as not quite normal after a childhood blow to the head, and yet both Delano and the omniscient narrator refer to her as insightful and brilliant – all while Mary herself speaks with strange verbal tics, makes impulsive and self-destructive decisions, and rarely has acted in her own self interest. I liked the strangeness of her character – and not least of all because being from a super-rich family (which made its money the old-fashioned – but now denigrated – ways; through forestry, oil, and mines), every personal tragedy in Mary's life has been open to public, mean-spirited criticism; culminating in a global newspaper/internet schadenfreude over her current situation. What hope for Mary?

As in previous novels, Richards makes many literary references here (incorporating Calvino, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare), and he once again makes many references to the Canadian literati: taking a swipe at Michael Ondaatje, apparently referencing Alistair MacLeod as “a Percy rock of a man who bagpipes his way along the crags of Cape Breton”, and denigrating himself as “the Miramichi writer who she liked but who she could never read ”(on a more positive note, Mary does refer to Jack Hodgins – whose Broken Ground I have read and reviewed – as a great, grand person). Richards keeps to the Canadiana by referencing pipeline squabbles, former prime ministers, Lord Beaverbrook, and the CBC; and he keeps this story related to his own world with appearances by John Delano, Markus Paul, and the River of the Broken-Hearted. This is a writer of maturity and confidence, and as for the iconoclasm, it's sure to provoke the progressives in Ottawa:

• Those who yelled loudest against her when they had the chance did not now utter a word to ask forgiveness for themselves. They were very quiet now. The Cyr pipeline that had been damaged by those who drove to the pipeline in cars that used oil, and slept in houses that needed it, and wore clothes that contained it, now issued not one statement about her. The university profs as well who spoke of progress – and said that the Cyr empire was one of failure and disaster, sitting in buildings some of which were donated by Cyr money – did not now come back to reinvestigate themselves.

• The great fortune for Nigel was that people who had very well-known CBC Radio talk shows never looked beyond the fashionable way to take the moral higher ground by pretending concern over the Cyr dynasty. In fact Nigel's whole life and the lives of his colleagues had been filled with misguided ambition and misplaced admiration. And this is what allowed them to protest their tenure, to go on strike while their students at the university, who had paid their money, were hostage to their demands; to look miffed when people did not see their worth, to become parasites on First Nations causes that would gain them attention, and to prey on the naïveté and idealism of the young.

• It was the beginning of her war against conformity – but of a very specialized sort of war – a kind of clandestine one. One where she was the silent observer of the disastrous world. That is, from then on, she distrusted women as much as men – she disliked their easy acceptance of role-playing, of bogus sisterhood and victimhood that university courses not only taught but encouraged – found them just as shameful in their pettiness and malevolence toward those who were cast aside...But she knew too how men used women like these, pandered to them in politics and literature in the way middle class had to always coddle their own. And she hated the men for their lies every bit as much. She hated those who used the First Nations as well, for they formed the same kind of manufactured pieties. She realized listening to First Nations leaders speak that too many of them expected this and needed it, so both they and whites could use the tragedy of the past to embellish their pretenses – and if you stared them in the face and told them so, told them that their victimhood was now obscenely corporate, they would counter with the plight of those reserves they themselves had never been to, and declare you a racist.

I am pleased that since his last novel, David Adams Richards has been appointed to the Canadian Senate; I like the idea of this contrary voice having its place in the Red Chamber. I am also not surprised that, for likely this very reason, such a fine novel was overlooked for the Giller Prize this year. This challenging read certainly pays off in the end.

As for the "swipe at Michael Ondaatje", I was intrigued enough by the passage to quote it here:

   She had studied on her own the battle for Hong Kong.   
   After the fall of Hong Kong the Canadians were marched off to concentration camps. They witnessed beheadings on the side of the road.
   Men drank their own piss, ate their own shit. Thirteen million Chinese were slaughtered by the Japanese between 1937 and 1939. It was something never mentioned in a book she read called The English Patient.   

   She read Vanderflutin's book as well. Vanderflutin's book, in the style of the day, in this post-colonial world, often mentioned the sins of the English against the First Nations – but, she discovered, didn't much mention his Dutch, or how they left the Natives, which they themselves tyrannized in the Far East, to the Japanese when they fled en masse to Rotterdam.  

    And of course in those two books racism was prevalent but prescribed as a condition of only certain English-speaking peoples. And certainly could not be prescribed to any Dutchman, or man of colour.   

   Yes, bravery, that's the ticket.