In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to the sea and hide — they lost their voices when they died. They cannot sing their secret song, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”; they know the words but no one who would sing them truthfully to you.
In the publisher’s blurb, it states that in The Mystery of Right and Wrong, critically acclaimed and beloved Canadian author Wayne Johnston “reveals haunting family secrets he's kept for more than 30 years”. With a main character named “Wade Jackson” — an aspiring young novelist from a Newfoundland outport — it is immediately reinforced that Johnston will be cutting close to the bone with this book. What follows is rather harrowing: this is a story of domestic abuse, systemic abuse (from the Nazi occupation of Holland to South African apartheid), intergenerational trauma, and mental illness. It is also a love story, a coming of age story, and an inquiry into whether, in the aftermath of abuse, either evil or free will can exist; the titular “mystery” of right and wrong. In a lengthy afterword, Johnston explains which parts are true (and how they played out in real life), and that part gobsmacked me; I can totally see how a masterclass on Johnston’s work can now be taught, with this novel serving as the key that unlocks it all. This book is courageous and important and compelling, and to be fair, it was also a bit too long, and although Johnston explains the reasons for the segments in verse, I found them, as they went on, exasperating. I am grateful to have received an advanced reading copy of this book five months before publication and I am daunted by the idea of being the first to review and “rate” it, but here goes: based on its importance and artistry, five stars; based on my personal “enjoyment” of the reading experience, I’m knocking it back to four. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Note especially, there was no particular formatting for the segments in verse and I reckon that could change.)
I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.
Wade Jackson — a recent university graduate, working as a newspaper reporter while he plans his first novel — meets a young woman in the university library, which they both frequent as a quiet place to work. Wade will be so struck with this Rachel van Hout — beautiful and quirky, born in South Africa and brought along with her family to St. John’s as a teenager when her professor father took a job there — that despite some alarming proclivities, Wade will immediately throw his lot in with her. No matter how odd, damaging, or dangerous Rachel and her three sisters’ self-harming behaviours become, Wade commits to the long haul. There is a real heaviness and dread to the plot — what will the sisters do next and how did they get this way? — as POV skips through time and rotates between Wade, Rachel, the encoded diary she keeps, and long snippets from the epic verse Rachel’s father wrote and forced the girls to memorise as children, The Ballad of the Clan van Hout:
Girls, get used to contradictions, truthful lies and false non-fictions. What isn’t there is everywhere; the things which are, are not, you see, however much they seem to be — and what is not is what will be as long as you and I agree.
In the moment I could understand why these sections are set apart in verse — and in the afterword Johnston further, intriguingly, explains the impetus behind his use of poetry — but as I began with, and perhaps it comes down to the novel’s length, it eventually became just too much as a reading experience. However, the insight these sections allow into the mind of the girls’ father, Hans van Hout, are integral to the plot and allow us to take his self-mythologising with a grain of salt. (But honestly, less would be more for me.) As the action moves from Newfoundland to South Africa, and back home again through Amsterdam, Hans’ origin story will morph and change; but everywhere and in every time we are forced to consider what is and isn’t credible, defensible, or justifiable.
It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.
There is a lot of disturbing material in this book, reflecting the fact that there is a lot of disturbing material in life (certainly there has been enough in Johnston’s life that he claims to never be surprised by anything of which a person can be accused or to which they might confess). To make a novel out of this kind of material — a novel that employs that material to explore nuanced questions of right and wrong with artistry — is no small feat; to learn that the author is using this vehicle to expose and explore close-held secrets and pathologies is breathtaking. I have no doubt that The Mystery of Right and Wrong will make a big stir upon its release and I am looking forward to reading what others make of it.
