Mind Picker: A Town Called Solace

There were two streets at right angles to each other, one running north-south, parallel to the lake, the other running east from the lake for a couple of blocks before petering out altogether at the edge of the woods. Apart from some small farms, a new-ish secondary school all on its own in the middle of a field, a sawmill and a lumber camp a couple of miles out of town, that was it: Solace, Northern Ontario, as of September 1972.

A Town Called Solace is a touching, human story told expertly in three distinct voices, and despite the fact that I can’t really find fault with its plot, philosophy, or construction, I have no idea why it was longlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize. Author Mary Lawson certainly displays skill and an empathy for the human condition, but when it comes to the town of Solace and its occupants, I’ll hearken back to Gertrude Stein and complain that there’s not a lot of there there. This was a nice little read, not a necessary one.

I couldn’t sleep myself. I lay there trying to reason away fear. To rise above it. I tried to think in universal rather than personal terms, to shrink the importance of “me” and see my life as merely part of the great flow of time. I imagined myself at home, standing outside in the dead of night (that is an interesting phrase, don’t you think? The “dead” of night?), looking up at the brilliance of the sky, and attempted to place my paltry seventy-two years alongside the billions of years of the lifespans of the stars. You know when you throw a log on a bonfire how there is a fleeting rush of tiny sparks? Not the ones that soar joyously up towards the heavens but the tiny ones that spring up and die almost instantaneously? That was my life measured against the stars, my love. Gone instantaneously. Over before it began.

The plot revolves around the third person POVs of Clara (a nearly eight-year-old who employs self-destructive magical thinking in an attempt to both bring her missing older sister home and to keep watch over the house of an elderly neighbour who has been sent to hospital) and Liam (a thirty-something recent divorcé who has been lured to Solace by an inheritance), and the first person POV of the elderly Elizabeth (aware that she will not be leaving the hospital again, she has a running mental conversation with her dead husband as she reviews a life of challenges). In a story about family connections and loss and loneliness, I did appreciate the three distinct perspectives and voices (and especially little Clara’s), and between being set in 1972 (a time in my own childhood memory) and rotating between a northern Ontario lake town and scenes set in Guelph and Toronto, this is all familiar and relatable territory to me. There is real tension in the plot as we wait to see what has happened to Clara’s sixteen-year-old runaway sister, Rose, and while there is a secondary mystery to the plot (Elizabeth hints that she did something damaging to Liam when he was a child, and Liam himself doesn’t understand what happened in his early childhood that placed an unbridgeable “river” between himself and others), that thread didn’t really play out to any great effect. These are ordinary scenes from ordinary lives and Lawson makes it all believable.

Driving home he was struck by the thought that, increasingly, his life prior to coming north seemed to be taking on the quality of an old movie, one in which he'd been deeply engrossed while watching it but which now seemed trivial, unconvincing and profoundly lacking in either colour or plot. Solace had colour and plot in spades, maybe too much. In every way it was coming to seem more real than Toronto, with its endless malls and traffic jams and high-powered jobs. Though maybe, if he went back to Toronto, the same would be true in reverse. Maybe when he'd been back for a couple of months he'd find that it was Solace that seemed unreal, its unremarkable streets and stores like something from a dream, its dramatic landscape fading to nothing, like a holiday photo left in the sun.

Lawson herself grew up in Ontario before moving to England as an adult, so it’s understandable that this novel has a nostalgic feel for a bygone time and place; and although I’m a generation younger than the author, I felt the pull of nostalgia as I read this. Again, I felt that the writing was skillful, and although thoughtful, not particularly deep. It feels like I’m damning with faint praise, but that’s probably just due to the curious Booker nomination; this is a fine read that ought to have wide appeal.

I have stopped trying to erase the past, my love. I see now that it is part of the story, and the story is me. Denying it is denying that I am who I am.