by Marion Douglas
FREEHAND BOOKS
2024/$24.95/340 pp.
Calgary writer Marion Douglas’s latest novel unfolds as a deftly wrought confessional. In Rose Drury’s voice, we become party to her thoughts and actions that are often kept from the people around her, even those close to her. She wants to run away. She tells lies. As an educational psychologist, Rose has all the jargon she needs for explanations as to why, but it is sometimes impossible for her to make sense of what she thinks and says and does. “I was about a yardstick away from myself,” she admits at one point. At another: “My motives seem murky at best… like snow in an avalanche.”
At the core of the novel is Rose struggling to raise Roger, her developmentally delayed child. Her lesbian partner, Lucy, is at her side all the way. But even with Lucy’s love and assurances, Rose cannot help fretting over Roger’s low reach on a percentile scale. She knows that such children are often labeled FLK (funny looking kid) on files. There is irony, of course, in the fact that Rose’s job is to test and write up assessments of such children.
Douglas knows how to keep an edge of humour on scenes where Rose deals with (or avoids) doctors and the public at large. There is humour too, but also gentleness, in the depiction of Roger with his odd appearance and peculiar behaviours. The challenges of raising a special-needs child weave in and out of the narrative. Roger is obsessed with clocks and watches, is intractable in choosing the clothes he wants to wear and expresses excitement with squeals like a smoke alarm going off.
The details of Rose’s work in Calgary schools are spot on, and I like the fact that Roger’s preschool teacher as well as the principal and speech therapist are sympathetic, fully fledged characters. In the wide range of the book, a number of other characters come into play: Rose’s ex-husband, George, who once kept her locked up in a cabin in the foothills; her mother, living at a happy distance in Ontario; a homeless man Rose invited to stay in her apartment; the neighbours helping her to raise Roger. Free-spirited Lucy, always willing to champion Roger, is a strong presence.
Among her subterfuges, Rose (in a bisexual turn) arranges a secret outing with her gym partner, Asa. It’s a road trip that turns into a raunchy comparing of first sexual experiences. Oddly, Rose’s relationship with Lucy is presented with a good deal more restraint.
Throughout the novel, Douglas works with a large canvas that grounds us in the fields and ravines of Rose’s childhood, and, later, as an adult, with getaway camp-outs along the rivers and hills of southern Alberta. The beautifully drawn exteriors complement Rose’s interior revelations in this empathetic novel.
Glen Huser is the author of Burning the Night (NeWest).
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