Having recently read Mary Lawsons first novel, Crow Lake, comparisons are unavoidable. Both similarity and difference are apparent from page one of The Other Side of the Bridge. Both novels are set in the same community in northern Ontario. Both begin with a prologue looking back to a past event, but the event described in The Other Side of the Bridge sets a dark tone not present in Crow Lake. Both use the device of narration in the third person from the standpoint of a particular individual. Crow Lake has a single narrator, The Other Side of the Bridge has two narrators, Arthur and Ian, roughly a generation apart, who alternate chaptersIan gets the odd numbered chapters, Arthur gets the even numbered chapters. This kind of structure telegraphs its ending, which always has the stories of the two narrators becoming intertwined. The readers challenge is to see if its possible to figure out (from hints the author drops along the way) how the intertwining will play out.
Crow Lake focuses on a single event and its effects on the narrator over time. Its more difficult to say what The Other Side of the Bridge focuses on. Id say it centers on Arthurs younger brother Jake, but it doesnt always focus there. Ian and Arthur have other concerns. Ian, the son of the town doctor, is an adolescent trying to find himself. Arthur is trying to run the family farm he inherited when his father was killed in a tractor accident.
Jake is a bright, personable, manipulative sociopath who is the apple of his mothers eye. For no reason that is ever given or even hinted at, he takes pleasure in making the rather plodding Arthurs life miserable. Arthur initially tries to get his mother to see what kind of person Jake really is, and he discovers early on that she will brook no criticism of her darling Jake. Arthur is thus effectively coerced into supporting his mothers delusion. When Jake accidentally or intentionally (we dont really know which) causes Arthur a rather severe injury, Arthur lies about its circumstances and fabricates evidence that supports his report that the injury was accidentally self-inflicted. When Jake is angry with a schoolmate, he cons Arthur into threatening him, getting Arthur into trouble.
Few others ever seem to be aware of Jakes unremitting dark side. Ian glimpses it momentarily in the events leading up to the novels climax, but his attention is focused elsewhere and he does not know what he has seen. In a community where everyone knows everyone else his or her entire life, this seems a bit odd, but I guess I believe there really are people like that.
Jake is stupid about Arthur. He assumes Arthur can always be manipulated. Jake is correct most of the time, but on the occasions when Jake pushes Arthur too far, it costs Jake dearly. But Jake is pathologically incapable of real feeling. The consequences of Jakes actions have far more destructive emotional effects on those around him than they do on Jake himself.
Sociopaths are thrill-seekersdaredevils. When Jake falls from the bridge, the disaster is of his own making. He has so thoroughly destroyed his own credibility with Arthur that Arthur quite reasonably dismisses his attempts to communicate the precariousness of his position. Interestingly, although Arthur becomes obsessed with the thought that he is responsible for Jakes fall, Jake never implicates him. Perhaps Jake fears that the revelation of the magnitude of the risk he blithely took would damage his status with his mother as the child who can do no wrong. This does not seem to occur to Arthur, who fixates on the fact that when Jake his voice a shriek cried out, Im going to fall, Arthur just said, Good …. A word that would haunt him for the rest of his life. (pp. 74-5). The thoughtful reader will have had the same thought, but without the regret.
Jakes father, although he does not know the exact facts of the fall, understands that Jake brought it on himself.
[His father] was so mad spittle was flying from his mouth. Fourteen damned years old, never taken responsibility for a single damned thing hes ever done. (p. 104)
When Jake and Arthurs father is killed in a tractor accident we learn about on page 7, but dont actually see until page 159, Jake tells Arthur, I hate him for dying before he learned I wasnt worthless. (p.160) Typical Jake. In any case, we never learn anything that suggests that Jake isnt worthless. I guess that just means Jake would have said the same thing whenever his father died. Jake cares what his father thinks of himor so he saysbut if he ever had even an inkling of what it would take to gain his fathers respect, he never acts on it.
The bridge incident reminds me of the central event in John Knowles (1966) A Separate Peace, in which the main character intentionally shakes the branch on which a schoolmate is standing, causing the schoolmate to fall to his death. But injury is not death, and Arthur did not deliberately try to make Jake lose his grip.
While Arthur is dull, Ian is bland. Ian doesnt seem to have strong feelings about anything or anyone except Arthurs wife Laura. He develops an adolescent crush on herwith strong erotic overtonesbut it never goes anywhere, although it does precipitate the climactic confrontation between Arthur and Jake. Thats relatively little to show for being the center of every odd-numbered chapter in the book. Most of the time, Ian just isnt very interesting. Dull, plodding Arthur actually seems more alive. The traumatic event in Ians life is that when he is seventeen his mother leaves his father to go off with the man who teaches geography at the local high school. Ian takes this as an unforgivable betrayal of both his father and himself.
Ians attraction to Laura reminds me of Edgar Allan Poes poem that begins
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, oer a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
Helen was the mother of one of Poes classmates. When he first met her, he was fourteen and she was twenty-seven. Although the poem was published when Poe was twenty-two, it bespeaks the same kind of adolescent, mother / lover confusion that permeates Ians feelings towards Laura.
A nice touch in the psychological dynamic of the novel: Ians mother leaves some time after Ian has been smitten by Laura. Full points to the author here. Things would have been much less interesting if the two events had occurred in reverse order. After Ians mother leaves, Ian is devastated. He reacts by refusing to have anything more to do with her. He discards her letters unopenedall one hundred ninety-two of them over the next three years. He never forgives her. And all the weight of his devastation falls onto his image of Laura. His inchoate longings and unresolved feelings towards his mother become entangled with his erotic attraction to Laura. It does not occur to him that his idea of Laura and the actual Laura are not one and the same.
Ian projects onto Laura his ideal of motherhoodshe becomes a symbol of the mother he doesnt havebut he has created a negative ideal of motherhood. Everything about his mother was wrong. The ideal mother is one who does not, would not, could not, do anything his actual mother did. As Lawson tells us:
Once when he was a small child a Sunday school teacher had taught a lesson on being good…. All you had to do was ask yourself what Jesus would have done….. [Ian] saw that for the past three years he had been working on a variation of that idea: in any tricky personal situation he had asked himself what his mother would have done, and then he had done the opposite. It seemed to him that she was the prefect anti-role model. (pp. 172-3)
May we all have the perspicacity to look back on our adolescent decisions like these with sufficient objectivity to recognize when we were being just plain stupid.
Part of the pleasure of reading is to encounter felicitously phrased evocations of everyday situations that make us see them in a new light. Here are some that appealed to me.
Silence is pretty much, well, silent, but Lawson makes it communicative as well. In the course of a single, short paragraph Ian reflects that Arthurs silence was companionable, his son Carters silence was morose, Ians friend Petes silence was thoughtful, and Carters silence (reconsidered) was resentful. (pp.94-5)
Anthropomorphism can be overdone, but Lawson wields a deft brush. Ian and Pete climb to the top of a cliff overlooking the lake.
Below them a couple of crows were bouncing about on a boulder, yelling at each other. Then a third crow joined them and added his opinion, then a fourth. They stood around bickering for a moment and then, abruptly, they seemed to reach agreement and they all flew off. (pp.185-6)
Ian knows that Arthurs son Marsh would like a rabbit for a pet. He mentions it to Pete, and the next time he and Pete go fishing, Pete hands him a box with a baby rabbit in it. Ian chides Pete because the box is too small.
He doesnt even have room to turn around, Ian said. I thought you guys were supposed to have this special thing with animals. A respectful relationship. Like, asking their forgiveness before shooting them, that sort of thing.
Pete gave him a look. He reached out and took the box…. He put his head down to the box and said, Hey, wabbit, forgive me, man. Im sorry I had to eat your mom and stuff you in a shoe box.
He handed the box back to Ian. There you go. He feels better about everything, now.
Lawsons message, expertly delivered, is that sometimes it is important not to take yourself or cultural stereotypes too seriously. I find this particularly amusing in light of the scene in the movie Avatar (2009) in which the Navi heroine apologizes to the vicious creature she has just killed to save the hero. Then she turns on the hero and reams him out for having made it necessary to kill the beast. Later, the hero brings down a deer-like animal with his bow and arrow. He apologizes to the carcass, explaining that it was needed for food.
[Ian] said bitterly, People are going to think youre scared…. Theyll think youre scared you cant make it out there.
Pete … looked at him. He said mildly, You care too much what people think, man…. At least Im not doing something I dont want to do just to prove a point.
Whats that supposed to mean? Ian said, hot with anger now.
You know what it means. ….
No, I dont.
Youre dumber than I thought, then, Pete said, still mild as milk. Go work it out.
The icing on this cake comes in the next scene. Ian dreams of his mother. She complains, as she did before she left, that there is nothing in Struan.
Thats what I cant stand about this place. I cant stand the nothingness.
He said, Im here, Mum. It isnt nothingness if Im here, is it?
She smiled at him and for a moment he almost thought she was going to say no, youre right, of course youre right. But instead she said., Go work it out.
Lawson has managed to tie together Ians plaintive question (p. 55) to his mother before she leftIf I wont go with you, will you go anyway?with his procrastinating ambivalence towards college planning.
Its nice that Ian finally manages to see Laura as a person instead of an unfaithful (fantasy) lover and a failed mother-surrogate. By that time, I was pretty much beyond caring.
Its Arthur, rather, who comes out better at the end. His final words to Ian are gentle and generous.
The smile once more. And Ian … thanks for comin. Not just now. All those times, back then. (p. 293)
Notwithstanding accurate psychological observations and the occasional rhetorical delight, I cant see recommending The Other Side of the Bridge. Im glad I read Lawsons Crow Lake and Ill keep an eye out to see if her next novel (if there is one) is better.