Review
Joan Skogan's narrator Rose in
Moving Water is an artist, a woman of "restlessness and vagrancy" lured all her life by moving water: "[M]oving water meant that there might be more than the present rigid moment. Land stayed steadily the same in one place, and you had to fit into it. But water moved and changed, formed around you, took you into itself and away".
When the novel opens, she has recently returned from a lengthy absence from her beloved north coast. Rose, who grew up in Vancouver in a home where "[c]hange was not encouraged" and arrangements were "intended to be permanent", married a fisherman and tried to settle down. She refers to this period as "the up-the-coast years when she and Richard and everyone else still thought she would never be wild and dark or deliberately hidden". But that's exactly what Rose is, and eventually she leaves Richard to travel the Black and Baltic seas on a cargo ship.
Now that she is back, she "wants to be a changed woman". She wants fourteen years to have been long enough to learn more than just "how to escape and keep moving, slipping through the hands of strangers. Or how to stay and be cast into stone. Long enough to choose". The novel is in a sense about finding home-in Rose's case, "the hard coast that knows me and still offers me consolation", a place where "I can imagine art and other ways of moving and changing course and overflowing the banks, even if I stay in one place".
Moving Water brims with fine writing as evocative as the nature of water itself. Eva Tihanyi(Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada
Book Description
Joan Skogan's marvelously poetic new novel draws upon her own years adrift on the sea as a wanderer and wonderer to tell the story of Rose Bachmann, a woman at mid-tide in a life awash in the debris of a mysterious marriage, in myths both long known and newly invented and in the magical coastline of the NOrth Pacific.
Rose finds herself at rest in the rock form of a petroglyph entitled The One Who Fell From Heaven, near Prince Rupert, B.C. and there she imagines, in a brilliant song to her past and those she has loved, voyages both real and surreal and the currents of an existence that have brought her to this place, this truth.
It is a story winding its way toward the "I", a story which opens to engulf the Skeena and the St. Lawrence, the Danube and the Tigris, swallowing the very self Rose has given over to propulsion and discovery. It is a quest which roams the swelling waves of personal history and may of the world's unfathomable waterways, at once, as the title suggests, in motion, yet serenely still.
