Turtle Valley [Hardcover]

From the very first sentence, Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s latest novel, Turtle Valley, brims with gothic foreboding. There is a forest fire, we are told, crawling across the top of the mountain, a fire that threatens to devour the valley of farms and acreages below. “Huge columns of smoke loomed over the Ptarmigan Hills,” her brave narrator Kat tells us, “blackening out the stars.” And so, with the first frame of her picture, Anderson-Dargatz propels us forward, into the darkness and the stories waiting within.
And what darkness and stories there are. As the forest fire closes in, stories that have the power to terrify move in on us, as we are thrust into Kat’s world and her family secrets of love and madness. There are striking similarities here to previous work-most notably, A Recipe for Bees. Interestingly enough, Anderson-Dargatz originally published that as a short fiction in Canadian Forum titled “Turtle Valley”. Now she revisits triumphantly the same rural landscape and characters, but with a different tale to tell.
On the surface, the plot revolves around Kat’s return to her family home in Turtle Valley. She’s there to help her elderly mother and father prepare to evacuate from the encroaching forest fire. Kat, when we first meet her, is lonely and frustrated in her marriage to a man who has been brain-damaged by a stroke. She spends her time looking after him and their young son, Jeremy. She was a writer, but hasn’t written anything for the past six years, since Ezra’s stroke. Then she sees Jude again, the potter and old lover who lives close to her parents’ farm. He reminds her of everything she once was and could have been.
There’s a sense that Kat and everyone around her-from both the past and present-are not just damaged, but haunted, too. And when Kat discovers a clue to a decades-old family mystery in her grandmother’s carpetbag, the real-life ghosts of her grandmother and grandfather begin turning up, eerily jingling their keys in the smoky, burning air, turning the stove elements on, threatening to burn the house down. Birds keep crashing into windows, a calf has to be butchered, Kat’s father succumbs to cancer, ladybugs swarm the house, there are poltergeists, and always in the background there is the fire creeping closer. It’s Canadian gothic at it’s very best, with layer upon layer of darkness, horror, and secrecy-each story and character connected to others through the devastating progress of the fire.
The domestic realm-the farm house and the men and women within-is central to the book. The grandparents, Maud and John, the parents, Gus and Beth, Kat, Ezra, and Jude-all revolve and evolve around each other like figures in an Ibsen play, slowly unveiling painful psychological truths. Tragically, most of the men are crazy, victims of violence or war. This is most especially evident in the character of John Weeks, Kat’s grandfather, who was wounded by shrapnel in the war, which, we are told, blew away part of his skull, leaving shrapnel bits still lodged in his brain. Kat’s mother tells her, “I thought of them as living things, eating away at him, like maggots.” Tormented by madness, the men are cut off from their feelings of love and emotion. On his deathbed, Kat’s father confesses, “It’s a terrible thing to love a woman and not be able to reach her, to make her love you back in the same way. I don’t think I ever reached your mother that way, not like I wanted to.”
As a consequence, the women, although made sturdy by the land-survivors, by all accounts-are damaged mothers, silent witnesses to unspeakable abuse of their children. Kat’s mother, Beth, appears to care more for her stray cats than for her own children. Kat says to her sister Val, “It was like I wasn’t there, like she didn’t give a shit about me or anything else. But then one of her cats would come yowling around her legs and she’d pick it up and coo at it like it was a baby.”
By the middle of the book, it feels as if the floor is falling out from under our feet. This is a crazy house, devoid of love, full of thwarted desire and broken dreams, aching from countless wounds. Still, the members of this family go on about their daily routines, clinging to the pretense that their lives are normal. It’s unsettling.
Then there is Jude, who, like a god, uses his clay to create with fire rather than destroy. He, like the figure of Valentine, offers us a sense of order and serenity amid the chaos and despair. Kat is also determined to navigate the turmoil of this familial landscape with love and care to protect Jeremy. As the family clears out the house, she is the one who learns the stories behind the ordinary domestic objects-a deck of cards, a camera, a razor, a chipped vase, to name only a few-imbuing each object, alluded to in lovely black and white photographs that preface each chapter of the book, with new meaning.
Yet, true to the novel’s gothic form, Kat concedes that she feels possessed. This possession is the outcome of her family’s history, the secrets kept by her parents and grandparents. It’s part of the book’s main theme involving time and memory: the longing to live and be whole in the present, to know but not to be trapped or damaged by the past. Fortunately, Kat, like the women before her, is a survivor. As she discovers her family’s terrible secrets, Kat finds a way to overcome both the past and the passage of time by engaging once again in the creative act of writing. The end of her marriage to Ezra and her possible reunion with Jude leaves the door open to a future full of the potential for love and creativity.
When the fire finally does come, it’s more purifying than destructive: “The lawn around my parents’ home exploded into flame and bits of burning letters and photos from the boxes belonging to Ezra and me were carried up from the truck by the wild winds.” Literally and figuratively, Anderson-Dargatz burns down the house on domesticity and the roles and expectations that fetter each generation of men and women. Her writing peaks here, as she uses the forest fire to burn away everything that Turtle Valley has come to symbolise:

“Embers and pieces of flaming wood and pine cones pummeled us, bouncing off the hood of the car. Jude clicked on the headlights as the smoke of the firestorm blackened out the sun, and I turned in my seat to watch, with my mother and Ezra, as the farmhouse was engulfed by fire, as the truck burst into flames, as our past burned away.”

In the end, there’s a wonderful sense in Turtle Valley that Gail Anderson-Dargatz is doing with her writing what Jude is doing to his pots through the process of raku pottery-throwing narrative, like clay, into the fire again and again, to achieve varying levels of blackness and varying degrees of the gothic. This is the novel’s beauty: the subtle layering of sinful deeds, greed, fear, and shame, tempered by the redemptive power of fire.
Christine Walde (Books in Canada)

Praise for Gail Anderson-Dargatz:

“Anderson-Dargatz has something that no amount of craft can give a writer: She is hopelessly in love with and attentive to her subject, the physical world and all its gifts.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Those who go hunting for ‘the next Margaret Laurence’ or ‘the next Alice Munro’ might find themselves perusing Gail Anderson-Dargatz. . . . If Margaret Laurence were alive today, she’d be looking over her shoulder–not with worry, but anticipation. Anderson-Dargatz is the real thing.”
—Calgary Herald

“Anderson-Dargatz’s characters are vulnerable yet valiant as they thrust at the encroaching darkness. A rich blend of magic realism and brooding poetry, her writing is by turns warm and chilling, tempered to the mysteries of nurturing and nature. Her command of imagery and dialogue is nothing less than remarkable.”
—Georgia Straight