The Other Side of the Bridge (Paperback)

Mary Lawson sailed into Canadian hearts with Crow Lake, winner of The Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second book, The Other Side of the Bridge, is, if anything, more powerful than that remarkable début. A deceptively simple tale about the many shades of rivalry in a small northern Ontario town, this is a narrative that gets thoroughly inside your skin. If you’ve had any experience of the north, it takes you back there; if you’ve never been, Lawson makes you intimate with the landscape she seems to know so well. This is the best kind of novel, the sort you’ll urge your friends to read.
In the broadest terms, Lawson’s fictional town of Struan, north of North Bay, harbours two sorts of people: those who naturally love it and those who, just as naturally, hate it. Among the latter is Jake Dunn, younger brother of Arthur, who embodies all the personality and street smarts his dutiful elder brother lacks. Their Cain-and-Able relationship opens the narrative with a game involving knives. Big brother Arthur is solid, salt-of-the-earth, but not insensitive. Urged-“worn down,” as is Jake’s specialty-to play a game where each player throws a knife at his sibling’s bare foot, he deliberately misses. Jake, after all, is their mother’s favourite. Jake is not so kind to his big brother. The details of the scene are spare and perfect, the knife in question-a hunting knife-features a blood runnel on one side that presages violence. “The thought came into his mind-not drifting in gently but appearing suddenly, like a cold hard round little pebble-that Jake hated him.” The relationship between the brothers raises the age-old question of difference: how can two boys born to the same parents grow into such opposites, one dutiful and caring, the other impulsive and selfish?
Running parallel to the Dunn brothers’ story, a full generation later, is that of teenaged Ian Christopherson, abandoned (as he views it) by his mother for a fancier life in the city with a fancier man than his father. Her act (selfish, life-saving, or both) leaves Ian alone in Struan with his hardworking doctor father, the two of them marooned in the town, living in their handsome house a couple of hundred yards from the lake. You can have the north, it seems, or you can have the excitement of the city, but you can’t have both. As Ian grows up and completes his high school matriculation, this is the question he must answer: which path will he follow? The fact that he nurtures a passion for Arthur Dunn’s attractive wife Laura, and so decides to get a job helping out at the Dunn farm, leads to further complications in the plot.
To her credit, Lawson makes the characters who flee Struan as appealing as she can. This is not a simple case of the rooted ones showing inherent nobility. Pete Corbiere, an Ojibway friend of Ian’s, is probably smarter than he is, and yet, to Ian’s frustration, decides to remain where he feels he belongs, if only, he jokes, to prevent the tourists from getting the huge muskie he’s been tracking for years. Although she is mostly offstage, readers will understand the mother who leaves, even at the risk of losing her son: the hundreds of letters she writes, each in turn dumped unopened into the trash by her unforgiving child, make her a sympathetic figure. The young, Lawson seems to be saying, know nothing of forgiveness, and why should they? They are wholly self-centred, as nature made them. Similarly, Jake, though flashy, is not quite the stage villain he first seems, and his eventual return actually masks an unsuspected depth in his character, for he has come back to reconnect with something cherished that he has left behind.
These family dramas are played out against the global dramas of the century, especially the Second World War, which takes so many sons of Struan, with the ironic result that a farm belonging to a Canadian-German family whose three sons are killed back in Europe has to be maintained by Arthur-whose flat feet keep him out of the army-with the help of two German POWs, two foreign teenagers who know how to work the land. The rhythms of planting, milking, and harvesting remain constant. Just as predictable are the facts that far-off wars mow down young lives, cruel accidents take away fathers, mothers are helpless when it comes to their children’s futures, and some young adults feel guilt and confusion while their siblings feel little but jealousy and anger.
The stories behind the seemingly bland headlines in The Temiskaming Speaker are full of surprises, and are much more profound than anything a stranger-even a prodigal son like Jake, returning home in a flashy red-and-white finned Cadillac-could ever imagine. Lawson’s narrative is, thankfully, leavened with wry humour. Ian’s history class, taught by a veteran teacher who lost a leg at Dieppe and “knew more about the battle of Dieppe than they knew about all the other battles in history put together.” As he desperately tries to elude his fated career in medicine, Ian decides that he’ll go into farming or become a pilot, and he is baffled and angry when no one will disagree with him.
The central irony in this novel is that Struan, at heart, proves as exciting as anything the city can offer: people are fatally injured in knife fights; they need blood transfusions-for which the doctor has devised a typing system; they fall off bridges into icy green rivers, swollen with runoff; tractors roll over and crush them in ditches-and those are only the physical injuries. Against the brutal reality is the undeniable beauty of the land, its age, its magic. Sitting on top of a slice of Canadian Shield that is three billion years old, looking down on a lace-like shoreline lit up with hundreds of bays and rivers and inlets, Pete and Ian are startled by the sight of a curtain of dragonflies dancing in the rays of the setting sun. Ian’s father is mystified that anyone would fail to love this land, and at this moment, so are we.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

In this follow-up to her acclaimed Crow Lake, Lawson again explores the moral quandaries of life in the Canadian North. At the story's poles are Arthur Dunn, a stolid, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and his brother, Jake, a handsome, smooth-talking snake in the grass, whose lifelong mutual resentments and betrayals culminate in a battle over the beautiful Laura, with Arthur, it seems, the unlikely winner. Observing, and eventually intervening in their saga, is Ian, a teenager who goes to work on Arthur's farm to get close to Laura, seeing in her the antithesis of the mother who abandoned his father and him. It's a standard romantic dilemma—who to choose: the goodhearted but dull provider or the seductive but unreliable rogue?—but it gains depth by being set in Lawson's epic narrative of the Northern Ontario town of Struan as it weathers Depression, war and the coming of television. It's a world of pristine landscapes and brutal winters, where beauty and harshness are inextricably intertwined, as when Ian brings home a puppy that gambols adorably about—and then playfully kills Ian's even cuter pet bunny. Lawson's evocative writing untangles her characters' confused impulses toward city and country, love and hate, good and evil. (Oct. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.