Torlée’s third and latest novel offers glimpses into the art world, exotic locales (decor, culture, and cuisines), philosophical concepts, and the interweaving of lives and histories to illustrate one universal theme: the complexity of motherhood.
Part One introduces several disparate characters who revolve around each other like planets in the night sky. At times, it’s hard to keep them straight. Twenty-six-year-old Aiden Quinn, the protagonist, is a despondent artist. His aunt, the woman who raised him when his mother couldn’t, has just died and, in his grief, he’s kicked out his girlfriend. A photograph in a magazine inspires a meeting in Vancouver with a man with an uncanny resemblance to Aiden’s long-deceased father. Turns out Uncle Stephen is “one of Canada’s best-known painters.” When Stephen realizes his nephew’s artistic potential, he offers him a chance at a new life and Aiden accepts, moving from gritty Downtown Eastside Vancouver to the glamour and glitz of life working with the El Hassans.
This is Torlée’s third book and, although it’s not described as a series, each of these character-driven books builds on another. Stephen was introduced in her first book, The Way Things Fall: a novel. We also meet Gabrielle Mazhar, an unhinged horsewoman who’s inherited an Egyptian stud farm; along with the perfect family, rich, hotelier Dominic El Hassan, his beautiful wife Amina, and their adorable children. Amina is the centre of Book Two, In Love With The Night. I’ve not read the first two books and was able to follow the story, but it would have been richer and simpler to digest if I had, due to the number of characters and detailed backstories. However, a few chapters in, things gel as we begin to travel between countries and locations.
In Part Two, we find ourselves in South America. Dominic’s in Patagonia with his perfect family. He takes his rather psychic son, Luka, to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to view the night sky, and on their return, they meet up with Gabrielle who’s flown to Patagonia to check on horses. This chance meeting inspires a diabolical plan that propels us into Part Three. Now, we’re in Morocco, where we glimpse the true natures of our flawed characters and the lengths they’re willing to go to get what they desire. Here too, we meet Fate: “A living, breathing force out there orchestrating the details of our lives. It separates people and it brings them together.”
Dominic, who feels like a second protagonist, has an ethereal quality and is able to articulate this concept of Fate perfectly.
“Through the weaving of the countless paths of fate, the lives of the three of them under the stars tonight, the lives of people they loved in the past and would love in the future—all were meant to intersect, fuse inextricably together.”
It is the desire to be a mother that fuels Gabrielle’s criminality, and the natural force of motherhood that propels pregnant Amina to save her daughter. Aiden cannot forgive his mother for disappearing and leaving her sister to mother him, even though she’s still alive and has been desperately trying to reconnect.
To summarize this story does it an injustice. Torlée’s a masterful writer and her rich and rhythmic, cinematic prose propels us through art galleries and exotic locations into these dramatically twisted lives. The book is like a living photograph—the reader becomes immersed in the intrinsic beauty of the far landscape then zooms into the quiet closeness of a character’s soul in an intimate moment. Through photographs and paintings we are drawn in. For example, take this description of Italy, drawn from a photograph.
“Here was the house itself, a fading creamy yellow, caper flowers growing tenaciously in cracks of stone, frothing mounds of wild lavender in the gardens at the side. The pictures showed terraced vineyards and lilac skies, the medieval towers of the walled city in the distance.”
Torlée loves stars, the concept of fate, travel and the desert—motifs that define her books. In fact, she met her husband Jürgen in Cairo, on the edge of the desert with the pyramids in sight. They now live in midtown Toronto.
Lovers of travel and culture will become immersed; in fact, this would be a good book to pack on your journeys. Armchair travellers will love the tangible sketches of Chile, Egypt, Morocco, even Toronto and Vancouver, and the in-depth emotional journeys of these divergent, yet intimately connected souls, as they take A Long Walk With Fate.
I picked up this massive paperback in one of our little free libraries (a weatherproof outdoor bookcase where people leave and take books.) I physically can’t pass by one without at least a sweep through the titles. I thought it might tell the tale of Hy Brasil, a mythical island off the West Coast of Ireland, that only reveals itself in the shifting mists every seven years. The name comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, meaning descendants of Breasal (mighty/beautiful.)
This story was not at all what I was expecting. I read the entire book of 438 pages entranced. It contained no fantasy whatsoever and I simply couldn’t put it down. Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil is as much a treasure as the Spanish goblet Jared finds while diving off the coast.
“… it was a delicate green, dark at the base, and translucent in the bowl, like seawater … The stem widened out into a fluted base; the shape under his fingers was like overlapping petals. There were circular ridges under the bowl of the goblet. And on the side of the bowl … a galleon” (80).
Hy Brasil was published in 2002, but the author, Margaret Elphinstone, Scottish poet and retired university English professor, says she wrote it in 1996/97 while spending a happy, inspired year at Central Michigan University as a visiting professor. I wish I’d been one of her students.
The story is a mystery/thriller/adventure inspired by the author’s love and understanding of several real and literary islands.
“My island of Hy Brasil is also Caliban’s, Robinson Crusoe’s, Gulliver’s, Long John Silver’s, Peter Pan’s, Ralph’s, and a host of other more or less fictional characters. It seems that people needed to believe in Hy Brasil. Until 1865 it actually appeared on Admiralty charts.”
Professor Elphinstone grew up on Shetland and taught at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Being fond of islands myself, I was absorbed by the lyrical descriptions and kept flipping back to the map (using my phone magnifier) to locate key characters and settings:
Sidony Redruth, an Englishwoman, who fraudulently won a writing competition, has been tasked with writing a series of travel books beginning with Hy Brasil, something that combines a guidebook with a narrative and first-hand experience—like Bill Bryson and my friend Bill Arnott write. Sidony begins her stay in St. Brandon’s, a town with pastel townhomes reminiscent of Ireland or St. Johns, Nfld., but she soon moves in with Lucy. Sidony’s first line hooked me: “I would hate to have to choose, but I think I’d rather have traveling than sex.” Fortunately, for Sidony, both are readily available.
Lucy Morgan, whose great-grandfather was a pirate, lives alone in her family’s fantastical old castle, Ravnscar, until joined by Sidony.
Jared Honeyman inhabits a lonely seabird haven on the Isle of Despair. Since the lighthouse is automated, Jared lives in the third bungalow of three and spends many hours monitoring the new gannet population (his paying gig) while exploring the Cortez, a sunken Spanish wreck (1611) off the coast for which he’s been given exclusive rights of salvage.
Ishmael Pereira, a businessman who lives at Ferdy’s Landing with his family and supports Jared’s salvage attempts along with Per, who drives the boat.
Columbo McAdam, journalist and friend of Lucy’s, introduces Sidony to Finnegan’s on the High Street, a lovely book shop with yummy doughnuts. Columbo’s best line: “[History] can’t be changed, therefore it has to be forgiven” (164).
Hy Brasil sits on the North Atlantic Ridge, has three mountains and is volatile. In fact, the eruption of Mount Brasil triggers a coup d’etat against the corrupt government. Sidony climbs Mt. Brasil alone and peers down the crater into the active volcano in an exceedingly well-written chapter (24).
Like any good mystery, there are murders, cover-ups and political intrigue. Add to that: piracy, sunken treasure, drug-smuggling, love affairs, eco-adventure, an active volcano, and incredibly detailed, sensory, lyrical writing and you have a masterpiece. This book’s a keeper that I’ll return to again and again. Someone needs to produce this story as a film.
If you’ve never heard of Cornelia Funke, you must find this book and read it. Funke has been called the German J. K. Rowling. Both women have written a fantastical series featuring a child protagonist. Funke’s is a trilogy: Inkheart (2003), Inkspell (2005), and Inkdeath (2007). The “ink” is a clue that these are stories about books and people who love books—people like me and you. This translation from the German by Anthea Bell is quite well done.
“Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness—and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.”
Funke was working as an illustrator and social worker in Germany when her son asked her to write a story about people who come out of books. We readers love to slip inside stories ourselves—in a figurative way—but imagine having Hermione Granger or Katniss Everdeen suddenly standing beside you? Or worse, imagine the Death-Eaters hovering over your bed!
Meggie is a twelve-year-old girl Funke named after her daughter. She gave her a wonderful father, who Meggie calls “Mo” (short for Mortimer) with a fantastical gift. Mortimer Folchart is a Book Doctor, a bookbinder/restorer and great lover of books. These words are etched on a metal plaque on the door to his workshop:
Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
But Mo is also something else. He was nicknamed Silvertongue by the characters he read out of Inkheart.
“Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.”
His gift comes with a price.
While reading Inkheart aloud nine years before, Mo accidentally pulled out three eccentric characters created by Italian author, Fenoglio. Capricorn is one of literature’s nastier villains. Basta is a superstitious, knife-wielding thug. And Dustfinger is a loveable fire-eater with a strange horned marten.
But, at the same time, Mo read Meggie’s mother, Theresa, INTO the book, and they lost her. After that horrific mistake Mo’s refused to read aloud ever again. He fears losing his daughter too. Capricorn destroyed all copies of Inkheart except the one he keeps for himself. He does not want to be read back into the book.
Like any good villain, Capricorn has his own agenda.
The tale begins in Germany where Mo and Maggie live. Dustfinger arrives with a warning: Capricorn is hunting Mo. He’s discovered another third-rate reader who’s read out some characters, but all have flaws. His reading is just not up to snuff. Capricorn has enough thugs and now wants treasure. Unflawed treasure. Pirate treasure. Gold. Mo and Meggie flee to northern Italy to take refuge at Meggie’s great aunt Elinor’s mansion full of books. Elinor is a collector and books are her world.
“A famous writer once wrote, ‘An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or a magician—but the magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.”
Mo is so obsessed with finding a copy of Inkheart and reading his wife home, they track down old Fenoglio to see if he has some stashed away. The charming old man joins them on their journey.
“Inkheart.” Fenoglio rubbed his aching back. “Its title is Inkheart because it’s about a man whose wicked heart is as black as ink, filled with darkness and evil. I still like the title.”
Eventually, they all end up imprisoned in Capricorn’s village in southern Italy. When Meggie reads Tinkerbell out of Peter Pan, she realizes she’s inherited Mo’s gift.
Unfortunately, so does Capricorn.
Allusions to classic literature paint the story along with much talk about books and reading. Wonderful quotes from our favourite children’s stories begin each chapter. This is a story to sink inside—not literally, of course—but to fall asleep with while you’re wrapped safely in words and soft quilts.
Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness, keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth … all those glorious words.”
Cornelia Funke with her children
Inkheart was made into a movie featuring Brendan Fraser in 2008. Although it was produced by Cornelia Funke, I really don’t want to spoil things by watching it. This story is all about the written word and I can’t see how a film could do it justice.
I recently found a used hardcover of Inkspell, with Funke’s illustrations, in my local Indie bookstore, and now, like Mo, I’m searching for the rest of the trilogy. I just read Inkheart on Libby so I’d be ready for book two. If you see any other hardcover copies in thrift stores, do let me know. Like Elinor, I’m beginning to build my library of book loves.
Some time in your life you must have been hugged by a poem written by Mary Oliver.
Upstream was published in 2016, not long before her death on January 17, 2019. It is both a memoir and an homage to her chosen town: Provincetown, Massachusetts. She moved there with her lifelong partner and soul mate Molly Malone Cook in the mid 1960s, and these essays celebrate fifty years of life lived in this artist haven at the northern tip of Cape Cod.
Provincetown resembles a crab’s claw on a map. It’s a long hooked peninsula, the historic scene of the Mayflower landing in 1620. Named Cape Cod by an English explorer in 1602, who appreciated the cod haul, it remained a fishing/whaling town for centuries. It is the ancestral territory of the Nauset People, who I’m sure had their own name for this place. The Nauset are an Algonquian-speaking People, who “sold” the pilgrims the land where they established Plymouth for “2 brass kettles, 6 coats, 12 hoes, 12 axes, 12 knives, and a box.”
But I digress.
I’m sure Oliver must have kept annotated journals as she writes:
“I saw wood ducks here for the first time in 1977” and “In 1985, a shoveler spent a spring morning on Blackwater Pond. Once, in late March 1991, a single hooded merganser appeared on Oak-Head Pond” (15).
The beauty of Provincetown is that the historic town stretches along a curved beach fronted by ocean and backed by a wildlife sanctuary. Blackwater Pond is there along the Beech Forest Trail. Idyllic. Paradisiacal. The town swells each summer with tourists. I can see why they chose this haven known for its artists and gays. This is a place worthy of a visit.
Why is Provincetown so Gay? explains the history and its liberal beginnings way back in 1899. A train connected it to Greenwich Village, NY, so many forward-thinkers found easy access to this out-of-the-way spot of beauty and freedom.
“Over the next two decades, Provincetown welcomed not only thousands of artists, but also writers, actors and left-wing political radicals who brought new ideas on gender and racial equality, artistic expression and sexuality.”
Oliver rises at 5am to greet the sun and go rambling through the wildlife sanctuary with her dogs. She writes as she walks. Nature is as much her muse as poets past. In particular, she loves Emerson, Shelley, young Wordsworth, Blake, and Basho. She writes of Emerson:
“The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind” (73).
The same can be said for her own work. Indeed, she writes in the Romantic Nature Tradition. Oliver is, at once, passionate and observant in her relationship with the land; her prose streaked with lines so vivid I must pause to savour them and capture them in my journal.
She includes brief bits in Section Three on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth, perhaps gleaned from her talks, as she travelled to lecture, though I think she would have just as soon stayed at home.
Oliver sees herself as one of Nature, both prey and predator. She harvests honey locust blossoms and once digs deep into a turtle’s sandy nest to steal half of her eggs (13/27). She takes them home to pierce and drain, scramble their big yellow yolks, and devour.
This I find horrific. It hurts my heart. I remember pregnant turtles crawling out of Bill Brown’s quarry pond north of Ajax, Ontario, and crossing Concession 5 on their way to nesting. I’d stop the car and help them cross. I can’t imagine digging up a turtle’s eggs to devour unless I was starving on some deserted island somewhere.
“Each of the turtles is a female, and gravid, and is looking for a place to dig her nest; each of the mosquitoes is a female also who cannot, without one blood meal, lay her own fertile eggs upon the surface of some quiet pond” (52).
This is her point. The mosquitoes bite the turtles in the circle of Nature and she takes from the turtle, including herself in the web. She is as much a predator as the fox and the red-tailed hawk she surprises one day ripping into a pheasant. She considers stealing that too, but decides against it.
“I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same” (56).
I fear I am a sentimentalist, driven by feelings—though I’ve considered how culling the local Canada Geese flock might feed the homeless. They, the geese—not the homeless—leave such delectable hor d’oeuvres for my lab.
Oliver’s essays make me homesick for the East where I grew up. I recall the painted turtles, blue herons, hawks, and pumpkin-coloured Baltimore orioles, their nests streaming like long silk stockings; crimson cardinals against white snow, and canary-yellow finches … the great grey owl who soared over our bog, vampiric through the shadows.
I think I must nestle into my winter quilt and read more of Mary Oliver. There is much here to learn.
There’s an ongoing argument among writers about what makes a novel literary rather than genre. This novel, which I picked up in one of my neighbourhood little libraries, solved it for me.
It’s in the voice.
Voice is how an author writes—what they choose to say and how they choose to say it. Voice is the one quality that can slow down my reading because I want to wallow in it, rather than race to find out what happens next.
Sointula is an older novel, going on twenty years, but I don’t feel it’s dated in the least. Vancouver Island and its wild places are still here echoing in the mist. Sointula, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, is a seaside town on Malcolm Island (just off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island). It’s built on the unceded Kwakwakw’akw Territory of the ‘Namgis, Mamalilikala, and Kwakuitl Nations. Sointula was created by a group of Finnish settlers in 1901 as their Utopia.
Bill Gaston weaves his awareness of the island through the experiences of Tom, a rough-edged, damaged, young man who’s there recovering from a near-wack by a Vietnamese gang. Something to do with drugs. Tom is living alone on the beach, observing and counting orcas. He’s also involved in getting drugs into B.C. — something about hearing boats on his orca sonar and building a big old bonfire when the coast is literally clear for the drug boats to come through.
Tom’s life story is described in wistful detail through his mother’s memories.
Evelyn has left her privileged life as the wife of the Mayor of Oakville, Ontario to join her dying ex in Victoria, B.C. After Claude’s passing, she puts his ashes into a glass vile, steals a double kayak, and heads north on her own. Evelyn has no money, no food, no clothes other than the ones she came with. She hasn’t seen her son Tom in a decade but she needs to now. She needs to tell him about his father’s death.
En route, Evelyn meets Peter Gore, whose gall bladder is literally killing him. Still, he joins Evelyn in her stolen kayak with his rum and his desire to write a book. Over many pages, Peter falls in love with Eve and with life.
All three characters are flawed. It would be hard to even sympathize with them if it weren’t for the elegant backstories Gaston weaves throughout this masterful story. I see myself in Evelyn’s estrangement from her grown son and her desperation to find peace in the wild hollows. I love her outlaw spirit. Sointula means “place of harmony” and in all the chaos of travel, sickness, grime, and starvation—traveling without funds is not clean nor romantic—it seems that harmony prevails. Even Love.
Reading Sointula was almost enough to make me get in the car and drive north two hours to Port McNeill. From there it’s only a short ferry ride to Malcolm Island. The land itself plays a character in this story and the tale borders on travel writing.
It was enough to make me look for more Gaston books and take a deep dive into Can Lit.
Over the holidays, I discovered this used book in our local bookstore and decided to read it. This is the kind of story one can call delightful. It was written by Edith Nesbit who wrote under the pen name E. Nesbit. Her biography says: “She was a mischievous, tomboyish child who grew into an unconventional adult. With her husband, Hubert Bland, she was one of the founder members of the socialist Fabian Society; their household became a centre of the socialist and literary circles of the time. The chaos of their Bohemian home . . . was regularly increased by the presence of their children and numerous friends, among whom were George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.
Like Mrs. Barnstable, the mother of The Railway Children, Edith was a published writer, and a good one. This Puffin Classic (first published in 1906 and this edition republished in 1994) has several full pages of pen and ink sketches that are remarkable. The writing voice reminded me of C. S. Lewis and the children of the Pevensies. Since the Chronicles of Narnia weren’t published until the 1950s, I can’t help but wonder if Lewis read and liked Nesbit’s books. Perhaps some of the Railway Children adventures rubbed off on him.
The three children: Roberta (Bobbie) who turns twelve, Phyllis who seems to be around eight years old, and Peter who turns ten, have all sorts of adventures after their father mysteriously disappears and they have to move from London into the countryside. They are suddenly impoverished, so their mother spends long hours writing and selling stories in order to make ends meet. With all kinds of free time at Three Chimneys, their new cottage, the children make friends with the locals—particularly Perks the Porter and the Station Master. They also befriend a wealthy and wise old gentleman who regularly rides the train and helps them solve the mystery of their father.
Things I loved about this story:
The trains of course. Who doesn’t love the old fashioned “Harry Potter” trains winding their way through the English countryside.
The innocence of it all. The children were allowed to roam free and get into mischief, as I did as a kid. This was a time in which a man could kiss a young girl on the cheek in the spirit of friendship and gratitude and not be maligned for it.
The writing, so clear, detailed, and descriptive.
“There was a cake on the table covered with white sugar, with ‘Dear Bobbie’ on it in pink sweets, and there were buns and jam; but the nicest thing was that the big table was almost covered with flowers — wall-flowers were laid all round the tea-tray — there was a ring of forget-me-nots round each plate. The cake had a wreath of white lilac round it, and in the middle was something that looked like a pattern all done with single blooms of lilac or wallflower or laburnum” (73).
The strength of character in all whom we meet.
Frank discussions about the differences between boys and girls, and corrections made with regard to stereotypical statements. (The doctor is somewhat old fashioned.)
A film of this particular story was produced in 1970 and the trailer seems quite true to the book. Apparently, the children returned recently in another film: The Railway Children Return (2022). This one concerns a different group of children and is set in 1944, when the children are evacuated from Manchester to East Yorkshire because of the bombings.
Thank you, Miss Nesbit for bringing your stories to the world.
