Mary Lawson
Crow Lake
Vintage Canada, 2003. Pp. 291. $21.00

Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

Mary Lawson, a Canadian living in England, has struck a chord with her first novel, Crow Lake. Childhood can be understood only by adults, and Lawson's narrator, twenty-eight-year-old Kate Morrison, looks back on her family background in the north country of Ontario to understand how she got to the point at which she finds herself when her narrative begins.

The story opens with a prologue that introduces the thread of her narrative. Great-grandmother Morrison, with her lack of schooling and her love of reading, is responsible for the destiny of her descendants. Her reading on her handmade book rest on a Sabbath sets in motion a train of events "that devastated our family and put an end to our dreams" (3). Her passion for education and her desire to help her family to escape from the farm for the cultivation of urbanity infects her son, her grandson, and even her great-grandson Matt Morrison, the narrator's brother.

Crow Lake has that essential element, the pull of narrative that begins with the first page when the narrator, as yet nameless, announces that "the Pye nightmare was destined to become entangled with the Morrison dream" (7). The subsequent sense of inexorability recalls the nemesis of Greek tragedy. Like Greek tragedians, Lawson focuses on the intense passions of a nuclear family and the complexities that develop when those passions intersect with those of another troubled clan. The question is: Is the Morrison destiny a tragic or a comic one?

The narrative begins with success and disaster both, as the narrator's brother Luke, a reluctant scholar, is accepted to teacher's college. In their eagerness to set him on his life path, his parents drive to Struan to purchase a suitcase and are killed when their car is struck by a logging truck. Left with their seven-year-old sister Kate and their infant sister Bo, nineteen-year-old Luke and seventeen-year-old Matt must determine how to cope. To keep the family together, Luke decides to give up teacher's college in order to earn a living and to enable his scholar brother Matt to stay in school in hopes of winning a scholarship to university and so fulfill the Morrison family dream of escaping the wilderness. Their determination to live together reflects the Darwinian struggle for survival that Kate witnesses in the scrub pines growing out of the cracks in the Cambrian Shield.

The narrative is structured around a series of contraries. First, there is the present and the past, as Kate's narrative counterpoints then and now, intersecting her present with "snapshots from the past" (285). Her present is her job as assistant professor of biology at a university in Toronto, where she researches "the effect of surfactants on the inhabitants of the surface film" (275) by studying the effect on pond skaters of reducing the surface tension. Part of that present involves her relationship with a brilliant young professor of zoology, Daniel Crane. Her past concerns her childhood at Crow Lake during the difficult year following the death of her parents, two decades earlier. Going "home," driving the four hundred miles from Toronto to New Liskeard, seems like "going back in time, moving from 'now' to 'then,' and the recognition that wherever you are now and wherever you may be in the future, nothing alters the point you started from" (259).

Connected to the counterpointing of past and present is the opposition of city and country and the old debate between nature and nurture or inheritance and environment, or Darwin and Freud. When Daniel judges that "Crow Lake seemed an unlikely environment to produce an academic" (243), Kate responds that "Crow Lake was actually the perfect breeding grounds for academics" (243). Kate cites Matt's "passion for ponds" as an example, a passion that he passed on to her.

The ponds, as they are called, provide a perspective on propagation and adaptability, as Matt and Kate, lying on their stomachs and brooding over the insect-infested water, discover the reality of reverse surface tension in a motif reminiscent of Frances Wingate's teeming ditch in Margaret Drabble's novel The Realms of Gold (1975) and Osbert Sedgewick's tidal pools in Jane Urquhart's Away. Biology is definitely destiny. Indeed, Kate and Daniel meet as Kate is absorbed in studying the reactions of a pond skater as she gradually reduces the level of surface tension that allows it to walk on water-a metaphor for the way providence challenges the Morrison family's survival.

Past and present intersect when an invitation arrives for Kate to return home to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of Matthew's son Simon at the farm at Crow Lake. The problem is that Daniel has seen the letter with its invitation to bring a friend. Daniel, who has been generous in sharing with Kate his formidable parents, the Professors Crane, believes that Kate has been withholding her self from him by not sharing her family secrets. Essentially, Kate, abnormally attached to her brother Matt ever since the trauma of her parents' death, has to transfer her affections to Daniel. The major question of the novel is whether or not she can accomplish this transference. Professor of perception, Kate is blind when it comes to comprehending her own passions. Fiona De Jong, a student, mirrors her predicament and provides insight into her own dilemma, and a member of the Pye family unexpectedly offers a surprising perspective on the Morrison family.

Education can estrange, and Kate and Matt have indeed become strangers in the decades that divide past and present, with the unbridgeable cultural gap of education dividing them. Morrison's spare but vivid style maps that uncharted wilderness, the landscape of the human heart, in a gripping narrative of family passion and individual destiny that makes compelling reading.