Novelist Peter Behrens
Review
of The O’Briens, by
Peter Behrens. Anansi, 552 pp, $32.95.
When
The Law of Dreams, Peter Behrens’s brilliant
historical novel of the Irish Famine, won the Governor-General’s prize for
fiction in 2006, Canadian readers could be forgiven for asking “Peter Who?”
Then 52, Behrens appeared to have sprung out of nowhere. In fact he was born
and educated in Montreal, had been repeatedly anthologized in Best-Canadian-Stories compilations in
the 1970s, and in 1986 published a fine story collection called Night Driving. Dividing his time between
Maine and Los Angeles, Behrens made his living writing screenplays, but his
Canadian sensibilities remained strong.
Behrens’s epic saga of the
survival of Fergus O’Brien--a boy cut loose from his moorings by the Great
Hunger who winds up on a coffin ship to Montreal—was at least in part inspired
by his own family past. That it captured the imagination not only of a Canadian
but also of an international audience (The
Law of Dreams was translated into eight languages) was a testament to both
Behrens’s talent and the power inherent in the tragic yet ultimately redemptive
tale of a demoralized and deracinated people.
Huge
expectations are raised when a sequel appears in the wake of a grand debut. The O’Briens, a stand-alone follow-up to
The Law of Dreams dramatizing the
story of Fergus O’Brien’s descendants, will inevitably be compared to The Law of Dreams. If anything, it has
an even greater scope. The O’Briens spans
a historical sweep from 1887 to 1960 and a geographic reach from the Atlantic
to Pacific. Members of the eponymous family are so bicultural that their
conversation often and readily slips from English to French. It’s difficult not
to read into the author’s intent the desire to pen “a” if not “the” great
Canadian novel.
The O’Briens begins in Pontiac County,
Quebec, in a logging community in the Ottawa Valley. At thirteen, young Joe
O’Brien becomes the head of his family when his father—son of Fergus—fails to return
from South Africa after fighting in the Boer War. Joe’s mother Ellenora wastes away upon making an unfortunate
second marriage: the new stepfather, Mick Heaney, is a wild fiddler and ne’er-do-well
who abuses Joe’s two younger sisters. Joe—already an entrepreneur and
precocious boss of a timber gang—wreaks vigilante justice upon Mick, but will
forever be haunted at critical moments of his life by “the caw of a fiddle.”
Tough,
determined, yet also pitifully vulnerable, Joe yearns to make good for himself
and his siblings. At the very moment when he beats Mick to a pulp, he
recognizes that he must find a woman “who was a better, finer person than he
was, and win her somehow, make himself live up to her beauty and ideals and
protect her and the family they would make together. He’d spend his love on her
and their children, be profligate with love, and she would teach him all sorts
of fine, delicate, harmonious things.”
By
the time he meets Iseult Wilkins, a young American woman of independent mind and
strong social conscience, Joe is well on his way to being a self-made man: his
business now the construction of railroads in British Columbia. In Iseult, who
down the road will become a serious hobby photographer as well as a tireless
volunteer worker in Montreal’s slums, he creates a sympathetic and credible
heroine. The romance between them unfolds in a deeply satisfying way. Behrens
knows how to get into a woman’s head, heart, and very womb convincingly. He
handles a sudden miscarriage, for instance, with both graphic realism and great
sensitivity: “she lay feeling like a package with something smashed and broken
inside.”
Yet
as accomplished as the writing often is and as rich and varied the material, The O’Briens falls short of greatness. As
Behrens moves his narrative forward to include later generations against the
background of two World Wars, Prohibition, the Depression, and the post-War era,
he sacrifices character development to the altar of historical breadth. While
his cinematic approach certainly gives an excellent sense of period
background—the depictions of Montreal* in particular are often wonderful--in
the second half of the book characters become cardboard cut-outs representing
trends and events, rather than organically realized personalities. There are
detailed descriptions of clothes, a great many lit cigarettes, and rivers of downed
manhattans. At the end I still cared enough about Joe and Iseult to be glad that
despite the many tensions between them, they weathered the storms of marriage
into old age. I couldn’t, however, muster much enthusiasm for their children:
they seemed like so many puppets manipulated by their creator to act out an
overdetermined history lesson.
*An excerpt from The O’Briens:
“He got up, went downstairs. The servants had retired and the rooms
were dark, moonlight slanting in. The front door was locked and bolted. Peering
out through leaded windows in the downstairs drawing room, he saw the air
humming blue with frost and moonlight. The window glass was cold to the touch.
Arctic air had dropped over Montreal in the past couple of hours, the normal
pattern after a January thaw, the North reasserting itself. There were wolves
in the outer suburbs when the rivers froze.” [The O’Briens, p. 302.]
By
way of comparison:
“The
headlights cascading down Côte des Neiges were like two rivers of light and it
was so cold the whole north seemed to be breathing quietly into my face. This
air had come down from the empty far north of spruce and frozen lakes where
there were no people, it had come down from the germless, sinless land. … I
could not help enjoying … [days like this], for they reminded me of my youth
and of the time before the glaciers began to melt.” [Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night, p. 23.]
Elaine Kalman Naves
Photo: Archie Fineberg.
Elaine Kalman Naves is the award-winning author of Journey to Vaja; Shoshanna’s Story; Putting Down Roots; Robert Weaver: The Godfather of Canadian Literature; The Writers of Montreal; and, with Bryan Demchinsky, Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination. Her radio documentary about the life of the photographer William Notman will air on CBC Ideas in the fall.
