Road Ends by Mary Lawson

Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.

I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.

Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witnesses to a tragedy at a cliff edge – Tom’s best friend Rob takes his own life.

He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing–the only thing–that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.

Until this moment the fear that it would accompany him to the end, enter eternity with him, had left him paralyzed, but the lynx had freed him to act. He thought it was possible that if he focused on the big cat, if by a great effort of will he managed to hold it in the forefront of his mind, it might stay with him long enough to be the last thing he saw, and its silence the last thing he heard above the thunder of the falls.

Oh Mary Lawson, what an extraordinary writer you are. Just absolutely stunning. And she leaves us with the mystery of why Rob has done this – who is the child mentioned? What has left Rob unable to escape from this memory?

We don’t get quick answers. Instead, we look at three people in some other timelines – in Megan in 1966 (a year before that opening chapter), and Edward and Tom in 1969 (two years after that climactic event). They are all members of the same large, dysfunctional family. Edward is the father – Tom and Megan are two of his children who are recent adults, while he has various other children right down to an ill-advised newborn. His wife Emily has retreated into caring for this baby, totally abandoning all her other children and seemingly losing her grip on reality.

At the heart of this family is a toxic assumption that only a woman can look after the young children. In 1969, with Emily incapacitated by all-consuming obsession with a baby, nobody is caring for the other young children. There is no food in the house, no clean clothes, and no structure or even conversation. None of the men quite express that it isn’t a man’s job, but it is the underlying belief – and Lawson is too subtle a writer to rail against this patriarchal nonsense in the narrative. She simply shows us how attitudes in rural 1960s Ontario are destroying a family.

Things are no better among the adults – Tom and Edward barely speak. Edward is a bank manager preoccupied with his mother’s diaries and his own tragic, violent past – desperately trying not to turn into his father, and missing that he is becoming a terrible parent in a different way. His is the only one of the three voices we hear in the first person – while he is emotionally unavailable to everyone, we do get access to his stumbling attempts to understand himself and his history, and how he has ended up where he is.

Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in the bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.

That phrase they use in a court of law – “The balance of his mind was disturbed” – sums it up very well. I married Emily while the balance of my mind was disturbed.

His son Tom, meanwhile, is in deep grief for Rob and has isolated himself from the world. He is a talented scientist, but has decided to stick to snow ploughing, where he needn’t interact with anyone. Lawson showed in Crow Lake that she is exceptionally good at families who are close-knit (even when they are stubborn and intractable) – she is equally good at families who dislike and distrust one another.

Fans of A Town Called Solace will remember one of the main characters beginning to thaw and get to know the community. While he is a newcomer to town, I also loved seeing Tom’s own thawing. He knows the place inside out, but not all the people – and it is a talkative young woman and her long-suffering brother who begin to bring him back to life. Spoilers: readers of Crow Lake will already know these two – it was such a delight for me to realise who they were, and encounter them a few years after the events of Lawson’s first novel.

So, where is Megan? She has been de facto mother to her younger brothers – but, as we see in the 1966 timeline, she has boldly decided to move to London. Not London, Ontario, but London, England. Despite never having been to a city before, she needs to escape her family and home and moves to stay with an old friend – only, when she gets there, she discovers the friend no longer lives at the address she has. She doesn’t even live in the country.

Megan is taken in by the houseshare nonetheless – she could scarcely be more naïve in some ways, but in other ways has lived a far fuller life than any of her new friends. The capabilities she has had to learn set her off on an unexpected career – and she begins to emerge from the shadow of her family. Over her years in London, she grows to find her group of people – including the handsome man across the corridor, whom she becomes infatuated with. But that, of course, is not a smooth journey. (Lawson moved to England around the same period and age as Megan, and I’d be interested to know how much autobiography seeps in here.)

Wow, what a novel – what characters. Because they are spread out, and there is so much sadness at the heart of the book, I don’t think it will call me back quite as often as Crow Lake. But, like all Lawson’s novels, it is a masterpiece. Her ability to balance brilliant writing, detailed characters who feel absolutely real, and compelling, page-turning prose sets her apart from almost every living writer I’ve read.

So, c’mon Mary Lawson, I need another novel before too long. Please!