The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

If you read my favourite books of 2022 list, you’ll know that Margaret Laurence came out on top – with A Jest of God, a brilliant short book about a woman called Rachel living a claustrophobic, hopeless life in a small Canadian town. I also read The Diviners last year, and read The Stone Angel many years ago – which meant that I only had two novels from Laurence’s Manawaka sequence left. One is a collection of short stories that I don’t own, and one is the book I recently finished: The Fire-Dwellers (1969).

There are a few connections between the books in the Manawaka sequence (though they can be read in any order). Perhaps the clearest link is between A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers – as The Fire-Dwellers is the story of Rachel’s sister, Stacey.

Stacey appears in the peripheries of A Jest of God as the sister who managed to get out of the town. Her life is only sketched in fragments, but she is held up as a contrast to Rachel’s stultifying inability to develop. In The Fire-Dwellers, we discover that her life has been far from ideal.

I’ve imagined myself getting away more times than I can tell you
Then do it.
Stacey looks at him, appalled and shaken by the suggestion of choice. Then she turns away again.
If I had two lives, I would. You think I don’t want to?

Yes, she has the husband, Mac, and the children – but she feels trapped and lost. Her marriage is hollow and sad, her children don’t bring her the fulfilment that she hoped they would, and the drudgery of daily life is overwhelming. As a theme, it is hardly unique – but Laurence brings her trademark insight to the telling. She is so good at getting beneath the skin of the everywoman. Her searing insights are remorseless. No character can hide behind pretences, even as we see their attempts at dissemblement – which might, indeed, fool the people around them, if not the reader. Her husband, for instance, is so fixated on an affair that he wrongly believes she’s had that he doesn’t notice the affair that she might have. The children are at an age where it is inconceivable that their parents might have independent personalities outside of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – though the oldest daughter is beginning to recognise this, and clearly finds it troubling.

Several of the side characters are drawn really well. There is Thor, the head of the vitamin company for which Mac is salesman – a company that is only millimetres away from being a cult, and Thor is every bit the darkly boistrous cult leader. There is Mac’s boorish best friend – a trucker whose chief pleasure comes from playing ‘chicken’ with other truckers, both facing each other down in the middle of the road, daring the other truck to last as long as possible before pulling to the side. And then there is the enigmatic man that gives Stacey a new lease of life – a kind, clever, funny man who is not unlike the man who intervenes in Rachel’s life in A Jest of God. Across the span of Manitoba, the sisters were experiencing similar epiphanies that they never communicated about. And neither is a panacea, because Laurence is too realistic for that.

So, did I love The Fire-Dwellers as much as A Jest of God? Well, I’ve made it sound wonderful – and I know that others have found it brilliant, including Barbara’s Book Obsession recently, but I’m afraid I didn’t love it. And that’s for one reason which may or may not matter to you, and which might have been clear from the quote at the top. For some reason, Laurence decided not to use speech marks in this novel.

Normally I give up on a novel immediately if I see it doesn’t have speech marks. I only persevered because I love Laurence. Some people don’t mind this increasingly common authorial choice, but I find it maddening – an affectation that doesn’t add anything to a book, and simply makes it harder to read. They might as well leave out spaces between words. (I did, actually, find Laurence’s technique of sometimes leaving several spaces between words rather more effective.)

Here’s a section that illustrates it as well as any other bit. When she uses a dash, it is internal thought.

Duncan, for goodness sake shut up and quit making such a fuss about nothing.
Leave him, Mac. He was scared. Ian told him a rusty nail would
Scared, hell. He doesn’t need to roar like that. Shut up, Duncan, you hear me?
Duncan nods, gulps down salt from his eyes and the mucus from his nose. His chest heaves and he continues to cry, but quietly. Mac clamps a hand on his shoulder and spins him around.
Now     listen here, Duncan. I’ll give you one minute to stop.
Duncan stares with wet slit-eyes into his father’s face. Stacey clenches her hands together.
-I could kill you, Mac. I could stab you to the very heart right this minute. But how can I even argue, after last night? My bargaining power is at an all-time low. Damn you. Damn you. Take your hands off my kid.

Perhaps you think this is a silly reason not to enjoy a book as much as I’d hoped. (Someone on Twitter certainly did!) Or perhaps you’re on the same page as me. I just found it frustrating that The Fire-Dwellers could have been a brilliant novel, in my opinion, if she hadn’t tried this affected stylistic avenue. I understand that people like to play with the limits of literary form, but the absence of speech marks would have looked a little ‘done’ by the 1930s, and brought nothing to the table in 1969.

So this is comfortably my least favourite of the Manawaka sequence, though there is enough of Laurence’s brilliance to keep me going. Ultimately I found it a frustrating read, but it still hasn’t dinted my belief that Laurence is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century.