The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

Mary Lawson’s latest novel is on the longlist for the Booker Prize. Seeing her name there finally prompted me to read the novel she was longlisted for in 2006 – and which I bought in 2009: The Other Side of the Bridge.

I first read Lawson with the novel Crow Lake, which I heard about on Margaret’s blog – and I reviewed it back in the first year my blog existed. Somehow it was a long time between drinks, but it’s testimony to keeping books on your shelves even if you haven’t managed to get to them for more than a decade. The Other Side of the Bridge is a wonderful read.

It’s set in rural north Ontario, in a fictional town called Struan. In winter, a few minutes outside is enough to chill the marrow in your bones. A trip to Toronto is possible, but in the two timelines we see here – the mid 1930s, and a generation later in the 50s – the community is pretty self-sufficient. The most important professions are farmer and doctor – and there aren’t a whole lot of other professions.

In the 1930s timeline, Arthur and Jake are farmer’s sons locked in a battle that at least one of them doesn’t understand. Arthur is the older – adept at farming but poor at school, stuck going because of his mother’s ambitions that it will help him have opportunities. The way he is described is often animalistic – slow, broad, heavy. But he is thoughtful and kind, and quietly sensitive – he knows that his father won’t ever do anything courageous, and he knows that his mother loves Jake more than Arthur.

Jake is quick-witted, intelligent – and seemingly cruel. As a child, he loves to get Arthur in trouble with his lies – cajoling him into hitting a boy Jake alleges is bullying him, which turns out not to be true. He fakes danger, calling again and again for Arthur’s help – until Arthur believes Jake is really in danger, and Jake can laugh at him for his gullibility.

It’s this ‘boy who cried wolf’ that leads to the defining moment of their lives together – tied up with the bridge of the title. ‘The other side’ is not simply getting away from Struan – it is the other side of the day where the bridge played its role in a devastating incident. I shan’t spoil.

In the 1950s – alternate chapters dip between the two – the focus is on Ian, the doctor’s son. He is intelligent and pensive. Everybody assumes he will follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor – but as a teenager he gets a weekend job at a farm instead. Arthur is the farmer now, married to Laura and father of three. Two women define Ian’s life: his resentment of the mother who left his family, and his silent adoration of Laura. At night, he goes to watch the house – content just to see Laura walk across the room, and be near the life she is living.

The Other Side of the Bridge is a slow, immersive novel. It reminded me a lot of Barbara Kingsolver, though with perhaps less visual description of the natural world. In Struan, the natural world isn’t considered for its beauty – only its practicalities. But Lawson is just as good as Kingsolver at the depths of human relationships in a small community, and the gradual consequences of actions that might sprawl over decades. Even sudden changes are not cut and dried – Lawson expertly shows how the tendrils of each big moment can creep through the years. Her writing is so subtle and perceptive.

In this community, few people leave and few people come – except in wartime, which comes in the earlier timeline. In the later timeline, Ian is weighing up whether to stay or go. Here’s a long chunk of a section where he’s talking with his girlfriend, Cathy:

“We’re going to miss it, you know,” she said.

“Miss what?”

“All this.” She gestured at the dark wooden booths with their stained red-plastic-cushioned seats, the red Formica tables, the walls festooned with photos of happy fishermen holding up big fish. Paper place mats with more fish swirling about the edges, fishing lines coming out of their mouths. Above the door to the toilets there was a three-foot-long muskie, stuffed and nailed to the wall.

“When we’re older, we’ll look back at this place and realise it was beautiful.”

“Harper’s” Ian said.

“Even Harper’s,” Cathy said earnestly. “We’ll look back and we’ll realise that our childhoods were beautiful, and everything in them was beautiful, right down to…” she looked about her, “right down to the holes in these cushions. We’ll realise that Struan was the most wonderful place in the world to grow up in. We’ll realise that wherever we go, wherever we live for the rest of our lives, it will never be as perfect as here.”

A little worm of irritation rose up in Ian from somewhere about mid-chest. “Maybe we’d better not go,” he said, twisting his mouth in a smile.

[…]

“But we have to go,” Cathy leaned towards him earnestly.

“We don’t have to go. Most of the kids we started school with aren’t going.”

“Yes, but people like us have to go. You know that.”

I love the steady beauty of this novel, and my only criticism is that the pacing gets a little awry towards the end – things more a little too quickly, in both timelines, and it felt a bit like Lawson lost confidence in keeping the narrative going at its gentle pace. It felt like portraits that had been built up of minute brushstrokes being finished off a little impressionistically. Though this wasn’t ideal, it didn’t spoil the reading experience – I still finished wondering at her ability to create such a nuanced world, more truthful than any cosy countryside or any Hardy-esque rural misery. Actually, that is what Lawson does best: truth. The Other Side of the Bridge is such a powerfully constructed world that it feels a little blasphemous to suggest that Struan isn’t really there somewhere, still living the legacy of the actions of men and women half a century or more ago.