March 18, 2003
Knopf Canada
0676974805
9780676974805
From Our Editors
In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control.
From the Publisher
Mary Lawson''s debut novel is a shimmering tale of love, death and
redemption set in a rural northern community where time has stood
still. Tragic, funny and unforgettable, this deceptively simple
masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leapt to the top of
the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and
earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and
The Globe and Mail, to name a few. It will be
published in more than a dozen countries worldwide, including the
U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy and Bulgaria.
Luke, Matt, Kate and Bo Morrison are born in an Ontario farming
community of only a few families, so isolated that "the road led
only south." There is little work, marriage choices are few, and
the winter cold seeps into the bones of all who dare to live there.
In the Morrisons' hard-working, Presbyterian house, the Eleventh
Commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Emote." But as descendants of a
great-grandmother who "fixed a book rest to her spinning wheel so
that she could read while she was spinning," the Morrison children
have some hope of getting off the land through the blessings of
education. Luke, the eldest, is accepted at teachers college --
despite having struggle mightily through school -- but before he
can enroll, the Morrison parents are killed in a collision with a
logging truck. He gives up his place to stay home and raise his
younger sisters -- seven-year-old Kate, and Bo, still a baby.
In this family bound together by loss, the closest relationship is
that between Kate and her older brother Matt, who love to wander
off to the ponds together and lie on the bank, noses to the water.
Matt teaches his little sister to watch "damselflies performing
their delicate iridescent dances," to understand how water beetles
"carry down an air bubble with them when they submerge." The life
in the pond is one that seems to go on forever, in contrast to the
abbreviated lives of the Morrison parents. Matt becomes Kate's hero
and her guide, as his passionate interest in the natural world
sparks an equal passion in Kate.
Matt, a true scholar, is expected to fulfill the family dream by
becoming the first Morrison to earn a university degree. But a
dramatic event changes his course, and he ends up a farmer; so it
is Kate who eventually earns the doctorate and university teaching
position. She is never able to reconcile her success with what she
considers the tragedy of Matt's failure, and she feels a terrible
guilt over the sacrifices made for her. Now a successful biologist
in her twenties, she nervously returns home with her partner, a
microbiologist from an academic family, to celebrate Matt's son's
birthday. Amid the clash of cultures, Kate takes us in and out of
her troubled childhood memories. Accustomed to dissecting organisms
under a microscope, she must now analyze her own emotional life.
She is still in turmoil over the events of one fateful year when
the tragedy of another local family spilled over into her own.
There are things she cannot understand or forgive.
In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings,
Lawson ratchets up the tension, her narrative flowing with
consummate control in ever-increasing circles, overturning one's
expectations to the end. Compared by Publishers Weekly to
Richard Ford for her lyrical, evocative writing, Lawson combines
deeply drawn characters, beautiful writing and a powerful
description of the land.
From the Jacket
"Crow Lake is a remarkable novel, utterly gripping
and yet highly literate. I read it in a single sitting, then I read
it again, just for pleasure. I await her next work with eagerness
(and a little envy)."
- Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat
"I didn't read Crow Lake so much as I fell in love with
it. This is one beautiful book."
- David Macfarlane, author of Summer
Gone
"A finely crafted debut ... conveys an astonishing intensity of
emotion, almost Proustian in its sense of loss and regret."
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Beautifully written, carefully balanced, Mary Lawson
constructs a history of sacrifice, emotional isolation and family
love without sounding a false note." -- Daily Mail
(London)
"A lot of readers are going to surrender themselves to the magic of
Crow Lake."
- The Globe and Mail
"The best [first novel for 2002] that I have read so
far…compulsively readable."
- Sandra Martin, The Globe and Mail (Dec. 27,
2001)
"Crow Lake…is a spellbinding story…a
marvelous story….The bitter land and climate of Northern Ontario
are like characters in this story of four orphaned children
struggling to stay together as a family….The language is subtle but
beautiful. The reader is drawn into the lives of the characters….
The prospects for success are endless."
-W.P. Kinsella, First Novels
"Crow Lake mesmerizes. … Crow
Lake may be one of the loveliest novels you almost ever
read."
- The Telegram
"Crow Lake [is] superb, elegant….
Lawson is a brilliant storyteller; she takes her time in laying the
foundation of her tale and layering on the complexities. She's also
an elegant stylist; her prose is lyrically thoughtful…. The depth,
honesty and feeling throughout are superbly wrought. Crow
Lake is a wondrous thing -- it's a new Canadian classic."
- The Hamilton Spectator
"The assurance with which Mary Lawson handles both reflection and
violence makes her a writer to read and watch….. Peripheral
portraits are skillfully drawn. Pot-banging Bo, with her minimal
vocabulary of mostly shouted words, speaks to the heart without a
scrap of sentimentality. The combative Cranes, unusual among
fictional academics, are funny without being ridiculous and square
off over the tablecloth with intelligence intact…. Most impressive
are the nuanced and un-self-conscious zoological metaphors that
thread through the text."
- The New York Times
"Lawson delivers a potent combination of powerful character writing
and gorgeous description of the land. Her sense of pace and timing
is impeccable throughout, and she uses dangerous winter weather
brilliantly to increase the tension as the family battles to
survive. This is a vibrant, resonant novel by a talented writer
whose lyrical evocative writing invites comparisons to Rick Bass
and Richard Ford."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Beautifully written, carefully balanced, Mary Lawson constructs a
history of sacrifice, emotional isolation and family love without
sounding a false note or a showy sentence."
- Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail (UK)
"Crow Lake: deep, clear and teeming with life. A lot of readers are
going to surrender themselves to the magic of Crow
Lake...So have I. Within days, you'll see people reading
Crow Lake in odd places as they take
quick breaks from the business of their lives. You'll also hear
people say, 'I stayed up all night reading this book by Mary
Lawson.' Mary Lawson, Mary Lawson. Remember the name…. Kate
Morrison's voice overturns convention and makes everything fresher,
larger, livelier than it first appears…. She is very
special. So is Crow Lake…. This is the real
thing."
-Terry Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail
"Every detail in this beautifully written novel rings true, the
characters so solid we almost feel their flesh. Bo must be one of
the most vividly realized infants in recent literature. Lawson
creates a community without ever giving in to the Leacockian
impulse to poke fun at small-town ways, instead showing respect to
lives shaped by hard work and starved for physical comfort. The
adult Kate's alienation from Crow Lake is initially difficult to
accept, for everything in Kate's life, including her career in
science, reflects the values of her formative years on the farm.
Soon, though, her crippling guilt becomes the mystery that draws
the reader on."
- Maureen Garvie, Quill & Quire starred review
"Lawson's narrative flows effortlessly in ever-increasing circles,
swirling impressions in the reader's mind until form takes shape
and the reader is left to reflect on the whole. Crow
Lake is a wonderful achievement that will ripple in
and out the reader's consciousness long after the last page is
turned."
- Amazon.co.uk
"Critics are raving about…Crow Lake, a tightly
plotted page-turner about sibling love, murder, and invertebrate
zoology in rural Ontario, set in the 1950s and '60s."
- Judy Stoffman, The Toronto Star
"Lawson achieves a breathless anticipatory quality in her
surprisingly adept first novel, in which a child tells the story,
but tells it very well indeed."
- Danise Hoover, Booklist
About the Author
Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a farming community in
southwestern Ontario. A distant relative of L. M. Montgomery
(author of Anne of Green Gables), she moved to
England in 1968, and now lives with her husband in Surrey. She
returns to Canada every year. Asked on CBC's This Morning
what she misses most about Canada, she says without hesitation that
it's the rocks of the Canadian Shield. England has rocks, she says,
but they are not smooth and rounded and "whale-like."
Lawson is a firm believer in the strength of the influences we
receive as children, a theme explored in the book. Lawson's father
was a research chemist for an oil company in Sarnia, Ontario, and
the family lived in Blackwell, which was then a small farming
community -- though not nearly as remote as that of Crow Lake --
and spent summers at a cottage up north.
She studied psychology at McGill University in Montreal in the
mid-sixties, and says that Montreal was an eye-opening experience
after growing up in Blackwell. "We had the radio, but we had no
television, and relative to what kids know today … they are just so
much more knowledgeable than we were." She graduated in 1968 and
went to England, finding work in a steel-industry research lab in
London, which is where she met her husband, Richard.
Published under the "New Face of Fiction" program at age 55, Lawson
calls herself a "late starter," though she began writing when her
sons were small. She joined a creative-writing class, which she
continues to attend, mainly for the companionship, and she took
literature courses to study other writers. She describes the first
novel she wrote, which was set in England, as a disaster: though it
was a good story with characters and plot, she didn't know what she
wanted to say. "It was a story without a point."
Then her parents fell ill with cancer, and she spent a lot of time
in Canada. She started writing Crow Lake shortly after the
double trauma of her parents dying and her sons leaving home. "I
was thinking a lot about the passing of time and different types of
loss and the importance of family and the significance of
childhood. I think you are particularly receptive when you are a
kid, and you take in not just the physical landscape, but the
society and the culture and what matters to people. And it all just
sits there -- eventually, if you are a writer, it comes out."
At length, a short story she wrote in the 1980s for Woman's
Realm magazine in England was transformed into Crow
Lake. She sent the manuscript out several times before it
found the right agent, who then responded enthusiastically within
twenty-four hours. The characters in the novel are entirely
invented, with the exception of the baby, Bo, who was modelled
closely on her own little sister. She was interested in exploring
the brother-sister relationship and the notion that family members
establish roles for one another which are hard to break free from
("In my family…I'm the 'Emoter'," she notes). In particular, she
wanted to look at hero worship and what happens "to the worshipper
and to the hero" when the hero fails. While indebted to J. D.
Salinger for pointing her towards using children as a subject, and
to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the
technique of writing a book with a child as narrator, Lawson says
it was having her own children that taught her that people are born
as individuals.
With its powerful emotional resonance, Crow Lake
has already won the hearts of many readers, and Lawson's
next novel will be anxiously awaited.
Bookclub Guide
1. In the Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of
the father are visited on the sons, and hideous events occur. How
do their tragedies compare to those of the Morrison family?
2. Reviewers have noted that Lawson "writes with the precisely
heightened sort of realism that comes from a long look back toward
home." To what extent does her description of the landscape of this
small community of Crow Lake heighten the power of the story?
3. Faith in education (and the often concurrent withdrawal from
ties with the land) can be seen as a fundamental element of the
Canadian psyche. How does Crow Lake explore the dual needs
of the mind and the heart, and how fulfilled are the main
characters in each respect?