Fall on Your Knees

"What a wild ride -- I couldn't turn the pages fast enough," Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald's dark, insightful and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.

At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother's piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters -- beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family's burden; and disabled Lily, everyone's favourite -- forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.

Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York's Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, "giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed" (The New York Times Book Review). As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one's family history gradually raises itself.

The book's epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey towards tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions.

The Sunday Times wrote, "It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy." With allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts, Fall on Your Knees simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language.

Ann-Marie MacDonald, playwright, actor and novelist, was born in 1958 and spent the first five years of her life in Baden-Baden, West Germany. Growing up on a Canadian Air Force base, she was constantly on the move and though she has lived in Toronto for more than twenty years, she still feels "geographically rootless." Yet she has many relatives live in Cape Breton. Her father is from New Waterford, where he worked in the mines to put himself through university, and her Lebanese mother is from Sydney. Every time they went back to Cape Breton, MacDonald would feel "like I was going back to the one spot on Earth where there was an anchor."

Moreover, as a child, her parents would tell stories that would captivate her. "For me Cape Breton was this mythic place with these mythic people who were my parents' family and friends. It seemed like all things authentic had happened there… For me it existed in the realm of fiction already because it existed in my imagination as almost a magical place, and certainly a haunted place." Because she never lived in one place for long, stories became very important. "Stories became my roots."

In 1980, MacDonald graduated from the National Theatre School in Montreal. In 1988, after working on several collective creations, her first solo-penned play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), premiered. Since then the play has had over one hundred productions worldwide, including last year''s sold-out Canadian Stage production in Toronto which featured MacDonald in the lead role. As a successful actor, something she does "for fun," her screen credits include I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Where the Spirit Lives and Better Than Chocolate. She continues to write for the theatre -- among the more recent productions is a collaboration called Anything That Moves, which won the Dora Award for Outstanding New Musical -- and also writes screenplays for television.

"I tell stories in various ways," says MacDonald, and that helped her to create the unforgettable identities of the characters in Fall on Your Knees. "I've played every single part in that book. I've said all their lines. And I've been through every one of their stories as I would if I were taking on a role. For me that's the litmus test of whether the character is true." But MacDonald was having problems telling the story of Fall on Your Knees when it began its life as a play. Not until a good friend and colleague asked her when she would start writing fiction did she realize that perhaps she was trying to tell the story in the wrong format; the story needed to be told as a novel. She spent five years working on it, writing in six-month stretches and then working to pull herself out of debt for the next six months. And in spite of it being a somewhat anti-social process, she plans to write more books. "Writing a novel was like a journey to another planet. I really loved that long, long journey -- the sense of huge frontiers and vistas opening up." Her second novel will be set during the Cold War in the early 1960s, drawing on her experiences as an "air force kid."

Meanwhile, she enjoys her role as host of CBC-TV''s Life and Times. "I''m a documentary junkie, and people''s stories fascinate me, both because of what they choose to reveal and what they reveal quite unconsciously. I like being surprised by a story that I thought I knew - I like finding out that I didn''t really know it after all."

In February 2002, MacDonald became the second Canadian author to have their book chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club. "I still feel that the best thing that can happen to a book is that someone reads it, tells their friend. That, quite simply, is what Oprah Winfrey does. She reads it, likes it, and tells her friends and tells her viewers. It's word of mouth, writ large." Thankfully, the importance of delivering a fulfilling story to the reader isn't lost on MacDonald, perhaps because she's accustomed to having the audience in the same room. "It reminds me that there's somebody who made time, who paid their money…. I don't want to disappoint that person…the person who loves stories."

1. A cedar box, a diary, a green dress, a scarecrow -- examine MacDonald's use of repeated imagery in her exploration of family history. Are her interpretations of memory intended to be naturalistic? How does this square with her use of the spiritual life in this novel? What, for example, does Ambrose 'mean' to Lily and Francis, and why does Pete haunt Kathleen?

2. Examine your sympathies with the family members of this book. Does the author manipulate or confuse the alliances of the reader? How does she handle revelation? Try to define the way in which the narrator relates to the reader. The internal logic of the book is also defined by the ways in which the characters 'decide' to interpret each others' behaviour -- are you surprised by the shifts in allegiance throughout the book -- where does the force for these changes come from?

3. 'That night, the Virgin Mary tells her what to do.' (p.561) Could you have predicted the course of Mercedes' life? What do you take MacDonald to mean in her use of religion to shape Mercedes, and what do you understand about Mercedes from the ways in which she chooses to respond to events? How closely do the sisters mirror each others' behaviour?

4. 'The knowledge that it is to be a coloured child is most useful in determining its future. First of all, there is now no question of keeping it. Illegitimacy is a terrible but invisible blot, whereas miscegenation cannot be concealed.' (p.393) The book addresses several major themes of conflict in the 20th Century - racial strife and inequality, sexuality, religious oppression and belief, poverty. Is MacDonald successful in her integration of such powerful topics into this intimate family history? What methods does she use to sustain the pace of the narrative throughout the 560-odd pages of the book? Some of the revelations of the character make for uncomfortable reading - is the author consciously trying to alienate the reader, shock them? If so, is she successful, and why do you think she adopted this approach?

5. 'Frances's eyes burst open. She had a dream about Trixie just now.' (p.373) As a plot device, what function does Trixie serve?

6. Frances manifests a particularly brittle variety of humour and resilience. Compare her responses to 'damage' with those of her sisters, mother and father. What do you consider Frances's principal motivations to be, and to what use has the author put these, in her construction of this book? What do you consider the author intends us to understand from her use of illness and affliction in this book?

7. How do you interpret the 'visions' and 'intuition' of the sisters towards each other? What do you consider MacDonald is interested in exploring by this added dimension to the story? Do you think our understanding of the personal histories is intended to change our perception of the 'public' record of War history in Fall On Your Knees? Which characters constitute the most obvious links between the private and public?

8. 'The cave mind has entered into a creative collaboration with the voluntary mind, and soon the two of them will cocoon memory in a spinning wealth of dreams and yarns and fingerpaintings.' (p.151) Memory and its reinvention are central to the sisters' survival techniques in the book; how does the structure of the book assist in our understanding of this?

9. Do the histories, for example, of prohibition, or the miners strikes, serve as functional plot devices or as a metaphor?

10. How precisely imagined is this book? How important is this in the revelation of plot? Consider the book in relation to linear time. How much is this book about Kathleen's history, and how does our understanding of the circumstances of her life reflect on our reading of other characters?

11. Compare the symbolism of this book with the magic realism of Rushdie or Márquez. How does your understanding of 'magic realism' inform your reading of this work, if at all?

12. Consider the roles of Mrs. and Ralph Luvovitz, Leo Taylor, Theresa, Hector and Adelaide, and what light their interior life sheds on that of the Pipers. How does Frances compare with Theresa? Attempt to describe the relationship between the two. Which characters do you consider to be least successful in the story?

13. What do you take the meaning of the title of the book to be? How do the chapter headings, along with the quotes and passages that preface each section of the book serve to enhance your reading?

14. 'Frances has recently revealed a natural talent in the kitchen. She cooks and cooks. Roasts and curries, stews and casseroles. It's mystifying. Frances is like one of those strange persons who awake one morning and play the complete works of Bach with never a lesson.' (p.429) Discuss the roles of books, clothes, music and food in Fall On Your Knees. How many central themes are explored using these symbols?

15. Do you think that the 'real' aspects of the novel -- MacDonald's powerful evocation of the trenches, for example -- change the way in which we view the fictional lives she explores? Does the juxtaposition of 'known' history give more weight to the author's intent?