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Review
‘Quite excellent. Hers is a name to set beside those of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.’ Anita Brookner, Spectator
‘A funny, compassionate, open-handed novel. A worthy British debut from a fine Canadian author.’ Glasgow Herald
‘Formally ingenious and inventive, strikingly evocative of place, of character, of the world of things, capable of both comedy and tenderness, and above all beautifully written.’ LRB
‘Clearly a work of an experienced and skilful writer. This is not only a first-rate read, it is also sophisticated and ingeniously crafted.’ Listener
Margaret Atwood
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Prepared to patronise, they were to his astonishment worthy of publishing. it was not to be Mary's destiny to see the printed book - her husband murdered her shortly after the visit to the editor's office, a visit marred by her anxiety about missing the bus home.
I am not giving away all the plot here! The book centres round four main characters who are obsessed with her: Frederic Cruzzi the newspaper editor, the lonely librarian Rose Hindmarch who 'knew her best', the obsessive and bitter Morton Jimroy and Sarah Maloney, a feminist writer. Had Mary Swann lived she would not have recognised herself as the person they prepare to present at the Mary Swann symposium that is the culmination of the book. She may not have even recognised some of her poems after Cruzzi's beloved wife mistakenly discards fish bones in the bag of her work causing the ink to run.
Mary Swann remains a shadowy figure and I must confess I would have liked an extra chapter that revealed more bout her life and death and the minor mysteries that were hinted at. For instance, to whom were the love poems written?
However, perhaps like a good meal it is best to leave the table wanting just a little more.
This novel intelligently asks whether an uneducated person can create moving poetry, and how well we can know a literary figure, especially in this day and age when people are more concerened with building their careers on top of someone's work rather than finding the truth. Shields only misses a beat in the end, with a section written as a screenplay pastiche which underwhelms.
As a follow up, you might want to read Margaret Atwood's "Negotiating with the Dead", which is about the role of the author in the world, and which includes commentary on "Mary Swann" (Carold Shields was a good friend of Atwood's.)
If you have lost anyone you have loved, you will understand this - that when someone has gone, they become open to any interpretation we put on them. They become public property. Why? Because they cannot speak for themselves. And so they become a myriad of contradictions. How different people remember them.
Shields does not merely open the can of worms of literary biography, but states the uncomfortable truth that all of us, in life (but especially in death,) are unknowable. She slowly erodes the "facts" relating to the fictional but poignant Mary Swann, be they retold in diaries, or photographs, or conversations, or poems, or memories. The things that root all of us in the here and now become open to doubt. The things we hope that count slowly disappear in the course of "Mary Swann", and Shields successfully illuminates the greater truth: that in our lifetimes, no one will ever get close to revealing who we are. The human spirit is unknowable.
And it is in that we become aware of our own sense of loneliness, of desolation, and equally that the lonely quest to know another leaves all of us feeling unconnected, and drives Shileds' characters apart.
Whether we are looking to escape, or to be found, or to find ourselves in another, all of us are constantly on a quest which ends with us tracing our own footsteps round in a circle, back to where we started from, knowing nothing, and wondering - who we are? Who any of us are?
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