The Observer: grim foreboding in a small town

The Observer, quasi-fictional recounting of a small rural town's seasonal doings through the eyes of a Mountie's young wife, proceeds with all the inexorable fatality of a comet as seen by those innocent of the scientific explanations. 

In this pre-cellphone, pre-internet proto-memoir our narrator is, by her own admission, a out-of-her-depth outsider in Medway (a fictional standin for Meyerthorpe, Alberta). She struggles to grasp the local rhythms of life, the inexplicable codes governing what dish to bring to which potluck. A recurring temporary job at the local paper, The Observer, gives her more insight into the denizens of town and surrounding farms, and hands her secret after secret that can't be spoken of directly, let alone printed in the paper. Mysteries come and go, adding menace but rarely resolved.

Mostly alone with her young child while her spouse Hardy is on patrol (sometimes for days on end) or at home sleeping between shifts, Julia fears her own emotions almost as much as she worries about Hardy's growing bleakness. She's a composite of thousands of law enforcement spouses: pitched without information or recourse into being the main emotional prop and outlet for a man under tremendous work strain, himself with no external support beyond that provided by equally stressed-out co-workers.

The characters are mostly sympathetic, the prose often beautiful, the moments of joy in nature sublime... and yet the darker undercurrents multiply, expanding like the comet's tail in the night sky. The sense of impending doom thickens page by page, chapter by chapter, recreating the nigh-breathless tension of life in an RCMP household, of an RCMP career, and in a town where too many assholes have been tolerated, too many secrets swept under for far too long. 

Something has to snap. You're just not sure what, or who, or how bad it's going to go.

At the novel's end, something does. By then Julia and Hardy are long gone, their reactions both sharpened by familiarity and muted by time & distance. Their subsequent life briefly touches on several changes forced onto the RCMP in the past twenty years, including Critical Incident Debriefing and other psychological supports. Spouses, though, remain outside the precinct, responsible for their own mental health and supporting each other without quite admitting just how much strain they're all under.

There's no emotional catharsis here for the reader, just as there was not for the very real townspeople who lived through, and still live with, not only the Mayerthorpe tragedy but the myriad dark currents that swirl beneath the idyllic surface of small rural towns.

The Observer

View Marina Endicott's book launch of The Observer

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Golden Gate is more than a place

The Golden Gate
by Amy Chua

The Golden Gate of the title is a hotel catering to the rich and infamous in San Francisco, and it's also a not-subtle delineation of the barriers that wealth and fame create to keep truth and justice at bay. A boffo prologue tells us there’s been a murder. In the first few pages, there are actually two deaths. And three golden girls--wealthy and beautiful cousins--who are all suspects. We don’t know all the players yet but we can be pretty sure things are going to keep on happening.

There’s a strong flavour of San Francisco noir, the cynical cop getting the runaround from wealthy businessman and politicians. Except this cop is half-Latino and thus very conscious of his race-based risk if he calls them out on their lies. He's worked hard to pass as white on the force, even using his mother's maiden name instead of his father's Mexican surname. Indirectly  at first, later more directly, the Japanese Internment of WW2 plays a role. Distinct overtones of Lavender House by Lev A. C. Rosen.

The chapters trip around in time between the first Golden Gate death, of a child, and the second, of a well known and much despised politician early in WW2. It's a slow unveiling of that ever-popular plot: rich Americans behaving badly. It's the author's first foray into crime fiction and that shows in the technique of revealing most of the useful backstory (and the solution) not through the detective's own efforts but through intermittent pieces of a long statement by the golden girls' grandmother, produced on the thinnest of legal pretexts.

There’s lots of evidence here that Amy Chua is better known for her nonfiction, as page after page elides away from the ongoing story into neutral-voice narration of San Francisco’s, and America’s, history. The history and culture are interesting as sidelights on the setting. Several characters are either real people, or fictional ones whose life events are lifted from then-living people. But those digressions, like the grandmother's statement, tend to distance us from caring about the characters or becoming fully immersed in exploring the plot.

 

As Chua is a talented writer and cares deeply about producing textured backgrounds rich in historical detail, her next mystery novel will almost surely be better, with the background serving as, well, background and the characters allowed to fully explore their own unfolding story. 

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