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.
View Marina Endicott's book launch of The Observer
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