Emily Donaldson is a freelance critic and editor.
In Road Ends, set between 1966 and 1969, it’s the lure of Cool Britannia — though having forgone university to run the family household in tiny Struan, 21-year-old Megan is so blinkered she has no idea any such phenomenon exists; her aim is simply to see the world before it’s too late.
Children forced to cope in the absence of their parents is another recurring theme in these novels. In Crow Lake this was literal: the parents of the Morrison children die in a road accident. Here, it’s figurative. Edward, the Cartwright family’s nominal head, avoids the nerve-shattering chaos of screaming children, unwashed laundry and uncooked meals by working late at the bank where he’s manager or holing himself up in his study, where he reads about great cities he’ll never visit. His “vague and forgetful” wife, Emily, meanwhile, has eyes only for her current baby, to the degree that four-year-old Adam literally goes hungry, his bed so drenched in urine that even the
housekeeper won’t touch it.
For years, Emily’s increasing ineffectiveness went unnoticed because Megan, her only daughter, had seamlessly filled her place. Megan’s role is so taken for granted by the rest of the family that when she announces she’s bought a one-way ticket to England, they either ignore her or don’t believe her.
One of the people doing the ignoring is Megan’s oldest brother, Tom, who’s been in a depressive haze since witnessing the suicide of his friend, Robert. Though presumed to have a bright future, Tom has given up on a career in aeronautical engineering for the solitary, Sisyphean comforts of driving the local snowplow. Robert’s suicide opens the novel, and so we assume much of the novel will be about the why. Instead, Lawson performs something of a bait-and-switch, allowing it to function more as a catalyst for Tom’s fate, and thereby Megan’s.
The novel is built through the triangulation of Megan, Tom and Edward’s perspectives. Edward’s story rests between the pillars of a disappointing marriage (though Emily pretended to share his dream of world travel, what she really wanted was babies) and the harsh upbringing that serves as an alibi for his ineffectiveness: He won’t lay a firm hand for fear of becoming like his abusive father.
Though its narrative is shared, spiritually the novel belongs to Megan, whose brave risk-taking and hard-won success we feel invested in. When Megan arrives in London, she discovers that letters have crossed and the friend with whom she presumed to stay a bandoned her shared flat weeks earlier. In an incident involving lost luggage, Lawson capitalizes brilliantly on Megan’s unworldliness; ditto for the eye-opening effects of her brief residency at what turns out to be a festering petri dish of drugs and free love.
After a miserable stint working in a department store, Megan manages to parlay her household-management skills into running a hotel for a young couple, a job she both adores and excels at. Life in London provides an education in other ways, too, as when the attractive journalist who lives across the hall tells her, regretfully, that he’s not “boyfriend material.”
Back home, Tom finally starts to emerge from his stupor to realize that — what with planes now breaking the sound barrier — a career in aeronautics sounds a lot more appealing than dealing with his brother’s sodden sheets. This is, in a way, the reverse ofCrow Lake, where Kate’s academic career is enabled by her brother Luke giving up a spot at teacher’s college to raise their siblings. Outcomes aside, however, in both cases it’s the male member of the family who gets to make the decision, and Luke’s sacrifice was tempered by the fact that he didn’t really want to be a teacher anyway.
Megan is a bit like a Rosie the Riveter figure in that her work and independence is lauded — or at least tolerated — until a man decides he needs her spot. Her breathy, pre-London declaration, “I want to see things. Do things,” may have the ring of shackles hitting the ground, but what eventually becomes clear in this fiercely readable novel is that not only were the shackles not hers to shed in the first place, they also need polishing.
Mary Lawson is well known as the late-blooming, Canadian-born author of two bestselling books. Now, with a third novel, Road Ends, she can justifiably lay claim to an oeuvre as well as a personal geography. If the part of Ontario west of Toronto is Munro country, then the area northwest of New Liskeard and Cobalt — where her fictional towns of Struan and Crow Lake are roughly located — may well end up being dubbed Lawson Country.
What preoccupies Lawson is families; specifically large, sibling-rich families pockmarked by tragedy. In her writing, Lawson has always been more about craftsmanship than innovation: What she does she does so impeccably that the triumph of duty over dreams seems somehow urgent and compelling. In each novel, there’s also some kind of pull from outside. In Crow Lake, it was the city and university; in The Other Side of the Bridge it was the Second World War. In Road Ends, set between 1966 and 1969, it’s the lure of Cool Britannia — though having forgone university to run the family household in tiny Struan, 21-year-old Megan is so blinkered she has no idea any such phenomenon exists; her aim is simply to see the world before it’s too late.
