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Ragged Islands

by Don Hannah

Before my father died he held my sister Laurie’s hand and wept. He was trying to say something, but the only word she recognized was “Elly.” Not until he struggled to bring her hand to his lips did she realize he thought she was our mother, Ella, and that he was saying goodbye to her. Mother was too ill herself to keep watch beside him, so Laurie allowed him to slip away thinking that he was bidding farewell to the love of his life.

Or maybe not.

The journeys the dying take are mysteries. No one ever returns to explain what those last words mean or if that vision of light really leads to paradise. Yet in Ragged Islands, novelist and stage director Don Hannah convincingly imagines the final journey taken by a rather ordinary woman born in New Brunswick, married in Nova Scotia, and ending her life in Ontario.

Eighty-five-year-old Susan Ann Roberts is amazed to find herself transported to a country lane in the Maritimes from a hospital bed in Toronto. Delighted to be mobile again, she visits the family farm where she passed her summers as a child, and begins to walk hundreds of kilometres to the house where she lived with her dearly loved husband Jamie on Nova Scotia’s south shore. Along the way she uses an old hockey stick for support and carries the designer purse given to her by her granddaughter as a bag full of magic. She acquires an amulet too – the cameo that she’d always hoped to inherit from her stepmother but which was stolen by her sister. At first she senses some animal tracking her, but then she realizes it is the little dog that she’d loved as a child, and who will now serve as her guide.

Hannah quite obviously wants us to be reminded of many other magical journeys from folktales and myth. He even begins his story with a quotation from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. His heroine is not larger than life – she speaks like a woman from the country who has lived only at the fringes of great events. At the beginning, indeed, her talk of bowel movements and young couples being “nudely-weds” makes the reader assume Hannah is creating another charmingly cantankerous old person whom we will follow to a sentimentally recounted death.

Susan Ann is much more than a stereotype, however, and Hannah’s story is more complicated than a feelgood yarn. Susan Ann’s dreamlike progress is intercut with the conversations of her family at her bedside and with excerpts from the documents her son comes across when back at her apartment. These more concrete sequences testify to the truth underlying Susan Ann’s mystical journey and underscore the mysteries in her life.

A central mystery is never solved, however. At birth, Susan Ann’s parents gave her away to be raised by an aunt and her husband. Consequently, even though her adoptive parents loved her, Susan Ann felt abandoned all her life. On her walk toward her death, she encounters her birth mother – aged 18, with high hopes for the future – but that glimpse offers Susan Ann no understanding as to why her biological parents pushed her aside. What the reader realizes is that Susan Ann probably was lucky not to grow up in a house run by such a strange woman.

Hannah may have chosen the day of Susan Ann’s death to emphasize how lucky she is in other ways. She is dying, we learn, on Sept. 11, 2001. Many other people die that day, suddenly, without the time to undertake a spiritual journey like hers, to try to make peace with the past and to prepare for a future life beyond the grave. But this aspect of the story feels forced and detracts from the way Hannah successfully combines prosaic details with poetic prose.

Still, the reader who might be put off by the possibility that Hannah is exploiting 9/11 should keep reading. This is a book of rare poetry, with many points at which one must stop to reflect. When I closed Ragged Islands, I thought of my own mother dying. I stood beside her bed, and when she put out her arms, I bent over and held her close for a final hug. But she didn’t stop with one final goodbye. Over the next quarter hour, she reached out again and again, all the time trying to say something.

We never figured out what that was or to whom she was talking. I would like to think that she had a chance to bid farewell to everyone she loved, but I don’t know. Death is the last great, private adventure, and Hannah helps us come to grips with that difficult fact.

 

Reviewer: Mary Soderstrom

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32.95

Page Count: 368 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-676-97791-2

Released: Jan.

Issue Date: 2007-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels