~ Fall on Your Knees, by Anne-Marie Macdonald ~
This novel is set around the Piper family, migrants to New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1900s. James Piper (whose mother tongue is Gaelic) is a piano tuner when he met “twelve going on thirteen” year old Materia Mahmood, in 1898. Himself only 18 years of age, James Piper elopes with Materia, to her father’s fury and enduring unforgiveness. The Mahmoods were originally from Lebanon, which they refer to as ‘Old Country’, people who think of themselves as Mediterranean not Arabic,
The Jameels are Arabs. We Mahmouds are more Mediterranean. Closer to being European, really.
p306
Race and language discriminations are seemingly practised by everyone in this amazingly diverse community, which despite being small and close-knit, is nevertheless extremely segregated. There are immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, the Jewish diaspora, African descendents, people of all colours and with a babel of languages. Even amongst fellow middle-easterners, there are sharp divides:
Such distinctions are apt to get blurred in the new country, where you open wide your arms to a brother from home who speaks the same beautiful language as you. The same shapely humorous language with earth and water in it. What a relief it is to sit down to a meal or a game of cards with someone, a Jameel for example, who shares this language. What a relief from the chill of English, which is exactly like immersing your tongue in ice water. Afterall, to the enklese you are all “black Syrians.” Mahmoud didn’t recognize till too late that his Old Country standards had eroded to the point where he had given his most beautiful daughter to a dirty half-civilised Arab.
p306
In this diverse community, there is great beauty and talent – Kathleen Piper, for instance, eldest born of James and Materia, is of “Celtic-Arab blood”, devastatingly beautiful with her white skin, green eyes and red hair, and an extraordinarily gifted singer. MacDonald is an author who is unafraid to cut down her key protagonists in the prime of their lives. The golden girl of the Piper family, Kathleen is sent by her father to New York to save her from risk and harm, as well as to develop her talent, but tragedy strikes: in 1918 in New York, Kathleen is 18 and “is sorely tempted to cut her classes, her hair and her hems”; within months, her father has brought her home and she is dies in childbirth. Materia survives her by only 3 days, in a different tragedy. Tragedy upon tragedy subsequently unfolds from these deaths, and Books 3 onwards in this novel follows the stories of Mercedes, Frances and Lily Piper. It is not until Books 8 and 9, the last in the novel, that we learn the story of what happened to Kathleen in New York, as Lily journeys through Kathleen’s diary and life, as well as journeys to New York and leaves her Cape Breton home, forever.
The novel marvellously teases out themes of music, religion, fanaticism, self-sacrifice, tremendous family solidarity, passions both sweet and forbidden, and raw emotion lurking beneath much decorum. MacDonald’s writing is pithy and uncompromising: for example, she writes of Mahmood:
It’s his last sting of love, as fresh and painful as youth transplanted over time and an ocean. There is nothing left for him now except to die, but that will take awhile because he is a creature of habit, and he has got into the habit of being alive.
p319
The chapters are short, punchy, the story moves swiftly, sometimes back and forth in time, illuminated by various characters’ different knowledges and perspectives. The stories eventually add up to a community-worth of people interacting, caring and suspecting, loving and hating. MacDonald depicts her characters with swift, sure brushstrokes, her word arrangement portraying with considerable meaning and impact:
“God has made Mercedes a judge. No one loves you for that, Not like a crippled child who’s prone to visions. Whom Mercedes prizes. Not like a fallen woman who makes people laugh. Whom Mercedes loves.
Mercedes is standing straight as steel, staring down at James. Brown-eyed people are popularly believed to be soft somewhere. And warm. Look again.
p348
Bottom line, this book is about love. All kinds of love: passionately felt, love which could not be, love which should not be, love which is divine, love which sacrificed, love which killed. And love which is often both the sweetness and the pain of so many lives in Macdonald’s luminous debut novel.
Recent Comments