In this follow-on to her 2001 novel Cargo of Orchids, acclaimed Canadian writer Susan Musgrave chooses a less conventional escape narrative. An unnamed narrator on death row among fellow child killers is handed an opportunity to escape from the suffocating clutches of prison and the law when a transport between facilities results in a car accident, leaving the driver and guard in the car dead and therefore unable to stop her from leaving.
Here, the narrative can run in various directions, and most of them have been travelled before. Rather than producing an account of suspense and a protagonist’s perpetual state of being on the run, the story veers off path and focuses on the narrator’s attempt at a healing process, one that involves a new life that cannot escape remnants of her previous one. It is a distraction for the narrator as well as an interruption of the real source of suspense for the reader: whether or not the narrator will get caught, which is not properly addressed—the reader keeps wondering what will happen, while the narrator appears to slowly forget that she is a fugitive.
Susan Musgrave’s real-life husband, Stephen Reid, is a convicted bank robber, whose arrests may have provided the inspiration for Cargo of Orchids, and may have sparked her desire to write about prisoners, to change them from being faceless numbers to human beings with thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, and regrets. This is certainly accomplished in the novel, as Musgrave has captured the inner soul of the prisoner with impeccable detail.
Musgrave keeps Given engaging with a contrast between direct and indirect discourse, which allows for the salient dialogue to directly appear while providing the narrator with control over others’ speech.
The unnamed narrator’s tongue-in-cheek vision of the world around her reflects her gloomy view of human nature: “Nearly everyone I saw carried a bottle of water – hard to believe the planet would have had so many pure mountain springs (as Vernal would have said, “Evian is naïve spelled backwards”).” The tribulations she has undergone have hardened her, made her impervious to humanity, and paired with those above mentioned ironic comments are vulgar images: “Her father, convinced that she was too lazy to get up and walk as far as the outhouse, sewed up her chocha. Rainy peed through the stitches in her sleep.”
The narrator’s experiences are best viewed through her own commentary, which is one of Given’s strengths, but other remarks come from the dead, accompanying her throughout her journey and informing her choices. Rainy and Frenchy, two friends of the narrator’s from death row who were executed (and featured in Cargo of Orchids) are back from the grave, refusing to leave her world without closure and redemption for their own sins.
Their presence is first made when the narrator remembers their specific sayings and recalls memories, and then their voices slowly resonate into the novel set in italics; their appearance grows until they physically occupy her space and become her baggage. Musgrave creates a unique concoction of ghostly characters, and what appears to be the narrator’s imagination turns out to be an actual supernatural element in the story. These are the voices she cannot abandon after leaving prison. Rainy, Frenchy, and the narrator come to terms with the deaths of their children by creating a narrative for each of them. One of the main themes in this novel, then, is guilt and how it can be dealt with.
The novel is bombarded with signs; in fact, it is rare for a single page to be without them. Signs and headlines are how the narrator navigates and makes sense of her world, with the most significant one appearing during the car crash: “Eternity: Where do you think you’re going?” This billboard relays a message that the narrator grapples with throughout the novel, but also facilitates perceived irony and the question of meaninglessness among these signifiers. “‘Teen Angel Dead: Driver Charged,’” Vernal read. “‘She always had a smile for everyone.’” Why is it that kids who die are never the unsmiling miserable depressed ones who smoke crack and swear at their parents who nag them to take out the garbage?”
Although the narrative does not follow the typical “prison break” format, a quiet degree of suspense is present, drowning in the overarching plot but coming up for air every so often to remind us of that threat. For instance, a magazine in which the narrator is featured due to her conviction materializes in various settings, but she is never recognized as the face on the cover.
The risk of being found is not real, as it appears that no one is actually looking for her, but there are enough reminders for her not to feel at ease. There is an irony in the amount of crime that occurs near the narrator: on her escape flight home, the passenger beside her gets caught for drug dealing as she is walking away from him in the airport, a man she meets while spending time in a BC First Nation forces her to help get rid of the body of a man he has killed, and she gets caught up in a plot to steal back an infant for a drugged-out young mother.
Musgrave employs a method of flipping back and forth between past and present to enlighten the reader about the narrator’s history, so information about her prison term and crime is scattered throughout. This puts the reader in a perpetual state of suspended time; it is often hard to distinguish if the time is current or the past, which reflects the unstable state of the narrator. An object, smell, or dialogue can transport the narrator’s memory back in time. Simultaneously, the novel assumes that the reader already knows the past, referring back to it in a casual way, and this is a smooth storytelling technique.
Given is preoccupied with death, whether it is through the frequent images of the narrator’s “hearse”—literally her method of transportation—the actual interaction with the many dead characters (Rainy, Frenchy, and their children), or the image of the narrator’s dead baby, Angel; these all contribute to the consuming idea that death is not the end and that it can unite family members.
The notion that death will unite her with her baby—and potentially cancel out the harm she has done in her life—is also a necessary justification for the narrator, who can escape prison but cannot escape her guilt from the actions that led her there. Throughout the novel, people ask her if she has any children, for example, and even the word “baby” sets her on edge: “I kneeled, brushed aside the rotting-apple scented grass, and read the words I’d spent the last twelve years of my life praying I would never have to see: Baby: Born and Died.”
Frenchy, who accidentally killed her son by shooting him in the head, surfaces along with her son, the HE, his wound remaining so that Frenchy cannot forget her sins. “The HE emerged from the bathroom, going gack gack gack gack trying to blow out the bullet that had lodged itself above his nose.” The narrator finds her saving grace in caring for an abandoned baby left in a dumpster, which represents Angel, whom she could not save.
Susan Musgrave’s strength lies in her unique and narrator-specific language as well as her recurring motifs, such as that of the shoelace, which the narrator desires because it is one of the things she cannot have in prison. The ending ties in beautifully to the overarching themes of recovery and death, and the beginning of Given starts out strongly, loaded with anecdotes and flawless images.
However, the presence of Rainy and Frenchy may be too much for a work that should focus more on its strength, which is the narrator’s voice. After the narrator has fled and connected with her husband, I was left wondering when the story would return back to the escape narrative, and instead it drove even further off course, involving the narrator with characters she has just met, and involving the reader with them for the second half of the novel. Nonetheless, this story of self-forgiveness and loss is still worth reading for its captivating narrator.
Thistledown | 268 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927068021
‘Given’ by Susan Musgrave
Book Reviews
In this follow-on to her 2001 novel Cargo of Orchids, acclaimed Canadian writer Susan Musgrave chooses a less conventional escape narrative. An unnamed narrator on death row among fellow child killers is handed an opportunity to escape from the suffocating clutches of prison and the law when a transport between facilities results in a car accident, leaving the driver and guard in the car dead and therefore unable to stop her from leaving.
Here, the narrative can run in various directions, and most of them have been travelled before. Rather than producing an account of suspense and a protagonist’s perpetual state of being on the run, the story veers off path and focuses on the narrator’s attempt at a healing process, one that involves a new life that cannot escape remnants of her previous one. It is a distraction for the narrator as well as an interruption of the real source of suspense for the reader: whether or not the narrator will get caught, which is not properly addressed—the reader keeps wondering what will happen, while the narrator appears to slowly forget that she is a fugitive.
Susan Musgrave’s real-life husband, Stephen Reid, is a convicted bank robber, whose arrests may have provided the inspiration for Cargo of Orchids, and may have sparked her desire to write about prisoners, to change them from being faceless numbers to human beings with thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, and regrets. This is certainly accomplished in the novel, as Musgrave has captured the inner soul of the prisoner with impeccable detail.
Musgrave keeps Given engaging with a contrast between direct and indirect discourse, which allows for the salient dialogue to directly appear while providing the narrator with control over others’ speech.
The unnamed narrator’s tongue-in-cheek vision of the world around her reflects her gloomy view of human nature: “Nearly everyone I saw carried a bottle of water – hard to believe the planet would have had so many pure mountain springs (as Vernal would have said, “Evian is naïve spelled backwards”).” The tribulations she has undergone have hardened her, made her impervious to humanity, and paired with those above mentioned ironic comments are vulgar images: “Her father, convinced that she was too lazy to get up and walk as far as the outhouse, sewed up her chocha. Rainy peed through the stitches in her sleep.”
The narrator’s experiences are best viewed through her own commentary, which is one of Given’s strengths, but other remarks come from the dead, accompanying her throughout her journey and informing her choices. Rainy and Frenchy, two friends of the narrator’s from death row who were executed (and featured in Cargo of Orchids) are back from the grave, refusing to leave her world without closure and redemption for their own sins.
Their presence is first made when the narrator remembers their specific sayings and recalls memories, and then their voices slowly resonate into the novel set in italics; their appearance grows until they physically occupy her space and become her baggage. Musgrave creates a unique concoction of ghostly characters, and what appears to be the narrator’s imagination turns out to be an actual supernatural element in the story. These are the voices she cannot abandon after leaving prison. Rainy, Frenchy, and the narrator come to terms with the deaths of their children by creating a narrative for each of them. One of the main themes in this novel, then, is guilt and how it can be dealt with.
The novel is bombarded with signs; in fact, it is rare for a single page to be without them. Signs and headlines are how the narrator navigates and makes sense of her world, with the most significant one appearing during the car crash: “Eternity: Where do you think you’re going?” This billboard relays a message that the narrator grapples with throughout the novel, but also facilitates perceived irony and the question of meaninglessness among these signifiers. “‘Teen Angel Dead: Driver Charged,’” Vernal read. “‘She always had a smile for everyone.’” Why is it that kids who die are never the unsmiling miserable depressed ones who smoke crack and swear at their parents who nag them to take out the garbage?”
Although the narrative does not follow the typical “prison break” format, a quiet degree of suspense is present, drowning in the overarching plot but coming up for air every so often to remind us of that threat. For instance, a magazine in which the narrator is featured due to her conviction materializes in various settings, but she is never recognized as the face on the cover.
The risk of being found is not real, as it appears that no one is actually looking for her, but there are enough reminders for her not to feel at ease. There is an irony in the amount of crime that occurs near the narrator: on her escape flight home, the passenger beside her gets caught for drug dealing as she is walking away from him in the airport, a man she meets while spending time in a BC First Nation forces her to help get rid of the body of a man he has killed, and she gets caught up in a plot to steal back an infant for a drugged-out young mother.
Musgrave employs a method of flipping back and forth between past and present to enlighten the reader about the narrator’s history, so information about her prison term and crime is scattered throughout. This puts the reader in a perpetual state of suspended time; it is often hard to distinguish if the time is current or the past, which reflects the unstable state of the narrator. An object, smell, or dialogue can transport the narrator’s memory back in time. Simultaneously, the novel assumes that the reader already knows the past, referring back to it in a casual way, and this is a smooth storytelling technique.
Given is preoccupied with death, whether it is through the frequent images of the narrator’s “hearse”—literally her method of transportation—the actual interaction with the many dead characters (Rainy, Frenchy, and their children), or the image of the narrator’s dead baby, Angel; these all contribute to the consuming idea that death is not the end and that it can unite family members.
The notion that death will unite her with her baby—and potentially cancel out the harm she has done in her life—is also a necessary justification for the narrator, who can escape prison but cannot escape her guilt from the actions that led her there. Throughout the novel, people ask her if she has any children, for example, and even the word “baby” sets her on edge: “I kneeled, brushed aside the rotting-apple scented grass, and read the words I’d spent the last twelve years of my life praying I would never have to see: Baby: Born and Died.”
Frenchy, who accidentally killed her son by shooting him in the head, surfaces along with her son, the HE, his wound remaining so that Frenchy cannot forget her sins. “The HE emerged from the bathroom, going gack gack gack gack trying to blow out the bullet that had lodged itself above his nose.” The narrator finds her saving grace in caring for an abandoned baby left in a dumpster, which represents Angel, whom she could not save.
Susan Musgrave’s strength lies in her unique and narrator-specific language as well as her recurring motifs, such as that of the shoelace, which the narrator desires because it is one of the things she cannot have in prison. The ending ties in beautifully to the overarching themes of recovery and death, and the beginning of Given starts out strongly, loaded with anecdotes and flawless images.
However, the presence of Rainy and Frenchy may be too much for a work that should focus more on its strength, which is the narrator’s voice. After the narrator has fled and connected with her husband, I was left wondering when the story would return back to the escape narrative, and instead it drove even further off course, involving the narrator with characters she has just met, and involving the reader with them for the second half of the novel. Nonetheless, this story of self-forgiveness and loss is still worth reading for its captivating narrator.
Thistledown | 268 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927068021