‘After Light’ by Catherine Hunter

Reviewed by Dora Dueck

After Light, by poet, novelist, and University of Winnipeg creative writing professor Catherine Hunter, is a big, multi-generational novel sprawling across the twentieth century and touching down in places as diverse as Galway in Ireland, the battlegrounds of the Second World War, Winnipeg, and New York. Characters are richly drawn, the plot twists deliciously in the wake of their personal choices or fate’s intrusions, and if the narrative bogs down too long at times, it will seem in the next moment absolutely essential, every line of it. It’s like a family reunion in other words: interesting, crowded, fraught—and immensely satisfying for all those reasons.

The novel sits within a fictional tradition famous in Canadian writing: sagas with some combination of mythic forebears, troubled parents, contemporary characters searching backwards for understanding and reconciliation. Think No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. Think Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. It’s a tradition that’s become easy to dismiss or perhaps be embarrassed about. Remember British writer Victoria Glendinning opining after her Giller Prize jury duty in 2009 that Canadians might be too fond of their grannies?

It may be true that the multi-generational saga and its look-alike sisters, the immigrant novel and historical fiction, are too well represented in our literature. It may also be true that the representation is fair in a culture that champions rooted multiculturalism and respects continuity, as opposed to an American culture of exceptionalism, say, in which each generation feels free to reinvent itself.

The point is, the genre exists in good measure alongside a wide range of other Canadian writing, and writers and readers continue to be fond of their grannies. Since trauma is transmissable and memory matters are a deeply human compulsion, the better question is: how—and how well—is the book of this category done? Which brings me back to the novel at hand.

Deidre Quinn, first up in the family genealogy of After Light, does not get the man she loves. She takes matters rather ruthlessly into her own hands, emigrating from Ireland to Brooklyn with her young son Frank. He in turn flees his mother and the complications of his immigrant childhood for Canada. Frank yearns to be an artist but in the meantime signs up for the war. He manages to stay alive but is blinded for his heroism and thus forced into a very different future as a social worker and owner, with his wife Eileen, of a Winnipeg greenhouse.

Daughters Von (Siobhán) and Rosheen suffer on account of the war too, because of its effect on their father. They also inflict and endure betrayals of their own. Scarred, addictive Rosheen flourishes artistically but flames out young. Von, the eldest and responsible child, narrows herself into the world of the greenhouse and her precious long-stemmed roses—“She’s learned how to lock the pain deep inside the body.” The sisters become estranged.

“Every family has a few skeletons in the closet,” someone says off-handedly at a party Frank attends in Toronto. The cliché could not be truer here. Besides the real skeleton named Yorick which hangs in a doctor’s cupboard, there are secrets galore. The characters keep secrets from one another, the author hints at but holds back information. (Catherine Hunter is the author of three mysteries/thrillers so is skilled at foreshadow and tease.) Rosheen is badly disfigured, but what happened to make her so? Beautiful Von lives alone, but who is this Bobby she keeps remembering?

The main skeleton of After Life, however, is protagonist Von Garrison. Her restoration to metaphorical flesh and blood is the book’s ultimate achievement. That slow transformation is seen throughout Von’s engagement with her sister Rosheen’s legacy, as she fulfills the promise she made to travel with her to Ireland and European war sites, to dig into family history, to collaborate on the project enthusiastically dubbed by Rosheen—“as if reading a marquee”—as “Two Granddaughters Tracing the Truth about the Past.”

The reader also experiences the change organically. It is felt in the novel’s structure, in the particular dynamic of how present and past interact. Let me explain. The novel begins with Von. The opening pages are bleak. We see how lonely, tentative, and afraid she is. There’s a sense of flatness—Von is not compelling. When she learns that Rosheen is dead, she puts the greenhouse into the care of her manager and sets off, first for New York and then Ireland. She promised, after all, and she’s dutiful, if nothing else. She buys and packs a journal, wondering “if she’ll remember how to write.”

As soon as Dierdre Quinn’s story appears, something almost magical happens. The narrative perks up and grips the reader. Dierdre is a “legend,” her life a rush of passion, determination, and deceit. We return to Von now and then, we watch her excavate her grandmother’s story, watch fragments of her memory loosen, such as scenes of her and her sister in their Winnipeg home.

And so it goes—the contemporary line of Von’s efforts to clean up Rosheen’s affairs and gather her work for a gallery exhibition weaves through the forward march of the generations, from Deirdre on to Frank on to the girls and beyond, and always those other lives, revealed in their thick humanity, throb with greater vitality than hers. She has a brief fling while in New York but it feels too pretty, superficial somehow. Her long habit of bitterness and resistance to the past not only inhibits her as a character but depresses the momentum of the novel.

But she quickens, gradually, and we come to realize that in animating the dead persons of her family, Von—“the writer”—is being animated by who they really were. And when she reaches “the most dangerous part of the story,” those years “when she and her father were both alive at the same time, both conscious in the same house,” the current quest and past drama begin to reach for each other and powerfully overlap. By the time another mystery is revealed in the person of a young relative and his wise-beyond-her-years partner, Von herself, even if still reluctant, has become compelling. By both discovering and yielding, she contains her history in a new way, not as something to hide but to tell. Best of all, she has “someone to tell.”

The novel’s tone is earnest, conventionally so for the genre, as opposed to the rarer light irony of David Bezmozgis’ three-generational The Free World, for instance. Hunter’s style seems easy, is accessible, but hers is a sure, steady hand in service of a complex tale. She is also a poet (her Latent Heat collection won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in 1997) and there are insights here as true and devastating as a poem. Her writing about battle and what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder is also impressive. Art is a theme throughout and lovely bits emerge from that—Van Gogh’s “oil-thick skies, like blue butter,” to cite just one example.

The novel’s title is a puzzle, taken I presume from the exhibition of Rosheen’s art, “Afterlight,” which is most fitting, but why one word there and two in the title? Why shift its meaning? Otherwise, this is a book that made me happy on many levels, a book that should be widely read. Happy is an odd final word, I know, as imprecise as social media’s “like” and probably not dignified enough for literary criticism. Nevertheless, it persists in me as a response to Hunter’s accomplishment here and so I’ll let it stand: After Light made me happy.

Signature Editions | 512 pages | $23.95 | paper | ISBN# 9781927426739