What Town Is Blue Lake Review Published in

A review of Blue Lake by Janet Savage Blachford

Published on March 24, 2018

In Blue Lake, Janet Fell Blachford has written a verse form in the shape of a novel, anchoring her story within a bright and magical Laurentian setting.

Blueish Lake is a place where the land belongs to everyone, where people "considered need or want more significant than buying." In Blue Lake, history and tragedy threaten to echo themselves in each generation, with each grapheme "doubled and shadowed by past, nowadays and futurity." In this community, it'southward considered perfectly reasonable to camouflage your cabin with paintings of trees or to cultivate a garden of poisonous plants, fertilized with the ashes of family and friends.

The story focuses on Ted Gault, a center-aged literature professor whose family unit has owned a cottage on Bluish Lake for generations. When Ted'southward mother dies, he is stunned to discover that she has cut him out of her will. Instead, she has left the cottage to his estranged ex-wife, Béa, who fled the marriage and the state after the drowning of their toddler son, Minnow.

Blue Lake
Janet Cruel Blachford

John Aylen Books
$24.99
paper
229pp
9780995334113

Determined to reclaim his birthright and confront his past, Ted returns to Blue Lake for the commencement time in years. Despite his concern about whether information technology will be "off-white or even possible to layer their lives over the scrim of the earlier ane with Béa and Minnow," Ted convinces his married woman Caely and their teenage son Rob to leave their comfy life in Vancouver and spend a whole summer at the lake.

Over the course of this summer, each character develops their own obsessions: Rob relives his father'due south youthful fixation with canoes and the Franklin trek, while his female parent Caely designs a fanciful rock garden, complete with a theatre and a plexiglass pyramid. Ted, meanwhile, roams the lake, brooding over his past and trying to make decisions nigh his time to come. Ted and his family are gradually absorbed into the Bluish Lake customs, interacting with a varied cast of neighbours who include a precocious preteen tomboy, an enigmatic hunter, an artistic divorcée, and an ancient matriarch. Everyone watches everyone else every bit they set off on personal quests towards self-realization.

This is a book where setting is more important than plot, and Blachford'southward glowing prose animates her descriptions of Blue Lake. Each flavor is beautifully depicted, with "iced-up bushes and trees sparkled in tiny shakes of air, rattling like bird basic" in winter, a springtime field of blue flowers "burning as blue as cognac on plum pudding," and finally summertime, when plants, like children, begin "pulling abroad from their nurturing roots."

Interwoven with the daily lives of Ted'south family and neighbours are elements of magical realism. Characters speak in the language of legend and allegory, dropping allusions to Celtic and Egyptian mythology as well as the Garden of Eden, Prospero'south island from The Tempest, and the archetype French-Canadian flying canoe described in La Chasse-galerie. The symbolism is especially noticeable with the book'southward animal life, from the pet domestic dog who is repeatedly mistaken for a bear to the wildlife living alongside the people at Blue Lake: a dying infant moose, an unpredictable blackness conduct, and a shadowy lynx.

At times, the narrative falters under the burden of these double meanings, leaving the reader bewildered by the dream-like logic that animates Blachford'due south novel. Several subplots seem to evaporate midway through the story and some characters are sketched likewise thinly, never quite coming to life.

As a whole, Bluish Lake succeeds as a poetic meditation, a figurative pilgrimage rather than a plot-driven novel, transplanting themes of life and expiry, guilt and luck, time and inheritance into the hinterlands of Quebec. mRb

Author photo by Bryan Demchinsky

Rebecca Morris is a Montreal author. Her brusk story "Foreign Bodies" won the 2017 Malahat Review Open up Season Award and her work has also appeared in Hamilton Arts & Letters, bill of fare blanche, and the Antigonish Review. She is currently working on a novel.

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Source: https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/blue-lake/

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