>>PREVIEW
JOAN CLARK
Friday, October 14
Saturday, October 15
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
Sunday, October 16
Rolston Recital Hall (The Banff Centre)
Joan Clark’s new novel, An Audience of Chairs, although set in Cape Breton, doesn’t offer any of the familiar characters and themes we’ve come to expect from Maritimes literature. Instead, Clark has taken the textures of Nova Scotia and woven one of the most intelligent and frustrating fictional creations in recent memory.
This novel is the story of Moranna, a woman slowly aging in a farmhouse in the Cape Breton countryside. She has limited contact with the locals, occasionally taking her sled to collect old newspapers and drop off sermons for the pastor of the town church. She’s used to condemnation by others for her odd clothes and behaviour, and when she feels threatened, is quick to retaliate.
As we learn, Moranna is a woman struggling with mental illness and the ghosts of her past. She’s haunted by her mother, who drowned herself when Moranna was a child, and her own time spent in an institution. Her memories reveal a woman whose struggles with a bipolar personality destroyed her marriage and her ability to be a mother. Her two daughters were taken from her more than 30 years ago, after one particularly disastrous mistake. She quickly found that her illness had cut her adrift, and with her husband and children gone, retreated into a hermetic life of peculiarities and disembodied voices, which still tempt her to dismantle what life she has been left with.
One day, Moranna hears news that one of her daughters is getting married – an event that just might offer the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Despite these beginnings, An Audience of Chairs isn’t an elegiac novel seeking happy endings. There’s a subtle subversion to Clark’s prose, which questions the common perceptions we have about motherhood and mental illness.
The Nova Scotia-born Clark, who came to Calgary when she was 22 (where she co-founded the literary magazine Dandelion and helped establish the Writers Guild of Alberta), says that this has been a novel 30 years in the making. After reading Clifford Beers’s memoir, A Mind That Found Itself, she became intrigued with the commonly accepted definitions of just what sanity is. That book, combined with personal events, slowly gave rise to Moranna and her story.
"My grandmother drowned herself at 45," says Clark. "Some stories have a long gestation. I wasn’t really ready (to write this one) until four years ago."
Moranna is one of Clark’s strongest creations – intelligent and often infuriating, her struggles ultimately demand understanding. You see how her weaknesses are our own, writ large in her own mind. "She’s the first woman I’ve written about who’s off to one side, who doesn’t fit in," says Clark, but adds that the tragedies in Moranna’s life are "certainly not uncommon."
But Moranna isn’t entirely a tragic figure. She herself points out that there have been ecstatic times of joy and adventure in her life, even as they were mixed with pain. "A life on the edge is not necessarily unhappy," says Clark. "Whether or not it exists, fun is a kind of happiness."
As a mother, Moranna could be demonized for what appears to be her lack of thought and love, but Clark doesn’t believe that’s the case. Her character’s ambivalence is something that many women feel when dealing with the daily challenges of parenting young children, she says. Moranna loves her children, but ultimately, without assistance, can’t take care of them. "I have three kids," says Clark. "When my older son was born, it hit me – ‘I’m responsible for him.’" With Moranna, independence and illness conspire against that sense of responsibility, and her hope of being a presence in her children’s lives disappears.
Clark’s evocation of Moranna’s illness is gentle, with an ambiguity about her actual condition that draws more attention to the woman herself and the details of her life. Clark points out that the word "bipolar" only appears once in the book. The book’s title refers to the unseen "audience" that Moranna performs for when she plays piano, an exercise that helps her steer herself away from her manic state. For Clark, the range of the keyboard is a metaphor for both sanity and personality. "I myself have been a middle C, not too high, not too low," says Clark, "unlike Moranna, playing one end to the other." Fluctuating between a stately Chopin and an erratic Beethoven, Moranna only asks for our understanding, in the hope that, in the end, she too can be somewhere in-between.
Joan Clark’s work will be celebrated at WordFest’s Wildflower Power! (Oct. 14). She’ll also be part of the Lands to Write On panel (Oct. 15) and the festival’s Closing Time finale in Banff (Oct. 16). |
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