Marvellous novel based on effects of disaster

By Lisa Moore

Anansi Press, 320 pages, $30

Many Canadians will remember the Ocean Ranger disaster of 1982, when an offshore drilling rig sank during a fierce winter storm, leaving no survivors.

For Newfoundlanders in particular, it's an event whose effects are still deeply felt.

Now Lisa Moore, one of the Rock's best literary writers, has penned a novel about the disaster's effects on one woman and her family. This is the second novel from Moore, whose 2002 story collection, Open, and debut novel, 2005's Alligator, were both Giller Prize nominees.

In February, the main character, Helen, is the wife of a man who worked on the Ocean Ranger. A mother of three, she's barely pregnant with their fourth child when the rig goes down.

What happens that day, and how it affects Helen's life afterward, forms the main thread of the book. Even to the end, the narrative keeps returning to that time: how Helen found out; how she coped afterward; how she replays the details over and over; how grief sometimes returns even 26 years later.

Another thread of the story concerns Helen's son John, now 35, whose life both parallels and contrasts with that of his parents.

He's an oil worker like his father, but unlike his parents, who married young, he has so far resisted plunging into marriage and family life.

He phones Helen one night to say, "I think I got somebody pregnant."

The narrative widens outward from these two main points -- November 2008, when Helen, now in her mid-50s, hears the news from John, and February 1982, the February of the title, when the Ocean Ranger went down -- to gradually reveal more about those times and the time between.

Not surprisingly, loneliness is a recurring motif. There is, first, Helen's unbelievable loneliness after being widowed, and the sense of being cut off from everyday life. Later, there is the added loneliness that goes with aging.

The other recurring theme is risk. Working on the oil rig was a risk in itself, and more so because of the way some safety procedures were handled.

John, too, confronts questions of efficiency versus safety when he signs on with an oil company. And then there's the everyday risk of loving and having children, believing it will all work out somehow.

Moore's writing resembles poetry in its frequent use of sentence fragments and the way she builds a scene through the accumulation of images. She expertly captures her characters' physical surroundings in sharp-edged fragments of colour and sensation.

She probes their emotional landscapes gently and thoroughly. Helen's abortive attempt to assemble the baby's crib is related in a flat, understated manner that underscores her intense frustration at having to do this alone

Past and present are constantly interwoven here. Moore takes a brief incident like a phone call between Helen and John and extends it through the use of flashbacks, associations and brief sensations of memory.

The book's only little flaw lies in the sections told from the viewpoint of Jane, the mother of John's child, which distract from rather than add to the main narrative.

John's sections, however, enrich the story by offering another perspective on Helen and on the way she and her husband interacted.

Helen comes across as a perfectly ordinary woman. She cooks supper; she goes to school concerts; she takes her kids to movies. She thaws frozen pipes with a blowtorch because she can't afford a plumber.

But that's what this is about: a perfectly ordinary woman whose life is profoundly changed by an extraordinary event.

This is a marvellous book.

Joanne Epp is a Winnipeg writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 28, 2009 B9