Questions abound after author’s husband drowns

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This article was published 12/08/2023 (1131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From Down Under comes The Anniversary, an engrossing novel that is both thought-provoker and page-turner. Australia’s Stephanie Bishop presents an intriguing married couple who enjoy helping each other with their creative careers until one starts to become more popular than the other.

Bishop’s main character is novelist Lucie Joy-Beth Blackwood, who writes under the name “J.B. Blackwood” and is the first-person narrator of The Anniversary. She begins with the 18-day cruise she and husband Patrick Heller embarked on to celebrate their 14th anniversary. It is a jaunt that J.B., 38, talked 59-year-old Patrick into, not only to rejuvenate their marriage but to give Patrick a break he seemed to need.

J.B.’s sequence of events — with flashbacks to, for example, when she was a student in Patrick’s film studies class — brilliantly shows how both their lives and their careers were so positively affected by their having met.

“In all fairness,” J.B. tells us, “in those early days it pleased us to please each other. In that way we were not so different from any couple in love. Even his efforts to control me could be interpreted as a form of flattery. A service. Although I didn’t think of it as control, not back then. It felt more like being guided, stewarded, directed.”

Early in their relationship, Patrick became a busy film director, while J.B. gradually enjoyed success as a fiction writer. They read each other’s work and made helpful suggestions. By the time of the cruise, though, J.B. has become so confident and popular that she doesn’t need much help from Patrick.

The cruise begins in Alaska and, on the 14th day, they are approaching Japan. Not long after some wonderful lovemaking, Patrick gets drunk and heads out of their room onto the deck — just as a storm hits.

J.B. goes out to find him, tries to talk him into coming in. The storm worsens. She tries to guide him; he shrugs her off. “He lifted his face towards me then and said something he perhaps would not have said were he not so drunk. Something he must have been storing up… Something terrible that I would later try to forget.”

He seizes her wrist, she pulls herself free. Lightning and thunder distract them; when he refuses to leave the deck, she scrambles inside to fetch him some water. When she returns, he is nowhere to be seen. She hangs onto the railing and goes looking for him. She shouts his name. Minutes later, she hears the call:

“Man overboard, portside!”

Confused, J.B. cannot believe what has happened. People are upset. It is only after she has talked to others that she realizes that the man overboard must be Patrick. And this is only page 30.

J.B. is taken to a police station in Sapporo, Japan, and is interviewed by an investigator, who later calls her at her hotel to tell her that Patrick’s body has been found. She is asked to identify him. What follows are J.B.’s attempts to adjust as she prepares, with help from her publisher Ada, to go to New York City and receive a major award for her latest novel.

Author Bishop deftly presents flashbacks to J.B.’s life with Patrick interwoven with her new life without him — her promotion of the book, her visit to Sydney for Christmas with her sister May and May’s almost- dysfunctional family, her phone call from Patrick’s ex-wife Trudi.

And then comes a phone call from England — a man who tells her there is concern about just how accidental Patrick’s death was. J.B. must return to England, where she may face charges. Just when the novel seems to be settling into J.B.’s career and domestic life — she has discovered that she is pregnant — she must face interrogation in a court of law.

In many ways, The Anniversary rivals last year’s Love Marriage, by England’s Monica Ali, in its vivid look at a contemporary couple’s adjusting to each other.

But there is so much more in both novels. Stephanie Bishop has produced a winner.

Winnipeg author Dave Williamson collaborated with Carol Shields on a stage comedy called Anniversary which also dealt with the many facets of a relationship.