Cordelia Strube’s 10th novel, On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light, is about a plucky 11-year-old named Harriet.
Precociousness in fiction is a tricky needle to thread. On the one hand, it's a fairly simple bait and switch – giving a child the perspective and (more often than not) the cultural reference points of an adult – but in the wrong hands, it can read as serious laziness on the author's part. Sure, you could investigate what a kid circa 2016 might sound like and be interested in. Or you could just give him an OED-calibre vocabulary and make him be unusually into Talking Heads, and call it a day.
The protagonist of Cordelia Strube's 10th novel certainly seems to fit the precociousness mould. Eleven-year-old Harriet, nicknamed Mugsy, is plucky, and a straight-shooter. She speaks bluntly to adults, including her mother and stepfather, Gennedy, without fear of reprimand. Her interests include romantic poetry and the painter Tom Thomson, unsubtly suggesting membership in the Old Souls Club. And, importantly, she's got no shortage of surrounding characters who vocally attest to that preternatural wisdom. As Harriet's grandmother puts it to a couple of fellow grown-ups: "Mugsy here knows more about life than the two of you combined."
But when On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light uses this familiar type, it isn't as a crutch. Rather, Strube bends the very idea of precociousness to her own ends, taking Harriet and catapulting her into the centre of a messy, polyphonic story built around a series of duelling opposites: parents and children, sickness and health, life and especially death.
For most kids, the concept of death is abstract. Not so for Harriet. Thanks to her younger brother Irwin, who is constantly in and out of hospital due to lifelong complications from hydrocephalus, Harriet understands death as a force that's all too close at hand – which is why she decides, early on, that Irwin would be better off dead.
The dynamic between Harriet and Irwin is at once the novel's key relationship, and also its most elusive one. At times, she seems to have his best interests at heart, but more often her pragmatism mixes with a nascent teenage rebellious streak, and the result is basically sociopathy: "It would be so great if he died," goes a not-uncommon thought. Despite Irwin's unabashed love for her, Harriet doesn't visit him in hospital and even flees their shared Toronto apartment in those rare times he's at home. (Her dream is to escape the city altogether, living like a Thomson-esque hermit in Algonquin Park as soon as she can afford the bus ticket.) The siblings' perpetually crossed wires are heartbreaking. Irwin wants her around so badly, yet Harriet, in her quest to be part of the larger adult world, would rather run meaningless errands for the senior citizens in their apartment building, not realizing how twisted her priorities have gotten.
Strube's true talent, which was as readily on display in her last novel, 2012's Milosz, is for layering characters and situations and subplots on top of each other, one by one, until the entire Shangrila apartment building buzzes like a beehive. These story lines then progress together as one huge unit, making for a reading experience that's pleasantly overwhelming, and one that also serves as a rebuttal to Harriet's ultimately naive search for tidy answers. Is life fair? Can people ever truly act out of anything other than self-interest? I don't know, but someone's been sneaking Mr. Pungartnik cigarettes again, Dee is working up the nerve to confront her cyberbully at the local Dairy Queen and Trent, Harriet's remarried father, keeps funnelling his child-support payments into expensive bikes and fertility treatments for his new wife. Ultimately, Strube shows that adulthood is about learning how to keep these unwieldy balls in the air however you can, and about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Despite the novel's many charms, the title, which comes from a Keats poem, is a bit overstuffed, and the book at times can also feel compromised by its bulk. That's particularly true in the latter half, when Strube yanks the rug out from under the reader with a twist that left me slack-jawed at its brilliance – and then slightly fatigued at having to reinvest myself as that narrative world gets rebuilt from the ground up.
What holds the book together, however, is the same thing Irwin wants so desperately from his sister. "Irwin longs to be loved this much," Strube writes, as he watches another parent hug her child tightly. "It would be like always having a protective coating. No matter how cruel people were, it wouldn't stick." Love as adhesive; love as Teflon.
Michael Hingston is the author of The Dilettantes and editor of the Short Story Advent Calendar. He lives in Edmonton.