Voice-Over

Helen Hacksel is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Montreal-born arts writer Carol Corbeil was educated in both French and
English schools before graduating from York University in Toronto. Her
first novel reflects this bilingual, bicultural background.

Voice-Over is a book of several dualities. The language alternates
between English and (simple) French; time and place alternate between
Montreal in the 1950s and Toronto in the 1980s.

Claudine and Janine are French-Canadian sisters who spend their early
years with a kind but alcoholic father and an emotionally distant
mother. The girls cling to each other and watch their parents’
marriage fall apart. When their mother, Odette, remarries they are
thrust into the upper-crust Anglo-Canadian world of their stepfather,
Walter. Now ensconced in Montreal’s rich suburb of Westmount, the
girls are sent to select English schools and made to feel the
inferiority of all things French-Canadian. Odette reinforces the message
by giving up her own identity and conforming to the world of the bigoted
Walter.

Having fled to Toronto in the mid-1970s to escape feelings of confusion
and conflicted loyalties, the sisters are still tormented young women in
the hip Toronto of the mid-1980s. Janine is immersed in motherhood, her
emotional distress barely below the surface. Claudine’s current love
affair is as unhappy as the many before, and the documentary films that
she makes are obsessively focused on social problems of the darkest hue.
Her haunt is Queen St. West and its environs, and intimate details of
the area add to a growing literary map of Toronto.

Corbeil has a talent for opening up the inner life of her characters.
Strong images and the telling phrase reveal the neediness of the young
sisters, their later emotional turmoil, and also the stifled pain at the
heart of Odette’s coldness.

This is an engrossing story of an emotionally wounded family struggling
to come to terms with its past. Obvious parallels with the troubled
history of French and English Canada can be drawn, and the call made
here for true communication and understanding could well be directed to
either side.