The Holding

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

Merilyn Simonds enchants early on in her debut novel by immediately
drawing her readers into a time and place far removed from their own,
transforming them into Scottish emigrants who love and loathe the sea
and long for a new land. In this world, even places and things have
souls, like a ship as it sails into the St. Lawrence River, “the
foghorn now and then sounding its plaintive bellow, the ship’s bell
clanging anxiously like the tap-tap-tapping of a blind man’s stick
searching to give shape to what lies ahead.”

Like the ship, the two women whose stories dovetail in this book are
also searching to give shape to what lies ahead. In 1859, 14-year-old
Margaret MacBayne travels with her family to the Canadian bush north of
Ottawa, losing her father to cholera at Grosse-Оle, and her mother in
childbirth shortly after they reach the holding of three 100-acre lots
belonging to Margaret’s three brothers. She spends the rest of her
life trying to find her place in the world, balancing the solitary,
liberating winters that her brothers spend in the logging camps with the
summers when they come back, relegating her to the woman’s role in a
family of men.

In 1990, Alyson Thomson is finding her way on that same piece of land,
a master gardener living with Walker Freeman, a man whose real name she
has never been able to learn. Once sure of her path in life, she finds
herself stumbling when Walker leaves her alone and pregnant through the
winter, and her baby dies just a few hours after birth. It’s not until
Alyson uncovers Margaret’s journal in the remains of the MacBaynes’
log cabin that life starts to make sense again, and meaning appears as
if by magic in the garden she plants following Margaret’s
instructions.

Throughout the story, each woman’s life informs the other, amplifying
the themes of isolation and relationships, two stories complete in
themselves merging into a far greater whole. What a joy to read a novel
written with such clarity of thought and in such beautiful language.