The Book of Sarah

Susannah D. Ketchum is a teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan School
in Toronto. She also serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

The Book of Sarah traces Sarah MacKenzie’s life from her fifth year
through to her 80th birthday. Part 1 (“Youth”) is a straightforward,
chronological narrative divided into titled chapters. Occupying two
thirds of the book, “Youth” takes us to Sarah’s marriage at the
age of 20. Highlights include her father bringing home a gasoline lamp
with a beaded fringe and a radio; the beaded fringe catches fire the
first time Sarah’s father lights the lamp, and the radio proves even
less satisfactory. A pony he buys for her turns out to be a
“moth-eaten, pot-bellied rack of bones” covered with horse lice.

Underlying the narrative is an awareness of the Prairies, an awareness
that is often reinforced by Sarah’s pleasure in drawing. Her father
has freshly calcimined the walls of the rundown house that, much to his
wife’s distress, he has bought. With such a wonderful expanse of blank
wall, naturally Sarah experiments. Some years later, she witnesses a
confrontation between a skunk and a coyote and tries to capture the
scene with donated oil paints on a “board she salvaged from an old
apple box.” When she has finished, “she knows she has caught
something true about skunks and coyotes and prairies.” Shortly before
her wedding, Sarah realizes “with a pang” that she will rarely see
the Prairies after she marries.

Part 2 (“Age”) is one long chapter called “Voyage to the
Faroes.” On her 80th birthday, as Sarah waits for her granddaughter,
she relives the preceding 60 years through a series of flashbacks. We
learn that Sarah has become a renowned artist and is a professor
emeritus at the University of Alberta. Many of her flashbacks are
triggered by her own paintings, such as The Trapped Coyote and a
“magnificent lone poplar rearing indomitable against the prairie
sky.”

Although the publisher’s synopsis likens this novel’s strong-willed
heroine to Margaret Laurence’s protagonists Hagar Shipley and Morag
Gunn, The Book of Sarah lacks the power and coherence of a Laurence
novel. Transitions are not always smoothly handled, and the time shifts
are often confusing. As well, there are several small inconsistencies.
For example, Sarah turns five in 1931, but at the end of the book is
celebrating her 80th birthday; in other words, we have somehow reached
the year 2006. Nevertheless, Sarah is engaging, and The Book of Sarah
makes compelling reading. Like Sarah herself, it captures “something
true.”