Visible Worlds

Chris Knight is managing editor of the Canadian HR Reporter.

Marilyn Bowering’s latest novel takes as its setting the tumultuous,
war-torn middle decades of the 20th century, and manages to be at once
sweeping and intimate. World events can be glimpsed hazily behind the
characters, while Bowering boldly paints the family dramas and traumas
that affect people more than history’s great speeches or treaties.

The action moves through space and time, from the boyhood of twins
Gerhard and Albrecht Storr, growing up in Winnipeg during the Great
Depression, to a mysterious lone Soviet skier making her way to Canada
over the North Pole in 1960. Albrecht tells much of this story: how his
brother is sent to Germany to study music just before the war and ends
up fighting for the Nazis; how Albrecht tries to find his own purpose
and wrestles with how much he should do for his country; and his
father’s crackpot notions about human magnetism, which are echoed
throughout the book in sightings of the aurora borealis and iron-rich
meteors, including one found by a young Albrecht and his friend
Nathanial Bone.

There is more—romantic liaisons are formed and broken among the
circle of neighbors in Winnipeg; children are born, die and
disappear—yet the book does not seem crowded, and the story moves at a
perfect pace. Bowering has done what few novelists do well, which is to
create a puzzle, mix up the pieces, and then hand them back in an order
that creates curiosity and wonder, never confusion or frustration, in
the reader. She has a fine ear for dialogue, and her descriptions are
tight and meaningful—in two pages, she can create the sounds and
smells of a travelling circus, circa 1935.

Visible Worlds is an intricate, well-told tale tucked into a corner of
this vast century.