Slow Emergencies

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

The first part of this extraordinary novel opens with the birth of
Angela. Her parents are Lin, a professional dancer, and Derek, a
philosophy professor. By the time their second daughter, Marina,
arrives, three years later, Lin’s delight in the physical realities of
motherhood has given way to feelings of suffocation and dread. Like
Isadora Duncan, whose two children drowned in a tragic accident, she
longs to be “freed of this abominable bad dream of matter” and to
express her lifelong passion “[for] tak[ing] life’s darkest themes
and turn[ing] them into light.” Recognizing that only through dance
can both imperatives be met, Lin exchanges husband and children for life
as the director of a touring dance company. The balance of the novel
powerfully evokes the irresistible pull of family destiny as her
daughters mature in different and often disturbing ways. In a
grotesqueparody of her mother’s journey toward the light, Marina takes
up self-mutilation and becomes obsessed with the Holocaust, transforming
herself into “a light that must go into

that darkness.”

Nancy Huston, whose novel Plainsong won the Governor General’s Award
for French fiction in 1993, is a superb wordsmith, expressing her themes
of abandonment and guilt, mortality and transcendence, and the
transformative powers of art in language that is by turns incandescent
and fiercely sensual. Her technique dazzles us with its sheer
virtuosity, but not for a moment do

we lose sight of the complex emotional truths that drive her compelling
and all-too-human characters.