Frank and Annie

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Joan Fern Shaw is an excellent teller of tales, as evidenced by the
linked episodes of Raspberry Vinegar or the stories of Managing Just
Fine, which earned her the Gerald Lampert Award. She manages the
different demands of the novel form with equal skill. The Yeatsian
vision that “Fair and foul are near of kin” and that love has
pitched its mansion in the place of excrement is one that Shaw shares.
Readers will be laughing and crying (perhaps simultaneously) over Frank
and Annie.

The novel is told through the eyes of a retired primary-schoolteacher.
Born into prim middle-class gentility in Toronto, the narrator spends a
year teaching in western Ontario’s rural Bruce County, where her
favorite students are the gentle, none-too-bright pair named in the
book’s title. The Bruce County setting, in and near Port Elgin on the
shores of Lake Huron, is well realized. Shaw’s eye for detail and her
feeling for incidents bring this rural outpost to vivid life. The three
main characters are linked for a lifetime by Frank and Annie’s respect
and admiration for “Teacher” and by the narrator’s love for the
simple pair.

Shaw’s vision is leavened by black humor, irony, and brutal honesty.
Her narrator learns that there is “a whole network” of mysterious
life lurking beneath a facade that passes for reality. For all its
relative brevity, Frank and Annie strikes deep into the Canadian
character and is destined to become a Canadian classic.