A Line Below the Skin

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

As her 90-year-old mother, Jean, lies dying, Lily becomes aware of how
little she knows about her past and her ancestors. At the same time,
Lily’s university-aged daughters are beginning to lead their own
lives, creating additional communication gaps. Lily tries to bridge all
the gaps by uncovering “a collective memory carried in their
bones—an almost lost knowledge from a silenced past.” The reader
seems to be eavesdropping on an omniscient narrator (possibly Lily) who
is recounting this process to Jean. The result is rather like watching a
scene refracted through, and distorted by, moving water.

Fran Muir makes few concessions to her audience. She assembles a large
cast of characters, many of whom seem unrelated, and who drift into and
out of the narrative without explanation. Mistaking poetic language for
licence, Muir indulges in long, rambling, and often incomplete
sentences. Frequent shifts of time and venue, and a disconcerting lack
of focus, force the reader to review and reread frequently. “The tree
wraps her in its own greenness. Is she tree, sunburned sky, grass,
rabbit hiding there, butterfly, bee in caragana, blossoms to yellow
blossoming sweetness in the tree rocking Lily carving the tree’s heart
with her hands, lying in the space where the heart was, feeling tree’s
skin where it is peeled soft, smooth, new skin, her skin, rocking
herself in the heart of the tree, in the whole hole in its heart, in
hers.”

The most coherent passages, which deal with Petra, an anthropologist
who “has become experienced in identifying victims in mass graves,”
echo themes from Anil’s Ghost.

The most moving passages are a ringing condemnation of the treatment
that elderly people often receive in hospitals and nursing homes. “And
these anonymous psychiatrists who sit with their backs to them [the
elderly], in their bunker behind the nurses’ desk writing notes to
themselves in their charts … schizoid … paranoid … which of course
you will be if you are being injected with mind-disabling drugs, a
normal reaction.”