Mere

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

Twelve-year-old Mere’s name evokes her vulnerable slightness, the lake
on which she was born, and her absent father’s alias of Merril. Even
more, it calls attention to her coming of age in the mother–daughter
relationship that forms the core of this novel. Cowritten by mother and
daughter, the novel’s own manner of production ties into its theme.

Mere and her mother, Faye, have spent years sailing the Great Lakes on
a 56-foot steel-hulled sailboat named Persephone. On the last day of
October 1982, they dock in Toronto, and their self-contained world comes
to an end. A re-enactment of the myth indicated by their vessel plays
out in Rosedale and Cabbagetown.

The male element in the novel begins with Faye’s father, whose death
immediately precedes her departing from home and taking command of his
boat. Faye joins a collective and develops relationships with
class-contrasted activists Gil and Ahab/Merril. Sometime after the birth
of Mere, the two men debark in Toronto and resume a life ashore. For
crew, the boat relies on a series of fugitives that eventually ends with
Mark, a Canadian juvenile fleeing detention.

Eight chapters intertwine present crisis with a mainly chronological
account of Faye’s past as a revolutionary gone underground. During the
summer of 1969, she progresses from dropping out of high school, to
demonstration, to arrest for disorderly conduct, to involvement in
political bombing and the death of a policeman. Fugitive Faye and her
infant daughter spend the early 1970s transporting 21 draft dodgers
across the Great Lakes to Canada and then settle into nomadic sailing.

The novel exploits its era for melodrama and atmosphere. Chronology has
weaknesses, event and situation are implausible, and politics amounts to
caricature. The plot manages to create suspense, but the murkiness of
connections overwhelms it: the effect of Mere’s writing a note to her
father and the nature of the trail that enables the FBI to pursue Faye
both remain mysteries. Though the novel’s structure and writing
display craft, the primary concern with psychology and myth reduces the
characters to ciphers in a fantasy. The compensatory effort to generate
realism through pseudohistorical crosscutting of the narrative fails to
ground the story or make its protagonists live.