Gabrielle Roy Pens Exquisite Prairie Portrait

Gabrielle Roy is probably the most widely read Canadian novelist in both English and French. She's also one of those retiring writers who seems more interested in her craft than in the limelight. Living in Quebec city and rarely giving interviews, she quietly minds her own business and turns out book after book of high quality.

Not that honors, critical adulation and bestselling success haven't come her way. Her very first novel, The Tin Flute (1947) about a working-class family living in a Montreal slum, won a Governor-General's award for fiction and has sold more than a million copies. She won another award for Street Of Riches (1957), a collection of stories based on her Manitoba childhood. And then 10 books later, at the age of 69, yet a third award last year for Children Of My Heart, which has just been published in an English translation.

Award-winning novels are traps for reviewers; there's always the naughty temptation to sniff at them, to say they are, for one reason or another, overrated and puffed up. But that's not the case with Children Of My Heart.

Return to roots

It's true that the book doesn't represent new directions either in theme or style; in fact, it marks a return to Roy's roots and early experiences as a schoolteacher in rural Manitoba during the Depression and the semi-autobiographical mode of such works as Where Nests The Water Hen (1951). And it's true that her compassionate concern with common humanity and the spare, almost child-like prose style seem overly familiar.

But perhaps that is what's so marvellous about Gabrielle Roy: The often self-serving cynical and doom-laden angst and thrust of contemporary life are not for her; rather, she concentrates on themes and characters, placed in simple settings, whose relevance is universal and timeless, touching us all.

Empty prairie

Children Of My Heart isn't a novel in the usual sense; there is no "plot" as such, the book consisting of a series of loosely connected episodes recounting the experiences of a teenaged teacher in schools pitched on the edge of an empty prairie. She is sensitive and idealistic, at 18 young enough to sympathize with her pupils' adolescent pain and confusion - and yet she's naive enough to make her a believable, attractive character.

"I had ... just passed beyond my adolescent dreams," she muses, "and was so little resigned to my adult life that sometimes, when I saw my small pupils appear in the early morning on the prairies as fresh as the dawning of the world, I wanted to run toward them and place myself forever on their side instead of waiting for them in the snare of school."

Those pupils invariably come from isolated immigrant families - Russian, Ukrainian, French, Italian who eke out a bare living in stupefying drudgery as farmers, domestics or laborers on the bottom rung of society. Because of such circumstances, they seem more keen in having their children help with chores than in providing them with an education. Through these stories of these children and their families-which emerge almost as parables celebrating the virtues of courage, endurance and spiritual generosity-Roy powerfully evokes a time and place.

There's a wry story of Vincento, whose doting Italian father is just as terrified as is his timid son of the first day of school. There's Clair, the son of a charwoman who cannot afford to give the teacher a Christmas present. There's Nil, who sings like an angel and charms everyone around him - even the inmates of a mental hospital. They are so captivated by his sweet and melancholy Ukrainian folksongs, which evoke thoughts of something other than they now possess, that they want "to take him alive, to prevent him at all costs from leaving them."

Subtle effect

These vignettes a subtle, cumulative effect, portraying a world of humane impulses in the face of poverty and an unforgiving, baleful environment. But innocence is shadowed and overtaken by experience, childhood by adulthood; and it is in the final, compellingly poignant story that Roy most skillfully evokes the vulnerability and the fragility of the children of the world, doomed too soon to lose their spontaneity to the harsher realities.

This last story centres around Mederic, "going on 14," an unruly and lonely Metis boy. The teacher slowly gains his trust and opens the world of books to him; he, in turn, introduces her to the wild beauty of the prairies. But this close relationship is altered when she realizes he is falling in love with her and that she must not hold him at a distance.

"I reached out to take his hand and comfort him, but broke off my gesture, realizing I would never dare to complete it, that I must never do so; and from the feeling of that deprivation came a confused regret that seemed to stretch out into an indefinite future, for I wasn't sure who was to be pitied, he or I or any being who, on reaching adulthood, loses a living part of his soul."

Indeed such images drop, like uncontrollable tears, into a pool, rippling outward in concentric circles of musing and insight, then blending into all that has come before and all that will follow. Children Of My Heart is a slim book, elegiac and graceful, but so filled with a homely wisdom that it overflows its pages. And it once again confirms Gabrielle Roy's position as one of Canada's truly distinguished writers.

Source: The Toronto Star, March 3, 1979.

Courtesy of The Toronto Star Syndicate.