The title
of Terence M. Green’s third novel, A Witness to Life,
worried me – a bit too portentous – as did the straight-up avowals
of sentiment in the opening lines: "It breaks my heart to see
her lying there, worn out, dying. But she is so happy to see
me…It has been so long, so very long. And I have searched so
far." I soon realized, however, that my own ironic sensibility
had to readjust itself to Green’s project here, to the carefully
modulated emotion in this portrait of a man, his city, and his
times.
On page
one we learn that Martin John Radey, the man visiting his daughter
and telling us his tale, is dead, and has been dead for thirty-four
years. No longer the Irish Catholic worker living in Protestant
Toronto from 1887 to 1950, Martin has become a revenant, a starling
"in a flock of dead souls." Now possessed of "piercing avian
eyes," his incurious human heart replaced "by one beating wildly
with wonder," Martin’s thoughts turn increasingly poetic and
metaphysical.
Green’s
novel proceeds to alternate between the living Martin-narrator
and the one who soars over the past as he tries to fathom the
nature of life, of death. Interestingly enough, this interspersed
bird-chapter technique appears in Pigeon Irish, a 1932 novel
by Irish writer Francis Stuart. In Green’s novel, the writing-style
is lean, uncluttered – monkish in its spareness. And it is the
Trappist monk Thomas Merton – note the Martin/Merton affinity
– whose quoted lines become the epigraphs heading the novel’s
short starling chapters.
For example:
"We must always walk in darkness. We must travel in silence.
We must fly by night." These words aptly describe Martin’s life
and after-life. For Martin, the last and thirteenth child of
Irish immigrants, appears to us as a son, a grandson, a worker,
a husband, a father and Torontonian living in the time of world
war, a local epidemic, and economic hardship. He is a splintered
self, adrift and "knowing I was letting everyone down." He knows
he must overcome his contingent approach to life – "enjoying
the moment, unable to see the future, as always" – and sees,
too, how a lack of curiosity will cripple every kind of love.
He notes
the disappointment that lines the facial expression of Maggie,
his feminist wife, when she hears his lack of interest in politics
and, specifically, the plight of women. Ironically, when Martin
visits his mute grandmother he can confess his doubts and inability
to intuit the pain of others, or even share his own.
While Martin
is the novel’s obvious protagonist, Toronto becomes his mirror-image.
Green details Martin’s favourite hats and cigars; we also learn
about the births, possessions, weddings, illnesses, and deaths
of people dear to him. Similarly, we learn the name and address
of Queen Street shops, the effects of typhoid and Prohibition
and the Depression, and of the fires that occasionally ravage
the city. This inventory of the personal and the urban recalls
Joyce’s itemizing of the public and private world of Dubliners
in Ulysses, a work Green perhaps deliberately invokes in Martin’s
one-time, yes-laden stream-of-consciousness.
Like Joyce,
Green is trying to record the inner and outer life of a man
and his place. And it is fire, that natural destroyer and creator
and celebrator – as in the candles on Martin’s birthday cake
– which becomes the symbolic link between Martin and Toronto.
When twenty downtown acres burn down, Martin reflects: "In the
destruction we sense a new beginning, a chance to transform
our world, ourselves…I am changed." These are the words of an
unmarried twenty-four-year-old man; soon he will realize how
difficult change is.
Terence
Green has written of family before, notably in his second novel,
Shadow of Ashland, which was lauded in "The New York
Times." Green, who taught high school English in Toronto, still
lives with his family in the city. A Witness to Life
now joins the tradition of great Toronto novels, settling beside,
among others, Morley Callaghan’s works, Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown,
Wyndham Lewis’ Self-Condemned, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s
Eye, and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.
Green’s latest novel does not wither in this company.
Harold
Hoefle teaches literature in a Montreal high school, and his
story "Spray Job" appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of The Nashwaak
Review.
