Accidents, mistakes, and misdiagnoses haunt many of the characters in Those Are Pearls, altering the course of their lives. Some wounds, both physical and emotional, are left to fester until they become life threatening. Others are self-inflicted, amplified either by damaging words or deafening silence. Still others are embraced, with a brazen disregard for others. Through it all, three different generations soldier on through conflict in South Africa, two World Wars, and the Winnipeg General Strike. The characters are, by turns, bitter, resigned, ironic, caustic, and melancholic, but the disparate ways they survive their lives never fail to move the reader.
In one of the most exquisite sentences in Those Are Pearls, a granddaughter reflects on her grandmother: “I can’t know it at the time, only realize later that Margaret is a woman for whom the past is a foreign coin with an unknown exchange value.” Indeed, for all the principal characters in André Narbonne’s second novel, knowledge comes late or not at all. In a sweeping narrative that follows the extended Short family over nearly a century from South Africa to Canada, Narbonne unfolds his characters’ dashed hopes and dreams with a gentle, compassionate hand.
Divided into three major sections — Duty, Education, and Accidents of Necessity — the novel leaps back and forth in time, even within single chapters, and has multiple points of view. Chapters on Harry and Margaret Short, their daughter Ruth, and her husband Frank are written in third person. These narratives are interspersed with first-person accounts from Margaret Good (the daughter of Ruth and Frank) and Nan (Ruth’s sister). Each chapter has a title to help situate the reader such as “The Coming of Frank (1924)” or “Margaret of the Earth.”
With so many points of view, timelines, and two major characters named Margaret, the early chapters require some work to follow. Quite quickly, though, the non-linear structure builds a cumulative effect. Information revealed in one storyline will return later to be enriched upon or corrected by another character. Even the more intimate first-person narratives of young Margaret are unreliable, limited by what she has been told or restrained by how much she is willing to divulge about herself. In this way, the characters have much greater depth than a beginning-middle-end structure could have given them.
Here, young Margaret reflects on her mother: “Ruth wasn’t left entirely bereft by her deviant musician husband. He left her with an expression she uses every time I act up. ‘That’s a minor-key melodrama.’ She says it to me when I talk back, when I balk at carrying pails of dirt after school. ‘That’s a minor-key melodrama,’ she says as she ties me to my bed.”
Here, Nan observes young Margaret, her niece: “The music over, I could hear Frank closing his violin case. Margaret stood in the dining room doorway. She rolled her eyes, grabbed the fork I held and placed it with deliberation. Assuaging her need for order, she adjusted the other forks I had already placed so their angle conformed with hers.”
While the novel devotes a chapter to Harry’s unsent letters to his wife
Margaret in 1915, references to the letters appear throughout the book. The unveiling of family secrets through discovered letters is a familiar trope — a minor-key melodrama in its own right. It works in Those Are Pearls because some secrets are hiding in plain sight. One final reveal in the Acknowledgements adds yet another layer to this poignant novel.
Those Are Pearls, a novel by André Narbonne
Palimpsest Press, 248 pages
Reviewed from Advanced Reading Copy