Sheldon Currie

Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Vintage Canada, 1996, ($18.95).

Not since Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt's epic poem, Brebuff and his Brethem, have we seen Canadian Literature writ so large and wide, and with such energy, passion, and nerve. Fall On Your Knees takes the reader through the first half of the twentieth century in the company of the family of James and Materia (nee Mahmoud) Piper, a star-crossed couple in a marriage between a Gaelic speaking scottish Protestant, and a Lebanese Catholic, an elopement and a forced marriage, cursed by intolerance and doomed to multiple failures.

 It wasn't so much that the piano tuner
 was enklese, or even that he was not a
 Catholic or a man of means.  It was
 that he had come like a thief in the
 night and stolen another man's property.
 "And my daughter yielded." There was a
 word for all this in the Old Country:
 'ayb. There was no translation, people
 in this country couldn't know the depth
 of shame, of this Mahmoud was certain. 
 There was no taking her back, she was
 ruined.

Indeed, the destructive powers of intolerance rage like forestfires through thisencyclopedic attempt to capture the sad, complex history of twentieth century industrial Cape Breton. For some readers MacDonald's novel will read as a vivid dramatization of a deviant psychology text book, a literary version of Murphy's Law wherein everything wrong that can happen will happen. To be sure, there are melodramatic romps a plenty, but it is important, if the reader is to keep events of the novel in perspective, not to miss the humour, which is easy to do in, a long book about serious matters. For example, listen to this, in a chapter called "Cheap Women 'n Cheatin' Men," about Frances, a well brought up teenager who shows up for work dressed in a girl guide uniform at a 1920's Cape Breton speakeasy where she performs as a piano player/singer/semi-tart.

 Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn't
 matter where she's been or who's pawed
 her, no one gets to handle the contents
 no matter how grimy the envelope. And
 its for sure no one's going to be able
 to steam her open. Frances will bounce
 in your lap with your fly buttoned for
 as long as it takes for two bucks. 
 ...A hand job costs two fifty-she has
 a special glove she wears, left over
 from her first communion. Another
 fifty cents buys you patter, a song,
 any name you want to hear. Touch her
 little chest and cough up an extra
 buck; nothing below the belt. That's
 the menu, no substitutions. If she
 laughs at you don't whack her or
 she'll holler for Butros.(p. 293)

Sometimes it's not the content but the tone that seems to veer between outrageous comedy and barely believable pastiche like a boat barely under control, butjust when you think the boat is bound to sink under the weight of its own crazy energy, MacDonald pulls it into port, safe and sound, ready for another excursion. Sometimes the reader might feel the novelist is a puppet of the dramatist so good is she at twigging to your diminishing interest as you become aware of the hard wood of the theatre seat, and suddenly the plot thickens, your interest quickens, tension tightens and the story goes off in another direction. But it is not novelistic and dramatic tricks that keep this novel going at breakneck speed. MacDonald is a master of rhythmical language, and of the pregnant, meaningful juxtaposition, knocking off paradoxes and ironies, salting and peppering her elegant prose like a metaphysical poet. She is equally adept at a mainstay of the epic figure of speech, the extended metaphor.

 On water street, the outside walls
 of the shed thump now and then like
 a brass drum with a foot-pedal at
 work inside it keeping the beat. 
 In the shed the performance has begun.
 The upbeat grabs her neck until she's
 on point, the downbeat thrusts her
 back against the wall, two 
 eight-notes of head on wood, knuckles
 clatter incidentally. In the half-note
 rest he lights up her pale face with
 the blue wicks of his eyes, and the
 lyrics kick in con spiritu, "What right
 have you, you have no right, no right
 to even speak her name, who's the slut,
 tell me who's the slut!" The next two
 bars are like the first, then we're
 into the second movement, swing your
 partner from the wall into the
 workbench, which catches her in
 the small of the back, gracenote
 into stumble because she bounces,
 being young. Staccato across the face,
 then she expands her ercussive range
 and becomes a silent tambourine
 through this part by pretending to
 herself that s	Raggedy-Lily-of-the
 -Valley, which makes her laugh his
 second verse, "I don't want to hear
 you speak dental note to the nose
 resolves into big major chord,
 "Do-You-Under-Stand-Me?" We've gone
 all stately; it's whole notes from here
 on in. She flies against another wall
 and he follows her trajectory, taking
 his time now because he's working up to
 the finale.  One' more clash of timbers
 and tissues and it's firiall@ opera. 
 "I'll cut the tongue right out of your
 head." She sticks her tongue out at him
 and tastes blood.  Cue finale to the gut.
  Frances folds over till she's on the
 floor. Modem dancer.(p. 263)

Not every reader has the patience for that sort of elaboration, but it goes with the genre. That's how to make palatable the sight of a father in a rage, beating the living daylights out of his daughter and still leaving open any possibility for sympathy or hope for either character; it's what keeps opera from being merely soap-Opera with classical music.

MacDonald has been praised for her narrative skill, adept characterization and the musical quality of her language, and rightly so, she deserves it all; and she deserves credit for doing what no one else has done, she has re-created Industrial Cape Breton's past in all it's complexity. "But memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable."(p. 270) True, but it's all we've got, and she does her best to get it right.

Industrial Cape Breton is a polyglot place and except for the Mi'kmaq, populated by immigrants, from Italy, France, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, The Ukraine, Africa, Lebanon and Poland, which you would never know from the popular press or the tourist bureau, who try to attract off island dollars with an image of atiny collection of green hills full of kilted sword dancers highland flinging themselves in the air to the skirl of bagpipes. MacDonald's novel should help dissolve this ethnic-cleansed image.

The vast majority of these immigrants came over the sea in flight from economic, political or religious oppression and had two things in common, the pit and the church, and for most the church was the Catholic church. There were, of course, significant numbers of Protestants and Jews in industrial Cape Breton, but they were in the minority, and for the most part belonged to or were aligned with the dominant middle class, the doctors and lawyers, merchants and managers. What little money the miners got they got from the pit. They owed their loyalty to the church and in return the church offered structure and culture to make sense of their meagrelives. Among Catholics there was only one profession, there ligious profession: for men, the priesthood, for women the sisterhood. You went up to the pulpit, or the convent, or you went down into a coal mine. For the miners and their wives and children the church provided not only solace for the tribulation of their lives but pretty well all the adult culture to appear above the short horizons of their days. What ceremony, what ritual, what art, music and literature filtered through their mean lives of work and moonshine came from the church. Boys and men, girls and women sang in choirs the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Shubert et. al. Young boys muttered in muted conversation with the priest on the altar in formal Latin taught to them by nuns who taught them everything from algebra to theology in skimpy classrooms untainted by taxpayers money. The music, and the languages they brought with them, the Gaelic, Italian, French, German, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, all but disappeared in a single generation.

MacDonald captures the smell of incense of Industrial Cape Breton's religion dominated culture. The title of her novel, Fall On Your Knees, is the most dramatic line from the most popular Catholic hymn, O Holy Night, sung by huge choirs in every parish on the island to expectant crowds in crowded churches waiting for midnight mass, the musical event of the year. She captures the smell of incense, the sense of ceremony and ritual and she captures the nasty side of it all, the bigotry and intolerance, the paranoid, fearful intolerance of the Catholics, the sovereign intolerance of the Protestants, the ethnic intolerance of the european tribes, and she captures it all with good will, humour, and tolerance. It is a novel about intolerance that inspires tolerance. It's too bad she didn't write it about a half century before she was bom.

And the pit. The miners who in their thousands burrowed under the ocean through rock and coal dust to feed the flames of the major world wars and a few minor conflicts, coughing and drinking as they dug their own graves, producing coal and money for their owners and their customers, spending their own handful of change for groceries in the company stores, and rent in the company houses.

It will be some consolation, perhaps, for the dead men, women, and children who formed thebridge the shareholders of The British Empire Coal and Steel Company crossed over to get to their riches that MacDonald has allotted their oppressors and torturers their proper place in hell. Present day politicians and magnates of industry take note: someday a future MacDonald will fit you into your appropriate cell in the inferno, a nice apartment across the hall from the Medicis.

 Special company constables have been
 on the rampage: drunken goons on
 horseback wielding sticks and guns,
 knocking people down in the
 street-women, children, it makes no
 difference. The bosses are now a
 monopoly called the British Empire
 Coal and Steel Company, "Besco". This
 time, not only have they cut off credit
 at the company stores, they've cut off
 New Waterford's water and electricity.
 For the past week, sweating bucket
 brigades have stretched from the few
 wells to houses throughout town. At New
 Waterford General Hospital children lie
 parched amidst a new outbreak of all the
 old diseases with the pretty names.

Alot of good research informs this novel. MacDonald seems to know not only what went on in the miner's lives in the streets and tunnels of New Waterford and Glace Bay but also how they conducted themselves when they took their turns at bayonet fighting in France. It is a great credit to her craft that this research is an unobtrusive as the page numbering. And in spite "Of wicked and most cursed things to speak" (quoted on p. 548 from Ovid's Metamorphosis), there is a lot of fun in this book, especially for those who experienced the exigencies of growing up in a culture dominated by cruel work, moonshine and the heavy handed rituals of the Catholic church; but it is a novel for everyone: for those who love fine writing, for those who love a good story, for those who like good entertainment, and for those who want to find out what it was like.

 The more Frances tells, the more
 she remembers.  As though it were
 all parked, waiting behind the
 flimsiest of stage scenery-a scrim
 perhaps-and suddenly exposed by a
 trick of light; the countryside
 dissolving to reveal the battlefield,
 present all along.(p. 439)

Fall On Your Knees is an epic without a hero, or at least with only a little hero, Lily, who walks her little epic voyage from Cape Breton to New York, to rescue what little of her family has survived generations of intolerance, snobbery, and pig-headed ambition, and to redeem, maybe.

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