The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2007, Síða 44

86
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 61 #2
MARTHA BROOKS
mIStik lake
Mistik Lake
by Martha Brooks
Groundwood Books, 2007
Reviewed by Kristin Perlmutter
It has often been said about small town
life that the bad news is that everyone
knows your business and the good news is
that everyone knows your business. The
accuracy of this description is proven in
Mistik Lake, the small lakeside community
in Martha Brooks' latest novel. In 1981,
when a carload of teenagers is lost beneath
the ice of Mistik Lake with only one sur-
vivor, a chain of events is set in motion
involving three generations in a local fami-
ly. Sixteen year old Sally McLean becomes
the focus of local attention. Her subse-
quent alcoholism and abandonment of her
family add further grist to the mill.
With its Icelandic and First Nations
roots and its burgeoning summer popula-
tion, Mistik Lake could also have been set
where I read it - in Gimli, Manitoba on
Lake Winnipeg, where I have spent decades
of summers. Perhaps this sense of place and
the fact that I am an Icelandic Canadian
woman of "a certain age" who can appreci-
ate the sensibilities of the two alternating
narrators, Sally's teenage daughter and her
Aunt Gloria, made it inevitable that it
would cause me to reflect on some of my
own life issues. It is certainly not essential
to identify with the book in this way but it
did create a powerful resonance and readers
of Icelandic descent will appreciate the cul-
tural references woven throughout. The
book speaks to anyone who is part of a
family and part of a community. Seeing the
lives of the characters unfold from more
than one perspective and having the text
springboard you into making personal
connections is what makes this novel work
for both young adult and more mature
readers.
One of the issues that is hard to ignore
when reading Mistik Lake is that of the
validity of personal and family history. As
I read, I sometimes visualized Odella,
Sally's young daughter, as a patient lying
on a ward, overhearing snatches of what
the medical staff were sharing with family
members about her condition that they had
not seen fit to share completely with her.
Some of the questions raised include "Who
gets to know things that concern him or
her in a deeply personal way? Who decides
what information is appropriate to share,
and when? Who knows what about whom?
What is the "truth" about the past? Do we
really know those closest to us? Have oth-
ers in our community got inside knowledge
from the past that would transform the
way we see things?" Each generation has its
secrets and, without access to these, one
fills in the gaps and then varnishes the
truth.
Mistik Lake also provides a strong
sense of the inter-connectedness of life and
of how actions, omissions, triumphs and
mistakes of family members past can
colour the lives of future generations. We
tend to see our own stories though rose
coloured glasses or through dark shades,