The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2002, Side 43

Vol. 57 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
41
and her interest in them leads to her even-
tual career as an historian.
1962 was the year that Saskatchewan’s
NDP government brought in the first
Medicare bill, paving the way for universal
health care across Canada eight years later,
but at the time prompting a bitter month-
long doctor’s strike beginning on
Dominion Day.
Thora’s best friend, Gretchen, is the
daughter of the town’s only doctor, the
charismatic Scotsman, “Mac” McConnell.
The McConnells, whose summer cottage is
next door to the Sigurdsons, have befriend-
ed Thora. Mrs. McConnell helps lead
Thora to her career in archeological history
by building a scale model replica of the
Sigurdson homestead where Bjorn was
born.
But the doctor’s strike forces everyone
in town to take sides, and tests Thora’s loy-
alty to Gretchen and the McConnells.
Thora remains publicly neutral. This neu-
trality is mirrored by her perhaps deliber-
ate inattention to the realities around her,
an inattention which has fatal conse-
quences. “Now I see that I always wanted
to leave things blurry;” says the middle-
aged Thora about her younger self. “I
feared the certainty of sharp lines and unas-
sailable facts.”
Thora was not, she recalls elsewhere,
“a particularly curious child, certainly not
about the past.” But the tests and traumas
of the summer shape her older self. “In my
field, historical archeology,” she says, “my
job is to look backwards and at the same
time figure out what the future would have
looked like from an earlier perspective.”
Still, she admits, “I’ve trained myself not to
get mired down in the present.”
Thora’s present includes not only her
Olafsson project, but also her ruptured
relationship with Paul. Helgason, whose
short story collection Fracture Patterns
(1995) contains many strong women char-
acters, creates in Thora a vivid and unfor-
gettable narrator. Thora is a remarkable
mixture of compassion and hard-headed-
ness, which she turns on her examination
of herself on the brink of young adulthood.
But, the narration by her middle-aged self
shows many unintended resonances of
lessons not learned..
The novel is suffused with water
imagery—stagnant, murky, cleansing and
unforgiving, life-enhancing and deadly.
(The novel’s opening line is “We are here
because of the lake, my father used to
say.”) This sustained motif is Helgason’s
greatest accomplishment in the novel. In
one particularly impressive passage Thora
and her mother learn of Bjorn’s heart
attack “out on the ice” at the curling rink,
while the minister who has come to deliver
the news makes unsatisfying tea from the
wrong water as his boots leave “cookie-size
pools of water” on the floor.
The chapters set in 1962 are the heart
of the novel, as Thora struggles with the
realities of the “adult” world, and they
contain some of the most moving and poet-
ically described scenes, partly because
Thora has learned to revel in detail and
“excavate” her past. The sections set in
1998 are not always as strong, the charac-
ters less deftly drawn. Still, Helgason pulls
it all together in the end as images and fore-
shadowing come together to allow Thora
to solve not only the mystery of the leaking
basement at the homestead, but the greater
mystery of why Markus abandoned poet-
ry-
Swimming into Darkness is a luminous
and haunting story told with confidence
and skill. I look forward eagerly to Gail
Helgason’s next book.
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