A FOREST BURNING
By Carole Giangrande
A Fire Burning begins with a famous photographer, Lorne Winter,
jumping out of a plane into a forest fire in northern Ontario. The plane’s
pilot, Sally Grove, is a former lover of Lorne’s, and his very public death
(his jump is broadcast endlessly on national television) brings a number of old
family secrets into the open. Fiction has a habit of making the world seem a
more connected place than many of us experience it to be and, as the fallout
from Lorne’s jump makes clear, everything in the world of this book is very
connected indeed.
Carole Giangrande is a methodically figurative writer, and her images, like
the fire that gives her new book its title, have both a symbolic value and
significance as a motif. A Forest Burning is about the fallout from
fires, real and metaphorical: The fallout from Lorne’s suicide, the fallout
from the disappearance of Sally’s parents, the fallout from falling in love (children
are a kind of fallout too), and the fallout from Vietnam.
The Vietnam era was a fiery time in the United States, which is one of the
reasons why Sally Groves ends up in Canada. Sally finds Canada a cool and
nurturing place ("as vast and sturdy as a giant pair of hands, the kind
that tend to injured birds") and Toronto in particular a sanctuary:
reserved and cultured and very English, a place that at first appeared as
bland as an invalid’s diet. . . . A polite murmur of a city, and yet, in this
home of propriety and silence, she felt a staid kindheartedness and mercy.
Lacking passion, Toronto would never breed people like her parents.
Toronto is indeed a bland city (and that is not just the way it first
appears), but there is nothing in Sally’s story that lacks passion. Nor does
it lack complexity. The novel’s construction is like an echo chamber, bouncing
its themes around three generations. The fire in Ontario, to take just one
example, recalls the similarly televised fires of Vietnam (both at home and
abroad), as well as the fire that destroys Sally’s island home in the 60s.
The book is at its best when it understates these connections, and leaves its
art below the surface. But this is not always the case. The super-heightened
emotions (be forewarned, there is a lot of crying in this book) and
confusing family history combine to give A Forest Burning something of
the feel of a soap opera. This isn’t always a bad thing, but a number of scenes
are clearly overwritten.
Thoughtfully constructed novels tend to be end-focused. This is most evident
in mystery fiction, and A Forest Burning is part mystery in that it
circles around an event that doesn’t get fully explained until the
end. Giangrande’s handling of the plot is skilful in this regard. She concludes her tragic cycle of unintended consequences and emotional
fallout not with closure but with, what is more important, reconciliation.
Notes:
Review first published online April 17, 2001.
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