Road Ends

Mary Lawson does it again - creates rich characters in her far-north setting of Struan, Ontario. The story is told from the points of view of three members of the dysfunctional Cartwright family: Edward, the town's bank manager who is more comfortable in his office than his home, Meghan, his only daughter out of eight children, and his oldest son, Tom, who has given up a promising career after witnessing the suicide of his best friend. Another heartrending figure in the novel is four-year old Adam, quiet, neglected, and just trying to stay out of everyone's way. I admit I didn't love this book as much as Crow Lake or The Other Side of the Bridge, but I do love Lawson's writing style and this book was well worth the read.

There's a lot to like about this novel. In many ways Lawson's writing reminds me of Marilyn Robinson, and compliments don't come much higher than that. I am particularly interested in the Canadian experience - how that climate and geography impact on people - and there's a lot of insight here. But much more than that, there's guilt, forgiveness, death, families, siblings, family history and the continuation of sins from generation to generation. There's mid 1960s historical interest, London, dementia, women's issues, and a whole lot more. I think many readers, like me, will be angry with Meg as she sacrifices her own life to care for her incompetent family. Part of me wanted to say this aspect detracted from the story, but as I think show more more about it, I realize this *is* the story. People do things that outside observers regard as foolish and inexplicable, and on a logical level the behaviour is indeed foolish . . . but life does not follow logic.This novel skillfully explores the way emotions and personal history influence our behaviour. My only criticism of the novel is that I thought Tom's incompetence in domestic matters and his detachment from his young brother's situation was perhaps a little overstated, but I guess this is Lawson's way of telling us what a powerful impact events have had on him. show less

Road Ends by Mary Lawson is a very highly recommended character study of three members of the Cartwright family, a family which is slowly, tragically falling apart.

Set in Straun, Ontario, and spanning 1966-1969, the large Cartwright family is heading for a breaking point. Lawson focuses her attention on three members of the family: Edward, Megan, and Tom.

Megan has been the caregiver, housekeeper, disciplinarian, and, really, the mother to all of her brothers for years. Her mother only wants to love and care for the babies but leaves the raising of her offspring to Meg, the second oldest and only daughter. Everyone has taken Meg for granted. Now 21 year old, Meg wants to experience life on her own and sets out to live with a friend in show more London. She has heard the doctor tell her mother and father no more children and she feels this is her chance to live her own life. Before she left, Meg "had started to wonder if her mother was going senile." She is sure that at 45, she can't be but was instead simply not listening to what people are telling her.

Tom, Meg's oldest brother is in the midst of a serious depression since the suicide of his life-long friend, Robert. Tom has a degree in aeronautical engineering, but he's staying in the family home in Straun, Ontario, driving a snow plow, or a lumber truck, just biding his time, reading newspapers, eating lunch at the diner, and becoming more and more closed and emotionally distant.

The father, Edward, is the manager of the local bank but he is purposefully and completely distant and isolated from his family. He eats his meals out, he stays late at the bank, he visits the library, and when home, he goes into his study and shuts the door, avoiding any responsibility or contact with his family. He never wanted the children and he expects his wife to raise them. Alternately, he is afraid if he does discipline his sons, he will become abusive like his father. He turns a blind eye to the problems around him and all the indications that something isn't quite right with Emily, his wife. Edward alternately dreams of visiting great cities and seeing treasured art work, while also reading what is left of the many years of his mother's diaries and trying to come to terms with his childhood.

Meg's arrival in England is fraught with challenges and disappointments at the beginning, but she overcomes these hurdles and with the help of a caring supervisor, manages to land a position that uses her skills at organizing and cleaning. Meg does miss her youngest brother, Adam. She sends him Matchbox cars and is hopeful that Tom will look out for him.

Back in Canada, out of his haze of depression, Tom notices that his younger brother, Adam, smells bad... and apparently has been left to go hungry with no one around to make sure he gets meals, baths, or clean clothes. His mother has had yet another baby and she is holed up in her room, with the baby, ignoring everything around her. His father is as mentally absent as Emily; both are living in their own world. Meg's absence has propelled the inevitable falling apart of the family since she was the caregiver who kept things going and organized.

This is an incredibly well written novel that is a complex character study over a few years of time in the lives of these members of the Cartwright family. While there won't be a lot of action or complex twists and turns, this is the kind of novel that those who love character studies will relish. It also has a distinctive Canadian feel to it. You sense the great burden of snow and more snow, with one blizzard following on the heels of the previous one. It reminded me of the novels of David Adams Richards, with the melancholy that seems to pervade everything. At the end, Lawson does give us a glimmer of hope, even amidst the increasing disappointments, and leaves the reader anticipating that beyond the story there is a hopeful future. It reminds me that even when bad things happen to people, ultimately good can come out of the struggles - that there is a reason for everything.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Random House for review purposes. show less

I read this 'on a break' from trying to conquer the world's longest and dullest biography of Sylvia Plath, but really wished I hadn't after meeting the characters. Apart from Megan, who escapes her supremely dysfunctional background to start a fairly successful life in London, the Cartwrights of northern Canada are the poster family for 'just because you can doesn't mean you should'. The parents are like Mr and Mrs Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, only without the excuse of living in Regency England and trying again and again for a son and heir. And at least the Bennets stopped at five! Nine children and only one daughter, who gets lumped with running the house and raising her siblings for fifteen years - but the father, Edward, who for show more some reason gets to tell his story in first person, hides in his study from children he hates and a wife he doesn't love, while Emily keeps popping them out and then abandoning her children once out of nappies. As Megan says, 'they're not even Catholics!' I did feel really sorry for poor Adam, but who keeps having children when the brood mostly runs to boys?

There is more to the story, and the narrative is Anne Tyler-esque, which I usually enjoy, but I just couldn't get past the selfish parents. The multiple timelines, jumping back and forth to cover the same events from different perspectives, didn't help either.

Back to Sylvia *sigh* show less

Mary Lawson’s third novel focuses on the Cartwright family: parents and eight children. It is narrated from three perspectives: Edward, the father; Tom, the eldest son; and Megan, the only daughter. Edward, the town’s bank manager, hides in his study reading about cities he dreams of visiting and ignoring the family that is disintegrating around him. Tom, in the depths of a guilt-ridden depression because of the death of a friend, has abandoned his career as an aeronautical engineer and seeks only solitude. Megan, after looking after the family for 15 years, escapes to England.

Each of the three protagonists has a conflict between duty and dreams. Edward is in a marriage which has brought him children he did not want; he wants to show more see the world but has to remain an armchair traveler. Unfortunately, because he isolates himself in his study, his children flounder, especially since his wife/their mother is increasingly unfocused and forgetful. Tom had dreams but an unexpected death derails him and now he wants only peace which becomes more difficult to find in the chaos that overtakes the family. Megan wants to start her own life after years of taking responsibility for the family and succeeds in making her way in London, but her family is never far from her thoughts. It is a conflict experienced by many: wanting, because of love and a sense of duty, to do the right thing and wanting, with a great sense of guilt, to escape the sacrifices required by that love and duty: “How are you supposed to stop loving someone you love” (231)? One of the characters comments, “Love was not an idea; you couldn’t choose to get it or not get it any more than you could choose to catch or not catch flu” (268).

One of the strengths of the novel is characterization. All of the protagonists are flawed. At times they become oblivious to the needs of others because they are driven by concerns of their own. For Megan, “leaving home, living her own life, that mattered” (16). For Tom, peace is paramount: “This was exactly what he’d been afraid of, the way one thing led to another, the way you got sucked into things, the way your painstakingly, designed routine . . . all in solitude, solitude above all, could be shot to hell and you’d be in it up to your neck, you’d have no control over anything, there’d be no end to it, no peace, and he couldn’t handle it, he just couldn’t handle it” (43 – 44). Edward retreats to his study and its books because he wants to broaden his “very narrow life” (192).

Nonetheless, none of the three is totally heartless. Megan may seem selfish at times, but she looked after her family for 15 years - even her father acknowledges, “’I dare say you’ve earned [your freedom]’” (16) – and her family is never far from her mind. Tom wants no one “making any demands on him” (151), but he is unable to disregard the distress of his brother Adam. Even the self-absorbed Edward is humanized when the reader comes to understand that he has struggles of his own and that he is capable of compassion and forgiveness. This detailed and realistic portrayal of characters cannot but draw in the reader.

I live in the part of northeastern Ontario in which Lawson has set all her novels, and I can attest to the fact that her descriptions are accurate. A review in the National Post stated it perfectly: “[Lawson] can justifiably lay claim to an oeuvre as well as a personal geography. If the part of Ontario west of Toronto is [Alice] Munro country, then the area northwest of New Liskeard and Cobalt — where her fictional towns of Struan and Crow Lake are roughly located — may well end up being dubbed Lawson Country” (http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/11/15/book-review-road-ends-by-mary-lawson/).

As the title Road Ends suggests, a sadness permeates the book and, indeed, more than one character faces grief and loss, but that does not mean there is no hope offered. Again, more than one character comes to realize that one road may end but there is another that can be taken.

I loved Lawson previous books, Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, and I loved this one as well. I found myself totally enthralled. It is a beautifully written story of duty, sacrifice and family love which will remain with the reader for a long time. show less

Mary Lawson’s third novel Road Ends is set over a three year period in the 1960’s. The story alternates between the small (fictional) Northern Canadian town of Struan and London. Lawson’s descriptions of the Canadian Landscape are breath-taking, making for a wonderful sense of place.

“Everything monochrome, shades of white and grey. Snake fences tacking their way down the edges of the fields, every rung neatly capped with snow. Dark, snow-laden trees beyond the fields. Sky a flat and endless grey. All around him snow stretched pure and clean and untouched apart from the path of the snowplough, a scar across a perfect face. Now and then a couple of crows lifted from the trees like scraps of charred paper, floated for a moment in show more the still air, cawing harshly to each other, then dropped back into the woods. No other sound”

Twenty-one year old Megan Cartwright has never been outside the small Canadian town where she was born; and still lives with her enormous family. Her education suffered from the years of helping her mother care for a succession of baby brothers. In 1966 Megan comes to a momentous decision, a decision she is helped in, surprisingly, by her emotionally absent father, the town bank manager. Megan decides to leave, and go to England. At home Megan’s elder brother Tom is studying aeronautical engineering, while her five younger brothers cause chaos around her. Megan is an organisational genius, under her exacting eye the house runs like clockwork, and the boys although frequently grubby and unruly behave as well as they are capable of.

The story is cleverly told from three viewpoints – moving backwards and forwards across the three year time period. In this way the story of a family, a community tragedy and its aftermath are gradually and sensitively revealed.

Megan arrives in London in the pouring rain, dragging a huge suitcase with her to the door of an old friend in Ladbroke Grove. Predictably perhaps, the friend is not there and Megan’s suitcase is stolen while she is introduced to the delights of a Chelsea bun in a local café.

“In terms of landscape the real thing was disappointing. She’d expected beauty – rolling hills, tranquil valleys – and instead, what little she could make out through the misted windows was flat and wet and a tedious shade of grey. She kept thinking it would get better around the next bend but there were no bends and it didn’t; in fact, as they approached London it got dramatically worse.”

The motley crew of inhabitants in the house where her friend formally lived invite Megan to stay, little knowing or caring themselves who is in the house at any one time. Desperate to find a reason to stay after her inauspicious start, Megan finds work in a department store, a job she tries hard to get on with but doesn’t much enjoy. Mrs Jamison in the personnel department takes a liking to Megan, and understanding that the store isn’t making Megan happy, puts her in touch with some friends who are starting up an exclusive little guest house. In helping to decorate and set up the Montrose, Megan is in her element, loving every minute of her new life, only occasionally feeling pangs of homesickness when letters arrive from home. Megan has friends, a flat of her own; she begins to feel that her life is settled with a great future ahead of her.

“His goal was to construct each day like the hull of a ship, every action a plank fitting exactly up to the next, no gaps or holes where thoughts might seep in, no changes to throw him off course, no surprises. Work, eat, read the paper, go to bed; stick to the routine and you’ll make it through the day.”

Back in Struan two tragedies occur that involve Tom’s best friend Robert. The events of a day in August 1967 are still being felt in the snow bound January and February of 1969, as Tom struggles to pick up the threads of his life. Driving a snow plough during the winter months, his studies abandoned; Tom’s life is one of easy routine, finishing work he goes to the town café each day orders the same food, and sits silently in a booth with his newspaper. His routine begins to unravel however when a new waitress starts working at his daily haunt, a girl seemingly obsessed with vegetables, Tom’s jealously guarded silence is threatened. Problems at home also begin to intrude into his consciousness. His mother is behaving a little oddly, his little brother smells and the home help is useless. Without the glue that is Megan holding the family together, this fragile family starts to unravel. snowroad

Tom’s father Edward, when he is at home is shut away from his struggling family, surfacing only long enough to roar at two of his more troublesome sons, in a voice that reminds him painfully of his own father. A thankfully inept arsonist is on the loose in Struan, evidence of which is found under Mr Cartwright’s office window. Edward’s bitter feud with Robert’s father rumbles on in the background, despite the hurt and tragedy that has scarred the last couple of years. Robert’s father; sitting barefoot on his snowy porch demonstrates poignantly the devastation that can come out of the blue.

In London meanwhile, some of the letters from home cause Megan some concern, not least the news that her mother is about to have yet another baby. Megan’s mother Emily always seems to pour all her attention into her latest baby, as Megan knows only too well having picked up the slack for years before she left. Certain that her little brother Adam was the last child her mother would have, Megan is dismayed that her mother has gone against medical advice and become pregnant again. In 1969, three years after leaving home, Megan is contacted by her elder brother – a conversation that infuriates Megan, and forces her to make a choice, a choice between her independence and the life she left behind.

This is my absolute favourite of the three excellent novels written by Mary Lawson, it’s very evocative, beautifully written, and I carried the characters with me for days after I had finished. In Road Ends there is depth and a multi-layered story rich in texture and emotion; it is a very fine novel about grief, dreams and family responsibility. show less

I have binge-read all of Mary Lawson's books over the last couple of weeks. I read Crow Lake many years ago and it became one of my all-time favourite novels. After re-reading it a couple of weeks ago, I decided to see if Mary Lawson had written anything else, and ordered her other two books, both of which I read over the weekend.

Road Ends is my least favourite of the three, but still a powerful and engaging read. Like all Lawson's books, it is set in a remote Ontario town called Struan. There are even cameos from a couple of characters from Crow Lake in there, which I enjoyed seeing.

The book is about a family with eight sons and one daughter. The father is remote and busy, shut away in his study when he is home and leaving the raising show more of all these kids largely to his only daughter since his wife seems only to be interested in children while they are still babies.

So when Megan, at the age of 21, decides it's time to leave home, it's inevitable that things might start to go wrong.

The story is told from three points of view: Tom, the eldest son, Megan and Edward, the father. Tom and Megan's sections are told in third person while Edward's are in first person, almost like a journal he's writing for himself.

Tom is home again at the age of 25, dealing with a tragedy that he feels at least partly responsible for. He's shut himself off from the world, not speaking or engaging with anyone any more than he has to and keeps to a strict, unalterable routine to keep his world within the boundaries he can cope with.

Yet as things begin to spiral out of control at home, Tom finds himself having to deal with more and more and his carefully built walls begin to crumble, allowing the rest of the world to begin creeping in.

Meanwhile, Megan has moved to London which, after the smallness of Struan is something of a culture shock. Yet, ever practical and pragmatic, she manages to find work she loves and build a life for herself. She misses her family, but revels in not having to be responsible for them anymore.

Edward, locked in his study, is largely unaware of the chaos reigning outside the door. The occasional rowdy fight between his sons drags him away from his reading and he emerges to yell at them, something he regrets afterward because it reminds him of his own father, a brutal man whose shadow he has never really managed to escape.

The emotional and physical isolation of these characters is almost painful to read. But their eventual growth as they begin to dig themselves out from the holes they have been hiding in is worth the pain.

The ending was disappointing though. And I think that's why it isn't my favourite of the three novels by this author. The explanation for the mother's fading from the world didn't ring entirely true to me, and both Megan and Tom disappointed me. They both had other choices they could have made in the situation, although I do sort of understand why they acted the way they did. I just wished it could have been different.

But overall, this is another beautiful book by Mary Lawson that illustrates the harshness and isolation and the wild, untamed beauty of small communities in the North of Canada. show less