[.ca] Swimming into darkness (ISBN 1550501860)

Taking the Plunge:
Helgason, Gail Swimming into Darkness Coteau Books: Regina 2001 Helgason's Gilead is a town "twelve miles south of Whitefish Lake in east-central Saskatchewan" The time is summer of 1962 when Thora - Helgason's protagonist - is 13 years old. Thora and her friends are spending the summer at their cabins on Whitefish Lake, taking swimming lessons while around them the rage on both sides of the doctor's strike of 1962 grows and turns uglier. Children are inevitably pitted against one another as their parents join in the dark rhetoric of the period. Deaths and an amputation are attributed to the doctors' refusal to work under the government's new arrangements, while on the other side of the heated debate, supporters of Medicare are convinced by the warnings of an impending communist takeover of the province. Helgason's other setting is Edmonton in the summer of 1998. Here an adult Thora is wrestling to complete a resurrection of the homestead of an Icelandic-Canadian poet by the name of Markus Olafsson before the deadline for its opening as a heritage site. In the course of her work, she discovers that a troublesome leak in the basement is caused by a tunnel Olafsson must have dug from an outbuilding to the cemetery where his son was buried. His guilt over his son's death (Olafsson asked him to work in the field and a sudden storm came up and the boy was struck by lightening while Olafsson was in his study writing poetry) is tied both to his tunnel digging and to the abandonment of his writing. Thematically, Swimming into Darkness explores the consequences of the struggle with guilt, the burden of accepting or rejecting perceived responsibility and the reaction against change. Helgason's protagonist is very much an observer, and through her eyes (relatively innocent in the 1962 episodes) we see the heart-rending, sometimes violent confrontation between neighbours, relatives and (former) friends as the change to a publicly-funded health system fuels cold-war fears of communist encroachment. The whole province was - one might say - "swimming into darkness." The Edmonton period of Thora's life seems too loosely relevant to its counterpart half of the novel for my tastes, as if two novelettes were intertwined to make a novel. It does, however, introduce the reader to the mentality that drove Icelanders away from their homeland into Canada to start a new life. For them, also, the move was a "swim into darkness." Helgason's choice of structure - telling the two stories in alternate chapters - is not her invention. She does the necessary work to bring the reader along, and keep him in both stories even though their relatedness is not obvious. Her writing style is workmanlike rather than poetic Attempts to be less prosaic often fall flat, as in, "My blood vessels throbbed and amplified, heating my inner core." More successful are some of her "snapshots", word paintings of memories in the mind of the young Thora: Gretchen keeping ahead, even though she's carrying the sweeping net, her copper hair flying, canvas shoes thudding against hard-baked earth. Pink-cheeked, giggling and bursting ahead each time I catch up. The lake a smooth blue sheet. The sun warm. The scent of alfalfa in the rain-rinsed air. Swimming into Darkness is Helgason's first novel. ***