Crammed with Crime

The Glass Harmonica is set in Newfoundland, but it is not necessarily a Newfoundland book. Russell Wangersky focuses on one street in St. John’s, rather than taking on the whole East Coast cosmology. A narrow focus, but The Glass Harmonica is a wonderful work, a large work, lyrical at times (children “can feel the currents in a room the way eagles find thermals”), yet the prose is clean, hard and informative, revealing hopes and spite as the narrative moves house to house on McKay Street.

The book is reminiscent of Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio, but the novel can also be compared to television fare such as Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane, Coronation Street or The Wire, and I mean that comparison in the best way. This book would make a compelling gossipy TV series. Suspicious eyes always watching and murderous secrets behind old glass windows. Romance! Intrigue! Latvian factory ships in the drydock!

The Glass Harmonica starts off placidly, but do not be deceived: events soon move in a headlong rush. Keith O’Reilly, a seemingly unremarkable retired dockworker, sorts drywall nails and odds and ends in his private workshop (“every piece had its own little history”). Then Keith witnesses a pizza delivery driver across the street beating a customer to death on his snowy doorstep. Keith is hesitant to call the police. As later chapters unfold, we find reasons for this hesitation, find that the witness is not so innocent himself, that he has a past hidden behind a piece of drywall (hence the book’s early mention of drywall screws) and a body hidden behind a ship’s welded bulkhead. There are few innocents in Wangersky’s book; it is both a whodunit and a who-the-hell-didn’t-do-it. 

The book comes with a map of McKay Street and the map reminds me of a harmonica, square row houses laid out like a scale of connected notes, high notes and low notes, the good end of the street and the poorer parts, each house, each window, each set of eyes.

The come-from-away architect killed over pizza was designing a house of secret beauty, plain on the outside, stunning and inventive inside, a house of secrets in a book of secrets, and Wangersky is patient with his hints, revealing telling details slowly, methodically.

And like the stunning HBO series The Wire, there is a stark refusal to lay blame in black and white terms; instead these crimes are made explicable. Crimes may still be repulsive, may show a lack of logic or foresight or intelligence, but they become understandable.

Money seems at the root of many choices and problems on McKay Street. Conflicts and fights and thefts seem driven by cash flow (or lack thereof) and class and sex (or lack thereof). This murder most foul is over eight missing loonies. The weapon is a snow shovel: murder most Canadian. The novel’s cheery lesson seems to be that “bad things are all pretty much inches away from everyone all the time.” A shovel, a burglar in your house, a teen abducted from the street, a moose coming through the windshield, hooves kicking at your head and breaking your neck.

The Glass Harmonica repeatedly plays on the idea of witnesses or watchers. Keith witnesses the killing, then Liz, the killer’s girlfriend, testifies as a witness against him at his trial. Edith, an older woman, watches the street, and even watches Keith watching the street. A younger man sees Edith taken to an old folks’ home against her will, abducted on the street like a missing girl years before. A woman catches a neighbour amorously admiring bras hung on a clothesline and calls him a pervert. Crazyman Carter says, “Not much escapes me when I am on watch.” Many eyes see a young woman cornered by local thugs who strip her, but no one comes to her aid.

No one set of eyes is reliable, no one voice can tell it all, but the parts add up, and at times alter the strange story, and the reader sorts through the pieces the way Keith sorts through nails. Every epistolary turn brings “a new piece you didn’t expect.” A woman’s overstuffed parlour has shelves “filled with figurines so close together they looked like passengers on a rush-hour figurine subway.” Crammed houses, crammed shoeboxes, crammed prisons and a full narrative; the reader learns more with each chapter and array of voices.

Different voices narrate many short chapters, reminiscent of linked stories forming a novel, as exemplified by Alice Munro, Ha Jin or Harold Hoefle’s recent novel in stories, The Mountain Clinic. I also thought of the English writer B.S. Johnson’s fine novel The Unfortunates, which comes contained in a case and with the chapters unbound; each reader can alter the order. The Glass Harmonica jumps very freely in terms of chronology, but all events are delicately connected, connected in the way Keith solders bits of metal in his workshop.

And all the lives are connected: affected by and affecting others. A husband works driving a snowplow. Struggling to pay off his wife’s gambling habit, he takes too much overtime and falls asleep at the wheel. He drives into a fence, crosses a line, turns to theft and is later branded a career criminal by the courts. But we understand what has happened, the cause and effect; we are privy to the secrets, the narrowing choices. Narrow houses on narrow streets made narrower with heaped snow suggest a lack of options: narrow sidewalks funnel down to a narrow harbour, as if lives are squeezed, directed, like Blake’s Thames, chartered, walled in.

A shovel is a murder weapon near the start, but another shovel shows up later in the novel in Keith’s backyard. Keith and his wife, Evelyn, are dead and their exiled son, Vincent, buries a jewellery box, buries his memories, his troubled birthright. Vincent had fled Newfoundland, but he is pulled back when his parents die, and he debates whether to stay. Is it home?

He leaves again and seems to find a kind of peace on the west coast of Canada, finds faith in a woman named Faith on the opposite coast. His parents are gone, his past is buried in the garden, the house and contents are for sale, and he can start anew, make a new home, released from history. A number of this novel’s characters in tight corners are forced to the same conclusion: “Some things you can’t just fix.” Vincent, however, does seem to fix his life. Vincent seems a positive note in the book.

Russell Wangersky is a fine writer and the book has beautiful descriptions of storms and light, a snowplow getting smaller and smaller under so much sky, snow-shrouded parked cars as the plow passes by “flinging the heavy, curling wave of snow and slush up onto the curb.” It is a skillful mix of an overarching narrative voice and the mimesis of many individual characters, an omniscient narrator, but also a sense of separate voices, like separate notes linked in a harmonica. Wangersky’s pages do not brim with sunny bromides, but they sing.

The final chapter is in the mind of a stroke victim, a shadowy version of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, a dark but compelling ending. In Joyce’s short story “Araby,” houses gaze at each other, conscious of decent lives within. Houses also gaze at each other on McKay Street, but this “Music for Glass Harmonica” is slightly more ominous.