Sex, Death and Education

In Elizabeth Hay’s 2007 novel Late Nights on Air, the book a character selects to cure her insomnia falls open at a passage beginning “Like imperfect sleep.” It is a “lovely coincidence,” the character muses, “but it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

As Hay’s work demonstrates better than almost anyone else’s, coincidences, recurrences, re-encounters and reverberations from the past can lead novelists to fruitful places in their explorations of human interaction. However, her most recent book, Alone in the Classroom, expects perhaps too much of coincidence as a guide in crafting a contemporary story pegged to the endless repercussions of two long-ago incidents occurring almost a decade apart in two widely separated localities— yet featuring the same quartet of major characters brought back together by chance.

All four meet in 1929, when 18-year-old Connie Flood makes her teaching debut in the fictional Saskatchewan hamlet of Jewel. Ian “Parley” Burns, the elitist and somewhat menacing school principal, belittles her efforts to teach Michael Graves, a dyslexic teenager, to read. However, Syd Goodwin, an enlightened school inspector, supports Connie and also reaches out successfully to Michael.

The climax of the Saskatchewan portion of the narrative comes with a murky, presumably sexual, assault by Parley on Michael’s sister. Although the principal is forced to resign, his crime is never prosecuted or even properly examined. It is Susan, the victim, who winds up punished. Locked in her bedroom by her father, she becomes the only family member unable to escape when the house mysteriously goes up in flames.

In an interview with CBC Radio’s Shelagh Rogers, Elizabeth Hay explained that she happened on the real-life roots of this tale while doing research on Depression-era Saskatchewan for A Student of Weather in the 1990s. The incident reminded her of a 1937 criminal case in the Ottawa Valley she had learned about from her mother: a 13-year-old girl was assaulted and murdered in the woods. Because the man tried for the crime later had his conviction overturned, the exact circumstances of the girl’s death remain cloaked in mystery.

Another man from her mother’s memory bank—a high school principal nicknamed “Parley”—supplied Hay with, if not an outright suspect, at least a “disturbing sexual presence” to place on scene in the Ottawa Valley. With that, the idea of a single novel built on two far-flung assaults was born.

Bringing the four characters from Saskatchewan to the Ottawa Valley eight years later required Hay to contrive how they might reconnect. Connie Flood arrives in the fictional town of Argyle in the Ottawa Valley in 1937, now working as a newspaper reporter drawn to a story of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. Almost immediately, she re-encounters Parley Burns, fled from the west and now the high school principal in Argyle. He also seems to have an unspecified interest in this child’s death.

Soon, Connie’s former student Michael Graves— with eastern family roots and now living not far from Argyle—appears to rescue Connie when she gets lost walking in the woods. Syd Goodwin rounds out the reunion when he too turns up, an educator now conveniently based in Ottawa. What are the odds?

In order to forge this raw ore of coincidence into links of destiny, Hay offers us a fifth major character, Anne—both Connie’s niece and the novel’s narrator. Although born too late to be an eyewitness in Saskatchewan of the 1920s or eastern Ontario a decade later, Anne is steeped in family lore and as fascinated by these four people in the present as they were by each other in the past.

When Alone in the Classroom works, for my money, it works very well, particularly in the early going. Hay is a wonderful stylist, and her deep attachment to teaching and learning as defining human activities is most evident in the Saskatchewan chapters. “A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone” is how she describes Syd Goodwin’s salutary effect on Michael.

Even the saturnine Parley Burns comes to life when imparting information. Whether it is via formal education or the sermons-in-stones lessons nature provides, teachers and pupils alike swap historical facts, literary quotations, observations about language, biological field notes and more.

Meanwhile, the pedagogical relationship between Connie, the dedicated young schoolmarm, and the seductively beautiful schoolboy feels like a fresh and suggestive reading of The Corn Is Green. Not only that, Connie stands up to Parley. While I did not know how someone so young and so new on the job could be so much her own person, I loved her for it.

However, when time and tide move us to the Ottawa Valley, Anne’s limitations as a narrator and Hay’s problems as a novelist multiply. The vagueness of what Parley may or may not have done to 13-year-old Susan in Saskatchewan thickens into murk when Anne speculates about what connection he may or may not have had to the murder-rape of the 13-year-old girl in the Ottawa Valley.

Yet, as much as this narrator can seem too far away from the time and place of the early action, by the end she comes too close. Like her Aunt Connie and countless women before and after, Anne falls for a now almost-elderly Michael and lets him scuttle her marriage.

“Death and sex. They smash through the walls and sit like tanks in the living room,” Anne tells us. The trouble is, they don’t. Not in this novel. The deaths that matter are offstage and obscured in shadows. Even a hint, late in the narrative, that Michael harbours some mysterious guilt about the fire that killed his sister remains only that: a hint.

As for sex as a war weapon, Syd Goodwin—too much of a mensch right from the outset—hankers after Connie in an almost entirely cerebral way. Then, shortly after he woos and wins her, cedes her to Michael without a shot being fired.

Indeed, Michael, as a backcountry Lothario, cuts a wide swath of conquest. But whether he is seducing Connie or romancing her niece several decades later, his actions lack the sensual immediacy he displayed as a schoolboy. It is as if we have Anne’s frequently repeated word on his fatal allure, but not her bond.

Perhaps this tendency to suggest rather than show stems back to Hay’s reluctance to indict Parley Burns—or anyone else—for the crimes she never depicts directly. Or it may be that her considerable strength as a writer gradually becomes sapped by the struggle to turn outright coincidences and chance recurrences into the inexorable workings of fate.

Particularly once Alone in the Classroom slips from its moorings in the 1920s and ’30s and into Anne’s contemporary reflections, the author’s efforts to make sense of it all become too palpable. Beautiful paeans to learning for its own sweet sake are supplanted by truisms that have a book club–ready ring of themes for further discussion: “Loosen the reins and our personalities take us back to childhood; loosen them more and they take us back to our parents as children.” “It’s possible that a hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life.”

Numerous elements in Alone in the Classroom make that backward journey rewarding. But I closed the book wishing Elizabeth Hay and her narrator had recalled more sharply what that earlier character in Late Nights on Air seemed to suspect: sometimes, following where coincidence leads might turn into a forced march with no clear destination in sight.