Deafening
By Frances Itani
HarperFlamingo Canada,
378 pages $34.95
'Taken aback where? Where had she been taken? Grania had never asked. It was one more mystery to add to the others she carried inside her. Years later, at school, when the words finally tumbled out, it was Miss Marks who intercepted and explained.
".'Put an a before back and the meaning changes,' she said. 'To be taken aback is to be surprised — by something unexpected.'
"One more complication. The language of the hearing was never simple. Language is our battleground, Grania thought. The one over which we fight, but with no desire to be part of the conflict."
Advertisements
The buzz, whiz and whir of pre- publication acclaim for Deafening has been extremely loud. Sold to 20 markets (the U.S., British and Japanese publishers are particularly ear-popping), Deafening has already made Frances Itani a millionaire. That's quite a success for any literary author, and unexpected for a first-time Canadian novelist. The last time anything like this happened (albeit with a quieter opening chorus), to as good a book and as deserving an author, readers were rewarded with Mary Lawson's Crow Lake. Deafening provides more varied pleasures just as flawlessly, and is going to win over many of the same readers and stay on the bestseller lists for as long. Inevitably, it's going to get turned into a movie and make itself as widely known as The English Patient. At a guess, that movie will begin to get made the moment Meryl Streep finishes reading this book — she's the perfect Mamo, the grandmother who saves Grania O'Neill from living the smaller, shallower, more closeted life that deafness seems ready to impose on her.
Grania grows up, comes of age and settles into married life in Deseronto, Ont., a prospering timber town and port on the Bay of Quinte, in the years leading up to and encompassing the First World War. As a five-year-old in 1902, she is struck deaf by scarlet fever. "Your name," Mamo says in the book's opening sentence, "This is the important word. If you can say your name, you can tell the world who you are." Grania can only say "Graw," and begins to say fully who she is only because Mamo rises above the hopelessness the rest of the family feels, responds to Grania's own resolute nature, and teaches her enough words and phrases to navigate neighbourhood life.
Convinced finally that their younger daughter deserves more than living at home can give her, Grania's parents send her to the Ontario School for the Deaf in neighbouring Belleville, where she spends seven years in segregated schooling (the deaf are returned to the hearing world only for summer vacations). It's there that she meets Jim (her beloved "Chim"), the hearing assistant to the school's doctor. They marry just before he departs for the Great War to serve as a stretcher-bearer in the entrenched battlefields of France and Belgium.
Frances Itani was a nurse in an intensive-care unit before she became the author of the eight collections of poetry and short stories which led up to her "overnight success" in her third decade as a writer. She's also married to an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and has lived with him in various war zones, including Croatia during the Bosnian conflict. When she shows readers the wounds Jim and his companions deal with every day, we see, smell and touch exactly what is always unavoidably there for front-line medical workers when limbs, eyes, ears and minds are shattered by bullets, flesh is torn apart and scattered by bombs, and life is violently sucked out of bodies amid the mortars, minefields and madness of military combat. It would be unendurable if it weren't so necessary to Itani's purposes, and it's as well-handled here as it's ever been by any novelist who knows what it is to be flattened by the furies of the 20th century. Comparisons to Michael Ondaatje and Timothy Findlay are inevitable, but Itani as an antiwar writer is the most precise, knowledgeable and honest of the three, as well as the least given to drawing attention to the art embedded in the writing.
Itani speaks English, French, German, some Japanese and Spanish, and is said to have mastered sign language in the six years she spent on this book. By training herself to speak to so many others on their own terms, she's acquired the elusive art of communicating directly with her reader by adopting an unadorned style that is almost Japanese and Zen-like in its suggested lyricism and suppressed theatricality.
Deafening is technically a "historical novel" (and even more meticulously researched than Jane Urquhart's excursions into rural life among the Irish in Ontario), but it has an overwhelming sense of immediacy. This happens in part because Grania, Itani says, is modelled on her own grandmother, Gertrude Freeman Stoliker (1898-1987), the Deseronto hotel the O'Neill family operates is based on a great-grandfather's, the Ontario School for the Deaf is itself, and its school newspaper, The Canadian, is quoted to excellent effect.
But it's the emotional intimacy that flows between the different generations of O'Neills that makes you feel that what exists between Mamo and Grania is carried forward, little altered, between Itani's grandmother and herself, and will be passed on to her own children's children: A neighbour says of Mamo, "Did you see the way she looked at that child? Oh, the love on her face when she looked at that ..... child." In order to get her readers entirely into the loving, serene places as well as the hateful, agitated theatres of war to which she wants to take us, Itani has trained herself to write historically in the way that most historians and all too few historical novelists do these days: by keeping the uncommon lives of common people in view without succumbing to Hollywood's stupidly narrow but potent conventions about who is heroic and who is not.
There are no generals on display in Itani's Great War, and no warriors, officers or gentlemen. The soldiers are any and all of us and the sound of war is the real enemy. "Sound knocks us all over," Jim writes to Grania from the front, "blocks all thought, seeps into the body like deadly gas." Those who vanquish it differ from those who are vanquished by it — and I'll give nothing of the plot away except to note that other members of Grania's family join the Canadian forces — through their willingness to learn what Grania can teach them about "tuning out" and finding complex but necessary routes between the roar of experience and the silence of understanding. Deafening is chockablock with lore about the techniques the deaf use to navigate an unheard world, and what they learn along the way that can teach the rest of us.
Frances Itani has the enviable knack both Austin Clarke and Barbara Gowdy share for capturing the isolation of remarkably resilient women in pictographic, unforgettable scenes of near-cinematic intensity. Deafening is not as intellectually challenging, dramatically complex nor as emotionally harrowing as either The Polished Hoe or The Romantic, but then again, those are the best two Canadian novels to have come my way in the 21st century.
Despite a plot that's predictable in too many places, Itani creates as deeply affecting a central character in Grania O'Neill as Clarke's Miss Mary-Mathilda or Gowdy's Louise Kirk or Mary Lawson's Kate Morrison — and that's very good company indeed.
Contributing reviewer T..F. Rigelhof reread Vergil's Aeneid rather than watch embedded television coverage of the invasion of Iraq.