Sign In Sign-Up

Fly-Fishing Equipment, from Orvis, Sainsburys Online Shopping, Ace Catalogue, UK, Satellite Radio, from Sirius Chapters, Canada . Buy Now Pay Later With Interest Free Credit | Crow Lake Author: Mary Lawson Hardcover Temporarily Unavailable to Order The vendor has indicated there is currently no stock of this title . Please select another item. Our Price: $34.95 Our Sale Price: $24.46 Savings: $10.49 (30%) Dimensions: 304 Pages | ISBN: 0676974791 Published: February 2002 | Published by Knopf Canada Our customers who bought this item also bought: Unless (2002) Book ~ Carol Shields Clara Callan (2001) Book ~ Richard B. Wright Family Matters (2002) Book ~ Rohinton Mistry Atonement (2001) Book ~ Ian McEwan The Corrections (2001) Book ~ Jonathan Franzen chapters.indigo Review Review by Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo Books & Music Inc. I will go out on a limb and say that I believe Crow Lake will be a Giller nominee. This beautifully written, intricately woven novel is an oft-told yet engrossing story about family, that at the same time, makes us question if we are enjoying and building our family relationships as well as we might as adults. From the Publisher A stunning first novel from a gifted writer. The rights to this searing family drama and contemporary love story have already sold in 9 territories. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch-perfect that you know from the opening page that this is the real thing – a literary experience to shout about, by an author of immense talent. Here is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rough-hewn heart of the Canadian Shield. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur – offstage. Centre stage are their neighbours, the Morrison children, whose tragedy looks more immediate, if less brutal, but is in reality insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison is her older brother Matt’s protégée, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Years later, working as an invertebrate biologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she has outgrown her siblings – Luke, Matt and Bo – who were once her entire world. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harboured and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with humour and consummate control, overturning one’s expectations right to the end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, Crow Lake is a tour de force that will catapult Mary Lawson to the forefront of fiction writers today. About the Author Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a farming community in southwestern Ontario. A distant relative of L. M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables ), she moved to England in 1968, and now lives with her husband in Surrey. She returns to Canada every year. Asked on CBC’s This Morning what she misses most about Canada, she says without hesitation that it’s the rocks of the Canadian Shield. England has rocks, she says, but they are not smooth and rounded and “whale-like.” Lawson is a firm believer in the strength of the influences we receive as children, a theme explored in the book. Lawson’s father was a research chemist for an oil company in Sarnia, Ontario, and the family lived in Blackwell, which was then a small farming community — though not nearly as remote as that of Crow Lake — and spent summers at a cottage up north. She studied psychology at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-sixties, and says that Montreal was an eye-opening experience after growing up in Blackwell. “We had the radio, but we had no television, and relative to what kids know today … they are just so much more knowledgeable than we were.” She graduated in 1968 and went to England, finding work in a steel-industry research lab in London, which is where she met her husband, Richard. Published under the “New Face of Fiction” program at age 55, Lawson calls herself a “late starter,” though she began writing when her sons were small. She joined a creative-writing class, which she continues to attend, mainly for the companionship, and she took literature courses to study other writers. She describes the first novel she wrote, which was set in England, as a disaster: though it was a good story with characters and plot, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. “It was a story without a point.” Then her parents fell ill with cancer, and she spent a lot of time in Canada. She started writing Crow Lake shortly after the double trauma of her parents dying and her sons leaving home. “I was thinking a lot about the passing of time and different types of loss and the importance of family and the significance of childhood. I think you are particularly receptive when you are a kid, and you take in not just the physical landscape, but the society and the culture and what matters to people. And it all just sits there -- eventually, if you are a writer, it comes out.” At length, a short story she wrote in the 1980s for Woman’s Realm magazine in England was transformed into Crow Lake . She sent the manuscript out several times before it found the right agent, who then responded enthusiastically within twenty-four hours. The characters in the novel are entirely invented, with the exception of the baby, Bo, who was modelled closely on her own little sister. She was interested in exploring the brother-sister relationship and the notion that family members establish roles for one another which are hard to break free from (“In my family…I’m the ‘Emoter’,” she notes). In particular, she wanted to look at hero worship and what happens “to the worshipper and to the hero” when the hero fails. While indebted to J. D. Salinger for pointing her towards using children as a subject, and to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for the technique of writing a book with a child as narrator, Lawson says it was having her own children that taught her that people are born as individuals. With its powerful emotional resonance, Crow Lake has already won the hearts of many readers, and Lawson’s next novel will be anxiously awaited. Author Interviews Q. What inspired you to write this novel? A. The honest answer is, I don’t know. The novel came from a short story, and the short story came from a single sentence, which came into my mind one morning without explanation and out of nowhere. It was, “My great-grandmother fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning.” This was true–fact not fiction–though I still have no idea why I suddenly thought of it. My mother had mentioned our great-grandmother often when we were children, but that was a long time ago and I hadn’t quite given her a thought for years. There was quite a gap between the short story and the novel, and during that time both of my parents died and my children flew the nest. I spent even more time than usual, then, thinking about issues of family, home and childhood, and I have no doubt that that had an influence on the novel. Q. Do you see Kate’s character as being autobiographical to a certain extent, and, if so, in what ways? A. If you’d asked if the story was autobiographical–no. Virtually nothing that takes place in the novel happened in my life. But you asked about Kate’s character, which is harder to answer. She is much more serious than I am, but circumstances have made her so. She has been damaged by loss, and the damage has made her rather self-righteous and judgmental–I hope I am not quite as hard on other people as she is. Having said that, I do share some of her prejudices: the work ethic is strong in both of us; I expect a lot of myself and of those around me; I am not by nature tolerant, easygoing or laissez-faire. But fear of further loss has caused Kate to limit her world. Academic study is safe; it cannot betray her. Love, on the other hand, would make her vulnerable again. So she keeps the barriers up, to protect herself. Life has been much kinder to me than it was to her. As for other similarities; I have two older brothers, whom I adored as a child (still do), so I have shared with Kate the experience of hero worship. I also have a younger sister, whose infant self was the model for Bo. (She is the only character based on a “real” person, apart from Great-Grandmother.) Family is tremendously important to Kate, and it is to me. Q. “Setting too much store by education can be a subtly dangerous thing.” Do you agree, and if so, why? A. I think setting too much store by any ideal, however admirable, can be dangerous. It can take over; it can damage your sense of proportion and blind you to other things. Q. Why did you choose northern Ontario as the background for this novel? How much did you draw on your own childhood experiences? A. I grew up in southern Ontario, but my family spent a lot of time in the North, and it is the North I think of when I think of home. The community I grew up in was larger than Crow Lake, less isolated, much less homogeneous, and less remote, but it was isolated enough that people depended on each other, and took care of each other. There is a downside to small communities of course–they are hell on earth for those who don’t fit in–but I remember it with affection, and Crow Lake is in some respects a tribute to it. Small incidents in the book did take place in reality–people regularly go through the ice out on the lake, for instance, and the winter storms I’ve described are drawn from life. The ponds are drawn from life too–as in the novel, they were back beyond the railroad tracks, and were full of all manner of marvellous wriggling creatures. Q. The novel moves in its very early stages into tragedy. Do you think it would be fair to say that the rest of the novel deals with overcoming that? A. A number of people who have read Crow Lake feel that its main theme is bereavement and coming to terms with loss, but in fact that was not uppermost in my mind when I wrote it. For me, the heart of the novel is the relationship between Matt and Kate, and the greatest and most tragic loss in the story is the loss of that relationship. The tragedy which occurs at the beginning of the book would have had an enormous effect on all the Morrison children, and the story of their attempt to remain together as a family is the backbone of the novel, but for me, the central struggle is Kate’s attempt to understand what went wrong between her and Matt – a struggle which requires her to re-evaluate the goals and principles by which she has lived her life. Q. For you, what was the importance of the ponds? Clearly, they are a symbol of a bond of closeness between Matt and Kate, but the strong emphasis placed on biological study is evident. Is this an area you yourself have studied in the past? A. Initially, I based the novel around the ponds purely out of nostalgia; I remember the ponds where I grew up as a source of great delight. They are small worlds, after all, and if there are shelves or shallow places within them you feel as if you are seeing the whole of that world. It changes constantly, and yet it is always the same. As the novel progressed, though, the ponds took on a wider significance. They were, as you say, a symbol of the closeness between Matt and Kate, but to me they also came to represent Kate’s childhood–the period of “innocence” before she was, as she saw it, betrayed by Matt. The trips with Matt to the ponds survived the tragedy that overtook the family at the beginning of the book, and partly through them, Kate managed to survive it too. But they did not survive Matt’s “betrayal,” and in an emotional sense, neither did she. In fact, the ponds were the scene of the crime. Kate says in the book, “By the following September the ponds themselves would have been desecrated twice over, as far as I was concerned, and for some years after that I did not visit them at all.” Years later, when Kate decides on her choice of career, it is partly because of a fear–almost a terror–that the ponds themselves, the symbol of the golden period of her childhood, may not survive. “I imagined myself,” she says, “going back to them one day in the future, looking into their depths and seeing . . . nothing.” Having set the novel around the ponds, the choice of biology as Matt’s passion and Kate’s later field of study was almost inevitable, but I was more than happy with that. I do not have a background in biology, but of all the sciences it is the most easily accessible to the layman, and as a subject it is so beautiful, and so fascinating, that I had no fear that readers would be put off by small passages of description. Q. In her adult life, the breakdown of her relationship with her brother affects her relationships with other men, i.e., Daniel. What do you think is the significance of Daniel’s character and why did you choose him for Kate? A. In spite of Kate’s denial, I think Daniel is quite a lot like Matt. He would have to be pretty special for Kate to be interested in him, and he would have to be quite unusual to be interested in Kate, disillusioned and bitter as she is! She says at one point that she had never expected to admire anyone again; if Matt could turn out to have feet of clay, what hope was there for anyone else? And yet she admires Daniel. She sees in him the qualities that she knows she is lacking in herself–tolerance, open-mindedness, and generosity of spirit. Daniel can see the whole view, whereas Kate is blinkered by the past. He represents what she would like to have been, and just possibly might still be. On another level though, Daniel represents what Matt should have been, and this is a problem for Kate. When she looks at Daniel, she sees all that Matt has lost. On his side, I believe Daniel is attracted to Kate partly because of her honesty. She does not pretend, to others or to herself. It is this that is her salvation in the end–she is able to look at her “picture of how things are,” and see that it is wrong. Q. What do you think lies behind the anger and resentment between the two brothers, Matt and Luke, which results in violence? A. I think a lot of the tension between Matt and Luke stems from the fact that their balance of power has shifted. Until “the accident,” Luke was very much the lesser brother. He was a standard, bored, sullen, resentful teenager, his deficiencies highlighted by comparison with his brilliant younger brother. And then comes the accident. Traumatic though it is, I think the accident is the making of Luke. From being the family problem, he becomes the family solution. He sees that it is in his power to save the rest of the family, and he does that, at great personal cost. Perhaps he would have “found himself” anyway, but it would have taken a long time. In particular, it is Bo’s overwhelming need of him that transforms Luke. No one ever needed him before, and no one adored him as she does. “Yeah, but she likes me,” he says to Aunt Annie. You could say that he needed Bo every bit as much as the other way round. So Luke is now head of the family. He is mother and father rolled into one, and this is a problem for Matt. I don’t see Matt as being jealous or resentful by nature, but still, things have changed, and the change is hard for him to accept. He is hugely indebted to Luke, and that debt would be a heavy burden. You expect your parents to make sacrifices for you–that is what parents do–but you don’t expect it of your siblings. To complicate matters, Matt genuinely doubts Luke’s ability to carry off his plan. His lack of faith would have been galling to Luke. What it boils down to, I guess, is sibling rivalry. That plus the anxiety, uncertainty and grief which both boys had to deal with at the time. Q. Did you enjoy writing this novel? And did the final ending mirror that which you had in mind upon starting to write? A. I loved it. Initially, when I answered this question, I wrote “I loved every minute of it.” My husband, reading it through, scribbled, “That’s a load of bull. You did not. I was there.” So for the sake of absolute accuracy, I’ve deleted “every minute of.” I knew how it was going to end, though for a long time I couldn’t work out how to get there. How to get Kate to see that she had got it wrong–that was the problem. Daniel and Marie helped me out in the end. Tips for your Reading Group Q. What inspired you to write this novel? A. The honest answer is, I don’t know. The novel came from a short story, and the short story came from a single sentence, which came into my mind one morning without explanation and out of nowhere. It was, “My great-grandmother fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning.” This was true–fact not fiction–though I still have no idea why I suddenly thought of it. My mother had mentioned our great-grandmother often when we were children, but that was a long time ago and I hadn’t quite given her a thought for years. There was quite a gap between the short story and the novel, and during that time both of my parents died and my children flew the nest. I spent even more time than usual, then, thinking about issues of family, home and childhood, and I have no doubt that that had an influence on the novel. Q. Do you see Kate’s character as being autobiographical to a certain extent, and, if so, in what ways? A. If you’d asked if the story was autobiographical–no. Virtually nothing that takes place in the novel happened in my life. But you asked about Kate’s character, which is harder to answer. She is much more serious than I am, but circumstances have made her so. She has been damaged by loss, and the damage has made her rather self-righteous and judgmental–I hope I am not quite as hard on other people as she is. Having said that, I do share some of her prejudices: the work ethic is strong in both of us; I expect a lot of myself and of those around me; I am not by nature tolerant, easygoing or laissez-faire. But fear of further loss has caused Kate to limit her world. Academic study is safe; it cannot betray her. Love, on the other hand, would make her vulnerable again. So she keeps the barriers up, to protect herself. Life has been much kinder to me than it was to her. As for other similarities; I have two older brothers, whom I adored as a child (still do), so I have shared with Kate the experience of hero worship. I also have a younger sister, whose infant self was the model for Bo. (She is the only character based on a “real” person, apart from Great-Grandmother.) Family is tremendously important to Kate, and it is to me. Q. “Setting too much store by education can be a subtly dangerous thing.” Do you agree, and if so, why? A. I think setting too much store by any ideal, however admirable, can be dangerous. It can take over; it can damage your sense of proportion and blind you to other things. Q. Why did you choose northern Ontario as the background for this novel? How much did you draw on your own childhood experiences? A. I grew up in southern Ontario, but my family spent a lot of time in the North, and it is the North I think of when I think of home. The community I grew up in was larger than Crow Lake, less isolated, much less homogeneous, and less remote, but it was isolated enough that people depended on each other, and took care of each other. There is a downside to small communities of course–they are hell on earth for those who don’t fit in–but I remember it with affection, and Crow Lake is in some respects a tribute to it. Small incidents in the book did take place in reality–people regularly go through the ice out on the lake, for instance, and the winter storms I’ve described are drawn from life. The ponds are drawn from life too–as in the novel, they were back beyond the railroad tracks, and were full of all manner of marvellous wriggling creatures. Q. The novel moves in its very early stages into tragedy. Do you think it would be fair to say that the rest of the novel deals with overcoming that? A. A number of people who have read Crow Lake feel that its main theme is bereavement and coming to terms with loss, but in fact that was not uppermost in my mind when I wrote it. For me, the heart of the novel is the relationship between Matt and Kate, and the greatest and most tragic loss in the story is the loss of that relationship. The tragedy which occurs at the beginning of the book would have had an enormous effect on all the Morrison children, and the story of their attempt to remain together as a family is the backbone of the novel, but for me, the central struggle is Kate’s attempt to understand what went wrong between her and Matt – a struggle which requires her to re-evaluate the goals and principles by which she has lived her life. Q. For you, what was the importance of the ponds? Clearly, they are a symbol of a bond of closeness between Matt and Kate, but the strong emphasis placed on biological study is evident. Is this an area you yourself have studied in the past? A. Initially, I based the novel around the ponds purely out of nostalgia; I remember the ponds where I grew up as a source of great delight. They are small worlds, after all, and if there are shelves or shallow places within them you feel as if you are seeing the whole of that world. It changes constantly, and yet it is always the same. As the novel progressed, though, the ponds took on a wider significance. They were, as you say, a symbol of the closeness between Matt and Kate, but to me they also came to represent Kate’s childhood–the period of “innocence” before she was, as she saw it, betrayed by Matt. The trips with Matt to the ponds survived the tragedy that overtook the family at the beginning of the book, and partly through them, Kate managed to survive it too. But they did not survive Matt’s “betrayal,” and in an emotional sense, neither did she. In fact, the ponds were the scene of the crime. Kate says in the book, “By the following September the ponds themselves would have been desecrated twice over, as far as I was concerned, and for some years after that I did not visit them at all.” Years later, when Kate decides on her choice of career, it is partly because of a fear–almost a terror–that the ponds themselves, the symbol of the golden period of her childhood, may not survive. “I imagined myself,” she says, “going back to them one day in the future, looking into their depths and seeing . . . nothing.” Having set the novel around the ponds, the choice of biology as Matt’s passion and Kate’s later field of study was almost inevitable, but I was more than happy with that. I do not have a background in biology, but of all the sciences it is the most easily accessible to the layman, and as a subject it is so beautiful, and so fascinating, that I had no fear that readers would be put off by small passages of description. Q. In her adult life, the breakdown of her relationship with her brother affects her relationships with other men, i.e., Daniel. What do you think is the significance of Daniel’s character and why did you choose him for Kate? A. In spite of Kate’s denial, I think Daniel is quite a lot like Matt. He would have to be pretty special for Kate to be interested in him, and he would have to be quite unusual to be interested in Kate, disillusioned and bitter as she is! She says at one point that she had never expected to admire anyone again; if Matt could turn out to have feet of clay, what hope was there for anyone else? And yet she admires Daniel. She sees in him the qualities that she knows she is lacking in herself–tolerance, open-mindedness, and generosity of spirit. Daniel can see the whole view, whereas Kate is blinkered by the past. He represents what she would like to have been, and just possibly might still be. On another level though, Daniel represents what Matt should have been, and this is a problem for Kate. When she looks at Daniel, she sees all that Matt has lost. On his side, I believe Daniel is attracted to Kate partly because of her honesty. She does not pretend, to others or to herself. It is this that is her salvation in the end–she is able to look at her “picture of how things are,” and see that it is wrong. Q. What do you think lies behind the anger and resentment between the two brothers, Matt and Luke, which results in violence? A. I think a lot of the tension between Matt and Luke stems from the fact that their balance of power has shifted. Until “the accident,” Luke was very much the lesser brother. He was a standard, bored, sullen, resentful teenager, his deficiencies highlighted by comparison with his brilliant younger brother. And then comes the accident. Traumatic though it is, I think the accident is the making of Luke. From being the family problem, he becomes the family solution. He sees that it is in his power to save the rest of the family, and he does that, at great personal cost. Perhaps he would have “found himself” anyway, but it would have taken a long time. In particular, it is Bo’s overwhelming need of him that transforms Luke. No one ever needed him before, and no one adored him as she does. “Yeah, but she likes me,” he says to Aunt Annie. You could say that he needed Bo every bit as much as the other way round. So Luke is now head of the family. He is mother and father rolled into one, and this is a problem for Matt. I don’t see Matt as being jealous or resentful by nature, but still, things have changed, and the change is hard for him to accept. He is hugely indebted to Luke, and that debt would be a heavy burden. You expect your parents to make sacrifices for you–that is what parents do–but you don’t expect it of your siblings. To complicate matters, Matt genuinely doubts Luke’s ability to carry off his plan. His lack of faith would have been galling to Luke. What it boils down to, I guess, is sibling rivalry. That plus the anxiety, uncertainty and grief which both boys had to deal with at the time. Q. Did you enjoy writing this novel? And did the final ending mirror that which you had in mind upon starting to write? A. I loved it. Initially, when I answered this question, I wrote “I loved every minute of it.” My husband, reading it through, scribbled, “That’s a load of bull. You did not. I was there.” So for the sake of absolute accuracy, I’ve deleted “every minute of.” I knew how it was going to end, though for a long time I couldn’t work out how to get there. How to get Kate to see that she had got it wrong–that was the problem. Daniel and Marie helped me out in the end. Review Quotes "Every detail in this beautifully written novel rings true, the characters so solid we almost feel their flesh. Bo must be one of the most vividly realized infants in recent literature. Lawson creates a community without ever giving in to the Leacockian impulse to poke fun at small-town ways, instead showing respect to lives shaped by hard work and starved for physical comfort. The adult Kate’s alienation from Crow Lake is initially difficult to accept, for everything in Kate’s life, including her career in science, reflects the values of her formative years on the farm. Soon, though, her crippling guilt becomes the mystery that draws the reader on." — Maureen Garvie, Quill and Quire starred review “The best [first novel for 2002] that I have read so far…compulsively readable.” — Sandra Martin, The Globe and Mail (Dec. 27, 2001) “ Crow Lake … is a remarkable novel, utterly gripping and yet highly literate, written in such a fresh, believable voice that I had to keep reminding myself that this was fiction. I read it in a single sitting (almost unheard of!), then I read it again, just for the pleasure of it. I await her next work with eagerness (and a little envy).” —Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat “I didn’t read Crow Lake so much as I fell in love with it. This is one beautiful book.” —David Macfarlane, author of Summer Gone Reader Reviews Average Reader Review: Number of Reviews: 1 1. Crow Lake Reviewer: E. Gillies from Burlington, ON Date: 8/1/2002 2:35:52 PM Fantastic book! I bought it yesterday morning and finished it last night. The story is beautifully written and the characters absorb you into their world, making you feel like you're in Crow Lake with them. One of the nicest books I've read in a long time. I highly recommend it. Info Desk iREWARDS Program About Our Company Affiliate Opportunities Careers Contact Us Corporate Sales Gift Certificates Privacy Policy Shipping Rates Store Locations Wish List chapters.indigo.ca: books Shopping Bag | Account Centre | Wish List | Help iREWARDS Program | Corporate Sales | Store Locations All Products Books DVD Video Gifts Books Advanced Search Search Tips About this Book chapters.indigo Review From the Publisher About the Author Read from the Book Author Interviews Tips for your Reading Group Review Quotes Reader Reviews . Head Office | Privacy Policy | Free Delivery | Chapters Indigo Coupons