Theresa Kishkan, A Man in a Distant Field

I don't know what has kept Theresa Kishkan's 2004 novel A Man in a Distant Field from rising to the top of Mount TBR, given how often I've blogged about her books, and given that this semester will see my third time teaching her novella The Weight of the Heart. Timing and choosing are funny things, and I'm old enough to have learned that amongst all of the other worries, this is a small one, but this doesn't mean that it can't be a worry and a source of regret.

(Probably it's because I misunderstood this to be an Ireland novel, rather than the BC novel that it is [albeit growing from heavily Irish roots, with the main character spending much time there], plus it hit Mt TBR at a busy time that left the novel stranded. And I confess, too, that there was a time when I found Kishkan's novels less welcoming reads for me than her nonfiction, even if I've been over that for many years now!)

And really, this is a lovely, lovely novel, with thorny plot elements to ruminate on (he saw her doing what, now, and did what?: pp. 141-143, and occasionally after), and achingly accurate descriptions (yes, that's just how one ought to feel about salmon: pp. 90-91), and characters to live with. Opening with around six months in 1922 on the BC coast, near Sechelt, and closing with around another six months in Ireland, we live this time intensely with Declan O'Malley, because there's so much intensity in events both large and small in his life.

The back cover gives plenty of detail: Declan has fled Ireland after his family has been killed by the Black and Tans (some context here), and has landed almost by accident at Oyster Bay, near Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast, an utterly broken man. A path toward healing opens up through translating Homer's Odyssey (from which comes the line "a man in a distant field") and through coming to inhabit Oyster Bay with a full consciousness. This includes connecting with the people around him, in particular the family near him and some men probably from the shíshálh Nation, and with nature in all its manifestations. Eventually, as the back cover remarks, "when Ireland beckons, [Declan] is drawn to his own history and to the opportunity for a happier future."

Though it comes only a third of the way through A Man in a Distant Field, there's one particular passage that for me establishes that Declan's journey may turn out well (though it could also have been foreshadowing of further tragedy, which certainly I was dreading at the time):

"There was sacrament in consuming the flesh of this fish, in drinking water of the creek that fed into the bay, nurturing a season's worth of infant salmon and gently releasing them to the ocean. He ate until he could not eat another mouthful, then walked over to the creek to pull up a handful of the peppery cress growing there; chewing it took away the slightly greasy glaze against his tongue. He scooped up another mug of water, straight from the creek this time, and returned to the edge of the bay" (p.91).

We're still a very long way at this point from seeing where Declan will end up, but this passage sees Declan returned to his body as part of how a person inhabits a place. His heart has been recovering through his relations with his pup Argos and with the daughter of the family from whom he's rented a cabin (more about Rose below); he has been recovering his mind all along through translating the Odyssey; and he has begun recovering what amounts to a soul through these things as well as his time with local Indigenous men. In eating salmon in this way, Declan shows a deep capacity for full-hearted existence, and to some extent, the rest of A Man in a Distant Field gives us the chance to see where this capacity will lead him.

When I say that this novel gives you characters to live with, I mean that there are at least three novels here that I imagine that I'll never get the chance to read: one for young Rose Neil, the stifled but free-hearted daughter at Oyster Bay; one for Una Fitzgerald, the woman in Ireland with whom Declan finds himself entangled; and one that tells the long history and possible futures of Oyster Bay itself. In all three cases, I say this because three weeks after finishing the novel, I'm regularly reminded of these characters, and in the case of Oyster Bay of the men who would take Declan out in their canoes. Novels are always walled gardens, giving their readers little access to the broader imagined world even when their characters turn up again in other novels (as some of Kishkan's do), so there's always the chance at this regret during the reading, but A Man in a Distant Field has been getting to me.

The story of young Rose, in particular, has me thinking about Kishkan's stunning new book The Art of Looking Back. In that, Kishkan looks carefully and soberly at everything that flowed from or connected with her brief period of modelling for the painter Jack Wilkinson, particularly Wilkinson's long and sometimes oppressive obsession with Kishkan. Among other things, Kishkan recalls that there was some scandal around Wilkinson for his repeatedly painting nudes of his young daughter (who seems to have looked very like Kishkan, and Wilkinson had stopped painting his daughter not long before meeting Kishkan). That's not what happens with Rose, to be clear; she does briefly turn up nude, or I wouldn't have thought of the comparison, but within her family, she's fully committed by her father to play the role that her father insists on for her. Regardless, Rose finds joy in her days and meaning in her life, so much so that at times I found myself wanting her to live her own story.

The complexity of Rose's portrait in A Man in a Distant Field has me thinking about how fathers can oppress their daughters, and about the women that daughters can become, so it would've been very satisfying to find Rose's later life given its own spotlight. I felt less strongly about that for Una Fitzgerald, but other readers might feel otherwise; on the other hand, it's possible that stories similar to Una's are already out in the world, and a wider-perspectived reader might already have found one of those. Rose's, though, feels to me that it would only be told by someone like Kishkan whose imaginative roots and whose history themselves grow out of the soil she shares with Rose.

This sounds like regret that A Man in a Distant Field wasn't the novel I would've wanted, or wasn't the novel it could've been, but that's simply not the case. I'm already planning to reread this novel, I've loved paging through it in drafting this comment, and I've already decided who gets copies of this book over the coming months.

When Declan weeps at "A Farewell to Music" when Bernadette Feeny plays it on the harp of his murdered daughter, weeps for each element of his pain and recovery, oh and oh again. When I read and was thoroughly moved by Tim Bowling's The Marvels of Youth, only to have almost my entire book club argue that it was maudlin and unproductively sentimental, I doubled down, and I would do the same for this novel that shares a similarly unprotected emotional core.

Life is too short for cleverness, and for refusing to give freedom to our emotions. As different as they are, in both cases I've found myself hit hard by these novels and their main characters, and in the case of A Man in a Distant Field, like Odysseus and Declan, I find myself seduced by the lure of what might come at the end of a journey, and the chance at a happy ending, however complicated it might be.