Beyond The Blue by Andrea MacPherson

Beyond the Blue by Andrea MacPherson
Vintage Canada
352 pages

Set in Dundee in 1918, Beyond the Blue tells the story a family of four women struggling to make ends meet during the final months of the First World War.

Like most women in the Scottish city, their lives are marked by the absence of able-bodied men and decent opportunities. Though for Morag, the matriarch, the departure of her bully of a husband is an answered prayer. Morag works at the jute factory, the town's main source of livelihood and cause of death. In an early scene, a factory worker is sucked into the carding machine to meet a painful, macabre end.

Morag suffers from the other fatal affliction associated with factory work, mill fever, though for a time, she manages to hide her hacking, bloody cough. Morag's eldest daughter, Caro, mans the local post office. Gorgeous and alluring, Caro's plan for a life of ease involves seducing the mill owner and cajoling him into leaving his wife. She is not the first to make the attempt, but she is the most beautiful and determined. Her younger sister, Wallis, also works at the jute factory. Wallis is plain, with a matronly figure and sensible shoes. But she is the one with the most intriguing existence - passing her evenings at boisterous union meetings and in secret trysts with a widowed Catholic man.

Wallis is slyly stowing away money for a voyage to Ireland that will reunite her with Paddy Hennessey, the love of her life.

The youngest member of the family, Morag's niece Imogen, is still in school and still traumatized by her mother's death a half dozen years before. All four women keep secrets from one another, though they are wonderfully loving and loyal, tender toward one another in their cramped tenement flat.

The women muse over their complicated pasts and hope against hope for joyful futures. The atmosphere of the book is thus a little dreamy. It rains so often an impression emerges of an underwater world. The narrator, who often seems to be observing characters through fog or mist, exacerbates this feeling, as in the novel's opening lines:

Dundee, Scotland (photo by Zack Davidson)

"A light so shifting, so grey and wavering, they might be figments. Their figures are dark, shadowy in the morning light."

The "blue" of the title appears in many shades, the silvery blue of an overcast sky, or blue white of the occasional bright day or the blue black of night. Texture and colour combine to make the reader dreamy and even drowsy.

The characters smack a little of Harlequin Romance women, with their intoxicating beauty, and even Wallis veers dangerously close to cliche with her vibrant personality that (thank goodness) compensates for her plain features. Yet they ultimately transcend stereotype: Predictable and surprising in equal measure, they are like human beings in real life. How conceivable, for instance, that Morag attends church regularly to pray for her family and for health. At the same time, how inconceivable that prudent Morag would fork out money to a travelling healer who promises to cure her disease; how even more improbable that she would find herself sexually drawn to this suspicious man. Yet these things happen.

Women took on factory work when male workers were conscripted to the army

I enjoyed this novel, especially the women's inner lives, the way for instance, Indian women and spices and the colour orange seep into the daydreams of Imogen and Caro as an exotic alternative to their grey existence. Wallis's attraction to the mysteries of Catholicism also operates as a magical, mystical space.

Even so, I found myself wishing MacPherson had been a touch more ambitious with her material. For instance, I expected to see rather than hear about the life and politics of the mill. And I wanted to spend more time with Wallis and the brazen union women. Most of all, I wish that the relationship with the Hennessey family - especially the events of the Easter Rising - had been woven into the mainstream of the story instead of remaining as an anecdotal aside.

Such technically challenging developments would have made for a more riveting tale. Still, it is always a good thing when a writer leaves you wanting more instead of less, which itself is no small achievement.

This piece appeared previously in the Gazette (Montreal).