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The Clock of Heaven
by Dian Day
Toronto: Inanna Publications
& Education, Inc., 2008, ISBN 978-0-9808822-2-3, 215 pp., $22.95 paper.
The Clock of Heaven is the first novel by Nova Scotia author Dian Day, and it's an excellent debut from beginning to end. It tells the story of Esa Withrod, opening in the past with a short prologue from Esa's childhood --a time of neglect and abuse, with just one short cheerful interlude with her grandmother, when Esa was seven. The novel then jumps to the present, in which Esa is twenty-five, recovering from a disastrous first relationship with a co-worker, Serge, and pregnant as a result of it. Her employer, Merle, and his life partner, Daniel, offer her friendship and concern, but Esa's loveless background has not prepared her to understand or accept such offers. The only love she remembers from her childhood is the three months she spent with her grandmother, who lives in the Maritimes near the ocean. Feeling that she can no longer keep her job--where Serge still works--Esa decides to return to her grandmother's home, hoping to find a safe haven once more.Over the last three years, since she started her job, Esa has been writing to her grandmother each month, and has been sending her money every month --several large bills, in cash. She has had no answer back, but still she hopes that Gam will accept her. Unannounced, she takes the train from Montreal where she works to the town (unnamed) near her grandmother's home.
But Esa discovers time has not stood still and things have changed. Gam has aged, still living alone but using a walker to get about. "Call me Alice," she tells Esa, and seems hesitant to have the young woman stay with her, especially when she learns about the baby. However, gradually the living arrangement becomes settled and the two come to accept each other's eccentricities. Their peaceful existence is shattered by a traumatic kitchen fire in which Alice is badly burned and the house significantly damaged. Esa's feeling of safety is shattered and she sinks into a state of complete lethargy. With the help of others --an elderly neighbour, Cyril; a social worker, Lori-Ann; and eventually the whole neighbourhood --Esa finally learns what love and friendship are all about.
Dian Day is a skillful writer, giving us just enough details from Esa's childhood to make the reader marvel that Esa has done as well as she has. (She won a scholarship to McGill and graduated from there prior to obtaining her job.) Particularly poignant are two incidents: the details of Esa's birth, when her mother refused to recognize the baby as belonging to her, and left it up to a nurse to name the infant; and an incident in early childhood when Esa and her two sisters are left immersed in a bath, with threats that they must remain there, while their mother talks on the phone and then forgets them and leaves the house to attend a movie.
The author's skill is evident in her frequent and concise descriptions of the countryside. There are so many lovely details a reviewer is hard pressed to choose only a couple. For example:
Jewelwing damselflies fluttered their iridescent green above the rushing water. The tall trunks of the trees above cast dark shadows over the cut, and Esa walked through the striated world, in and out of sunlight like a moon repeatedly eclipsed. (106)
and
Cyril's farm was a maze of open fields bordered by evergreen woods, with occasional birch trees stark against the deep green, hung with pale green tufts of old man's beard. . . . Other fields held cut hay fluffed up in rows of golden green, steaming in the hot morning sun, or baled hay stacked upended in triangular pyramids, dry as kindling. (169)
I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of birds: barn swallows that "flew in and out of the open front door of the house like a fleet of wartime carrier pigeons carrying secret messages" (155) and a killdeer feigning injury by "dragging a stretched-out wing along the ground" (125). (I did find it surprising that the killdeer had nested in an old mailbox and used a collection of twigs, since in my experience they are ground nesters with little more than a depression in soil or gravel.)
According to her bio details, Dian Day is now at work on a second novel. I certainly recommend her first one, and look forward to the next.
Donna Gamache is the author of Spruce Woods Adventure (Compascore Manitoba) as well as many short stories for both children and adults.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.