We’re going to take the circuitous route to the 1920s Saskatchewan schoolhouse in Elizabeth Hay’s novel Alone in the Classroom. We’re going to start instead with Alice Munro’s short story “Open Secrets” from the 1994 collection of the same name. Of Munro’s work, I find “Open Secrets” the most compelling for its imagistic quality and ambiguous conclusions. The premise of story is that a girl scout goes missing (is murdered?) while on a hike in the woods. While it’s been a while since I’ve read it, I still remember all these little moments that suggest some level of knowledge or culpability in the event: a man pumping water from the house to wash away evidence? A woman lowering her fingers onto the burner of a stove—to burn away her fingerprints? At the end of the story, it seems everyone is aware of what has happened, but Munro never gives the audience the satisfaction of knowing, but instead feeling like they maybe know.
This is largely the feeling imbued by Alone in the Classroom. The premise here, at least initially, revolves around some seeming impropriety at a rural schoolhouse. Connie is a new teacher working under principal Parley, who also happens to lead the drama club. Feeling consistently uneasy by Parley’s presence on her walks home, Connie (narrated through Anne—disregard for now) instils mistrust for Parley with the audience. The school starts staging a production of Tess of the D’Urbervilles [first of all: in elementary? really?], and a bright young girl acts in the titular role. One day, leaving the classroom after being alone with Parley, little Susan, seems upset, changed. The rumours start, Susan stops attending school, and it seems pretty clear that something inappropriate happened. Decades later, Parley admits that he was hard on her, but not much else.
The creepiness is pervasive. It’s an unsettling book from the very start, and it becomes more explicitly terrible when Susan dies in a house fire. While she is at home off school, her house goes up in smoke with her locked in her room, the key apparently in her father’s pocket. The moment is loaded with the same ambiguity as Munro’s story: a lamp in Susan’s room hints that perhaps the fire was self-inflicted, though there are later suggestions that her brother Michael set the fire by accident—more on that later.
Incidentally, the central character, Connie, goes to great lengths to help Michael Graves learn to read. He’s dyslexic (remember: the b is the headboard, the d its footboard). He improves, but it doesn’t really take. The main impression it left on me, though, as an educator, is how creepy the whole thing feels. Connie judges Parley’s relationship to Susan, but her relationship to Michael seems hypocritically perverse, as well. Her special interest feels inappropriate, which made it hard for me to really connect with any of the characters as likeable, and it doesn’t help that a few years later, Connie pursues a romantic relationship with Michael, which goes on for a number of years.
I’ve alluded a few times to time passing. Hay’s novel does, in fact, jump around between the decades. I mentioned Anne as the narrator, and she forms a kind of frame narrative around the rest of the text. In fact, in the ‘present’ at the start of the novel, there’s another young girl who has been raped and murdered with inconclusive results. Parley hovers around the periphery, and comes to the defense of the man accused, Johnny Coyle. There’s an engaging ambiguity here, as well: the accused man, requiring a cane, does not seem to have been capable of the motion required for chasing the girl in the woods; the hair in her hand only somewhat matched his sample, and so on. All things considered, I am inclined towards his innocence, but he is sentenced to death by hanging—later to be acquitted. The way this case plays out, and given its Canadian context, the parallels to the Steven Truscott case seem hard to ignore and an engaging intertext.
All of these mysteries proliferate throughout the first half of the book and the tragic, poetic tone draws nicely from Tess, which Hay’s narrator describes as more effective as a poem than a novel. That poetry works its way through Hay’s novel, as well. Alone in the Classroom is beautifully written, both in terms of descriptive detail and the dynamics of the sentence structures. There’s a quality to the work, if not rhythmic then lyrical. The way Hay establishes the imagery and the way she develops character is consistently powerful.
That being said, around the mid-point of the novel I started to lose interest. The book does not deliver on its promises: there is no resolution to the storylines of murdered little girls and no conclusive findings about guilt and innocence. I can handle all of that. I love ambiguity, but it ceases to gain in layers partway through for a prolonged period of time. Instead, the book reads like a series of character sketches: a trope of early Canadiana suitable to the milieu, but lacking the linchpin that makes it all click. Connie’s relationship with Michael takes a predominant focus which, as I’ve said, makes me so uncomfortable that I couldn’t bring myself to romanticize it. The same is true when Anne, a woman far too young for him, takes an interest and ‘steals’ her from Connie. Again: too inappropriate for me to feel invested in.
Substituting personal histories for the intrigue offered a number of opportunities to weave some central themes together, but the book requires more cerebral attention than heart. At many times, I was not up to the challenge.
Where the book really restores my attention is towards its final act. Hay reveals that Parley was a playwright and his play runs largely parallel to actual events. This is where, a hundred pages after the fact, a bit of doubt is cast onto Michael. It’s implied that Michael, feeling slighted by his teacher Connie, attempted to set fire to the schoolhouse, but wind carried the flames to his house across the street, killing his sister. The possibilities here remain ambiguous but allow us to reevaluate other moments in the text: Michael giving fire safety advice to children, for one. Or, perhaps it’s a more metaphorical moment through which Parley found he could displace his own feelings of guilt. Does his fictionalized play offer a projection? A contradiction? The truth?
Similarly, Anne finds connection between her mother and Parley. When she discovers Parley’s grave, covered in particular vegetation, it brings her back to a memory of her mother’s painting, which had the same vegetation. Ending the book with a moment like that offers a whole new realm of heretofore unconsidered possibilities. Is there, for instance, some kind of impropriety that her mother was victim to? Or, did she have a special love for Parley that had to be unexpressed due to all the mystery that surrounds him?
When I consider the book as a whole, there are parts of it that I find simply masterful. Yet, I didn’t feel the same personal connection that I did when reading Hay’s book Late Nights on Air. In that book—the only other of Hay’s novels I’ve read so far—the human connections were what held the book together. Alone in the Classroom is a book where its questions are the driving force—that’s where I felt invested. The human connections are once again foregrounded here, but they seemed more of a distraction than an enrichment of the text.
Unlike some other writers, Hay at least has the defence that when the plot gets slow, or when the focus drifts, the writing is at least beautiful enough to make the novel worth reading. I just can’t help but feel that I needed some more layers to peel back, to have a bit more of a foothold on the core mysteries of the text. One of Parley’s plays was about a nice young man visiting an elderly one in the hospital. At the end of the play it’s revealed that the young man is culpable for something truly horrific. The implications of the premise are intriguing: what did Parley know? About whom? Again, is his guilt being displaced? Is he projecting it onto someone else rather than facing his own culpability? These mysteries need just that little bit of extra.
Overall, in Alone in the Classroom, the meandering path, while often beautiful, just needed some more landmarks along the way.
Happy reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment