The Mountain and the Valley (49 page)
Read The Mountain and the Valley Online
Authors: Ernest Buckler
Tags: #Fiction, #Classics, #Girls & Women, #Canadian, #Juvenile Fiction, #Literary Criticism
None of all this was consecutive and time-taking like thought. It was glimpsed instantaneously, like the figures of space. And orchestrated in the subliminal key of memory: cold water reaching to the roots of his tongue when thirst in the haymow was like meal in his mouth … the touch of the crisp dollar bill he had changed his dented pennies for …
Here the analytical voice gives way abruptly to a discontinuous series of sensations, which reiterate the music of Ellen’s rug-making and forecast the greater apotheosis of the Epilogue.
These chapters,
VII
to
X
, are among the most lyrical and free-seeming of the novel. Yet they complete the large outer circle of the design. Even into the idyllic interlude of Christmas, dramatic irony inserts itself with the recurrence of David’s dream:
David slept and he dreamed that they were all walking back the road that led to the top of the mountain. All the trees along the road were Christmas trees. They were shining with presents, but as he reached for something (for himself or for Anna) the thing would disappear, and Herb Hennessey would be there, cutting down the tree.
Looking back from the end, one can see how this dream, a version of which appears in Chapter
I
, represents the pattern, repeated in large and small events, and highlights its symbols: the road to the top of the mountain, the evanescent Christmas shine. Herb Hennessey, the solitary, representing an antithesis to the Canaan family, makes ominous appearances that foreshadow David’s state of isolation at the end – or the state he might have reached if the end had not come.
The Mountain and the Valley
is not a romance. David, unlike Anne of Green Gables, does not rise from his mistakes and disappointments unscarred, nor does Chris, Toby, Anne, Joseph or Martha. Momentary lapses and chance interruptions – the word spoken out of season or not spoken when called for – have lasting consequences. What occurs in the Canaan family over two generations and through the War mirrors the larger world in its movement from stability to restlessness, connectedness to rootlessness.
There is, though, for all the irony in its design, a kind of transcendence at the end of the novel. The central consciousness depicted retains at the moment of dissolution its will to affirm: “I’ll make the light shine kindly on him in the book. On all of them.” And serenity remains in the completed pattern, in the figure of Ellen the survivor as we last see her: “Only one tiny circle remained. White. White … She picked up the scrap of fine white lace and made of it the last circle.
She smiled.” Following this, the narrator puts in place his own last piece, beginning quietly – “The snow began falling all at once, but without hurry.” – but ending dynamically with the flight of the partridge “down between the trees, down, swoopingly, directly, intensely, exactly down over the far side of the mountain.” David’s soul flying out of its valley? Natural life going on, patterned but not confined? Whatever it is, it leaves this well-closed book, in a way, unclosed.
FICTION
The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
The Cruelest Month (1963)
The Rebellion of Young David and Other Stories (1975)
FICTIONAL MEMOIR
Ox Bells and Fireflies (1968)
HUMOUR
Whirligig (1977)
MISCELLANEOUS
Nova Scotia: Window on the Sea
[photographs by Hans Weber] (1973)