Book Reviews

Out of Bounds

Freda Jackson (Author)
Searching for Billie. Touchwood Editions
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Sean Dixon (Author)
The Girls Who Saw Everything. Coach House Books
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Reviewed by Andrea Wasylow

Searching for Billie by Freda Jackson and The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon deftly demonstrate starts and stops in the discoveries that beckon these narratives. Both authors propel their characters through setbacks and shy secret smiles to reach a moment of truth or grace. As Dexter’s character Aline proffers, “I see reality! I am capable of rising above the limitations of my body and my surroundings, through the strength of my will and desire! But I also have eyes, ears, and a brain! I can look at the world and see it as it is!”

Freda Jackson’s novel cracks open history to provide us with an account of Billie, a “home child” who was shipped to Canada in the hope for a better life during the British Children’s Emigration Movement. Searching for Billie shows how misplaced good intentions not only defer or complicate healing, but can really prevent its realization and in effect compound suffering. The well-mannered Englishwoman Jane dispatches herself to Canada in the fall of 1897 to locate Billie and assess his situation. We know what Jane does not: that the thieving Billie is trying to survive excruciating poverty by trading his innocence to the grimy “Dook” for sour food and boots that fit. The novel begins by describing the extraordinary dichotomy between Billie and Jane, their only tenuous thread of connection being Jane’s pursuit of Billie, read Jane’s pursuit of superior purpose. Jackson give us less of Billie’s narrative compared to Jane’s, and this disproportion seems like a tactic to make Billie seem lost in the wilds of late nineteeth-century Canada, at large in the largest area. Billie struggles but does not languish, driven by a stubbornness which seems metaphysically to reach Jane herself, as circumstances force her to unexpectedly endure miseries which encounter her. Connecting with Luc and providing assistance for another home child are part of what enables the “Anglaise” to ultimately serve Billie in the way he needs: as Luc says, “she rescues things.” Billie first needs freedom from pain and entrapment, and then, just freedom. Jane, already possessing freedom, needs Billie.

Similarly, the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club seek each other out and depend on each other for adventure, reasons, and explanations for their lives. Sean Dixon’s novel The Girls Who Saw Everything is a decidedly exhilarating blend of crises (both self-induced and inherited) of the many characters, such as Runner Coghill (sister of Neil, the real Coghill). She identifies with Anna: “you’re a bit of a damaged masterpiece yourself, aren’t you?” Thorough right and wrong, life and death, explicable and inexplicable, the Cabalists are “like a unit of the army in battle, like the chorus in an old Greek tragedy, like the Scooby-Doo gang.” The fact that the women (and men) actually enact the events from the stories of their study is what distinguishes the book club from any other, but that they take such creative license with interpreting possible offshoots and variations to their novels is what leads to complication, peril, mystery, sex, death, and journeys around the globe. The cuneiform Coghill Tablets provide the group with their current text, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” and the most intense play-acting reaching its apex in the killing of the monster Humbaba, after which nothing is the same between the Cabalists. Dixon creatively treats a vast array of subjects such as prostitution, cross-dressing, orphans, rituals, brainwashing, the underworld, the will to die, and disease (well, dis/ease) in his chapters and footnotes.

Where Freda Jackson shows how her characters are ginger and the wilderness is inner and outer, Sean Dixon’s characters are nimble, adaptable, but not interchangeable. Why, for so long, could Jane not find the home children she was pursuing? Perhaps Jane herself needs to suffer, to receive purification or emancipation from her gentility and privilege. Jackson explores how the mind and the body can be disconnected: “she wanted her spirit back. Wanted her memories to float away, not her spirit, wanted to sleep soundly at night and think straight during the day… How long did it take to heal a mind?” Likewise, Dixon writes, “there’s always the small comfort in knowing a part of one’s mind can’t be touched. It’s detached. The trick, though, is not to allow the detached mind to take over for good, nor to let it take over so much that you won’t struggle.” Case in point: why does Runner keep falling through the floor? These novels delight in miscalculations, but not in self-indulgent ways. The characters proceed altered, with a series of approaches. Will they succeed?

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), Marion Douglas. (pg. 140 - 141)

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