Summer Reading

My novel reading of late has been based on chance encounters. I found Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) at a small thrift store on Kingsway; Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) at the Value Village on Victoria Drive; and Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (1985) in the People's Co-op Bookstore "Loonie Cart" (actually, Kim from Paperhound noticed it first but gave it to me when I said I have always wanted to read it).

Something common to all three novels is a woman in love. In Tess, the woman is Tess, who loves the proud and high-minded Angel Clare; in A Farewell to Arms, it is Catherine, a British army nurse, who loves Frederic, an American lieutenant in the Italian Army Ambulance Corp; and in Slash it is the activist Maeg, whom Slash meets after his (final) return home. All three women pass away by the novel's end: Tess is executed for killing the man who convinced her that her husband (Angel) would never return to her; Catherine dies after a difficult childbirth; and Maeg is killed in a car crash.

Of the three novels, the death of Maeg hit me the hardest. I knew something was coming, but with a third-of-a-page remaining (before the "Epilogue"), I relaxed, thought otherwise. Then, out of nowhere, Slash tells us:

"Two days later, Maeg came home in a box. A car had hit theirs and killed her and her two friends."

Something about the suddenness of Maeg's passing, and the matter-of-fact -- if not harsh -- response by Slash. But Armstrong knows what she is doing and this, now that I think about it, is an instance of a form and tone consistent with the structure of a character and the world this character has made of himself -- in words.

I am sorry Maeg had to die to make it so. But that's life, right? At least it was in the early-1980s, when Armstrong was writing Slash. Had she started writing this book today I wonder if the story might be written from Maeg's perspective.