Fall on Your Knees
A year or two ago a friend of mine raved about a book she'd recently read, Fall on Your Knees, the debut novel of Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald. This particular friend is one whose book sense I've learned to trust, so even though I was busy slogging--with mixed success--through my 2005 Book List, I ordered a copy to save for later. As it turned out, my book list was too ambitious by half, and I managed to get to Fall on Your Knees only by putting aside (temporarily, I assure you) a number of my earlier picks. After reading it, however, I don't feel a lick of guilt for bumping it to the top--if anything, I'm guilty of not putting it there from the beginning.
Fall on Your Knees is the story of a family from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. It is an epic tale, spanning nearly the whole of the twentieth century, and fairly brimming with tragedy and heartbreak and love and human understanding. I admit I had a bit of difficulty getting into the book, but after fifty or so pages I was completely hooked. The story is powerful and the language is nothing short of magnificent. I marked at least a dozen passages that especially resonated with me, and I've gone back again and again to read and ruminate on them, even weeks after turning the last page. The one I've chosen to share with you here is probably my favorite, both for the insight and for the beauty of the words, and it's especially appropriate for our "Truth and Consequences" theme.
Everyone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child. You'd have to be an idiot not to have figured that out, what with the girl's hasty home-coming and incarceration in the house. But the thing you do in a case like this is go along with the idea that the child is the offspring of its grandparents. Everyone agrees to this fiction, and the only people who'd breathe a word of the actual facts to the illegitimate child are those who are so malicious to begin with that they are easily dismissed as liars. As in truth they are. For the beneficent lie tells the truth about the child, which is "you belong to this community", whereas the malicious truth-tellers use fact to convey a lie, which is "you don't belong". This is an imperfect system, but it's the prevailing one. And as the years go by the facts get eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don't know than people who do.
I think this is a stunning paragraph, breathtaking in the way it renders clear and simple a complex situation. Even as I admire it, I can't help but be envious of MacDonald's skill with words. In fact, the book as a whole inspired a fierce case of writer envy in me that I still haven't quashed (I might be more successful with that if I could make myself stop re-reading it--truly, it's that good). If you read only one book this summer, do yourself a favor and make it Fall on Your Knees.