Michelle Hardy Reviews:

Kit Dobson, We Are Already Ghosts, University of Calgary Press, 2024
Sydney Hegele, Bird Suit, Invisible Publishing, 2024

The phrase ‘the lake,’ as in we’re going to the lake this weekend, has deep undertones. Ironically, its common form implies property ownership and financial or generational exclusivity. Conversely, when mentioned as a proper noun, conversation about a named lake often includes tourists immersing themselves in local vibes for a short rental season. Novelists Kit Dobson and Sydney Hegele each write about a fictional lake, one in south central Alberta and the other, named Lake Ligeia, in Southern Ontario. Dobson’s format, informed by Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, sets the richness and breadth of weeks at the lake between passages of time on a global scale. Hegele’s novel also looks to the past by experimenting with traditions of folklore and mythology to create a surreal, fully formed world in which trauma and abuse are explored. 

We Are Already Ghosts is Kit Dobson’s first novel, a family epic that opens in the 1990s. It’s August and most of the Briscoe-MacDougalls are gathered at their lakeside cabin. Readers join these characters for four separate summers, with five years elapsing from one to the next. The summers are numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4, while each five-year span is titled ‘Corridor.’ The ‘Corridors’ are page-and-a-half summaries of family updates and world events. The first ‘Corridor’ explains: ‘Time was allowing them to take a breather from history. It was a gap…from the inexorable march of events in which they were all entwined.’ The ‘Corridors’ contain entropy: war, politics and economics. They are also the places where Dobson’s characters go to die, similar to how Woolf’s characters die within parentheses in To the Lighthouse. In addition to holding chaos at bay, Dobson’s ‘Corridors’ serve as throughways leading characters away from ‘the city [where] there would be clocks’ to the timelessness of summer and memories made at the lake. 

This would be a different novel if set in flashy July, when hours of Canadian sunlight feel endless, and days stretch on forever. In August, demise drifts upon the air: ‘It felt like just yesterday that they had been shovelling out in Calgary, out from under all of that late snow. Now here summer was, ending. It was ending and it was still mid-August.’ Dobson’s setting underscores pragmatic considerations at the heart of this novel. William, the newly retired patriarch, contemplates ‘his next existential task…to learn how to die well. It would be neither a simple task nor a quick one. He had to render himself obsolete, make space for his children to come into their own.’ Essentially, William wants to make way for others by shifting his status from patriarchal mainstay to corridor. His existential task aligns with the transitory nature of August and takes place on ‘days when you could feel the change coming…where you couldn’t quite be sure if it would be warmer to be in the water or out of it, on the shore or on the dock. Fish or fowl.’ Corridors lead to thresholds, slippery spaces of duality.  

Dobson’s narrative is punctuated by rustling trees and wildlife, by the engine of William’s longstanding truck and by the decades-old groan of the patio door. The language is sometimes preposterously formal, as when 13-year-old Helen proclaims, ‘Summer came again: how grand it was!’ This does not sound like a nineties teen. Perhaps Helen’s voice retains ghostly cadences of the cabin’s history, or maybe she channels Woolf. Teenage Helen recognizes the luxury of cabin ownership, lamenting on a drive to the dump with her dad that trees lining the road obstruct the lakeview splendour from all except ‘those who could afford the cabins.’ Helen produces a puppetry pageant with her siblings and cousins; its plot references European contact, 20th-century wars and revolutions. Helen’s mother Clare, entranced by the spectacle, wonders, ‘But what could it all mean?’ By the novel’s final summer, anxieties around land ownership become more defined. Signs on the fence surrounding the dump now read: ‘Your home on Natives’ land’ and ‘Stolen land.’  

It’s tricky keeping members of the Briscoe-MacDougall family straight, especially because some share names. The author goes to considerable lengths to help readers with an informal family tree in the opening ‘Corridor’ and a chronological list of names on the back cover copy. Perhaps some vague confusion is intentional, pointing us back to the title: We Are Already Ghosts. The Briscoes and MacDougalls are ethereal characters, representing those present, absent and others who have passed away. 

Finally, what is summer at the lake without a book to read? When matriarch Clare picks hers up from the coffee table, it’s Proust’s magnum opus! Clare admits her choice is a bit performative: she’s ‘doing it to impress—well, herself first of all—but also Jéanne and Françoise both,’ the two cosmopolitan sisters who have been spending summers with her for years. Is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time partly why Dobson’s novel occurs during a few brief weeks at the lake, when food, family and rest garner emphasis, while births, deaths and wars are relegated to the ‘Corridor’? At the lake, Clare’s thoughts of death and a salad share equal weight: ‘She chilled at the thought of her own eventual passing—what would that final darkness feel like as it descended?—but there was a salad to dress.’ Again, we are reminded that time passes and dinner must be made. 

Sydney Hegele’s novel Bird Suit is set in Port Peter, a fictional Southern Ontario town near a mythical Lake Ligeia. The novel opens with tourists lured by the perfection of peaches; they descend from nearby cities and gorge themselves each summer. When September arrives, the peaches turn soft and sour, and the vacationers depart, leaving locals to endure unemployment and a cold, rainy winter. Some visitors, however, leave a little of themselves behind: ‘Nine months after tourist season, the Port Peter girls give birth in bar bathrooms and school smoking pits and on ripped floral couches in their fathers’ apartments.’ These new mothers are then counselled by Port Peter women on what to do next with their dirty little secrets: ‘go to the cliffside lookout off County Road Five, where there is a white plastic laundry basket with a pink fitted sheet inside…leave [your] babies for the Birds.’ In Port Peter folklore, Birds are believed to be ‘sirens emerging from Lake Ligeia in white lace dresses,’ who sometimes bear signs of more otherworldly creatures: ‘Scales. Gills. Fur. Hooves.’ In the uncanny world of Port Peter, Lake Ligeia’s supernatural conventions are quietly accepted. 

Bird Suit is divided into three parts: ‘Bloom,’ ‘Ripen’ and ‘Feast.’ As if peaches, babies and Birds aren’t enticing enough, Hegele concludes the opening section with an even more compelling hook.: The girls ‘kiss the babies’ sweaty foreheads and leave them squirming in the dark. When the girls go back the next morning, the basket is almost always empty.’ Almost always? ‘Almost’ means not quite something, yet Hegele expands this word to mean everything. Like a babe slung from the beak of a stork, the remainder of this book’s plot hangs on the strength of one well-placed adverb. 

The novel has a tangled chronology that compounds the mysteries of Port Peter and Lake Ligeia and complicates the muddle of relationships that lie therein. The story centres on Georgia, a survivor and artist-in-the-making, who becomes involved with the family of Port Peter’s new parish priest. Georgia is a fragmented character who ‘pities and envies’ her multiple selves: ‘What they know and what they don’t. What they think they know. What they still have, and what they think they’ll never get. Who they think they are. What they choose to remember.’ Fragments are dispensed out of order and include narrative techniques like poetic dialogue set off by white space and a copious number of lists. Abuse runs rampant in this novel, and like Georgia’s reliance on self-fragmentation, other characters deploy coping strategies too. Some describe having birds in their heads, which serve as protective alarms or resurfaced memories. For example, the priest’s son has a loud cardinal that ‘arrived when Isaiah was three years old. A red handprint on his face after spilling apple juice on his father’s sermon. Birdsong like the sound of crying.’ As multiple storylines advance and recede, a nest of complicated intimacies emerges. Eventually all strands of this multi-family saga intersect to reveal the consequences of friendship, love and abuse. 

Folk tales are passed down through generations. They teach, moralize, satirize and comment upon the long-term consequences of social and political reality. Yet the best tales are not heavy-handed with advice, a direction in which Bird Suit occasionally leans, such as when telling readers what stories are supposed to do. Nonetheless, what will future generations surmise about contemporary culture when reading Hegele’s mythic tale? Comparatively, how will We Are Already Ghosts evoke nostalgia in readers? Might Dobson’s novel encourage some to re-examine their own family memories, and how those nod toward current, specific cultural moments? Finally, maybe owning property at the lake will sound preposterous someday, like a creaky old notion of the past.  

—Michelle Hardy