February by Lisa Moore

I was afraid to read this novel, and not just because Lisa Moore is one of my favorite authors, and I don’t do disappointment well. I was afraid because I knew it would force me to feel and consider, at length and in intimate detail, one of my greatest fears: it is written (in part) from the perspective of a woman who is widowed with a houseful of young children. So I read gingerly at first, then fast, ripping it off like a band-aid.

Of course, it broke my heart anyway. I knew it would. Ripping a band-aid off quickly only makes it sting less.

Believing the worst of it, the anticipation, was behind me, I went back for a second read almost immediately after finishing it, and as I was masochistically poring over some of the most fascinating/painful passages, I realized that my first approach had been weirdly, ironically, appropriate: this novel is all about managing risk and reward, forms of safety and their consequences.

This novel traces the presence of risk in the lives of Helen, Cal (her husband), John (their son), Jane (a woman he meets and beds on vacation) and, to a lesser extent, in the lives of many people connected to them. Like Helen, who uses the investigative reports on the sinking of the rig to reconstruct and replay Cal’s death in her mind, Moore puts certain moments in each of these lives under a microscope, and faithfully reports, in incredible, often very difficult, detail, what she sees. She never flinches, or tries to extract ‘lessons’ from these lives in that annoying, pollyanna way another author might:

People do not say failed anymore, Jane thinks. They say other things. A whole movement has risen up to avoid the acknowledgement of failure. People want to learn from failure, they want to embrace it.

But failure isn’t good, she thinks. If something can be redeemed it isn’t really a failure.

Jane is failing spectacularly.

She doesn’t make excuses for anyone. This is not a story of heroes and villains. It’s a story about human nature: that is, about how all lives are, in a sense, an exercise in the art of risk management: we’re all very fragile, the world is terrifically dangerous, and so a certain amount of risk is inevitable in a rich, human existence. Some risks prove fatal. Some prove infinitely rewarding. The problem is, we often don’t realize when we’re taking, or asking someone else to take one—and even when we do know… sometimes it’s impossible to tell them apart before it’s too late.

Spoiler alert: a very limited synopsis follows, by way of illustration: if you’re the sort who doesn’t like to know much about the plot before you read, skip to the last paragraph!

Helen and Cal fall deeply in love, and their attempts at ‘safe’ sex are perfunctory, at best—with the invincibility of youth, both assume that unplanned pregnancy is something that happens to other, less lucky people, and soon find themselves with two little girls whom they’re not quite financially equipped to support. Because Cal so loves his family, he goes out to work on the Ocean Ranger for the money, despite the dangers, of which he is well aware—he doesn’t even know how to swim, for god’s sake—just for a while, until they’ve enough money saved to open a convenience store instead…”But they didn’t speak of those plans. Because if they talked about Cal giving up the rig, they were admitting the risk. And it was something they agreed never to admit.”

The rig goes down because the men were not provided with adequate training; it was run by a corporation practicing its own form of risk management:”The oil companies were all about acceptable levels of risk and they always had been…They advised strongly against intuition when assessing risk. If you were scared shitless, they said, that was only intuition and you should ignore it. They asked the public to consider the overall good to be achieved when we do take risks.”

After Cal dies, John grows up to thrive on physical risk, follows his father into a dangerous career, yet spends the whole of his adult life trying to avoid risking his heart the way his father did, by falling too much in love and consequently, ending up enslaved to “something squalling and blood related”. His approach to safe sex is the direct opposite of that practiced by his father…yet the end result is the same.

This is a wonderful achievement, a novel that feeds your mind as it breaks your heart. I highly recommend it, to all of you. February was my 9th book for the Canadian Book Challenge. Next up: Generation X.