Mere

by Linda Spalding

Mere’s young life is confined to the wind and water, the boat that she lives on docking only long enough to stop at the grocery store or visit the library, but never long enough to take out any books. That would mean having a library card, and a library card would mean revealing your name on a government form. Mere, her mother, Faye, and Mark, the mysterious teenage runaway who shares their boat, seem destined to sail around the Great Lakes forever, navigating the Persephone through the deep waters, stopping in Toronto twice a year to pick up envelopes of cash left with the dockmaster. Faye is a fugitive, still pursued for her part in the violent one-year anniversary events marking Chicago’s 1968 “Days of Rage”—a seminal student protest against the Vietnam war. Now Merril, Mere’s father, has suddenly appeared on the boat after many years. The authorities are looking for him and Faye is his ticket to freedom. But, in a desperate bid for her own adolescent freedom, Mere makes a choice that will change everything. Mere is a wonderfully electric novel about the inexorable bond between mothers and daughters, written by two of Canada’s most talented writers—themselves mother and daughter. Rich in its allegorical and sociological strands, it reaches into the Greek myth of Persephone; it explores a woman’s primeval need to protect her child; and it lays bare the explosive events of a touchstone period in our history. A novel of choices and consequences, betrayal and atonement, Mere builds lyrically to a shattering climax, an ending that haunts long after the last page is turned.

Genres: Fiction, Canada

211 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Linda Spalding, Kansas-born Canadian fiction and nonfiction writer, often explores world cultures and the clash between contemporary life and traditional beliefs. Born in Topeka, she lived in Mexico and Hawaii before moving to Toronto, Ontario in 1982.

Spalding's work has been honoured numerous times. Her non-fiction work, The Follow, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize and she has since received the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community.

Her novel, The Purchase, won the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award.

She has two daughters and is currently married to novelist Michael Ondaatje. Linda, her daughter Esta, and Michael are also on the editorial board of the Canadian literary magazine, Brick.

Reviews

[Marilyn Boyle]

This is a quirky intriguing novel, which I'd definitely recommend. The characters are well developed and the plot tense.

[Glen]

The title is a bit misleading since the story is really more focused on the mother of the eponymous character, who is a 13-year-old girl that has been raised on board a sailboat captained by her mother, a fugitive from her radical activist past in the United States. The mother and daughter are accompanied on board by an older boy that they have taken in as a surrogate son/brother as well as some others from the mother's past. Their life consists of moving around the Great Lakes (mostly Ontario, Huron, and Erie), back and forth between the US and Canada in a daily effort to avoid detection by authorities. One can either suspend credulity regarding this premise to the story or not (it was hard for me, given the capacity for surveillance and detection among law enforcement agencies), but I found the narrative to be unnecessarily complex in its movement back and forth between the past and present. Perhaps that was meant to mirror the physical back and forth, but I felt that the poignancy of the relationship between mother and daughter would have been better accented if the facts of the mother's past had just been presented linearly early in the novel and then the bulk narrated in present tense. A flawed but interesting novel.

[Reza Aleeya]

Harper Perennial Canada
209 pages

A thoughtful life...
living in a boat, as fugitive
Always in fear.

As a child, thinking how would it be
If she had a different luck by chance....
Determined to leave her mum, searching for somebody who could help her....just to be free
To feel safe.

Trying hard to understand. Why this was her mum's only choice. And helping her to move on and faced her fears.

There are rooms for empathy
and rooms for forgiveness