Labrador by Kathryn Davis

The snow fell faster and faster outside, encasing us all. In Labrador, Willie, the snow sometimes rises in drifts so high that a person can walk up to the bell in the church steeple and set it ringing with their hand. In Labrador there is always too much of something or none of it at all. Jacques Cartier called it "the land God gave to Cain." For my part, I think of it as your kingdom--the kingdom of the queenly Willie, whose neck I would have broken gladly, had it not been so fragile.

When I picked up Kathryn Davis' novel Labrador I expected--quite reasonably, I think, based on the synopsis on the back of the book--a realist sort of novel about a young girl who travels to Labrador with her grandfather to escape a complicated relationship with her older sister. I've always had a predilection for novels about the Canadian far north, where people live improbably, and while this is an improbable novel, that synopsis of it isn't really worth much. I didn't expect the lyrical and metaphorical intensity of the narrator, a teenager named Kathleen, and I didn't expect so much of the story to be about a literal angel named Rogni who speaks with her:

So I entered the language of the angels, the dangerous territory through which quills shot--where the heart of a human child is most vulnerable. A wing folded around me; I was bound in by pinions, the hooks and barbs of enormous feathers; the other wing rose and fell, beating a dark chord, and we flew, higher, through the thick yellow rapture of souls stewing in heaven's pot. An then there was the silver and judgmental silence.

"Look, Kathleen," said Rogni, pointing to where I could see myself standing on a silver and empty plateau under a silver sky. "An event is taking shape here," he said, "if only you know how to recognize it."

Is Rogni real? Probably not. He's probably a manifestation of Kathleen's intense devotion to Willie, a white-hot and inexplicable love for her more graceful and admired sister that is undermined by Willie's capriciousness and cruelty, and the way that Willie, as older siblings inevitably do, wanders away from their shared imaginings as small children. Rogni attaches himself to Kathleen but he, too, loves Willie, and seems to want to use Kathleen to get closer to her. But Labrador is written in such a way that the question really doesn't matter, like really effective narratives, it has its own logic upon which the world outside its pages is unable to intrude.

"Fantasies," Willie tells Kathleen, "are supposed to give you what you want. They're not supposed to make you jealous." But Willie, like real world logic, has it all backwards; though Rogni may be a story Kathleen is telling herself, he also suggests that he is the one writing the story of Willie and Kathleen: the love that creates the world, rather than being the part of creation. The reader might well ask, "Is Kathleen real?"

Into this family, which is completed by a pair of unhappy and quarrelsome parents, Kathleen's grandfather appears. He has been living in Labrador, in the far north city of Nain, since abandoning his wife several years back, and neither Kathleen nor Willie has ever met him. The grandfather is the first person ever to take a shine to Kathleen, rather than Willie, and Kathleen begins to see returning with him to Labrador as an escape from her crippling love.

Labrador begins as an idea and becomes a place, and the sudden shift is so powerful that the narrative style changes; while most of the book is in the first person, written to Willie from Kathleen's perspective, the section "Labrador" is in the third person, holding Kathleen perhaps at arm's length. Kathleen's fantasies about what Labrador might mean for her seem close to fulfillment; she meets and falls for an Inuit boy named Jobie, for instance. But a boat trip and a sudden storm put their lives in danger, and the grandfather--who, honestly, she seems to have met just a moment ago in narrative time--is suddenly face to face with a very real polar bear.  Davis wants us to know just how real:

It was a real bear filled with the breath of this world, putrid and immense, its tongue a grayish pink, its teeth crusty with green sediment. Believe me when I tell you it was not a story bear; not a legend bear; not a bear preparing to shuck off its skin and reveal itself to the youngest sister as a suitor--the prince, at last, static as paradise and requiring only admiration.

In this way Davis, as she does throughout the novel, blurs the line between the mythical and the real. Perhaps Kathleen is a story told by an angel; perhaps Labrador is an idea only, but an idea is as deadly as anything else and has its own consequences. The failure of Kathleen's brief Labrador trip forces her back home, to deal with Willie once and for all, to find a way to control the story of the two sisters herself.

Every year I discover a couple of "surprise" novels: books that seem to come out of nowhere and floor me with with their beauty or their brilliance. I picked this book up at a used bookstore in Rockport, Maine, for no other reason than I like reading about Canada, and I had a vague sense that the author's name was familiar. (It's possible I was thinking of Lydia Davis.) Labrador is so shimmeringly weird, so tremendously written, to have found my way to it feels like an amazing stroke of luck. A gift, maybe, from a guardian angel.