Visible Worlds by Marilyn Bowering

Visible Worlds is a wonderful amazing novel. It creates the lives of members of three families who are neighbours in Winnipeg during the Great Depression. In magical and circular sweeps Marilyn Bowering brings us back and forth in time and place: Siberian labour camps, way back when and not so way back; Germany on the verge of WWII; front line tunnels of the Korean War; back home and back out again. Every member from three generations is affected by the direction and destiny of every other character. Pru and Charlie hatch a plot to temporarily abandon their baby, so they may adopt it later, once married, without the stigma of illegitimacy. They are foiled by the neighbours' 11 year-old son Nate who, following the directions in his head from his recently dead little sister, collects the baby from the church doorstep and forces his womanizing father to allow the whole family to join him and his mistress, as they travel with the circus. Meanwhile, Albrecht, Nate's neighbour and the story's narrator, stays at home, devoted to the younger daughter of the neighbour on the other side but envying Gerhard, his blonder twin brother who is living the glamorous life as a music student in Germany, which is where their parents both came from, and where their mother revisits in search of Gerhard and refuses to aknowledge the scary politcal stirrings that are afoot. And that's not the half of it. History repeats and reflects as one young woman defects from her "home" country, over the North Pole, on a pair of skis.

The pile-up of events and connections, each in themselves perfectly credible, weave into a type of surreal mystic saga, maybe a norse saga for all the cold and ice that's always around. It contains a mythic quality in that it is as satisfying in emotional truth as it is in excitement and adventure. In this bit Albrecht flies his cessna through a storm and reminisces. It speaks to me about the structure/philosphy of the novel

"Electricity scouts for a route into the ground, sparks crackle in the white void of the heavy cloud I fly into, and the patch frizzles out in static. My father says there are invisible wires, magnetic pathways, fibers of force. He used to come into our room during thunderstorms and, standing in the darkness between flashes of lightning bolts, squeeze on a broomstick to increase the nervous flow to his muscles, neutralizing imbalances by placing ice between his feet and grounding the static. He made us feel safe. He was doing something about the weather, about the state of the world."

In a perverse way, I wanted to nail down the global wanderings of the characters, as if I could depict the filaments they made and the magnetic pulls they were following. I wanted to see this whole complicated story at a glance and I thought a diagram would be just the ticket, which you see above. Doesn't really work does it? You'd better read the book. --RBR

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