(courtesy Penguins Books Australia)
Life takes a heavy toll on all of us.
How much damage it causes us in amongst all the good and happy times doesn’t become readily apparent until much later in life and usually only when some lightning rod of an event causes us to be plunged into a past that we never really left behind but which is, for a whole host of reasons, pushed to the nether regions of our consciousness.
Just how confronting it is to have some traumatic part of our past spring from a place of self-preservational repression to something bewilderingly front and centre becomes brilliantly apparent in Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger which takes on a journey, literal and metaphoric, through time and across Canada as two people come to grips at long last with likely the worst time of their entire lives.
Married at one time, a union which produced their much-loved daughter Una, Yannick, 73, and Kathleen, 65 from small town Ontario, Canada, have somehow remained close friends through the former’s three subsequent marriages and a 19-year rift that, as the novel begins, is only just being unwillingly mended (at least by Kathleen; Yannick, the instigator of the rapprochement arrives in town for the first time in almost two decades with clear intent and singular purpose).
Perhaps the greatest test of their still-strong if substantially-battered relationship is the approximately 22-year old disappearance of Una who hasn’t been since she disappeared off a dock late one night in Tofino, a small fishing town on Vancouver Island’s ruggedly beautiful west coast.
He thought about her out there, though, other side of the country, and each time he did, he was surprised by the memory of that picture book, that moonlight reflection on the water. That moon road. Where it might lead and how far it might take her.
While many people have moved on and the annual party that Kathleen doggedly holds each and every year for her daughter is less and less patronised by a township that sees Kathleen as obsessively unhinged – the initial empathy for her has long since dissipated – Kathleen remains in the grip of her grief.
She daily and dutifully changes the number of days since Una went missing on a whiteboard in the kitchen and maintains a Facebook page where a revolving cast of wannabe true crime sleuths watch the CCTV footage of Una on the dock and throw forth scenarios where she either lives or most often dies.
For someone who can’t let go of the iron cast grip she has on past trauma, Kathleen is reluctant to accompany Yannick on a drive westwards to Vancouver and then by ferry to Vancouver Island, seeing no point on another journey into what-ifs and what-might-have-happeneds.
It’s as if Kathleen exists in a world where Una hovers on the cusp of being found and anything which takes away the intangible idea that she is out there somewhere – in this case bones have been found and Kathleen and Yannick are among a number of families called upon to contribute to a possible DNA match – simply can’t be countenanced because it means that all her fossilising hope and willful commitment to a cause will be at an end.
(courtesy official Twitter account)
And then what will Kathleen do?
It’s clear she doesn’t want to face that eventuality, but on the spur of the moment she decides to go with Yannick and it’s at this point that the gorgeously written and deeply, luminously emotionally resonant Moon Road becomes a road trip, not simply across the prairies and mountains and through the forests of Canada, but through all the hopes and regrets and broken promises and dreams of a past both people want to both forget and never let go of.
While Moon Road is far from being some fairytale story of log-delayed healing – it simultaneously offers up finality and lingering loose ends – there is a sense in amongst the arguments, intimacy and nostalgia of the road trip that all that pain long put away by them both may yet find some sense of resolution and might finally free them from the pain that has, in various ways, kept them imprisoned in a time long gone and yet wholly and painfully present.
Going on this quietly, and revelatorily nuanced journey with Yannick and Kathleen is a wondrously affecting experience as we dive deep into a relationship and those of people in their orbit which endures despite a host of quite terrible reasons why it should not, and as the past bleeds into the present and piece by little piece leads to a future that may not be broken or calcified as might otherwise have been the case.
‘I have never been so scared, Yannick,’ Kathleen said. ‘I don’t know how to do this.’
‘I know,’ he said.
There is SO much richness to the way Leipciger tells the story of Moon Road.
Her use of language is superlatively poetic and moving and often quite arrestingly beautiful and yet she’s one of those rare writers who can use words that sing and leap with artistry off the page who can still write with real emotionality and humanity.
You thus are treated to both masterfully lush writing that will have you gasping with how it so perfectly expresses emotions you might have thought of out reach of satisfactory expression, and a grounded humanity that conveys at every point how destructive and painful traumatic loss can be and how healing from it, if that can even take place, is never an easy or quick journey.
Leipciger writes with such empathy and insight that you grieve almost as fully and completely as Kathleen and Yannick do, and while the novel never quite wraps things up neatly with a big red bow for the two longtime friends, it does spur them onto the healing they both so desperately need, especially Kathleen who is ensnared by a pain she can’t seem to escape.
Moon Road is a thing of moving beauty and truth, a novel which offers us insight into how great pain and loss can carve great channels through the once-expected undulations of a person’s wished-for life, how finding a way to healing is never easy but, if we’re open to it, possible, and how perhaps a new future can be forged where the past in not forgotten but rather gives way to the quiet possibility of what might be once the pain has finally been put aside.