The Other Side of the Bridge was deservedly longlisted for the Man booking agent prize. It is Mary Lawsons second novel: her first, Crow Lake, was memorable for its sp ar, impressive style and its powerful storytelling. This new book revisits the same grime in northern Ontario - the lake features, and the townsfolk doctor becomes a key figure - and is, if anything, even more arresting. She has a remarkable submit for conjuring up place and the great unwashed in a handful of words, a few lines of dialogue. Struan is a remote town set amid wilderness and farming land, with a sawmill, a dispirited bunch of stores lined up along a mothy main street, the Hudsons Bay Company, Post Office, bank, restaurant, bar, hotel. The population is gnarled in farming or employed at the sawmill and the local mine. There is also the Ojibway reserve, with its own self-contained community.
Characters rebound into perspective from the very first page, when we meet Arthur Dunn and his younger familiar throwing knives at each others feet - Jakes diabolical idea. Soon two utterly polarised characters are established: Arthur is slow, reserved, responsible and essentially good; Jake is quick, clever, unprincipled and bad.
It is a particular fictional feat to write compellingly of comely people, and most of the cast of The Other Side of the Bridge are decent, generous and altruistic, from Arthur through the town doctor and his son Ian to non-homogeneous more peripheral figures. Struan is a place in which people help one another out; housewives take cooked meals to a family in distress, the doctor fails to present a bill to those who would construe it hard to pay. Everyone knows everyone else, and the novels strength is that by its end the reader more or less does, too. This essential decency seems to spring from the demands imposed by the harsh environment - the isolation, the vicious winters.
The story dips back and forth in time, neatly placed by inscrutable headlines from the Tamiskaming verbalizer at the head of each...If you want to get a all-embracing essay, order it on our website: Orderessay
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