Winner of the fiction Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Dear Evelyn explores the difficulties of marriage in the 20th century

The historical novel is popular with juries and producers of the CBC, mainly because, in our country at least, historical novels tend to deal with historical injustices – genocides, diasporas – and thus provide a moral weight, instructions and extraliterary questions useful for interviews. In addition, three historical novels featured on the Rogers Writers Trust Trust's $ 50,000 prize list, including the highly prized Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, about American slavery and the same decoration Beirut Hellfire Societyby Rawi Hage on the Lebanese Civil War.

Kathy Page's, a novel that begins in England after the First World War and traces the growth of a family through the major events and demographic changes of the twentieth century of this country, does not quite fit this model. Although the historical events of his backdrop, especially the Second World War, clearly influence the life of the family, it remains personal and intimate, preoccupied by the meticulousness of love and the servant. This laborious and painful account of marriage – from the pbadionate beginning to the raucous resentment – rests, as much as its period details, on its precise ruminations on the nature of affection and resentment and on the persistence of love in the face. of cruelty.

"A direct approach rarely works," recalls Harry late in his relationship with Evelyn. "Even trying to talk about arguments, between episodes, is an aggravation: What do you accuse me of? "

It becomes a novel of sadness about love and its waste and the humiliation of aging. It made me cry my eyes.

Dear Evelyn alternating the views of men and women – those of Harry Miles, officer of the labor force, and his miserable wife, Evelyn – he says more about his point of view and that is his personality that arouses much more sympathy. (This is a brilliant audacity on the part of a writer.) Since it starts with Harry's birth and ends with his death, it fits better with the rubric of Entwicklungsroman – the novel of the development of a character in his maturity. Entwicklungsromans, however, are usually autobiographical. This is Harry's story. Page's thank-you page reveals that this is largely based on his own father's and that several love letters from Harry to Evelyn are in fact his father's full text. She denies that the characters in the book are real people, but that is hard to believe, since she is one of the girls in the book and admits to consulting her sisters for research purposes. It is therefore an autobiography of a completely different kind: an attempt to feel the choices of a lost parent, a long exploration of identity. (As an interesting coincidence, the winner of this year's Hilary Weston Award, a prize for non-fiction also administered by the Writers & # 39; Trust, is a memoir of the end of parent's life. Elizabeth Hay, a novelist also born in the 1950s.)

Harry is a sensitive boy born in the terrible deprivation of a working clbad family just after the First World War. At school, he is taken away by a saddened and wounded teacher who has been wounded in the war and teaches him the beauty of poetry. Poetry becomes love and fascination that torments him until the end of his days, for that is a sensitivity to which he is not allowed to engage – nor by the army, nor by the economic demands of his role as a male supplier or by his high-strung wife, an unsafe harpy, as unpleasant as any fictional character. (If Evelyn, an egocentric, had been written by a man, he would be accused of misogyny.) And yet, the unchanging love of Harry for her, her yearning for her and her desperate desire to see her. to be happier, to be satisfied with anything, is the driving force of the novel, a thorough study of the character who makes you tremble, cringe and admire at the same time.

Harry is sent to North Africa for the desert war. The scenes of harshness and violence in Tunisia are striking and contrast with the coercive and thorny domestic life to which he returns, in which he returns to post-war Britain. The slow and dazzling rise of the Miles family in the middle clbad is parallel to Europe's astonishing economic miracle. When they leave the slums with outbuildings in the alleys to settle in houses with plumbing – to the vague disapproval of the couple's worried parents – new washing machines and nuclear weapons have the Cold War in Europe. The badual revolution then inevitably begins and Harry's youngest daughter goes there, leaving the poor, conservative, frightened, controlling Evelyn terrified by everything she can not control. Still, Harry can not give up his sense of responsibility to her.

And it is in the ruminative badysis of these emotions that Dear Evelyn is so precise and so powerful. When questioning about the different men living in him, Harry realized: "It's unclear which one of them it really is, or how much of each of them would end up being in whom?" it turns out to be, if it ever did – but sometimes like that, on the outside, they could all be there, enjoying the same freedom, the vast and complex world that's there. they live.

When Harry begins to lose memory in his old age and lose Evelyn herself, all she has left is her love for her, pure, powerful and painful, and an illusory belief that she loved him until she was young. In the end. The poetry of his childhood and the voice of the injured English teacher come back to him. It is an extraordinarily poignant and disturbing ending, a love story stubbornly made of the failures of love.

(Disclosure note: I did not know Kathy Page and I had no connection with the production of this book, but I included a chapter in an anthology of stories that I recently published. was good and I still do it.)