“The Unfinished World is a beautiful, insightful novel that performs a remarkable trick with history, time, and memory, a brilliant interweaving that is both teasingly cerebral as well as richly heartfelt.” – Bill Gaston, author of Juliet Was a Surprise and The World
“As intricate as Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – but more fluent – this dazzling novel takes the reader around the world, through time, across genres, and finally, into deep, cold, and dangerous waters. A thrilling and compelling read propelled in equal measures by grief, wonder and joy.” – Kathy Page, author of This Faulty Machine, A Memoir of Loss and Transformation
“The Unfinished World is extraordinary … Marilyn Bowering’s writing has always had the power to enchant.” – Isabel Huggan, author of The Elizabeth Stories and You Never Know.
In a global culture seemingly intent on stripping the young of the possibilities of love, purpose and belonging, Pearl stands at the end of her strand of descent and DNA with the resources of the lives of those who have come before to act as warning and counsel if only she can uncover their significance to her own life and use them to change its course.
Distraught after her grandmother Nora’s death, Pearl scatters Nora’s ashes in the places she has loved. As Pearl retraces her grandmother’s last journey, she recovers a series of handmade dolls that Nora has left behind for her to find – dolls that have been handed down in the family for generations. Hidden within each is a tiny note from grandmother to granddaughter.
Together, these dolls and the messages they carry lead Pearl to recall and recount tales given to her as a child. It is these stories, ranging from the semi-mythic past to the present, that enable Pearl to view her life against the larger scale of human survival and responsibility to the future. Once Pearl accepts her mysterious gift of communication, not only is she allied with the survival of another species, but she uncovers the key to love and happiness for herself.
Second chances are possible, as are deep and fundamental connections with the natural world.
“The dolls were like footprints; like breadcrumbs or still-life objects stored in a palace of memory, a palace that Nora said contained the rooms of your life. All you knew and learned and all you had inherited was stored in them, but you had to make a map to find your way through, like the storytellers did.”
“What will people think?” the poet asked himself. Although the only question that mattered was the girl’s question, “How will I get through the coming days and nights without the companionship of those I love?”
A Commonplace of Hills a non-fiction work-in-progress
I’ve lived in the middle of the Sooke Hills on Vancouver Island, at one end of the Sooke basin, on and off over a period of thirty-five years. During that time, I’ve been aware, with more or less intensity, of the landscape that surrounds views of the sea, trails along the beach, and framing the distant vista of the Olympic Mountains. I’ve hiked various hills in East Sooke Park and climbed Mt. Maguire numerous times. I’ve driven up, and admired the view from, Mt. Matheson. What I had never done until I began this project, was to explore the hills that are hidden by dense second growth forest, or are a little further away from the main road.
It’s clear that this period of relatively untouched landscape—an in-breath after the logging a hundred years ago of the first growth forest—is about to end. Some of the more visible of my nearly invisible hills are beginning to sprout subdivisions. Areas once only accessible to logging, are becoming parks and attracting tourists. I have a sense of something precious that’s been at my fingertips and is about to be taken away.
I began thinking about these hills with a view to climbing them and writing about them several years ago. It began with the above awareness of what I could not see yet lived so close to, and with an observation made from my house just above the Sooke basin (the harbour), that the hills form a rough series of concentric circles with the harbour at the centre of the ‘bowl’. I thought it would be interesting to consider the hills from the point of view of geometry. Others have done this in other places and found (apparently) meaningful connections between landscape features.
I bought several large scale maps and drew lines from the tops of the hills and saw that I could connect these points to form pentagons and decided that this was the shape that would determine the order in which I tackled the hills. So far, so whimsical, although because I was living in the countryside where it was possible to watch the night sky, and likely because I was sleeping beneath a skylight that gave me a window on the heavens, the pentagonal star-shape seemed an appropriate way to try to read the land: as above, so below, as is said in philosophy and metaphysics.
I drew up a list of hills (ten originally), and while I was still thinking about all this, a First Nations acquaintance told me stories of the hills being used for refuge after confrontations with Europeans in the first decades of the 1800’s; and then in order to hide from American First Nations Bounty Hunters, and to protect First Nations women during the 1850’s local Gold Rush. I began thinking about the hidden cultural history of the hills apart from records of European ‘discovery’. Later on, I learnt that the hills are still used as refuge, or as hiding places, and that sometimes people also need to escape from them as well as flee into them.
Because of the heavy forestation and isolation, the geological history and composition and to some extent the flora and fauna of the hills was also not commonly known, although this too, through the use of new mapping technology is changing. This is an earthquake region: and there have been, historically, vast alterations in the shoreline regions at the foot of these hills from earthquakes and tsunamis. One of the world’s great earthquakes (estimated at 9 on the Richter scale) took place here in January 1700. It is a landscape that sits at the edge of a fault, and slippage and landscape fluidity are part of its nature.
Other aspects began to interest me: for instance, the alteration in the nature of my village from a pioneering farming, fishing and logging community, to a tourist based bedroom community for an urban population. The original settling families, of which there are a few remaining, hiked, camped and explored these hills as a matter of course; in the early years of the 20th century there were climbing, hunting and skiing clubs and even lodges in the area. Most of these have vanished, nearly out of recollection. Nonetheless, my first hikes were made after making contact with people who still knew and climbed the hills in the old way– without much in the way of trails, and with few signposts.
By this point, I found that for reasons of seasons and weather, and because of the changeable physical abilities of me and my climbing companions, and for various other unpredictable causes, I had to let go of my detailed original plan and just see what happened. I have softened the conceit of making geometrical and other connections in favour of describing what I find. I have discovered that each hill not only comes with its own geology, topography, plants and animals and history, but with a relationships to the others; and often with people who live in or explore them, all with stories of their own. I will still, when I am done, make a drawing of the climbs in triangle groupings—just to see.
The list of hills has been added to and subtracted from: some remain inaccessible to me but others have popped up to take their place because someone knows the way and will take me, or an access to private land has been obtained or denied. Illness, accident and dispersal have played their part in changing both what I thought the book could be, and me as its author. I have not finished the climbs (two to go) and may or may not be able to: either way, that will be part of the story, too.
Since A Commonplace of Hills is a work-in-progress, I’ll post an inspirational photo of my path-finding friend, Alan Danesh.
