Finding Hope in Mary Lawson's 'A Town Called Solace'

Note: This review is intended as a thematic exploration of the novel, and as such, it contains spoilers.

An eight-year-old girl refuses to leave the window, too scared to miss the secret message her missing sister promised to send her. She watches as a strange man moves into her next door neighbour’s house. How odd, she thinks, when Mrs.Orchard promised she would only be gone to the hospital for a few days. Mary Lawson’s latest novel is a compact, thoughtful novel, where characters struggling to find hope ultimately find tentative solace in their connections with others.

Young Clara’s perspective is particularly moving, as she struggles to understand why the adults lie to her, and believes in a poignant magical thinking to cope with her terror that her sister, Rose, will not return. She is kind and serious and takes her responsibilities to others very serious, sneaking into the house to feed Mrs.Orchard’s cat even after the appearance of a strange newcomer. She agonizes over whether to break her promise to her sister. After all, a promise is a promise, but how does this weigh against the worry that Rose may be in danger? Far from romanticizing childhood, Lawson’s characterization shows the frightening, bewildering strangeness the world has for Clara, who astutely recognizes the schadenfreude in her false friends. Jenny, Clara’s best friend, reassures her that ‘I’ll always be your friend, no matter what anyone says,’ in a pleased way that made Clara not want to be friends with her anymore.’

While Clara waits, Elizabeth lays in hospital dying. She has very little to look forward to except an increasingly painful aging. ‘There’s no point in life when you’re nothing but a nuisance to people’ she reflects. Although she should ‘welcome’ death, instead she is frightened. In hospital, she’s stuck next to ‘raving’ Martha, another elderly patient. Although she shared a tender love with her husband, he is dead now, and Elizabeth finds her greatest comfort looking back on the past. Her fondest memories are of Liam, the young boy who used to play at their house. Without any children, Elizabeth decides to leave Liam everything she owns, including the house. Liam is lost in his life. His beautiful but rather heartless wife has just let him, and after impulsively quitting his job he goes to Solace, primarily to avoid having to make any more decisions until he is ready to cope with them.

Here, we have the set-up for a Man-Called-Ove-style arc of redemption, where the protagonist finds love and friendship in a small cozy community. When he stops to reflect on what he wants from life, it seems obvious that this town isn’t it. Liam sits in his new house eating only stale cookies, lonely and confused.

Unlike some other small towns portrayed in novels, Lawson’s Solace does not presented an idealized charming country community. Instead, one character worries that his son will never get out of this town and end up like him. He wants his son to ‘go out into the big wide world and see stuff and do interesting things and have a bigger life than (I) did.’ When Elizabeth says she wants the house given to Liam immediately, her lawyers tells her bluntly that he won’t want the it. After all, he lives in the city, and it’ll be a hassle for him. Moving to the town, Liam eats a grimy dinner in The Hot Potato, one of two cafes in the town and the only one that remains open. He can choose from poutine or hamburger and fries. The waitress does not smile.

But neither does the outside world does not offer a much more promising option. Fears grow for Rose, who at 17 is believed to have run away to Toronto, where many young girls end up in a life of crime and prostitution on the cold Canadian streets. City life also hasn’t been kind to Liam, who has lived an acceptable but lonely and unfulfilled life.

What Solace does provide for Liam, as Elizabeth’s deathbed does for her, is a place to reflect and collect their stories in a way that is meaningful to them. Liam and Elizabeth stories come together as we learn that Elizabeth offered him the love his own mother could never give him. Suddenly, Liam’s story makes much more sense, as his whole life he has been haunted by the feeling that he is unlovable, scared to love with his whole heart. The cruelty, of course, was that although Elizabeth and Liam both found in each other what they had long yearned for, they are torn apart. As at other times in this novel, we see the law butting up against other ethical values. Clara must decide between doing what is right in the eyes of the law, from the land of the grown-ups, and doing what she promised her sister. Elizabeth’s actions are easily and legitimately condemned by the courts, yet we witness exactly how her heart break could’ve driven her to that point, and understand that rather than trying to steal a child, Elizabeth was trying to give him a home.

Perhaps the answer to what they are both looking for also lays in the thing that has hurt them the most: love, and connecting with others. Here is the antidote to the stagnation Liam felt in the city. Initially, Liam rebuffs, or can’t bring himself to believe in, the opportunities for connection he is given. He tells Clara that she must not visit when he is home; he likes to be ‘alone’. He rejects an offer to come to dinner from his new neighbor. He tells himself he is only staying in this town while he decides what to do next – he cannot possibly stay here. But, slowly, Liam begins to thaw. Perhaps the house itself, a symbol of Elizabeth’s love for him, helps Liam to understand something poignant; that we often leave a greater impact on the lives of others that we can ever imagine. Liam is able to offer Clara what was taken from him; a place of refuge. He takes a chance and starts to form connection with others, accepting a deal to help with the building work the house needs. He does this in order to save money, but finds instead the beginnings of a friendship and the pleasure of constructive work. Here, we see Liam building up the ingredients of a fulfilled life; connection and meaningful work.

While Liam has hope for the future, Elizabeth must find consolation in looking back at her past. The most important people in Elizabeth’s life are largely absent from it. Her husband is dead and, after being banned from seeing Liam, she is only able to get in touch with him near the end of her life, through a scattered series of occasional letters. The joy and sadness crescendo together. Liam brings about the happiest and saddest day in her life. Yet, although it is over now, she is still able to take comfort from the past. ‘Maybe it’s a matter of tenses.’ She reflects. ‘Of grammar. Our love existed, it does exist, it will exist. On the great continuum of time, perhaps it is the tenses that will cease to be.’ On her deathbed, Elizabeth remembers the great tender joy Liam brought to her life. Although it is over now, on the great ‘continuum of time’ that doesn’t matter. The past is over, but Liam’s love is a story she can tell herself over and over again, as the reader can always flick back to the start of the book. While Clara frets for Elizabeth, she is already dead, and her present is Clara’s past. But the love she laid down for Liam still lives on, perhaps giving him the strength to start his new life.

Even in Elizabeth’s condition, at the very end of her life, she is able to form bonds with others – she is tender to another patient who she initially can’t stand, being her champion and promising to stay with her so she does not have to die alone. Here, perhaps, is the Solace promised in the title; although Elizabeth has largely given up on her life, even noting of Clara that although she is a nice girl, she didn’t move her the way that Liam did, and confiding only in her dead husband, in connecting with others she is able to find meaning. Ultimately, it is through forming new connections that Clara is able to save her sister – by confiding in Liam, who cautiously passes it along to the police officer. It’s a chain of connection that brings Rose home again.

And so, connection brings a cautiously optimistic hope of a slow recovery. A traumatized Rose is returned to her home, and will not speak. Clara hears the gossip at school and her friends ask invasive questions. Liam is unsure what he will do next, but seems to have the tentative beginnings of a happy ending. Elizabeth’s happy ending was short-lived, and has now vanished into past, but the effects of it still resonate in the present, shaping the lives of Liam and leading him onto a new path. Looking back, she is able to say that at least she has loved.