Certainty by Madeleine Thien

I have not always been thrilled by the list put out by the CBC of the Top 100 Canadian Books. I mean, I'll read the whole thing if it kills me, but the list itself was far to heavily weighted towards books that had come out in the five years before it was compiled. And so, many of the books on it have left me a little baffled as to why they're there, other than that they're recent, and it probably pleased the publishers.

Luckily, although Certainty is still fairly recent, this was not a book that left me rolling my eyes in disbelief and wondering who the heck picked it. I can't say I loved it with the deep-down love I reserve for a few books every year, but it's definitely one that I might recommend to someone if I thought this was up their particular alley. Phew! It's nice to be able to say nice things about these books. I want to support Canadian literature. Just not, you know, if it's terrible.

We have a bunch of interlocking stories here - the story of Gail, a radiojournalist obsessed with the stories of people's lives, and not knowing what is not told. (As made material by a diary written in a Vignere code.)  Then stories of her parents, particularly her father - growing up in a Malaysia at war, negotiating terrain of loyalty and collaboration that have deadly consequences, and then later, when her father meets her mother and they go to Australia as students. And the story of Gail's partner, Ansel, coping with grief after Gail dies unexpectedly in her 40s. As a doctor, he searches for a way he could have prevented a freak occurrence, while trying to help a tubercular patient with AIDS negotiate his last days.

It's a lot, and these stories do not interlock in neat ways, perhaps trying to avoid the certainty of the title in favour of different stories with different meanings. This does, however, make it a bit harder to pick out themes that are universal to all the stories in the novel. The back-of-the-book description makes this all seem neater than it is - like Gail goes to Amsterdam in search of the woman in her father's past, where in the actual novel, she goes following an unrelated story, and ends up contacting a man there who married her father's childhood sweetheart without really have any idea of the full sweep of the story. It's more than that she's curious than that she knows the precise outlines of the mystery.

In fact, the back of the book prose makes this all seem like the emotions in this book are more tempestuous and passionate than they are. This isn't the story of raging feelings. It's the story of adults dealing with deep feelings, mostly well. They don't really act out. They try to work through their emotions, even when they are emotions not easily handled. Ansel still goes to supper every week with Gail's parents, and they are together, even when grief sweeps through. When it does, there isn't any gnashing of teeth or rending of clothes, and this is closer to my own experience of grief - it colours everything, but doesn't necessitate destroying what still remains.

Does what Gail finds out give her any closure? Did it her father? Ansel? They all go on, as long as they can, until death ends one of the stories. And the discovery of secrets doesn't really end anything, it just alters the circumstances.

So, because these stories don't neatly interlock, don't unfold a secret at the centre, they're a quieter story. Much like what Gail finds when someone decodes the Vignere cipher for her - life is more mundane, more able to go on, more constant than you might expect. That sense is what I responded to most strongly in this book.