Ann-Marie MacDonald may be best known for her stunning debut novel Fall On Your Knees (1996), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in 2002. Last year a powerful stage adaptation of the novel, directed by Alisa Palmer, came to Neptune Theatre for a sold-out run. Fall On Your Knees is set partially in New Waterford, Nova Scotia, as both MacDonald’s parents were from Cape Breton, and, as her surname suggests, she is Scottish on her paternal side, with her father’s parents speaking Gàidhlig as their first language. Her newest novel, Fayne, published October 11 2022, takes readers back to the old country, an t-seann dùthaich, to an old estate in a mystifying real-life place called The Borders, or Crìochan na h-Alba, along a soft border between England and Scotland where people live almost in two countries at once. It is here at the end of the 19th Century that we meet the Honourable Charlotte Bell of the DC de Fayne, aged twelve, who lives here with her father, Henry, Lord Bell, a scientific man who has passed his deep passion for knowledge down to his child.
We are told that Charlotte suffers from a vague condition that both she and her father hope she might someday outgrow, but that, for now, means that she must live sequestered from others in the old house on the moor of the estate, with only her father, her doting nanny, Knoxy, and the mysterious jack of all trades Old Byrn for company. Charlotte is the very definition of precocious, and loves exploring the land, devouring books, and having scholarly chats with her father as he obsesses especially over his fascination with birds. Charlotte has a mnemonic memory and quickly outpaces her father’s knowledge and his library. As she has grown up alienated from society’s social constructs and has been raised neither particularly as her father’s son, nor as his daughter, but simply as Charlotte, she naively expects that she will be able to study with a tutor, go to the university in Edinburgh, and become a doctor, once she outgrows her condition. Her father doesn’t have the heart to explain to her how she will be viewed as a woman in the world beyond Fayne, hoping, perhaps, that he will never have to, that she will remain his sweet child enamoured with her home forever.
Looming over their happiness is a portrait on the landing of the staircase of Charlotte’s dead mother and dead older brother. Her brother, who died as a toddler, continues to haunt her, and she cannot help but feel contempt for both him and her mother, who died in childbirth, for reasons that she doesn’t understand. When her much-loved tutor disappears without a word of goodbye in the night, just as an artifact from the past is uncovered from the moor, and Charlotte transitions from childhood to teenage-hood, everything in her secure little world gets turned upside-down overnight.
As MacDonald has said in interviews the allusions to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre are vivid. The novel transitions back in forth in time, telling not just the story of how Charlotte begins to step into the reality of a world not at all ready for her, but also of her mother, Mae, an American heiress originally of Irish descent, and her aunt, Clarissa, her father’s older sister, who has strict views about the way things are done in their family, and who is willing to see that these ways continue at any cost. I have heard MacDonald say in interviews before, and I’m paraphrasing, that she needs to approach each one of her characters with a degree of empathy; she needs to be able to see the world of the story from their perspective, no matter how heinous their actions may be, as with the patriarch James Piper in Fall On Your Knees. She also mentioned that she puts an element of herself into all (or most) of her characters, that there is no one character that she pours her own self into- she is sprinkled in and disseminated in many different facets and guises throughout all her books. As a writer, I have held tightly onto both of these ideas, and in Fayne you can really see the empathy creating complex scenarios, and three dimensional characters whose choices are sometimes abhorrent, but who remain very much human throughout the story. No one exists outside of the context of their time, their place, their histories, their gender, religion, culture, and social status, and we can see so clearly how all people get ensnared in these to some extent, and how they influence the choices that people make, whether they are aware of this or not.
The novel is mostly historical fiction and rooted in scenarios that feel, akin to Brontë, plausible, but with allusions to faerie tales. In Fayne, there is an element of magic afoot as well, like the world of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is just over the border, or out in the mist on the moor. The Borders provide a symbolic landscape for the story- a place in-between places, a Colonial place of disputed ownership that is stuck between the past and the future, a place that needs to be two things at once, for if it were only one thing, it would disappear altogether.
In Toronto especially Ann-Marie MacDonald is known to theatre audiences as an actor. More recently she played Jayne Fine in More Fine Girls at Tarragon Theatre in 2011, was Pope Joan/ Louise in Top Girls at Soulpepper in 2007-8, and I will never forget her outstanding performance as Edward/Betty in Cloud 9, one of the best productions I’ve ever seen in my life, produced by Mirvish Productions in 2010. As an actor MacDonald is extremely funny. She may have spent her childhood travelling across the country as a self-described “army brat,” but she has a Gàidhlig sense of humour. This humour is infused throughout Fayne, as it is in all her novels, and it makes reading an absolute delight.
“With newfound boldness did I climb the stairs that night, and once again raise my candle and my eyes to the portrait on the landing. This time I looked straight at my brother. The grey-eyed cherub nestled in his mother’s arms gazed merrily outward. I hated him a little less tonight. After all, I had a tutor and he was dead.”
Perfection.
I waited a year to begin reading Fayne. My mother bought the book for me for my 38th birthday, and as it turned out it was her last birthday gift to me. I put off reading it because new Ann-Marie MacDonald novels are rare, and I didn’t want to start reading it because I knew once I did, the experience of first reading would soon be over. Once I did start reading it, however, I was able to savour the first two parts of the novel, but I read the rest in one single sitting, unable to do anything else until I unraveled the full mystery of Fayne with Charlotte. I can imagine the novel as an epic play, like Fall On Your Knees, as a film, or a miniseries, or perhaps, in time, all three. Perhaps someone will someday adapt it into a musical, a fate that might also happen eventually for Fall On Your Knees. And like with Fall On Your Knees, should that day arise, I would be very invested in how it was done, who was cast, the manner of it, because this story and these characters have done what great novels do, they have become a part of my heart, friends that I spent days adventuring with in my imagination, and who I very likely will return to one day, where I am certain new things lie in wait for me to discover on the moor.
Fayne is available wherever novels are sold, including locally at Bookmark, King’s Co-Op Bookstore, and Agricola Street Books. Ann-Marie MacDonald reads the audiobook; so that is sure to be magical and hilarious. Ce livre est maintenant disponible en français.
