As much as I enjoyed Elizabeth Hay's Giller-winning "Late Nights on Air," I didn't find it captivating or engrossing. Thus, I began "Alone in the Classroom" with some trepidation, not confident it would sustain my interest. Turns out I had nothing to worry about.
From the first chapter of this exquisitely-written book, the story had me hooked. In 1937, a girl picks chokecherries on an Ontario hillside but in the next paragraph is found dead. Perspective shifts to the present as the narrator reads a newspaper article on the mysterious tragedy written by the young Connie Flood, whose perspective then takes over, transporting the reader to small-town Saskatchewan a decade before the murder.
And so the novel progresses, shifting seamlessly between voices and generations as the plot unfolds. Connie takes center stage, a first-time teacher confronting her fear of rejection and moulding an undiagnosed dyslexic student. Her principle, Parley Burns, appears as a stoic, dedicated but hollow man who casts a shadow of sexual menace over the school. Hay's characters are so rich and rounded that they truly come alive as the author builds narrative tension. Daily incidents emerge like revelations thanks to acute, simply beautiful prose.
Time accelerates in the final third of the novel as the network of stories grows. Connie slowly moves into the background and her niece, the narrator, takes over. Here, the book loses some momentum and becomes less engaging, though certainly not to the point of boredom. Ultimately, the novel focuses on family; the narrator admits that she has learned about her mother's life sideways through stories of feuds, loves and mistakes. "A hidden symmetry is often at work as we stumble our way through life," she finds as she luminously works her way through history. "You touch a place and thousands of miles away another place quivers. You touch a person and down the line the ghosts of relatives move in the wind."
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