“The mud between the opposing trenches is known as No Man’s Land. In the First World War, James takes a post in a narrow strip of France and Flanders, and volunteers to “collect the dead and comfort the dying” in a zone that defines his turmoil: The principle patriarch, James, may be despicable, but MacDonald does not allow him to remain in the dull purgatory of masculine evil. While Atwood has been criticized for her mistreatment of male characters, the same cannot be said about MacDonald. And MacDonald has used the skill of a method actor to develop characters – including many children – far beyond stereotype. The tense plot, which signals MacDonald’s addiction to the mystery novel, does not require readers to play Spot the Archetype: it drives regardless. When the wash of symbols threatens to flood the narrative field, MacDonald transports the story to higher ground. While other novelists have ventured into the Jungian dark – Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood, for two – MacDonald’s feel for the requirements of drama keep her writing dynamic and prevents it from seeming derivative. By some sparkling shape-shift, MacDonald has been transformed into a novelist, the only clues to her dramatic heritage being a fervent use of rising action, reversals, and Shakespearean gender overlaps. But Fall on Your Knees is not a retelling of, or a sequel to, MacDonald’s plays. And her more recent play, The Arab’s Mouth, skirts some of the thick thematic concerns of the novel, such as how we constantly pick at the tight tangle of family secrets. Her Governor General’s Award-winning play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), is brilliantly imbricated with allusions to Shakespeare and Jung. Predictably, her first novel – a saga spanning five generations of an Island family – is riddled with ghosts and saints and governed by a splice of Roman Catholic and Jungian magic: alchemical transformation, fertility quests, and shadow presences function as crafty plot devices.
In a 1990 interview, Ann-Marie MacDonald said she is haunted by “the mythic place called Cape Breton,” and that her imagination projects “an aura of magic, of mystery” onto its landscape and residents.
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