Perhaps a bit dated, but incredibly timeless, hit old, still familiar chords of childhood, those innocent perceptions and fears, the secrets — and in this book there are childish secrets and understandings as to how the world works, as well as very severe secrets of Soviet defection of a scientist to Canada, and the murder of a child. There are moments of odd child abuse by a fourth grade teacher, so subtly created, written at angles and shadows and indirect imagery, sadly, frustratingly experienced by us, the helpless readers. It touched me as well, the reality of how a family works and what it was like, exactly like for this particular one, a Canadian Air Force family, moving from post to post.

The writer creates several important subplots, all somehow woven together, from the relationships within the family of four, (a French mother, prone to exasperated expression in her native tongue, the father, and Madeline and her teasing, but loving, older brother,) to the quirky, crippled girl across the street who carries a switchblade knife, with her German Shepard dog, to the many young girls who are abused in the seemingly innocent Air Force base school, never to be known about except by us.

MacDonald’s seamless, natural writing comes to us smoothly, beautifully, and it appears her words flow out, all original, not a single worn out phrase or cliché, as easily as though falling through lovely space. She was clearly meant for the purpose of expression through language as she is a master of the craft. Her form, her pacing, her lack of fear to take the readers into the depths of character, all so natural, as if the story were being copied down from tablets shown to her, miraculously. I find it a flawless book.

The story line concerns a Canadian Air Force officer and his family as they move location to location, most recently from Europe to a small post in Canada. It’s peacetime, 1962 and most of the novel is seen and felt deeply by eight year old Madeline, and at times by her father, a good man, Jack McCarthy. Through one impossibly timed perception connects himself with his daughter through a terrible secret that they keep, without ever literally sharing it, the murder of a little girl….and who may have done it. The best part of Anne-Marie’s writing is the intimate understanding and real experience of the characters, especially the girl and her father. We experience her thinking, her fears, her views, her growing up, her confusion, her joys, her pains, her everything. We get to know her possibly far more than we could a real person.

And that’s the thing: we, in short, love these characters. I found myself missing them while away and have rarely regretted putting a novel away. The title itself, obscure at first, by the end takes on an amazing, uniquely startling perception of and in itself. The novel is a 738 page delight. I wish it’d been 1738 pages.
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian, playwright, novelist, actor, and broadcast journalist who lives in Toronto, Ontario The daughter of a member of Canada’s military, this novel seems likely to be familiar territory for her. MacDonald won the Commonwealth Prize for her first novel, Fall on Your Knees which was also named to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

Books Review: “The Way The Crow Flies”, by Ann Marie MacDonald

A Good Man by Larry Baker is one of those books that came to me under a halo of synchronicity.  There’ve been a few like that in my life.  For example, Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar which literally fell off  the bookshelf at my feet in a used bookstore days after I had seen an interview with Alice Walker in an anti-war documentary that really hit me.  So I bought the book, and found in it a theme that was completely consistent with something going on in my own life at that moment.

“A Good Man” was sent to me by the publisher, Steve Semken of Ice Cube Books in North Libery, Iowa.  The cover caught my eye.  A grainy, colorful photo, blue sky and tawny sand, and a man holding the hand of a small boy, both walking away from the camera. But I set it aside, because we had a full schedule for the next couple of months.  I’d learned that Steve publishes interesting books by articulate authors, so I wanted to do the interview… someday.

Then the coincidences began.  First, we had a slot open up in just a week, due to miscommunications when an author switched publicists.  We called Steve to see if one of his authors was available.  Larry Baker was the first to respond.  I picked up the book. As usual I started with the blurbs on the back cover, where I learned that A Good Man was, in part, an update of several Flannery O’Connor characters from “The River,” one of the stories in O’Connor’s seminal collection,  A Good Man is Hard to Find.  Which I had just bought, and just read, for the first time.  I had just discovered Flannery O’Connor, and now here were some of her characters seeking me out.

I started to read.  At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  It was a novel, with photographs, interspersedwith excerpts from newspaper columns and blog posts, with a few poems feeding the story line.  The chronology jumped around a bit, but not too much.  It tackled big themes  - politics, religion, 9/11, salvation – in the venue of a small town radio station.  Soon the main character,  Harry Ducharme, finds himself interviewing writers on his talk show.  Coincidence  number three.

But what really sold me onthis book was the interview I did on Writers’ Voices the same day I started reading it, with Hugh Ferrer,  associate director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.  This interview was based on a lecture I had heard Ferrer give on the Big Silent Dialogue – and the many ways that writers use and even hopefully steal material from those who came before them.  I realized very quickly that Larry Baker was a living example of many of the techniques that Ferrer had divulged to our listeners.  Like Baker says in his Notes to Readers, ” This is a work of fiction that sometimes relies on the words of writers other than me.  That is an important point of the story.  Read the book; you’ll understand.”

And I did.