#38 – Remembering The Bones

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Frances Itani’s latest novel, Remembering the Bones, this weekend. On a day (today) where I barely managed to get out of bed, it kept me good company. The story of an elderly woman named Georgina (Georgie) who drives her car off the road and into a ravine down the road from her house, Remembering the Bones is an addictive little novel.

The title refers to the main character’s obsession with her grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy, 1901, and how she studied the various body parts over the years. Lying on the cold, spring ground, Georgie remembers not only the bones of her body, but those of her life as well, as she waits either for death or to be rescued.

When she drove her car off the road, Georgie was on her way to the airport, headed off to London for a lovely holiday. Born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II, Georgie, along with 98 other lucky members of the Commonwealth, is invited to a special birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. And the novel makes the most of this connection, and spilled in between Georgie’s own memories are those of Elizabeth’s, from her life-long interest in the Queen, and as the days pass while she’s lying on the bottom of the ravine, we learn more about both of their lives.

It would be impossible not to think of Margaret Laurence when reading this novel, not to think of Carol Shields, but even if Remembering the Bones fits in with a long line of similar Canadian novels that came before it, it’s still refreshing, interesting and told in Itani’s pure, generous voice. She has the capacity to create these honest Canadian characters, ancestors we all have packed away in our own genealogical closets, without them feeling stereotypical or confined by their small Ontario towns.

I enjoyed all of the characters in this book, the ones touched by the two great wars, the ones touched by the other tragedies that seem to define a life, deaths, births, books, all of the important things that mark the way from one end of a person to the other. And, as always, I’m looking for inspiration for my own stories and am thankful for Itani for introducing me to Queen of Home: Her Reign from Infancy to Age, From Attic to Cellar by Emma Churchman Hewitt, which I am now obsessed with tracking a copy down.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the last 10 pages of the novel sitting at my desk at home when I should have been writing. You can catch how cluttered it is with the week’s worth of flyers, magazines and other catch-alls underneath the book. You can also see the text of my next Classic Start underneath.