Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay

It was only towards the end of reading Snow Road Station (2023) by Elizabeth Hay that I realised it was a sequel to an earlier book but, you know what, I don’t think it mattered. I bought it in Oxford’s loveliest independent bookshop, Caper, drawn by the cover, by the fact Elizabeth Hay is Canadian, and by the recommendation from Mary Lawson on the cover. I also have one of her books which I bought in Canada (not the prequel to this) but I think that came a bit lower than those other recommendations.

I was also very drawn by the opening to the blurb:

In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat to Snow Road Station – a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

Now, that is good marketing copy! Consider me sold. The actor in question is Lulu. She has had a fairly celebrated career on the stage, but now she is in her sixties – still very attractive and with lots left to give, but with fewer and fewer professional demands, and a life that is looking increasingly lonely.

Beckett’s plays are notoriously difficult for actors, and Happy Days most notorious of all. As you may know, it is one long monologue for a character called Winnie who, as the acts progress, becomes steadily more and more buried in a pile of sand. Beckett demanded total precision in his plays, down to the ums and ahs, and Lulu cracks. She corpses on stage, forgetting her lines. And her confidence is gone. She decides to abandon rehearsals and retreat to visit her friend Nan.

Now, if I’d read His Whole Life, I’d doubtless be totally up to speed with the relationship between Lulu and Nan – as it is, I was piecing it together. Lulu is visiting for the wedding of Nan’s son, Blake, to a woman he doesn’t want to marry. Lulu sees the word through the lens of theatre, and Hay uses this in a way I found effective – not too often, to feel laboured, but giving you an understanding of her vantage on reality when so much of her day-to-day experience is understood through a prism of stage character.

Blake’s limp hair fell into his eyes. It could use a good wash, Lulu thought, but maybe that’s how it looked after a good wash. He was a blend of Nan and her brother Guy, but morose and much more confrontational in his born-again life as an evangelical preacher. She would have cast him as Iago or Angelo, a blend of hot and cold, an agitated man whose blood is very snow-broth, and Nan as some gaunt queen who’s in the dark.

I’m always interested in how writers create Christian characters (usually very badly), but I found Blake quite a successful portrait. He has the stubbornness that comes of a fixed morality, and perhaps the melancholy that can accompany sacrifice, but his happiness or otherwise stems from his beliefs and behaviours much as everyone else’s does. He is not marked out, by Hay, as particularly victim to his worldview – and, frankly, in modern literature that is up there with the better portraits of Christians.

There are a range of other characters – Jim, Blake’s half-brother, who was apparently the central character of the earlier novel; Lulu’s brother Guy, who still lives nearby and with whom she has a rocky relationship; Hugh, a piano tuner and handyman who is perhaps a little idealistically kind and wholesome.

The villain of the piece is Nan’s ex-husband, John. There is a harrowing scene where he gives Lulu a lift and expects them to sleep each other. It seems to be the ‘price’ of this favour. When she resists, he responds with a cruelty that is not physically violent – but so vile, and so precise, that you’ll remember it for a much longer time than most portrayals of abuse.

The novel is set in three ‘acts’ – called Snow, Road, and Station – and there is a lot that feels play-like in its structure. It is firmly set in a particular time and place, and time – 1995 – is significant because the second Quebec independence referendum is taking place, and characters align themselves on either side. But in another way, it is eternal. Snow Road Station is about relationships – between old friends, between parents and children, between somebody’s life and the life they had hoped to live. Hay has extraordinary control over her plot and her characters. Not in the sense that there is a tightly orchestrated set of story points, but in her clear, total understanding of who these people and how they will act – within language that feels loose and thoughtful, but is clearly chosen with absolute exactitude. I can see why Mary Lawson loved it. Hay is an expert storyteller.

Lulu thinks, of the town’s history, “Snow Road Station was an arrival, a departure, a long wait — a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road.” In the novel, it is all those things. Hay certainly resists any hokey ‘Town good; rural bad’ or ‘Town bad; rural good’ dichotomy – though she recognises that there are certain places that allow and encourage you to develop different facets of yourself. It’s a beautiful, dark, curiously affirming portrait of a group of people who are seldom totally honest with themselves or each other, but whom we end up understanding totally. A triumph – and now I clearly need to read the previous book.