Death and the Butterfly

May 1, 2020
From the Battle of Britain through 9/11 and beyond, a group of characters is connected by bonds of grief, loss, and beauty. The sequence of appalling disasters flows relentlessly in Hester's second novel. A downed wartime pilot expires in an airplane riddled with enemy bullets; a beloved daughter dies in her crib; a solitary Scotsman falls at the scene of a terrible air tragedy; a cherished wife fades away. The litany of heartbreak, overshadowed by larger horrors--a couple committing suicide together; wartime land mines; 9/11; terrorist bombs--winds through a story that spans multiple decades while looping among a scattered group of characters. Susan McEwan, in England in 1940, meets two of her brother Phillip's friends, RAF Capt. Roger Grey, whom she will marry, and Nial McKellan, who will reconnect with the Greys, disruptively, 20 years later. In Toronto in the 1980s, a husband named Polo must deal, in difficult financial circumstances, with his wife's pregnancy. And in Montana, in 2001, when a wedding is suddenly threatened by unwelcome news, the groom, Jack Riordan, finds an article written by Polo about Susan and Roger and Nial. Hester moves among these figures in teasing fashion, sometimes affectingly, often using provocative stylistic tics, including sensational chapter openings, distracting phraseology ("Their hair glistening and wavy and succulent as plums"), and the invention of verbs from nouns or adjectives ("tauted," "genesised," "raven'd"). The effect is both whimsical and disruptive, the novel's sincerity on the subject of love and parenting sometimes snagged or punctured. The author's tendency toward sentimentality has a similar seesawing effect, most noticeable in a late chapter spent, eye-poppingly, with King George VI and Princess Margaret. A story of passion and intermittent poetry undermined by technical soft spots.

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May 25, 2020
Hester’s tragic tale (after Diamond Sutra) uses delicate vignettes to connect a story of loss in WWII with a journalist turned paperboy in the 1980s and a gun-shy groom in 2001. In England, Susan McEwan, 13, loses her RAF pilot brother, Philip, and chief air raid warden father, Charles, during the first years of WWII. Alexander Polo becomes a 31-year-old paperboy in early 1980s Toronto when no other work is available to support his family. In 2001 Montana, Jack Riordan flees from the altar before his wedding to Bea Sims, and hides out in the used RV he bought Bea as a wedding gift. There, he finds Polo’s article about Susan’s death stashed in the console. Jack anonymously sends the article and some Neruda poems to Polo, which inspires Polo’s first successful efforts at poetry, leading him to move on from a series of personal elegies for his daughter, Shoshanna, lost to crib death, in favor of more abstract musings. Jack and Bea eventually marry, and later, Polo’s poems console Jack after Bea is stricken with cancer (“I love you like violins love windows/that open onto orchards and pear blossoms”). Neither sinking to the maudlin nor trite, Hester writes with a grace that uplifts these myriad lives. This gift to readers shows how beauty and death can coexist.