February
Lisa Moore
February
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.
4.2 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
320 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0701184902 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.
Reviews
The Guardian
Sarah Crown
"...a minor-key triumph... The novel's only real weakness is that [its] symbolic richness doesn't extend into the lives of its second-tier characters; Helen's three daughters, in particular, are only lightly sketched... The novel's ending, too, seems suspiciously neat from afar... But these faults can be forgiven in the context of what Moore manages to pull off: a novel which takes a moment of catastrophe and focuses not on the moment itself but on all the moments that surround it; that are altered, subtly or dramatically, by it."
27/02/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Gabriel Weston
"Just as the past and present live inside each other in her prose, she makes bedfellows of love and grief, suggesting that there is never one without the other. But the author goes further than to imply death’s ubiquity. She also denudes it of its glamour, giving grief no holy quarter... It has been a joy indeed to discover Lisa Moore."
25/01/2010
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The Daily Mail
Michael Arditti
"Lisa Moore's heart-warming second novel is domestic fiction at its finest, exploring the family's lives over the subsequent 25 years with a wealth of telling, unexpected but absolutely true detail that is worthy of her compatriot, the late Carol Shields. Moore depicts her characters with compassion and respect..."
22/01/2010
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The New Yorker
Books Briefly Noted
"Moore deftly weaves together the present and the past, evoking memory and grief in pitch-perfect detail."
15/03/2010
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
"Lisa Moore's firm grip and fine craft make something special from this novel of disaster and its aftermath… Assured double-time plotting, and supple, graceful prose, set the long work of grief against a changing world that widens horizons while leaving old wounds still open."
19/02/2010
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The New York Times
Sylvia Brownrigg
"Moore has great strengths as a writer, chiefly in her powers of description ... Helen’s informed, distraught imaginings of the rig’s sinking — when precisely the men knew they were doomed, how they died — have a particular, painful sharpness. But there are difficulties, in part with the novel’s pacing and in part with Cal himself. Moore is adept at conveying the emptiness that followed the accident, but not what had filled it. Although Helen and Cal were married for 10 years and we are told often of their abiding love, the man himself remains hard to grasp."
16/02/2010
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