Accommodation

Accommodation A Novel by Linda Hart A thesis submitted to Canterbury University to fulfill the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Christchurch, New Zealand May 2008 Contents Essay ........................................................................................................................................................2 Excerpt Chapter 1.............................................................................................................................................13 Chapter 2.............................................................................................................................................25 Chapter 3.............................................................................................................................................38 Chapter 4.............................................................................................................................................52 Chapter 5.............................................................................................................................................80 Chapter 6...........................................................................................................................................104 Synopses Chapter 7...........................................................................................................................................132 Chapter 8...........................................................................................................................................133 Chapter 9...........................................................................................................................................135 Chapter 10.........................................................................................................................................137 Chapter 11.........................................................................................................................................139 Chapter 12.........................................................................................................................................141 Chapter 13.........................................................................................................................................143 Chapter 14.........................................................................................................................................145 1 Essay When Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock came out in 2007, I gravitated to it immediately. A great fan of Lives of Girls and Women, I was hungry for the insights Munro might share about the immigration of her ancestors from Scotland to Canada. I should have taken my cue from Lives of Girls and Women, where Munro’s characters, although apparently revealing all, keep their secrets, their motives remain obscure and their actions unpredictable. In The View from Castle Rock, all Munro feels able to give readers is a chronological overview of her ancestors. The thoughts and feelings of her people remain unknown making her relatives a mystery in everything but name and physical appearance. Wisely, perhaps, Munro allows her readers to furnish the story with their own subtexts. As a writer’s writer, however, Munro always delivers, and although initially frustrated that she would not hazard anything about the inner workings of her long- dead ancestors, I was taken by the prime psychological nugget buried in her title. This is delivered by her matriarchal great great grandfather James Laidlaw who, one wet night, forces his son, Andrew, to accompany him to the top of Edinburgh castle. Having climbed a thousand steps, James has both the breath and vision to insist that it was possible to see America from Castle Rock. As a central conceit, seeing America from Edinburgh Castle is both compelling and illuminating. Perhaps Munro’s premise is that if people think in metaphors they have the ability to manufacture and drive their dreams. It is certainly James’s dizzying vision from the top of Edinburgh’s Castle Rock that launches a generation of Munro’s ancestors in the direction of North America. My ‘view from Castle Rock’ is also a dizzying one and began in early childhood. It started perhaps from the fact that I didn’t live with my biological parents and can still remember scrutinizing other people’s parents who, for such fabled people, looked far too ordinary to satisfy my needs. My own absent but imagined parents seemed made from altogether different clay. Throughout adolescence and early adulthood I continued to fantasize about my parents but did nothing about finding the actual people. The impetus, when it came, was like a tidal wave, and originated from seeing inexplicable expressions ghosting in the faces of my own children. Of course, by then, my search was thirty years too late. Both parents were dead. It was like walking into a wall. Perversely, the blocking effect only intensified the desire to locate my parents, if not physically at least emotionally. I began collating relevant information and photographs and reading history books in order better to understand the age they lived in. On the face of it, the obvious solution seemed to be to turn this emotional scrap- booking into a novel. 2 I opted for the idea of a novel because my collection of memorabilia seemed like just so many artifacts, valuable in a particular sense but without context; and it was the static aspect of them as objects that left me feeling dissatisfied. Perhaps my dissatisfaction with object-as- artifact had its origin in my early twenties when I completed a Fine Arts Degree. My major was painting and though I enjoyed the absorbing nature of the process, I often found the finished object disappointing. This was because it didn’t properly show its own process, stopping without explanation at an apparently arbitrary point in time; and it was at this point that it seemed to become a static and inflexible object, confined to one place in time. A novel, on the other hand, although as synthetic as a painting, is more of a roving brief in that it enables the writer to range backwards and forwards in time and use process as its métier. This travel is achieved chronologically, because things like war and death actually happen at specific places and times but flexibility of time and space occur around how external events live in the mind. As Hamlet says, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” which indicates that, rather than being collective, ‘reality’ per se, is the interpretation of an event in the mind of an individual and, therefore, coloured accordingly. By definition, anything this subjective is self-interested, but this sort of willfulness also lends its self to creativity, which, when defined as art, operates outside the realm of necessity. The artistry of the mind, therefore, is the license to be both visionary and re-visionary. In, some respects, consciousness acts like film, in that single-shot images are segued into sequences and by definition sequence indicates time and space. In this way, sequencing intimates the ordering which things occur and can be used to mimic the flow of physical time; and, let’s face it, there is no denying the quantitative nature of physical time. People are born and people die. Life is that speculative thing that slips in between beginning and end. In physical time, days follow in numerical sequence and, in order to count, calculate and communicate in consistent ways, people have set up logical modes of sequencing. We see evidence of this function operating in mathematics and in the way sentences are structured. Within such frameworks non sequiturs declare themselves by upsetting our sense of equilibrium and by disrupting the whole. However, the principle of certainty displayed in these formal operations is so often contradicted by evidence of what is random, contingent and fugitive, and this models unpredictability. In response to this, other models of expression have evolved to illustrate, if not explain, the mutable elements of existence. Common wisdom has it that if you can see it, you can control it, and that certainly stands for the logical intellectual systems described above. However, these systems cannot provide security in the situations which they cannot quantify. For instance, Jack, one of the main protagonists in Accommodation, feels better knowing how to calculate angles and measure distance when he looks down the sights of his machine gun 3 because he believes he has some measure of control over the odds of his survival. He is not, however, blinded to the fact that his calculations only give him a measure of control and are not ironclad guarantees of survival, because someone else may have first-mover advantage, while the passage of flying ordinance is so random it cannot be anticipated or avoided. I have used the image of flying ordinance to illustrate how intelligence and virtue are not sufficient armour against the unanticipated. By definition, chance equals lack of control over circumstance. Naturally, the concept of this sort of uncertainty provokes the strongest emotional responses in people and is the theatre where extreme and creative behaviours are most likely to occur. So, if continuity, consistency and predictability are crucial to systems such as mathematics and operational language, the functional aesthetic of art is to externalize and make visible forms that stand as metaphors for what is fugitive

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