Frances Boyle's ​Tower

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018

This is such a good book. It’s a novella, but it’s so full and rich that it feels like a novel, and a thoughtfully complex one at that. The characters are fully-developed, living people, and the story—an ageless fairytale loosely adapted to show how we hurt and tentatively reconcile with those we love—is both realistic and cautiously hopeful in its depictions of close relationships, whether familial or romantic.
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The fairytale in question is “Rapunzel,” with a tongue-in-cheek 1980s twist in which a baby appears in a cabbage patch (Tower is very aware of its 80s and 90s setting, and it gets all the little details correct). Arlys, a stubborn gardener on an island near Saltspring in B.C. who ekes a living out of vegetables and quilts, is positioned to fulfill the part of the witch. When a young, clueless couple move in next to her and plan to grow marijuana—despite not knowing what they are doing—Arlys befriends the  woman, Emma, who is pregnant and who discovers that she likes the produce from Arlys’ garden. One night, Arlys finds Bill, Emma’s partner, stealing vegetables from the garden to give to Emma; the couple is having difficulty even feeding themselves. Arlys lets him go. The two disappear a few weeks later when the RCMP raids their land; when Arlys goes outside to investigate the commotion of the raid, she finds their newborn baby girl in her cabbage patch. Eventually, she manages to adopt the girl, who she names Chicory after the peppery, bitter greens that she has taught Emma about:

I went on to talk about how slippery the names of plants can be. So many sources of chicory you’d never guess were even related: the radicchio, along with Belgian endive, escarole, sugarloaf, just to start. Never mind the root chicories that are good chopped into soups and stews, even as coffee if you can stand the taste. And common wild chicory with its blue flowers. Ramps was another slippery name, I told her, that could either mean tender wild leeks, or rampion—what my grandmother used to call rapunzel—a totally different plant that is edible, leaves to roots.

When she names the baby, she claims that Chicory is apt because “I needed a name for my child that would bind her to this place, to what grows here, and to what has brought her to me.” Obviously, little Chicory will play the role of Rapunzel from the fairytale, and Arlys’ version of confining her to a tower will be simply inflexible control. Focused willpower and unflagging determination may shape a vegetable garden (Arlys is proud of her “tough love in forcing the Belgian endive”), but they can wither a child.

Tower focuses on its eponymous structure as a metaphor for traps we create for both ourselves and others. Chicory has a personality as sharp as her namesakes, and she is clearly headed on a collision course with Arlys from a very young age. Arlys, deeply wounded by people who have abandoned her in her past and unable to have children herself, is determined to smother Chicory rather than let any harm come to her. Other towers in the novella include addictions, inabilities to apologize or grant forgiveness, social marginalization, and the absurd lifestyles of the very rich who are insufficiently connected to reality.
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One of the aspects that I love most about Tower is its honesty about the messiness, regrets and lost opportunities of life. When Torque—an addicted, disabled and talented young chalk artist living on the edges of society—meets Chicory during her university years, I initially thought, Oh, he’s going to teach her something about embracing the moment, opening up to Arlys again, and finding the Hollywood-style beauty in life. Too many books and movies would play their relationship out this way, which perhaps makes for an emotionally satisfying (if superficial) narrative, but which doesn’t acknowledge the real-life difficulties of people in both Torque’s and Chicory’s positions. Tower, however, skirts this artificial sentimentality and instead portrays with clear eyes both the good sides and serious failings of all its characters; without giving too much away, while Chicory and Torque do learn and grow together for a time, their relationship does not last, just as it most likely wouldn’t in reality. Similarly, Arlys and Chicory together so thoroughly poison their relationship that their eventual attempts at rapprochement are tentative and sporadic—there will be no falling into each other’s arms weeping forgiveness and acceptance for these two. But they do start to hesitantly stumble towards some kind of improved relationship, with all the emotional complexity that people experience in trying to resolve this kind of long-running conflict with a close family member. As for Torque, he falls and comes back repeatedly, and the last time we see him, he is newly out of jail and giving treatment and an employment plan another shot:

Torque waits a while before scoping out a place downtown to draw. He thinks about the chalk drawing he’d last been working on in Victoria—he had abandoned the arched gate half-done and he’d barely started drawing faces into the stone sides of the turret. But, he shrugs, he never would finish that now. He’ll figure out something new. But first he’ll start with whatever is involved in this treatment plan. The plan involves talking about employment, strategizing for jobs that combine artwork with deskwork for the chair-bound. Torque says he always wanted to go to animation school but knew he’d just get suspended. Not even a groan.
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The counsellor dude talks about the blind spots that Torque has. But, the guy goes on, that’s okay, they’ll work on them. Fine, says Torque. Just fine.

No one in Tower finds an easy, happy ending, but at the same time, no one is completely without hope. In this way, the story avoids both the easy resolutions and the horrifying nihilism of fairytales, depending on whether you’re talking about Disney or Grimm.
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Tower is also a beautifully-crafted book. It covers a lot of ground—over 20 years—in the relatively short amount of space that is the nature of a novella. Part of the reason that it has the psychological depth of a much-longer novel is that absolutely nothing is superfluous—Boyle has both a wonderful eye for detail and a sharp ear for dialogue, and she therefore manages to convey a lot of very precise information in each carefully-observed scene. The scenes themselves are selected based on how they help the reader understand characters’ personalities and development over time; we don’t, for instance, see Arlys’ navigation of bureaucracies in order to adopt Chicory, nor do we see Chicory, much later, giving birth to her own children. These kinds of events obviously have a strong significance, but that significance can be fleeting, and Tower chooses instead to focus on scenes like the following, which demonstrates so succinctly the stubborn love beneath the power struggles between Arlys and an adolescent Chicory:

[Chicory] hears Arlys turn the knob, open the door and come in. Arlys puts her hands on Chicory’s shoulders and steers her to sit on the bed. She sits down as well, engulfs the girl’s hand in her own. Chicory doesn’t move the hand, but keeps her face turned away.
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After several silent minutes, Arlys lets Chicory’s hand go. She picks up the hairbrush and comb. Chicory braces herself, not quite believing that no recriminations or sarcasm are coming out of Arlys’ mouth. Her mother is doing what she always used to do when Chicory was younger. Whenever Chicory would sit still long enough, Arlys would work slowly through all the tangles and knots. Gently, taking her time, she would brush the hair smooth and coppery-shiny.

Or consider this scene from Torque’s childhood, back when his nickname was Twist and not Torque:

When he’s called down to dinner, Twist darts his eyes around the dining room. His mother and Magnus are still finishing their drinks in the other room. Yes, the thing she bought is there; she’s put it on the tall table in the little nook. He tilts his head—it is pretty interesting. A bowl, but an unusual shape, sort of lump. And it’s pierced with irregular holes. The outside is blue and the inside’s pinkish or maybe coral, like a sea shell. But, he wonders, is it really painted, it’s so glossy smooth.

He has to feel the texture, know what the shiny is like to touch. He reaches up, strokes the outside with his palms, fingertips to the inside. It’s so cool, it bowls him over. (Ha!)
“Franklin Oliver! What do you think you’re doing!” His mother is pissed off again, big surprise. Twist pulls his hand away. The ceramic piece wobbles, wows to the edge of the table. He tries to grab it but jostles the table while he’s trying, and the bowl falls to the hard tile below. …
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It’s hopeless; the beautiful thing is garbage now. And it’s his fault. He doesn’t wait for his mother to tell him how much his carelessness has cost her. The glossy fragments clink against each other as he sets them down, climbs the stairs to his room.

And Arlys’ wry self-awareness helps the reader to see past her prickly exterior to empathize with her: “My grannie used to say I needed to learn how to blunt my knife of a tongue but I was better at slashing with it than using it to mince words.” And any parent who has heard a child scream that they hate them will recognize the following: “‘Whatever.’ Chicory leans as far away from Arlys as the seatbelt will let her.”
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Tower is honest, insightful, and beautifully written, with the kind of tight execution to which many novellas aspire, but which few achieve. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

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​Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.