Valerie Mills-Milde's The Land's Long ReachReviewed by Aaron Schneider
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I should start with an observation that is also a bit of an admission, although not a qualification: I am in some ways an ideal reader for this book. I was born and raised in Bruce County, twenty minutes north of Owen Sound, and, for a while now, I have nurtured a fairly nerdy interest in the history of the region. Set in Owen Sound and the farms outside of it during the First Wold War, Valerie Mills-Milde’s second novel, The Land’s Long Reach, takes place in a time and location that I am intimately familiar with. When Mills-Milde describes the house on 7th Street in which the protagonist’s mother lives, I wonder which house, sort through my memories of the town, and maybe, I’ll admit it, pull up Google Maps to refresh those memories. When she writes about Harry Stewart, “a farm lad from Kemble,” who runs off to join the army at the start of the war, I wonder if she has invented the name or lifted it out of a history, a newspaper or a military document, and I pull out my copy of Beautiful Stoney Keppel, a history of the first hundred years of the township in which Kemble is located, to see if I can find Harry’s real-world counterpart in the pictures of the soldiers who enlisted. Although this book feels very close to me, and that is one of the reasons I like it so much, don’t get the wrong impression: it is not just a book for devotees of the history of Bruce-Grey. It is a deft and accomplished novel that contains a very rare mixture of empathy and clear-eyed, unsentimental precision in its understanding of its setting, its characters, and the violence that is at its story’s core. It is, in short, a book that will reward anyone who picks it up.
The novel follows a pair of couples from the spring of 1914, a few months before the start of the First World War, to the spring of 1918, half a year before its end. Ena, a baker, is married to Jamie, and they live on and work a farm that is part of Jamie’s family’s large holdings outside of Owen Sound. Jamie’s brother Hugh is the more ambitious and successful of the two, and his wife, Sarah, an aspiring artist, completes the tetrad. When the war arrives, Jamie eventually enlists. Although Hugh is the older and the stronger brother, he can’t join up because of a travelling eye. While Jamie serves in Europe, Ena works to keep their farm running, and Hugh prospers, buying up farms left vacant by dead soldiers. Jamie eventually returns, shell shocked with lungs damaged by gas, and dies back home in Owen Sound. Folded into the narrative of the war, and of the lives that were lived out at home by those who watched the soldiers leave, is a story of domestic abuse, and the way it shapes, deforms and destroys people. Blain is a teenager who enters Ena’s life as one of Hugh’s hired men, and then, when Jamie is shipped out to the front, he helps her keep up her and Jamie’s farm. Blain’s mother is dead, and his father is the local bootlegger. He controls his son, confiscates his wages, and responds to the barest of slights, real or imagined, with sudden and brutal violence. This may seem like a bit of an obvious setup, a juxtaposition of the war abroad with the war at home, the catastrophe of the war and the violence ingrained in the society that produced it, but one of the pleasures of this book is the way that it evades these types of easy clichés and avoids reducing abuse to a symbol or a trope. This is most obvious in Mills-Milde’s handling of character. The ability to realize a wide range of characters in the difficult fullness of their complexity has always been one of her strengths as a writer. And when I write “wide range,” I do want to stress the breadth of characters she is capable of imagining. In her first novel, After Drowning, she paired a graduate student in her thirties who is working on a PhD while raising her daughter with an aging biker who masterminds a massacre partway through the novel. It would be difficult to come up with a more unlikely pairing, but it works because both of the characters work, because they both emerge as complex, nuanced, real. And the same impressive grasp of personality and psychology underpins The Land’s Long Reach. What this means in practice is that Mills-Milde is capable of profound empathy, but that that empathy is as much alive to the weaknesses of her characters, to their flaws and blemishes, as to their more sympathetic dimensions. For example, when Ena finds out that Blain’s father beats him, discovering him bloodied on her front step, Mills-Milde writes: |