These accounts of the past are rendered through the eyes of Anne, Connie's niece, who is the narrator. How a week later, their house caught fire.” She doesn't directly describe the incident between Burns and Susan Graves instead we glean only a few troubling but inconclusive facts: “How a principal kept a thirteen-year-old girl after school, how she had stumbled home sobbing and in disarray, how her father was so ashamed, so worried about appearances that he locked her in her room. Storytelling is as much about withholding information as it is about supplying it, and Hays is adept at both. Although the principal is outwardly a model of decorum, Connie senses in him cruelty and a capacity for violence. Burns himself takes a special interest in Michael's younger sister, Susan, which makes Connie uneasy. In her idealistic enthusiasm, she starts tutoring one of her pupils, Michael Graves, after class despite Burns' scathing dismissal of the boy as hopelessly backward (nowadays he would be considered dyslexic). Connie, just 18, is already in her first year of teaching. Back in Saskatchewan, Burns had been the principal and French teacher (hence the derisive nickname “Parley”) and had resigned in disgrace following a disturbing incident involving a young student.īack to fictional Jewel, Sask.
For Connie, a young Ottawa reporter covering the story, there's an added shock: Ian “Parley” Burns, a man she taught with seven years earlier at a small prairie school, is now living in the Ontario town. The crime of course horrifies the community. The narrative opens in a small town in the Ottawa Valley, in 1937, with the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. But what a history - marked by tragedy, moral complexity and emotional turmoil, and involving characters who are totally convincing in their choices and compulsions.
It's basically a family history that shuttles in time and place, from a Saskatchewan town on the brink of the Great Depression to the Ottawa Valley in the late 1930s and to contemporary Ottawa. Ottawa's Elizabeth Hay plumbs that vast, deep well in this engrossing new novel, a follow-up to her Giller Prize-winning Late Nights on Air. It was the vast, deep well from which we all drew.” At one point in Alone in the Classroom, a character expresses her view of human nature as a paradoxical enigma: It “polluted the finest and elevated the lowest.
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