This is quite a tomb, 722 pages worth, but also a good read. My daughter Beth suggested it. Her reading group read it and she said it really effected her. I can see why. It took me over a week to get through it and it was an intense read, set mostly in Canada in the earl 1960's, on a Canadian Air Force Base. The family, the Mc Carthy's, seem to be a typical, happy Canadian family. Jack, the father, is the head of the Air Force School. His wife, Mimi, the perfect homemaker, efficient, perky and cute, the two kids, Madeleine and Mike, well adjusted and happy. But, like all novels, like life, this idyllic life does not last long. Why and how the trouble begins is one of the questions of the book. It could have been Hitler's fault, or the United States, for pursuing it's Cold War strategies, or Jack's, for keeping a secret, or Mr. March's, for abusing the fourth grade girls in his class, or Madelaine's for not lying instead of telling the truth. So many small things go into telling the whole story, something Mac Donald tries to understand.
The first two thirds take place on the base, and we see things from both Madeleine's and Jack's points of view. Jack is the realist, a patriot, an officer sworn to defend his country, to do as he's told. He missed WW II because of an injury, has lived in Germany with his family, and seems like a strong, efficient Air Force officer, a good family man. Madeleine is a bit of an individual, strong in her beliefs, a thoughtful and questioning child, the perfect complement to her father and they get along well. Two stories intertwine, the molesting of Madeleine and other young girls in the fourth grade class, culminating in the awful murder of one of her classmates, Claire, a child of an American officer on duty in Canada. The other thread concerns a German scientist, secretly in Canada before being allowed to come to the States to work on the NASA missile program, to outdo the Russians. Jack, the father, is asked by an old friend, now a British intelligence officer, to look after this German for a few months. The two threads, impossibly, get linked, in a way that's too hard to explain. A young neighbor is accused of the murder, and Jack has some info that might exonerate the boy but it also might compromise the scientist, lead to his exposure, possibly sabotaging the efforts to win the Cold War. Jack does his duty, keeps quiet. His daughter, meanwhile, wants to lie to save the young boy's life, but is convinced by Jack to tell the truth, dooming the young boy to prison for a crime he did not commit.'
The last third takes place some twenty five years later; Jack and Mimi are retired; their son, Mike, is still MIA from the Vietnam War (he joined the American Army, against his father's wishes, to prove he was as good as his old man). And Madeleine becomes a very successful comedian, unhappy, but funny, still troubled by her past. She is also a lesbian, something her mother finds very difficult to accept. Gradually, Madeleine delves into her past, with the help of a therapist, researches the newspaper articles about the killing, finally understands that she is not to blame for the incarceration of her neighbor, and seems to have found some peace. And she finds out, to the shock of herself and the reader, that the killer was not their pedophile teacher, Mr. March, as she thought, but two fourth grade girls, also victims of the teacher. They, too, are victims and its never quite clear why they killed their classmate, whether it was an accident, just fooling around, or confusion caused by their teacher's molestation.
It was an engrossing and effecting novel, long but worth reading and well written. The setting, during the mid 1960's was very realistic and affecting, something straight out of Betty Crocker and Ozzie and Harriet but beneath the veneer of normality, was sickness, lies, subterfuge, child molestation, and death. Things are never what they seem. Doing what we think is good often has dire consequences; nothing is predictable, as King Lear says, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."
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