Reviewed by Kimberley Allsopp

In 1875, a massive immigration of families moved from Iceland to Canada. Today, the descendants who acted as pioneers for others in Iceland make up "the largest concentrated number living anywhere outside the tiny north Atlantic island from whence they came" (181). Martha Brooks is one of the sixty thousand offshoots who still remain connected to the province. This connection is remarked upon in her author's note and acknowledgments in that maternal grandparents (who immigrated as teenagers) were very much in her mind during the writing of Mistik Lake. Brooks's awareness of her family tree pulses through the novel's prose, giving it a fittingly sweet tenderness.

Mistik Lake is the tale of fictional descendant of the Icelandic settlers, Odella McLean, and her journey from a short-lived childhood to an adulthood in which she must redefine everything she once thought she knew. This well-worn journey has been documented by many an author over the years. Even when the journey occurs in a seemingly functional environment it is always muddled with high confusion. Odella’s family life is a far cry from “functional”, and that is what pushes her journey out of a commonplace realm. Her mother, Sally, is the catalyst for this knotty transformation. The only survivor of a local tragedy, the 16-year-old Sally was in a car loaded with teenagers, which plunges into an icy lake. This creates a presence of death that refuses to leave her. A well-formed, life-long drinking habit is one response to this presence, and it forces her three, protective girls to lie to their father, and become adults well before the allocated time. When Sally commits the worst betrayal, her family is left to try and turn the abstract into something linear.

A second, steady narrative runs through Mistik Lake, and takes the reader back to another family secret that started in the earlier days of the settlement’s history. Odella’s Great Aunt Gloria holds close a taboo that could ostracise her from Mistik Lake’s cloistered community. This omission from her early public life is drunkenly passed down - years later - to only one family member, Sally. After this morbid exchange of secrets, Gloria becomes confidante and keeper of secrets to Odella, in the same way as she was to Sally, though Gloria ultimately seems geographically distant, where Sally as a mother and wife is emotionally.

An “outsider” perspective on the deluge left by Sally’s selfishness, is provided by Odella’s love interest, Jimmy Tomasson, another descendant of the original immigrants. Jimmy has his own dysfunctional, distant mother to deal with, otherwise he is able to lead a simple and happy life full of childish mystical dreams and castles in the air. His character is a welcome refreshment from the heaviness of guilt in the McLean family. His gentle naivety offers a perspective against the other happenings in Mistik Lake, and transforms it from a classic Mother-Daughter, coming-of-age narrative into something independent in the genre.

Mistik Lake’s length is appropriately short; this is not a tale that needs to be dragged out and weighed down by excessive adjectives. Brooks offers a fragility that gives the feeling that one more secret would have been enough to break through the ice and join others that have been reckless before. She immerses us in Mistik Lake’s long -standing community, despite the alienation such old-fashioned notions might engender in the majority of the contemporary Western readers, and this is no easy feat. Brooks has weaved a delicate tale that stands out from many others who have dared to look under what appears to be a otherwise secure surface.


Mistik Lake
(2008)

by Martha Brooks
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 9781741754322
192pp AU$18.95