Raising Orion

Raising Orion is filled with backward-looking characters pursuing their own journeys, a bit in the meandering tradition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

 

Several stories run parallel, most of them intersecting at various points. Choyce’s main characters include a whimsical Halifax bookstore owner whose family kept a lighthouse in the harbour, a previously suicidal Ottawa university professor who comes to Halifax to research an explorer, an aged rich woman gathering details of her son’s death and a fourteen-year-old boy without a future. Add to the mix a philosophical northern native who works as a janitor, doggedly non-conformist high school students who have a band named Dumpster Teeth, a taxi driver whose poetic taste runs to Leonard Cohen and a retired school principal who trusts her instincts.

 

At the centre of the story is bookstore owner Molly whose parents were able to summon the moon and the stars when she was a much-loved child on their island. What they could not do was prevent the victims of a plane crash from washing up to the rocky shore one morning. Molly helped drag the victims out of the sea and her father carried them up to the lighthouse where each was placed in a bed in a separate room until rescuers could arrive.

 

Choyce employs a nearly-invisible peripheral character to have Molly visit cancer- ravaged fourteen-year-old Todd in hospital because his emotionally-battered family is from out of province. In recounting her fanciful childhood, Molly is able to provide a measure of release for the boy who almost immediately falls in love with her. The enchantment soon gives way when his family, hospital staff and ultimately police are confronted with a shocking scene in his hospital room.

 

Eric, the divorced and disillusioned university professor who is the other main character, initially appears in opposite chapters. He struggles to understand why his carefully constructed suicide attempt failed, although he grows increasingly grateful for the outcome. Transformation comes when he realizes who led him through the stormy winds and over frozen ground to the home of an Inuit family.

 

It is a convoluted, even bizarre story but Choyce, a prolific writer, skillfully propels it along to a dramatic finish. —Rosalie MacEachern