I assume that babies born in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, are wrapped in a receiving blanket with a copy of Ernest Buckler’s 1952 novel tucked into its folds. It’s #23 on the New Canadian Library list of classics, which launched in 1958. And Quill & Quire ranked it thirteenth in its classic ranking of the Forty Great Works of Canadian Fiction. Canadian books weren’t required to be taught in school until 1977, but The Mountain and the Valley was already on the curriculum in eastern schools.

Buckler fits with American writers like Bellow, Melville, Faulkner and Wolfe, Claude Bissell writes in a 1961 introduction, and he calls out James Agee’s A Death in the Family as one of Buckler’s favourite modern novels. The Mountain and the Valley is a story about family, Bissell says: “a study in the power of the group, of the way in which human beings living in separate worlds are yet made one with each other.”

In my reading history, it settles on a couch, twenty-one years ago, finishing the book with a slant of winter sun through the window, falling across the carpet, and thinking what a fine thing it was to finish a book that was so satisfying through and through, with that sense of having read just one book by an author who had published more.

In his work on the Canadian novel, John Moss declares this is Buckler’s best, although his later story collection offers new perspectives on this novel’s main character: The Rebellion of Young David. His essay collection Oxbells and Fireflies, contains some of his “finest writing” but it’s not a novel, and his follow-up novel, The Cruelest Month, doesn’t come close to The Mountain and the Valley.

But perhaps nothing could touch Buckler’s debut, because Moss triumphs this book. Its “tour de force of regionalism” which perfectly balances imagination with realism, its “great depths of psychological perception”, its “lush, intricate, and precise” prose, and the “unrelenting accuracy” of Buckler’s language offsetting a “tendency” to be “too rich, too sensitive, too warmly nostalgic.”

Because I’d read this book before, I read Moss’s essay beforehand, and wondered: could it really have been that good? But I found myself immediately swept away with the slightly off-kilter remembrances of the family matriarch Martha, twisting and stitching the strips of rag into a rug, falling and settling into memory while she works.

Moss points out this is where the novel’s structure resides: with a sporadic thread of the present-day where she sits with the thread of David’s later-life memories, wound together with various other threads (his father—Joseph, his brother—Chris, sister—Anna, and those they come to love). But this structure isn’t overbearing, it feels natural.

Great attention is paid to characterisation. Long detailed and exacting descriptions (of the Nova Scotia landscape too) showcase simple and effective language. And character development includes interior elements which build readers’ connections. Like this of Joseph Canaan, Martha’s husband, and David’s and Chris’s and Anna’s father (which also showcases the rag rug).

“But he was a kind man, with no thought of the shame of being thought kind. He was not brittle anywhere, not spotted anywhere with softness; yet he was tender. It showed in the way he looked at a new rug Ellen spread out before him, though he could find nothing to say; or the way he’d hold up the sweet pea vines Martha had planted in the vegetable rows, carefully from the hoe; or the way he’d look at the children sometimes, though he hesitated to touch them. He almost never laughed aloud, but there was no severity in him. His anger came seldom, but when it did—in loyalty to a friend or at lies or meanness or pretence—it was fierce and deep.”

David and Chris have different experiences with their father and, because he’s older, Chris inhabits a privileged position from David’s view. Chris’s relationship with a neighbour girl, Charlotte, also moves dramatically and enviably, from David’s point-of-view:

“He’d thought about what it would be like, but he’d never really thought about doing it. It was like getting married or having children or going away to work. You knew you’d be doing it sometime for sure, but it was among those things that went with ‘older’—it seemed like something not quite real.”

As the characters come of age and “discover” elements of life and their own selves, other themes emerge (from my first reading, all my notes surround David’s inner-artist and how he found communion in the work of other artists, with E.M. Forster’s writing playing a particular and significant role role) and it all feels like it’s over too soon. (Although, it’s also true that some of the brutal scenes of farm life could not end soon enough.)

The novel’s ending seems inevitable, and it feels correct (though not predictable from the start). And Moss’s comment rang true when I read this, a few pages from the end, with a modern touch to this classic rural story:

“All the faces there were everywhere else in the world, at every time, waited for him to give the thought to exactly how each of them was. (What about the Englishman or the Frenchman or the Micmac who might have stood on this very spot exactly how long ago?) There was the listening fact of the presence outside him of every eye, every lash, every smile-wrinkle of every cheek that had ever been; possible to be known, but unattended, because he had never seen them… And the frightening clarity… I could realise the whole content of everything there is, he thought, if they didn’t swarm so.”

With a hint of George Eliot and Forster’s “Only connect”, I completed this reread with even more appreciation than my first reading, more than two decades prior. I’m grateful that Kaggsy and Simon’s #1952Club encouraged me to revisit this classic. (Their lovely badge is the featured image for this page, so depending how you load this post, you might not see it.)

I plan to reread Mavis Gallant’s “One Morning in June” and “The Picnic”, also from 1952, later this week as well; Emily Donaldson’s recent article in “The Globe & Mail” has reinspired me.

Have you read this classic 1952 novel? Or, do you want to now? Or, have you already had enough?