The Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a storm in February of 1982 and all 84 members of the crew went down with it. Under the subheading “Aftermath” in the Wikipedia entry for the Ocean Ranger, Lisa Moore’s novel, February, gets a mention. I misread the note about Lisa Moore’s novel and took it to mean that the novel itself was a bit of the aftermath, like detritus floating on the water after the oil rig went down. I think whoever wrote the entry meant that the novel deals with the aftermath because it concerns a (fictional) woman named Helen O’Mara whose husband was on the crew, and she must grieve and raise their children, and cope with the loss as best she can. I on the other hand took it to mean that the book was literally a piece of the aftermath. When I make a mistake like this, it shakes my faith in my ability to read simple sentences, much less report on the contents of a novel. Even so, when I revisit my misreading, I wonder if maybe I wasn’t so far off the mark.
The loss of the Ocean Ranger was a huge maritime disaster that galvanized the people of St. John’s and all of Newfoundland besides. It brought strangers together in their grief. Moore captures this nicely in a scene when Helen’s sister Louise drives her home after identifying the body. Louise pulls up in front of the house but large snow banks have narrowed the road so that cars can’t pass. A man in a pickup truck honks his horn as a line of cars grows behind him and, frustrated, he gets out of his car to have words with Louise. As soon as he learns that the passenger is a widow of the Ocean Ranger, everything changes. He helps Helen out of the car and up the path to her front door and sees her safely inside. The other cars will have to wait.
In the face of major disasters, there is a public sense of loss and a collective experience of grief that echos the private loss and grief of those directly affected. Public expressions of grief leak into the community’s cultural life through liturgy, music, film and of course novels like February. It is in this sense, then, that this novel forms part of the disaster’s aftermath and my misreading of the Wikipedia entry may not be so skewed after all. I expect we will witness something similar happen as the months and years give us some distance from the immediacy of our pandemic experience. Each of us will have to face our personal losses alone, but we will find comfort in the shared cultural expressions that accumulate over time.
There isn’t much here by way of plot. In the novel’s present time a quarter century after the event, Helen’s grown children try to encourage their mother to live for more than them. One daughter recommends a contractor to do a renovation and it turns out the arrangement is a set up. Stick a lonely man in the same house with a lonely woman and sooner or later they’re bound to notice one another. At the same time, the oldest child, their son, is returning home from a job in Singapore. A woman 7 months pregnant has contacted him and advised that he is the child’s father. Will he or won’t he accept responsibility? That is about it.
For the most part, February concerns itself with an interior journey: we stand witness to Helen’s slow-dawning discovery that no matter how many years pass, the grief will never go away. She can choose either to live out the balance of her natural life as if it ended in February of 1982, or she can accept a kind of compromise where she acknowledges the enduring grief, but carries on with some semblance of a life for herself. If Helen is to move forward at all, she will have to do it with a split perspective.
In fact, most of the novel is characterized by a split perspective. Call it Lisa Moore’s modus operandi if you like. Even in present time, Helen’s thoughts drift back to the events of February 1982 or to the earliest days of her life with her husband, Cal. Moore deftly shows us how Helen slips fluidly between two times and two places. While grief accentuates this habit, I would suggest that virtually everyone functions this way, always holding some part of their self in reserve and accessing it through memory and through rehearsed personal narrative. It may not even be possible to have a self without engaging this habit. In this regard, Moore’s writing exhibits a faithfulness to the interior aspect of human experience.