The Power of Silence

[bibliogramma]

The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald

This is a book about power and silence - the abuse of power, the power to command silence, the power to conceal, the power to damage, distort and destroy, the power of privilege, the power of authority, the power of secrecy - and all the ways - personal, familial, social, political, institutional, ideological - that power can go wrong and the truth can be suborned or silenced. It is also about making ethical choices - when, if ever, is it proper to lie, and when must one tell the truth, no matter what.

It's a complex story. A young girl moves with her family from a military base in Germany to a new base in rural Ontario. An officer is asked to do something very confidential, and vitally important, for an old military friend. A sexual predator collects and grooms his victims, shaming them into silence. A torture survivor sees one of his torturers on the streets of a quiet town. A murder is committed. The Cuban missile crisis and the cold war threat of nuclear warheads hangs over everything. Strategic alliances and the desire for power and dominance, whether at the school-yard level or the global arena, hold the keys to two interlocking tragedies.

Reading the book was unsettling for me, and for more than the obvious reasons. I knew beforehand the era in which the book is set (1962-3), but I hadn't realised that the protagonist, Madelaine, is about the same age that I was in that year. Some of the general circumstances of Madelaine's life, right down to the references to certain textbooks, I remember perfectly. But other things are totally unfamiliar. The author has Canadian children performing the same "duck and cover" drills that were common in the U.S. at the time, but I have no memory of ever doing that. Maybe it's something that was a part of living on an air force base in heavily populated southern Ontario that wasn't part of life in Saskatoon public schools, which is where I was at the time.

Despite such instances of the atmosphere not always ringing completely real for me in such details, the book moved me deeply. And asked me, once again, to consider my own standards of ethical choices.