February

By Lisa Moore

In the wake of an oil-rig disaster, a widow tries to rebuild her life in this novel by “an astonishing writer” (Richard Ford).
 
Inspired by the tragic sinking of the Ocean Ranger during a violent storm off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, February follows the life of Helen O’Mara, widowed by the accident, as she spirals back and forth between the present day and that devastating and transformative winter.
 
As she raises four children on her own, Helen’s strength and calculated positivity fool everyone into believing that she’s pushed through the paralyzing grief of losing her spouse. But in private, Helen has obsessively maintained a powerful connection to her deceased husband. When Helen’s son unexpectedly returns home with life-changing news, her secret world is irrevocably shaken, and Helen is quickly forced to come to terms with her inability to lay the past to rest.
 
An unforgettable examination of complex love and cauterizing grief, February investigates how memory knits together the past and present, and pinpoints the very human need to always imagine a future, no matter how fragile.
 
“Lisa Moore’s work is passionate, gritty, lucid and beautiful. She has a great gift.” —Anne Enright

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9780802197900

Lisa Moore

LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and the young-adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Book preview

FEBRUARY

ALSO BY LISA MOORE

FICTION

Degrees of Nakedness

Open

Alligator

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women’s Short Stories (Selected and Introduced)

Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth (Co-edited, with Dede Crane)

FEBRUARY

LISA MOORE

Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Moore

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [e-mail]

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

First published in Canada in 2009 by House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto, Ontario

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9790-0 (e-book)

Black Cat

a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

For my parents, Elizabeth and Leo Moore.

EARLY MORNING

Sunrise or Sunset, November 2008

HELEN WATCHES AS the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener. There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up. A deep grinding noise grows shrill and she thinks: Johnny is coming home.

The sharpener vibrates the counter beneath her fingers; John had phoned last night from the Singapore airport. The roar of a plane landing in the background. She’d sat up on one elbow, grabbed the receiver.

Her grandson Timmy stands before the bubblegum dispenser, transfixed. There is a cardboard sign written in pen promising a free skate sharpening if you get a black jawbreaker.

I’ve got a quarter in here somewhere, Helen says. Unzipping the beaded coin purse. She is the mother of one son and three girls and there are two grandchildren.

My daughters complied, she thinks, digging for the quarter. She thinks of a slap, stinging and loud; she slapped Cathy’s cheek once, the white print of her hand flooding red—this was years ago, a lifetime ago. Helen demanded of the girls that they give in, do what she said; but Johnny had been ungovernable.

A boy just like Cal, is what she thought when she discovered she was pregnant with Johnny. The nurse didn’t tell her the sex of the fetus that first time but she’d known it was a boy. The ultrasound was at five in the morning and she rode her bike. Lime Street covered in an early October frost. There were still stars at that hour. Her hands cold on the handlebars. Having to walk the bike up Carter’s Hill.

How desperately her son had wanted everything when he was a kid. He had wanted that puppy he’d found behind the supermarket sitting on a scrap of cardboard. She had said about the cost and fleas and the exercise a dog needs. But Johnny wanted the dog.

The grinding wheel revs and squeals when the blade touches it, and Helen pulls out a handful of change and lets Timmy take a quarter. His mother will be furious. Timmy doesn’t eat his vegetables, lives on macaroni and cheese. They have rules; Helen’s daughters all have bitter rules. The fate of the world can hang on a jawbreaker. If you say no, you mean it.

All profits, Helen reads, go to the Canadian Mental Health Association. She watches the boy slide the quarter into the notch and turn the stiff handle and the jawbreakers slump against each other behind the glass. Timmy lifts the little gate with his finger. Black. A black jawbreaker rolls out into his hand. He turns to show it to Helen. His pale freckled skin, lit up. The blue vein in his temple. Orange hair. The spit of his mother. The very spit out of her mouth. It is joy, the colourless eyelashes, green eyes flecked with hazel. The sharpener on the second skate blade. The smell of burning metal. And the fan of orange sparks. Timmy holds up the black jawbreaker and the man behind the sharpener stops the machine and lifts his goggles and lets them rest on his forehead.

A free one, he says. He frowns, running a thumb down the blade.

Johnny called last night to say the sun was rising over Singapore. Rising or setting, he did not know.

I don’t know what day it is, he said. He was coming from Tasmania and he’d slept on the plane, lost track of time. His cellphone kept cutting out, or there was a zooming in and out of his voice. He’d woken her up. A telephone at night scares the hell out of her.

It might be Monday, he said. Or it might be Sunday. A big red ball hanging over the palm trees at the edge of a landing strip.

Have you ever tried to figure out the difference between what you are, he said, and what you have to become? He said it softly and Helen sat up straighter. Sometimes his voice was perfectly clear.

Johnny was capable of grandiose philosophizing while encountering a sunset; that was all. Maybe there was nothing wrong, she’d thought. He was thirty-five. He was somewhere in Singapore.

She thought of him: a day at the beach when he was seven years old, his tanned chest, his shins caked with sand. Some bigger boys had been whipping him with strips of seaweed, forcing him farther out into the waves. She’d looked up from her book. Helen had been lost in a novel one minute, and the next she was knee deep in the water, striding, screaming her lungs out. The boys couldn’t hear her because of the wind.

Bullies, she screamed. You big bullies. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Then she was upon them and they froze.

He started it, Missus.

Look at the size of you. Just look. Pick on someone your own size. And the boys took off, plowing through the waves, glancing back, half saucy but scared.

Where had the girls been on that day? Cal must have given her a break. A day at the beach long ago, three decades or more, and now here was the dresser, her perfume bottle pierced by a street light, the brown liquid full of a still fire, the fringe of the rug, her housecoat on a hook; Johnny was a grown man. She was clutching the receiver. She was fifty-five; no, fifty-six.

What you have to become, she’d said.

Johnny was the kind of guy who phoned his mother infrequently, but when he did he was by turns pithy and incoherent and, inevitably, he had a bad connection. Or else something was wrong. He wanted to share the sunset with her; that was all, she’d thought. The sun was going down. Or the sun was coming up. But no, it was more than a sunset. This time he had something to say.

The proprietor hooks bright red skate guards over the blades and knots the long laces so the skates can hang over Timmy’s shoulder.

There you are, you’re all set, he says. He gives Timmy a soft cuff on the ear. Timmy ducks shyly. Helen sees the jawbreaker move from one cheek to the other.

Going skating, are you, the man says.

We’re going to give it a whirl, Helen says.

The ponds will be good soon, the man says. We’ve had a nice stretch of weather.

They all turn to look out the window. The street has been sanded away in a blast of wind and snow.

. . . . .

Basilica, February 1982

THE OCEAN RANGER began to sink on Valentine’s Day, 1982, and was gone by dawn the next day. Every man on it died. Helen was thirty in 1982. Cal was thirty-one.

It took three days to be certain the men were all dead. People hoped for three days. Some people did. Not Helen. She knew they were gone, and it wasn’t fair that she knew. She would have liked the three days. People talk about how hard it was, not knowing. Helen would have liked not to know.

She envied the people who knew that the winds were ninety knots and could still show up at the Basilica in a kind of ecstasy of faith. Three denominations were at the altar for the Ocean Ranger mass and the whole city came out.

They didn’t call it a memorial service. Helen doesn’t remember what they called the mass or if they called it anything or how she came to be there. What she remembers is that no reference was made to the men being dead.

Helen was not church-inclined in 1982. But she remembers being drawn to the Basilica. She needed to be around the other families.

She cannot remember getting ready for the service. She might have worn her jeans. She knows she walked to the Basilica. She remembers getting around the snowbanks. The snow had been shaved by the plows. High white walls scraped smooth, soaking up the street light. There was nowhere to walk. The statue of the Virgin with snow in the eye sockets and over one cheek and the mouth like a robber’s kerchief. She remembers that because already something was rising inside her: the injustice of being robbed.

And when she got up over the hill there were people out on the Basilica steps. They couldn’t all fit inside because of the crowd.

But Helen pushed her way through. She was supposed to meet her sister but she doesn’t remember seeing Louise first or last. People pressing in on all sides and the organ and candles and incense. She remembers the candles and the lilies. More lilies than you could shake a stick at.

Helen’s mother-in-law, Meg, was also at the church, but Helen didn’t see her either. Meg must have been at the front. Cal’s mother would have wanted to be close. Meg had a dream the night the rig went down. She dreamt a baby: I got up and looked out the kitchen window and there was a little baby in the tree branches all wrapped up in a white blanket. I said to Dave, I said, Go out and get that baby before something happens to it.

Everybody had some kind of dream the night the rig went down. Every soul in the whole province knows exactly where they were on that night. One of Helen’s friends was coaching tennis at the Boys and Girls Club in Buckmaster’s Circle. Just Helen’s friend and a child prodigy, a seven-year-old tennis star, alone in the gym, and the vicious smack of the ball, and they had no idea about the storm going on outside. They came out of the gym and the car was a blob under a drift, a single marshmallow in the empty parking lot. The whole city had shut down. Another friend was supposed to waitress for a Valentine’s dinner that had been pre-sold. Every table with a candle burning and a rose in a miniature vase, and there was duck in blueberry sauce for the main course; but the restaurant had to close and the owner asked Helen’s friend to join him in a meal before they went home. After they’d eaten, the owner went around to each table and blew out the candles.

There were men out on the rig who had said goodbye before they went out, that was the funny thing. Some men phoned their mothers. Men who were not in the habit of using the phone. A lot of the men weren’t used to saying how they felt. They didn’t think that way. They certainly did not say thank you. Not goodbye or I love you.

They were in the habit of turning those sentiments into actions. They chopped wood or they shovelled. A big pile of wood stacked under the blue tarp out by the shed. They brought over moose steaks. They put in an apartment for the mother-in-law. They got up on the roof with a bucket of tar. That was thank you. Some of them were so young that to say goodbye would never have occurred to them. They couldn’t think that far ahead. But even some of those kids in their early twenties phoned home. Called girlfriends. Said they were heading out to the rig and just wanted to phone before they went.

A lot of the men who died on the Ocean Ranger had gone out of their way to say goodbye, and it was strange. That’s the way it got remembered. That’s what everyone remarked on years later. He called up just before he left.

On the night of the Ocean Ranger mass Helen walked up the steps to the Basilica and said, Excuse me. She shouldered her way in and nudged forward and she was unapologetic.

She doesn’t remember Louise and she didn’t see Cal’s mother or father anywhere in the church but they must have been there.

The organ thrummed a long, low note like a human moan. She felt that note in the soles of her feet; it vibrated between her legs, in her pubic bone and in her gut, turning her insides to water, and in her nose. It made her nose hurt and her eyes filled. The organ music went through her.

She was not church-inclined but some part of her must have been hoping for a hint about how to get through what was coming. She was numb and unbelieving, but she had three children and a kind of intuition about the pregnancy though she hadn’t even skipped a period yet. Or if she had, she hadn’t noticed.

Louise says, I was there. We said about the crowd and I gave you a tissue. I had a tissue in my sleeve. But Helen doesn’t remember Louise.

The candles—there must have been hundreds on the altar, each in a little red glass, all slipping sideways in a blur when her eyes filled. She blinked and the candle flames became sharp stars and the stars threw out spears and her eyes filled and the flames became a wall of sluicing light.

This is a big cathedral, the Basilica, with vaulted ceilings and usually a chill, and that night you could not move because of the crowd. And the organ music was loud. People probably heard it on Water Street.

And the voices were just as loud. When people started to sing, the candles held their breath and then blasted brighter. Or the doors at the back blew open and the cold wind went all the way up the aisle and the candles flared.

Who came over to watch the kids? Helen didn’t bring the kids to the church. She regrets that. Johnny was nine and Cathy was eight and Lulu was seven. Bang, bang, bang, one right after the other.

Three youngsters on the floor in diapers, her mother-in-law Meg had said, as if that was a plan. She should have kept the children awake that night, got them into their snowsuits. She wishes she had.

The kids should have been with her at that mass, but she wasn’t thinking that way at the time. She doesn’t know what way she was thinking. She had an idea she could shield them. Ha.

The candlelight moved in time to the organ music. A bank of golden light behind the priests—or whatever they were; ministers, an archbishop for sure—in their white gowns with their arms raised. The singing began and she had to get out.

The wavering high-pitched voices of the old ladies in the front. Those voices are distinct, they don’t blend, they’re on key but reedy, and they just don’t ever blend or harmonize or join in; they lead is what they do, old ladies who come to church every morning, walking up from Gower Street or King’s Road or Flavin Street after putting out some food for the cat and a dishtowel over the tan bowl with bread rising in it. They come in rubber boots with zippers up the front, boots that slide over indoor shoes and used to belong to the husbands, who are dead, and the old ladies have plastic rain hats they tie under their chins and wool coats with big buttons and permed hair and rosary beads in their pockets beside balled-up tissues. Those old women couldn’t believe they had to look at so much sorrow so late in their lives. That kind of thing should have been over for them. They sang and the reedy sound was resignation. It takes seventy or eighty years of practice to master resignation, but the old women know it is a necessary skill.

And there were male voices, deep and full of the texture of trying to think. The men were trying to think of how to get through the hymn and the mass and find the car afterwards and drive back to the church to pick up the wife and youngsters so they wouldn’t have to walk in the weather—I’ll come back to get you, no need for you to get wet, you just wait on the steps there, look out for me—and these men were thinking of the traffic, and whether their sons or brothers were dead. Knowing they were dead—they all knew—but wondering if. Holding the hymn books out at arm’s length, these men, because they were far-sighted, and squinting and nodding as if they agreed with the words they were singing, or were just glad to be able to make them out.

The men holding the hymn books had their brows furrowed and their wives were standing next to them. The cathedral was full of the smell of wet wool and winter, cold stone, incense, and near the altar there was the smell of candle wax and lilies. In some of the pews were whole families, little girls with ringlets or braids and dresses that hung out over their snowpants, red-cheeked, yawning, swaying back and forth. Toddlers asleep on their mothers’ laps.

Here’s why Helen left the church in the middle of the mass: Some of those people were full of hope. Insane with it, and the lore is that hope can bring lost sailors home. That’s the lore. Hope can raise the dead if you have enough of it.

She was glad she hadn’t brought the kids. What kind of people would bring their kids to this, she thought.

Helen knew, absolutely, that Cal was dead and she would be lucky to get his body back.

She wanted his body. She remembers that. She knew he was dead and how badly she wanted his body. Not that she could have put it into words then.

What she might have said then: She was outside. The best way to describe what she felt: She was banished. Banished from everyone, and from herself.

. . . . .

Outside, 1982

BECAUSE OF THE children Helen felt a great pressure to pretend there was no outside. Or if there was an outside, to pretend she had escaped it. Helen wanted the children to think she was on the inside, with them. The outside was an ugly truth she planned to keep to herself.

It was an elaborate piece of theatre, this lying about the true state of where she was: outside.

She pretended by making breakfast and supper (though she often relied on chicken nuggets and frozen pizza) and she did the children’s homework with them.

John bit the erasers off his pencils, chewed the gold metal until she could see his teeth marks, and there was nothing left but a bit of saliva-coated rubber that fell off the tip of his tongue when she held out her hand. He started chewing things after the rig went down. His teacher said John ate his pencils during class. He ate a pencil a week, the teacher figured. It can’t be good for him, this teacher told Helen. He also chewed the cuffs of his shirts until they were in rags. He came home, and his cuffs were damp with saliva. And he ate his lunch with his mouth open, showing the food.

The teacher said, Kids will make fun of him. Just gently remind him, she said. Chew with your mouth closed. This is basic. One day I went into the cafeteria and he was sitting by himself. Big table.

Helen told this to John, and then he ate with his lips pressed hard and tight, eyes wide and fierce with the magnificent strain of being polite.

Helen did math with John, and she told him: Your fives are backwards.

They made a project about penguins with photographs from National Geographic and bristol board and Magic Markers. Penguins keep the one mate for life. They slide off the cliffs of ice on their bellies. Every now and then one will get eaten and the other will be left alone. These were the maudlin, sentimental facts about penguins. Johnny cut out photographs with his round-nosed scissors and glued them onto the bristol board and he made slanting lines with a ruler for the captions. His printing was atrocious.

Helen made the children sit at the table together for the evening meal. Always. Sitting at the table together was the cornerstone of her act.

She didn’t bake. Helen put store-bought pastries in their lunches, and she put in cans of pop. She put in a ham sandwich with mayonnaise and Wonder bread. All the families of the drowned men were waiting for the settlement, because how do you feed four kids and pay Newfoundland Light and Power?

After a while she got a job bartending. Meg babysat and Helen worked when the bar called her in, and she found she couldn’t count change. She’d look at the change in the cash register drawer and the change in her open palm and the five-dollar bill in her other hand and she had no idea what it all meant.

She got the orders wrong. Some people had tabs and she didn’t know which people. Once she refused to serve a man and he offered to blacken both her eyes for her. Then you won’t think you’re so smart, he said. He picked up the phone and called the owner and gave her the receiver and the owner said, You’re there to serve beer. Now serve the goddamn beer.

She cleaned up puke in the bathrooms and she’d leave at four in the morning and walk home. Cars crawling beside her on Duckworth Street. Men asking did she want a lift. Do you want to get in? I got something for you.

Once she screamed in a man’s face and burst into tears and demanded to know: Where is your wife? Where is she? Don’t you have a wife? The mirrored window rolled up with a whir and she saw her blotched face and the snot and tears and the halo of her hair lit from the street light and she didn’t know who it was. Screaming as the car burned rubber. The smell of the tires and her face streaking in the glass.

The money from the bar was enough to keep her family in groceries until a man smashed a beer bottle on the corner of a table and held it to his girlfriend’s face. The bouncer broke the man’s back tossing him out and then Helen quit.

She called to the children from the foot of the stairs, her hand on the banister: Supper is on the table.

Johnny got a paper route and on winter evenings she and the girls followed him, waiting on the street while he banged on doors collecting change. He was ten and the baby, Gabrielle, was in a carrier on Helen’s back. John had

Reviews for February

[smc01_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The characters in this book are well developed and compelling. Moore really captures the emotions in dealing with long-term grief, and the Newfoundland experience. It is also an interesting chronicle about the Ocean Ranger disaster; one that should not be forgotten.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

More like 3 1/2 stars, actually. It's a book less about grief than about loneliness, I think. Well-written. I did love the main character but could never tell the three daughters apart. A little bit boring and the subplot with the son made me restless. The happyish ending was not entirely earned.

[thebookjunky · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book languished in a stack on a to-be-read shelf for almost two years, squashed between a Julian Barnes below and some short story anthology above.
It was 31 years ago on Valentine's Day that the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland, killing all aboard.
31 years later, on Valentine's Day yesterday, February won the Canada Reads award. (Oh crap, now the masses will like it, it will be popular, and more often than not that means the writing sucks, but jeez, it's Lisa Moore, she's a good writer. She has cred!) I kept putting it off, fearing the mawkishness that was sure to fill the pages of a book about a widow of one of the dead crewmen. But that's not how it turned out. This isn't about wallowing in grief and outrage. It rises above that. The narrative skips around in time, both directly and indirectly as memories and dreams. This seems ideal for this type of story, because the present is so pregnant with the past. Very slowly the widow Helen begins to weave the future into her existence.
The structure, the architecture were great, but what I enjoyed the most was Moore's expressive prose. The effortless hyper-realism of her descriptions brought it to life, and overarching it all were quiet wisdoms and simple but profound insights. Lovely.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Helen lost her husband in the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982. Following his death (along with 85 others in the disaster), she raised her four children alone, one born posthumously. The novel jumps back and forth in time from the story of Helen's early life with her husband Cal to the time of the disaster to the present when her children are grown. This is another book in which there is little coherent plot, and the events are simply presented as fragments of life. Perhaps I was expecting the book to be the compelling story of the oil rig disaster and its aftereffects, but in fact the way in which Helen's husband died had very little effect on the story. Usually lack of a plot, or novels presented as episodic fragments don't bother me, and I have enjoyed many novels written in this manner. However, this was another book that left me cold.2 1/2 stars

[maggieflo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On February 15 1982, the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig platform sunk off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is the story of Helen O'Mara whose husband Cal is one of the victims. Lisa Moore's story is about how Helen survives widowhood with 4 small children. It is very well written and beautifully portrays her struggles with finances, single parenthood, loneliness and hope. She is a very strong character who survives to witness the success of her children and the birth of grandchildren. She is haunted by how Cal died in the sinking and combs the official report to find clues. The book is full of hope, humour and life. Loved it.

[tinkerbellkk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While I enjoyed the writing and story that the author wove about a real life event, I found the flow very difficult to follow. It jumped back and forth between present time and the past and also between different characters very frequently. Loved the Canadian reference such as fries with vinegar and street hockey. :)

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wavered between giving this book 4 stars or 4 1/2 stars but in the end I had to stick with 4 stars. Some of the writing was beautiful and the ability to portray grief so palpably was amazing. However, there were times when the narrative jumped around too much for my taste.Helen O'Mara's husband, Cal, was one of the men drowned when the Ocean Ranger drilling rig capsized. Left with 3 small children and another on the way, Helen somehow made it through the days and weeks and months and years following that disaster. However, she can't help imagining, over and over, what happened on board the rig as it went down. Even years later, after all the children have left home, Helen still grieves for Cal. And she is lonely, very lonely. She finds herself thinking about the man that is doing carpenter work on her house. Should she ask him for dinner? Does he have someone? Who phones him and asks him to pick them up? This is the kind of book that makes you think about what would happen if your mate died. When you are happily married can you ever recover from the loss? Would you want to marry again? Personally, after taking so long (15 years) to find a soul mate, I can't imagine being lucky enough to find someone else. Plus, it was enough of a shock to my system to adapt to another person at the age of 40. I don't think I could go through that again. On the other hand, if I was the one who died I would want my partner to be happy and if someone else could help with that then I wouldn't expect him to grieve forever.This is the fifth read for the Canada Reads nominees. I still think Indian Horse should win but this would be my second place pick.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this for Canada Reads (2013) and am so glad that I did. Lisa Moore has told the story of Helen, whose husband died on the Ocean Ranger, and how she and her children cope without him. She has chosen a writing style that is not fractured but multifaceted. At times, two people are in the same room but having totally different conversations. The reader is given a fuller picture of each character by the way Ms.Moore allows them to express their thoughts. The writing is beautiful -- sparse and very deep at the same time. Helen is a very real character; one you can feel you know well by the end of the book.

[canread_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As much as I wanted to love this book, it just didn't work for me. The pace was painfully slow. A lack of action is fine if linguistic waves pull you, and the characters, along. And the book is very well written, poetic even. But the words seem designed to evoke the grief the characters must feel. The result, for me, was boredom. I became bored with the every thought and memory of the characters as they did nothing to rectify their pain. Perhaps if I too was grieving I would better appreciate the feeling and the language of this work. But as it stands, if a story lacks plot I need the language to snap with life.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

And at first you think you will not be alone forever. You think the future is infinite. Childhood seems to have been infinite. Downstairs the saw revs and Helen hears a stick of wood fall to the floor. And so will the future be infinite, and it cannot be spent alone.But, she has learned, it is possible: not to meet someone. The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever. The future is unyielding. It is possible that the past has cracked off, the past has clattered to the floor, and what remains is the future and there is not very much of that. The future is the short end of the stick.February, by Lisa Moore is about grief. Helen is a mother of three, pregnant with the fourth, when the Ocean Ranger, the oil rig her husband is working on, goes under off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982. [February] chronicles Helen's story, from meeting her husband to the life she manages to carve for herself from the wreckage of her earlier plans and expectations. Grief is ever present, and something that can't be shed after a suitable length of time, like an unfashionable coat. Her husband Cal is always somewhere in her mind and she is haunted by her imaginings of his final moments. But life goes on and she has four children, also marked by the loss of Cal, to care for. She doesn't get to give up or give in. The book jumps forwards and back in time to different parts of Helen's life; a good thing, because focusing too long on the intense period of sadness just after the rig went down would be unreadable.There were long stretches in that phone call where neither of them said anything. Dave O'Mara wasn't speaking because he didn't know he wasn't speaking. He could see before him whatever he'd seen when he looked at his dead son, and he thought he was telling her all of that. But he was in his own kitchen staring silently at the floor.Looking at his dead son must have been like watching a movie where nothing moved. It was not a photograph because it had duration. It had to be lived through. A photograph has none of that. This was a story without an ending. It would go on forever. And Helen was trying not to faint because it would scare the living daylights out of the children, and besides, she had known. She'd known the minute the bastard rig sank.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure why so many others rated this book more highly than me. I found it hard to see the connections between all the vignettes. I would assume that's my deficiency, in view of the book's standing (Man Booker long list). Subtlety was never my forte - I need to be hit in the face.

[donna828 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Widowhood is a painful thing. Left alone to raise four children, Helen stays the course and goes through the motions of daily life even though the deadness inside her is unrelenting. Twenty-six years later, she is still suffering from the "injustice of being robbed" of her (fictional) husband Cal in a (real life) freak accident at sea in 1982. Her grief pours out in a deluge of terse sentences. Some incomplete.At an age somewhere in her late 50s - she frequently forgets her exact age - she is lonely. So lonely she lives in her memories and fantasies about the man remodeling her house:..."She made him a sandwich because she was making one for herself, but she found herself peeling carrots, too. Garnish. She was making a garnish for the plates, and when you live alone you are a stranger to the idea of garnish. You are a stranger to any flourishes at all. Because you do not exist. There is the TV...the grandchildren...the worry of John. There is Christmas. But Helen does not put a garnish on a plate."Some readers may not like the skipping back and forth in time; however, the dates are clearly marked so there is no question about when the events occur. The rambling nature mimics the emotional nature of bereavement and gives testament to Helen's deep pain. This is not a happy book yet it has moments of joy and hope about the resilience of the human spirit.

[pdebolt_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

February is an unflinching look at grief. Helen O'Mara is pregnant with her fourth child when her husband, Cal, dies in an oil rig accident. This is the story of Helen's long, arduous grief journey that spans over 25 years. Lisa Moore's description of the shock and, disbelief, followed by a pain that pierces her very core is unsentimental, which makes it all the more powerful and poignant. Life does go on for Helen, punctuated by memories of her life with Cal. She raises her children with all the attendant joys and challenges alone, and her grief is a constant, unwelcome companion as the years pass. The ending of this book brings a promise of unexpected happiness for Helen.

[crosbyc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love how Moore has drawn the characters in this novel--sympathetic, changing and very human.

[cecilturtle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moore tackles a slice of life with poignancy and delicate emotion. I really enjoyed the seamless passages through time which help build the story, the characters and the reasons behind Helen's choices and John's dilemma. It created an energy and a rhythm which drew in the reader despite the relative lack of action.Whereas the theme of the shipwreck is dealt with a lot of compassion as is Helen's ability to survive and raise her children, I was a little annoyed by Helen's inertia when came time to really build her life. She seemed trapped in time and I found it curious that it took her some 30 years to move on - not necessarily to remarry but simply to accept what had happened. The end, full of hope and renewal, is a lovely way to break that cycle, but I would have liked to see less lingering on Cal.Overall, a touching and heartwarming novel.

[bcbookjunky · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book languished in a stack on a to-be-read shelf for almost two years, squashed between a Julian Barnes below and some short story anthology above.
It was 31 years ago on Valentine's Day that the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland, killing all aboard.
31 years later, on Valentine's Day yesterday, February won the Canada Reads award. (Oh crap, now the masses will like it, it will be popular, and more often than not that means the writing sucks, but jeez, it's Lisa Moore, she's a good writer. She has cred!) I kept putting it off, fearing the mawkishness that was sure to fill the pages of a book about a widow of one of the dead crewmen. But that's not how it turned out. This isn't about wallowing in grief and outrage. It rises above that. The narrative skips around in time, both directly and indirectly as memories and dreams. This seems ideal for this type of story, because the present is so pregnant with the past. Very slowly the widow Helen begins to weave the future into her existence.
The structure, the architecture were great, but what I enjoyed the most was Moore's expressive prose. The effortless hyper-realism of her descriptions brought it to life, and overarching it all were quiet wisdoms and simple but profound insights. Lovely.

[iudita_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There were many redeeming qualities to this book; the most obvious one being the skill the author has with the use of language. Moore is able to take simple common everyday activities such as assembling a crib or watching your dog dig up something in the sand, and turn them into frozen moments in time where all you see is the vivid picture of what she is describing to you. I've never read an author who was so gifted at making you see every little moment of the story. Yet aside from the writing, I was a bit dissapointed with the storyline. This is a chronicle of Helen's grief journey that begins when her husband is drowned at sea and ends a couple of decades later. I found the storyline very flat. The process just went on and on with little purpose or conclusion. I was waiting for the story to come together right up to the last chapter and was dissapointed that it never seemed to.

[janismack · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book drew me in. The subject was difficult but the writing was so well done, I persevered through the tough descriptions of when the Ocean Ranger goes down in the freezing waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The story goes back and forth to different times in the life of Helen the widow and her family. Recommended

[wassilissa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1982 sank die Bohrinsel "Ocean Ranger" mit 84 Besatzungsmitgliedern, von denen niemand überlebte. Dieses reale Geschehen bildet den Hintergrund für den Roman.Helen verliert bei diesem Unglück ihren Mann Cal, von dem sie gerade das vierte Kind erwartet. Das Buch erzählt nun, hauptsächlich aus Helens Sicht und der ihres Sohns John. Helen und Cal haben sich sehr geliebt, so dass die Trauer um ihren Mann auch 26 Jahre danach ungebrochen ist. Natürlich hat sie sich arrangiert, sie hat die Kinder großgezogen, ein eigenes Geschäft mit handgenähten Hochzeitskleidern (!) aufgebaut, doch die Möglichkeit einer zweiten Liebe hat sie sich nicht mehr gegeben. Ähnlich ist es mit John. Er bewältigt trotz mancher Widrigkeiten sein Leben wunderbar, aber eigene Kinder möchte er nicht. Zu dominant ist die Gefahr des Verlustes bei einer engen Bildung.26 Jahre nach dem Tod Cals wird eine Frau von John schwanger, mit der er nur eine kurze Affäre hatte. Sie möchte das Kind. Und auch für Helen eröffnen sich Möglichkeiten des Glücks. Dabei liegt diese Öffnung wahrscheinlich weder bei Helen noch bei John daran, dass nun die eine richtige Person gekommen ist, sondern dass es einfach an der Zeit ist, wieder Nähe zuzulassen.Das Buch schildert diese Geschichte in Zeitsprüngen und eher sachlich. Dennoch werden Beweggründe und Gefühlslagen der Protagonisten sehr deutlich und nachvollziehbar.

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

February is my first experience with Lisa Moore, but it will not be my last. I adore our East Coast storytellers; I think they have a gift that is all their own. Moore continues in that tradition.Helen O’Mara, a young Newfoundland wife and mother of four, is widowed when husband Cal dies tragically on the oil rig Ocean Ranger. Cal is fictional, but the Ocean Ranger is not. It sunk on Valentine’s Day 1982; the fact that the tragedy behind [February] is real, made Moore’s story even more alluring to me. From CBC Digital Archives: "Feb. 14, 1982: a fierce storm rages off the coast of Newfoundland. Some 315 kilometres east of St. John's, the Ocean Ranger, a giant self-propelled oil rig, temporarily halts its search for oil. High as a 35-storey building, the Ocean Ranger is the largest and most advanced oil rig of its kind, built to withstand the world's stormiest seas. But that's little comfort to the 84 men in the eye of the storm, or their families."Helen knows, from the moment she hears of Ocean Ranger’s fate, that Cal has is dead. Cocooned in a grief that threatens to immobilize her, she raises her young family with the financial help of her community and eventually a settlement from the oil company. Her family thrives; and she makes a decent life for herself, even as they’ve grown and flown. But her grief is insatiable. Decades after Cal’s death, she aches still: “How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered is more of the same – not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.” (242)This second novel of Moore’s was declared A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. The National Post wrote, “Loneliness is hard to write about without become maudlin or clichéd. But Moore never errs on the side of sentimentality . . . There's an economy in Moore's style that shows us how a once vibrant life can be whittled down by pain and loneliness. But, by grounding her writing in the physical world, Moore shows how life's everyday tasks and encounters create a comforting continuity that allows forward movement.” I loved February. I think Helen’s story is one that will always need to be told and retold. It is a human story of human triumph, even in the face of intimidating odds. It is a story about life.

[nickelini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“And all that remains is the faces and the names/of the wives and the sons and the daughters.” (The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot)Lisa Moore’s February is a novel about a family—the wife, the son, and the daughters—of Cal, their husband and father, who perishes one stormy February night off the coast of Newfoundland. He is a fictional crew member on the real life Ocean Ranger, an oil rig that sank on Valentine’s Day 1982, killing all 84 men aboard. Helen is left to raise her three young children, and soon finds out that there is a fourth on the way. Moore’s writing is astonishing in both her word play and the structure she chose for the book. All together, her take on the excruciating suffering of grief and loss was achingly beautiful. Sounds depressing and maudlin, doesn’t it? Some readers think so—the Quill & Quire even said the book was “tedious” and “overly sentimental.” Well, I didn’t find it depressing, sentimental or tedious—I found it haunting and stirring. There are several three-star “meh” reviews here at LT, and when I first started reading I thought I’d be in that crowd too. But by page twenty I had changed my mind and was loving it. Others have found it wonderful too—after all, it was nominated for last year’s Booker Prize.Recommended for: readers who appreciate gorgeous writing and don’t mind a contemplative novel that jumps back and forth through time.

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

February is Lisa Moore’s second novel and one that has garnered a lot of attention in 2009 as a Globe and Mail Best Book and Quill and Quire Book of the Year, in 2011 as a 2010 Booker Prize Longlist and as a Commonwealth Writers Prize Shortlist and more recently in 2013 February won CBC’s annual book debate Canada Reads. High time I found out what this book is all about for myself.Using the Ocean Ranger disaster – the mobile offshore drilling unit that sank in Canadian waters on February 15, 1982, killing all 84 crew members on board at the time – as a focal point, Moore has written a slow, reflective novel that grew on me as I read it. Character perspective books, and in particular ones that employ multiple time, place and narration shifts, can take some time to warm up to. February was no exception to this rule as I found I had to pay close attention to the section headings to ensure I knew where in the timeline the narration was as I was reading. Thankfully, Moore restricted her shifts in narration to Helen, her son John and his female acquaintance Jane. If you prefer plot-driven books, this one will drive you to some level of frustration as the focus is on fleshing out the emotional landscape of our main character, Helen and the impact that fateful night when her husband Cal dies and her life suddenly becomes that of a single mom raising four kids in Newfoundland. It is a poignant portrayal of aching loss and overpowering loneliness spanning some 25 years, all shrouded in a brave front to persevere and care for her family as best she can. What I really liked about this one is Moore’s ability to create real characters.... characters you may recognize from your own community or would not be surprised to encounter on the street. Characters that reach an emotional cliff and wonder if they should just jump off or turn back towards land and continue on with life. The writing is stunning - fluid, evocative, and yet plainly written in a manner that speaks to the masses as its intended audience. She has also captured a Canadian perspective/point of view that is hard to explain but one that I can recognize and relate to. Grief is an anchor that can drag us down and change lives irreparably, if we let it. Some favorite quotes: "The act of being dead, if you could call it an act, made them very hard to love. They'd lost the capacity to surprise. You needed a strong memory to love the dead, and it was not her fault that she was failing. She was trying. But no memory was that strong. This was what she knew: no memory was that strong.""We are alone in death. Of course we are alone. It is a solitude so refined we cannot experience it while we are alive; it is too rarefied, too potent. It is a drug, that solitude, an immediate addiction. A profound selfishness, so full of self it is an immolation of all that came before. Cal was alone in that cold. Utterly alone, and that was death. That, finally, was death."A book I am very glad I have finally made the time to pick up and read!

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Grief changes everything. For Helen, whose husband, Cal, died in the Ocean Ranger oilrig disaster in 1982, grief suffuses her life. Everything she does, her children, including the one on the way at the time of Cal’s death, her work, her connections (or lack thereof) with others, all of it is enveloped in grief. But it’s more than that, because grief changes even what has gone before. It tinges the memory of her time together with Cal with foreboding and a previously unrealized sadness. It gets in all the cracks; it is in the very air Helen breathes. And it isn’t just Helen. The loss of their father affects each of her children, though perhaps her son, John, is most palpably affected. At one point, a seer grips his arm and states ominously, “You’ve lost someone in the past,” continuing a moment later to complete the vision, “Or you are going to lose someone in the future.” Well, yes, that about covers it.Lisa Moore’s style is distinctive and well practiced. Those familiar with her short story collections, Open or Degrees of Nakedness, will find the same fractured and faceted narrative structure here. There the glimpses she provides, mirrored by her fragmented and suggestive sentences, work brilliantly to create a mood and imply a whole life, a whole story. Whether such a style is as suitable for a novel is debatable, though it certainly works well enough for her first novel, Alligator. Here, however, everything seems muted, monotone, a bit depressed. That works well, of course, with the overall presentation of grief. But it does tend towards a single note. Sections with different characters as leads all sound the same and the characters begin to bleed into one another.If grief changes everything and everything is grief, then sooner or later the reader, and one suspects also the characters, will start discounting. We start looking past the grief just as we look through the air to see the things that stand out. And what stands out here are the ties of family, the bonds of love, the blunders we make and how we rectify them, and the in-built drive to create new life and new love. Grief may be everywhere, but we get through it. Recommended.

[librarycin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

2.5 starsIn 1982, an oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland. This book follows Helen, now a young widow, as her husband, Cal, had been working on the oil rig. Helen is left to care for four children. It wasn’t a boring story, but the book flipped all over the place in time, mostly between 2008 and other years, looking back. Each section did introduce the year, but it was really all over the place, I thought. I didn’t care about characters, and I didn’t believe the outcome of John’s (John is one of Helen’s children, an adult in 2008) storyline. Also, what is wrong with using quotation marks?