February

By Lisa Moore

Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twenty-five years later, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile, before we truly come home. This is a profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780887849008

Lisa Moore

LISA MOORE is the author of Degrees of Nakedness, Open, Alligator, February, Caught, Something for Everyone, and the young-adult novel Flannery. She lives in St. John’s where she is a professor of Creative Writing at Memorial University.

Reviews for February

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[crosbyc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.