Come, Thou Tortoise
Jessica Grant
Random House
Review by Jordan Hall
“I would not say no to a tortoise,” says Audrey Flowers, the protagonist of Jessica Grant’s debut novel. It’s good advice. This is not a book to say no to.
Come, Thou Tortoise follows Audrey—or Oddly, as her uncle Thoby calls her—as she flies home to St. John’s where her father is in a coma, which Audrey keeps thinking of as a “comma.” While Audrey is in mid-air, composing her touching bedside speech, her father slips away, and after the funeral her Uncle flees (or is he kidnapped?) back to England, leaving her alone. Thus begins Grant’s eccentric mapping of The Tempest onto a British family exiled to the island of Newfoundland, where Prospero is a longevity researcher run down by a Christmas tree, Caliban is a beloved Uncle with hemihypertrophy, and Miranda is obsessed with Clue and missing the pet tortoise she left behind in Oregon.
The novel wings between near-magical memories of Audrey’s childhood, the elaborate mysteries the adult Audrey constructs to distract herself from her grief, and interludes narrated by Winnifred, Audrey’s very opinionated tortoise. As it does, Audrey’s adventures, past and present, unfurl into a sprawling narrative, surprising in both its resonance and strange familiarity.
With linguistic panache that readers of her Journey Prize-winning short story collection, Making Light of Tragedy, will recognize, Grant skips puns and malapropisms through the novel like stones. Whether silly (a mountain-climbing ex-boyfriend named “Cliff,” Audrey’s grandmother worrying what her luggage might be up to at the “Baggage Carousal”), or painful (when asked if she is feeling “run down” Audrey replies, “my dad was run down.”), her wordplay ripples through the text, turning up meaning where least expected. Add to this Winnifred’s dryly observed adventures, and Come, Thou Tortoise becomes the sort of literary high-wire act one can’t help cheering.
Audrey Flowers is undoubtedly Grant’s tour-de-force creation. A little girl who believed that the people she loved would never die left alone to grapple with death, Audrey is at turns insightful and oblivious, petty and magnanimous, heartbreakingly sweet and painfully awkward. The narrative may take almost the first third of the novel to start moving (especially for those who read the spoiler-heavy bookflaps), but Audrey, with her quietly eccentric observations, takes hold from the first word. Through Audrey’s eyes, Grant offers readers a world where there are planes in the basement and pet mice live forever on Licorice Allsorts, but which is also undeniably our own, full of humour and grief and, Oddly, moving.
Jordan Hall is a Vancouver-area playwright, and a mentor for UBC’s Booming Ground program. Find her online at www.jordanhall.ca.
