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n The smell of cut grass and gasoline reached her, deeply reminiscent, reassuring… and sad. Everything is fucking sad. It’s sad to be conceived. We start to die the moment we’re born.n
I chose this quote to represent The Way the Crow Flies because it succinctly represents the style the novel is written in. And, if you feel at all connected to this sentence, you have a good chance of enjoying the novel’s overall tone—or at least, of refraining from crying.
In The Way the Crow Flies, Madeleine McCarthy, the daughter of an air force man and his picture-perfect wife, is a grade four student whose innocence is swiftly taken when her teacher begins sexually abusing her and several of her female classmates. This story occurs in tandem with a broader story about the air force and government intelligence in the 1960s. With a 700-page book, it is near impossible to tell you everything that takes place, and even more so with this book, because the writing is so profound and every word can be seen as significant and connected to multiple themes and events throughout the novel.
It’s not a perfect book. I’m sure that some readers would criticize it for being melodramatic, but I think it’s anything but. Sure, a lot of sad things happen. A lot. But, somehow, all of them are plausible. Nothing happens that makes me roll my eyes and question it. Child rape, injustice, gender inequality, homophobia, broken families, illness, death. It all happens all the time, and yet, people are quick to claim that it’s unrealistic to write about. In a way, I can understand that, because some authors intend to sensationalize, but not Ann-Marie MacDonald. She writes from a place of knowing, or she’s really good at faking it. Like, really good. In the same way that Fiona Apple is an icon of the anorexic scene, MacDonald is an icon of the child sexual abuse survivor scene. Not categories anyone wants to be part of, yet categories lots of people are part of.
But I cannot begin to express how interconnected and seamlessly woven the plot of this novel is. Even on a line-by-line basis, the author writes something, only to reference it in a gut-wrenching way several chapters ahead. Sometimes, a sentence of a few measly words refers back to three different themes or events, leaving you with your jaw dropped and a knot in your stomach. And this keeps happening, for 721 pages.
I read MacDonald’s earlier book, Fall on Your Knees, in 2009, so 10 years ago. It has a sub-4.0 rating on Goodreads, and this book’s rating is only marginally higher. I put off reading The Way the Crow Flies out of a fear that I wouldn’t like it, that this low rating meant I was missing some fatal flaw in her earlier novel. But frankly? I don’t get why the rating is comparatively so low. Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but with this author, her books are so well-crafted that I am in constant awe while reading them. The only explanation I can think of is that the books are just too damn sad. And I get that.
This is the kind of book that makes you swear you’ll never read another sad book for the rest of your life. Like reverse candy. Instead of being too sweet, it’s too bitter. But you can’t get past the fact that it’s plausible. It’s real. And that fact hurts more than anything the author herself could write.
I’m clearly drinking the Ann-Marie MacDonald Kool-Aid. And all I want is more. But maybe not for another 10 years.
n We go to the same well to grieve and it’s fuller every time.n
