1 / Emerging Fiction

A moving study of the way in which unusual and dramatic events shape our lives, Riel Nason’s The Town That Drowned is a novel that adopts a strategy of narrating profound changes from conflicting personal and community perspectives. The narrator, a teenage girl called Ruby Carson, observes the reactions of her brother Percy, a boy with extreme hypersensitivity and a need for strict routine. The slightest change in his life triggers unpredictable psychological trauma and emotional outbursts which Ruby has long lost the desire to empathize with. Ruby’s amusing list of such changes includes the observation that it is the large events that appear to affect him the least and the small events that have an enormous impact: ‘When Percy lost a button off his winter coat, he also lost his mind.’ Ruby summarizes Percy’s predicament as a prelude to the novel’s main event, the drowning of an entire town behind the floodwaters of a new dam: ‘It was as if the whole evolving, revolving world was by nature the problem since it would never stay still for him. Percy wasn’t wired to understand that you can’t control change, so he could never, ever catch up and adjust to anything.’ Percy might not understand or be able to cope with change, but then as Nason gradually reveals, neither can most of the townsfolk who learn of their town’s impending doom. Percy’s abnormal behaviour involves intense scrutiny of the types of changes that pass most people by; in small-town life, such abnormality leads to scapegoating, something that Ruby discovers when she becomes a seer in the novel, through a skating accident in which she starts ‘babbling’ her prophetic vision of Haventon: ‘I could see into the river, and under the water was all of Haventon. There was our house at the edge, then the houses of our neighbours. I saw the high school and the churches. I saw the apple orchard and the garage and the Legion.’ Ruby starts waving to her neighbours who appear to be swimming by, while physically, to the onlookers at her accident, she appears to be without sense or sight, let alone foresight. Typically among teenagers, Ruby becomes an outcast, someone who is labelled ‘weird’ because of this incident, ‘quarantined all alone on the Island of the Odd.’

As a seer, Ruby envisions the eventual: that which will be happening in due time; but the shock to many of the townsfolk is that the construction of a dam is simply happening at all, that the place they call home and are attached to will eventually be under water. As insider and outsider, Ruby has a unique vantage point, her liminality being akin to standing at the water’s edge, being able to see under clear water and back toward dry land at the same time. Ruby speculates that ‘the problem with visions’ is that ‘they are open to interpretation.’ But Ruby is not the only one who misinterprets or at least tries out different readings of the situation: the novel charts the town’s first few whispered revelations about what is going to happen, their misunderstanding about Ruby’s father who works for the provincial planning department that has made decisions about the town’s future (decisions that he was not actually privy to), and then the myriad responses to the official news that the town is literally going to be rebuilt on higher ground. This new town is disorienting and alien, disturbing the memories of what was there before: ‘It’s small, tiny even, not like coming over a hill and discovering a hidden city, but it can still throw me off seeing it, knowing that what in my memory was a field is now divided into a whole grid of straight little streets and lots for houses.’ Ruby is further disoriented by the act of falling in love and the emotional changes that occur as she rapidly matures; her family ponders the conundrum of what to do in a situation where they must move and change, but with a family member, Percy, who cannot cope...