Tom Avery, a child with rickets, was taken from his
impoverished, ill mother and raised in the care of twenty-
seven girls from the Department of Home Economics at the
University of Manitoba. Moving forward to today, Fay
Macleod, who works in a Folklore centre, decides to leave
Peter, her partner of three years, as the love has left the
relationship.
THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE brings Tom to light as a night-time DJ
for a Winnipeg local radio station. As he lives a boring
life while praising his unemployed and redneck
listeners, he looks back on the marriages he's managed to
accumulate and vows never again to marry a woman who cannot
cook, or who is addicted to codeine, or has other drawbacks
best discussed before marriage. Meanwhile, Fay muses on
mermaids and decides that her family is far from reticent on
personal matters and that most people's lives are a mess.
Roll on to page 167 when our two lonely characters meet at a
party. While Tom can't stop thinking about the lady he met
at the party, amusingly Fay can't remember what he looked
like, the next day. In achingly slow passages, they start to
get to know each other. and we can't wait to see if the
outcome will bring them happiness or - given that this is an
artistic novel - more disillusionment.
Carol Shields has won the Pulitzer Prize with her novel The
Stone Diaries and collected other awards for her writing.
She reflects modern life as she sees it, with the choices we
all face. I found a disconnect with the text as tenses
continually change from past to present.
We need to be in the correct frame of mind to read a
literary novel; an attitude that says moody prose is better
than moving the plot forward and it's okay to spend three
pages making toast or a few chapters deciding who gets to
keep the spatulas. If that style is suiting you at this
minute, you'll enjoy draping yourself with passages from THE
REPUBLIC OF LOVE. If you would rather read a fast-paced
story that presents repeated challenges to the characters,
I'm afraid you'll just have to pick up a romantic suspense
novel.
With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the
hands of a blackjack dealer, Carol Shields introduces us to
two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There's
Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her
from focusing on any one man. And right across the street
there's Tom, a popular radio talk-show host who has focused
a little too intently, having married and divorced three
times.
Can Fay believe in lasting love with such a man? Will
romantic love conquer all rational expectations? Only Carol
Shields could describe so adroitly this couple who fall in
love as thoroughly and satisfyingly as any Victorian couple
and the modern complications that beset them in this
touching and ironic book.
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