Unrest
Unrest centres on the raw beginnings of Ottawa, called Bytown, in 1836 – a squalid, crime-and-booze-infested shantytown. Mariah, badly facially scarred from a vicious dog attack when she was sixteen, is unmarried, in her thirties, and mostly invisible. Her resulting terror of men and dogs pervades every moment she is away from the homestead, when she ventures into Bytown to sell her sister’s medicines. Thomas, Mariah’s teenage son, apprenticed to a Bytown blacksmith, has been raised to believe she’s his aunt. Mariah’s sister, Biddy, and her husband Seamus agreed to raise Thomas as their own and shelter Mariah when they emigrated to Upper Canada. But Mariah is treated worse than a servant by all except Seamus, whom she still holds a candle for. In Bytown, Thomas’s Irish heritage attracts repeated prejudice, drawing him into the protection of the Shiners, Irish thugs who assault anyone anti-Irish, and sometimes just anyone. Meanwhile, the family homestead, which Thomas refuses to visit, is rife with bitterness and anger now that Mariah threatens to tell all and reclaim her motherhood.
Fear is a well-utilised theme: fear of safety, hunger, violence, poverty, and particularly men and dogs. Tuinman expertly paints this unsafe place in an unsafe time, bursting with racial tension, making her characters’ choices all the more understandable. In intimate first-person accounts, Tuinman moves her two main protagonists down separate paths, with little interaction, revealing their thoughts, insecurities and decisions, good and bad. Several scenes of note capture Mariah’s courage and quick thinking when she’s up against her worst fears, despite spending most of her life in hiding. The festering family resentment drives the plot, but settles to a satisfying and quite unexpected ending to one woman’s resolute journey to take back what is hers. A riveting, tightly plotted family story.
(Ed. note: as this novel is not yet available outside Canada, please see the publisher’s website for purchasing options.)
