The creation of art, that dark and terrifying zone between futile effort and the bright glow of creative ecstasy, is a strange and wonderful place to set a novel. But then, you could also place your characters between the fallout of the great depression and the grinding wheels of history while the world stumbled toward a second world war. In his new work of historical fiction, Lay Figures, Mark Blagrave has done both.
Set in 1938, protagonist Elizabeth MacKinnon has moved into an apartment in Saint John, New Brunswick. Her intention is to write poetry in her newfound space, but the Saint John of 1938 has other plans.
Elizabeth is dropped into an almost secret world of writers, painters, sculptors and even marionette artists. She finds herself the subject of interest and attention from a number of fronts, but it is the eye and brush of a painter that first captures her. The loosely connected group of creatives are, themselves, navigating not only the hardships of the times but also their own landscapes of creative struggle, force and tension.
Blagrave’s characters occupy a space that, in other hands, might have been less engaging to the average reader. But he fills his rooms and his dialogue with a fire that makes the simple act of sitting for a sketch or stringing a marionette fraught with energy, and the reader feels themself walking a wire between two characters.
The city, which will be familiar to many of the novel’s readers, takes on a voice and a texture all its own as the setting becomes a character and moves and breathes around our artists. The years at the end of the ’30s, caught as they were in the winds of history, were critical to the formation of a colony of artists living, working and gathering on these streets and in these apartments, studios and houses. We are so used to the idea of Saint John as a city of the arts that we can forget the conditions that forged that mettle, that made it what it was and is. The mostly working-class town was caught between the shattering effects of the great depression and the low thunder of the coming war across the sea.
Blagrave’s characters are aware of the world around them, but their conversations and concerns are almost entirely inward. The sharpness of Blagrave’s dialogue gives away his years as a playwright and professor.
Indeed, Mark Blagrave has had an illustrious career in the arts before his first works of fiction were published. Raised in Ontario and Bermuda, Mark completed his BA at Mount Allison and went on to do his MA and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. He pursued a long career in academics at UNBSJ and Mount Allison, which culminated with a tenure as Dean of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Huron University College in Ontario. All the while, Mark was writing and producing plays and publishing stories. His novel Silver Salts (2008) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Novel Award (Canada and the Caribbean), and his collection of short stories Salt in the Wounds followed (2014).
Mark has brought his deep and intrinsic understanding of art and process to the pages of Lay Figures. He has filled the spaces of studios and city streets with complex and intimate moments of creation, lust, jealousy and insecurity while at the same time pulling back the curtain to show us the mechanics and processes involved in that creation.
There may be those who feel he has shown too much of the artistic process, but is that not the role of the writer? There are moments of striking beauty and metaphorical magic throughout. The accidental breaking of a lay figure, a small posable human model that painters use to study form, brings the fragility of these characters to light. The striking visual of a usurper cutting the strings of a marionette mid-show, the body falling to the floor in a tangled heap, was one that stayed with me. The remarkable overlapping of forms, painters and sculptors and potters arguing over wine and cigarettes, the various pros and cons of this style over that, drew wondrous lines between the characters and their chosen art forms.
If I had one criticism of Lay Figures, it is that Blagrave did not dive deeply enough into the art of the time and the events of the time. There is mention of a Diego Rivera mural demolished by the Rockefellers, which rings true and important on the page, but I honestly wanted more from the characters about who and what was driving them. However, after further readings, I realized that Blagrave had to walk a careful line; Lay Figures is not a history of twentieth-century art and artists, but a well-crafted work of fiction that fills those spaces of time and place with his own life and characters. The events of Lay Figures are shaped by their time and place, but not defined by them. To do so would have drawn too much away from the story being told, and it is a story worth telling.
Published by Vagrant press, Lay Figures is a book about the moments of creativity, and the loves, light and darkness that comes from those moments. It is not a novel that will grab everyone who picks it up, but for those who connect with its characters and their artistic struggles, it will speak volumes of a place and time — when a city found itself, almost secretly, at the heart of the artistic and creative world. For those people, it will be nothing less than a touchstone.