Reading by Lightning: A Novel
By: Joan Thomas
Published: September 11, 2008
ISBN-13: 9780864925121
ISBN-10: 0864925123
Format: Paperback 388 pages
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Lily Piper grew up in the Depression ravaged Canadian Prairies, surrounded by hard times, drought, and harder religion. Her journey from Manitoba to England, in the tumultuous years before the Second World War, is a story of personal growth and triumph over the forces of man and of nature. In lyrical prose, that floats from the pages, author Joan Thomas delivers a masterpiece in her powerful tour de force Reading by Lightning: A Novel, The stories in the book are told, as if illuminated by the brilliant flashes of lightning, where every detail stands out in total clarity, if only for a fleeting moment.
Like the Pilgrim Christian, in John Bunyon's The Pilgrim's Progress, the story is an allegory of the pilgrimage from the world of the here and now, toward a Celestial City. The journey for Lily begins on her Manitoba farm home, and she travels to England to care for her sick grandmother. For Lily, England represents the heavenly afterlife, and she feels as if God has removed her from one world and transported her across a symbolic ocean to another plane. Along the way, she meets and falls in love with her version of Mr. Worldly in the form of her adopted cousin George. He introduces her to love, and to other ways of seeing the world beyond her youthful religious upbringing.
Award winning author Joan Thomas (photo left) brings an allegorical tone to the story, as she weaves into the life of Lily Piper, the great themes of love, war, and the journey of self discovery, and the competing ideologies of religion, evolution, Empire, and politics. Standing in the lightning flash glare of these momentous events, Lily and her family are transformed in ways they had never imagined possible. The events of this world turn like pages in the the unbound remains of A Pilgrim's Progress, read by Lily's mother as if they were cards in a Tarot deck. The singular pages of that ramshackle volume are echoed in the very lives of Lily and her family.
As care laden Lily Piper searches for her Celestial Home in England, it's the opposite journey taken by her father, many years earlier. His unexpected removal from his English life took the form of following the ill fated Barr colonial expedition, on that tragic quest to recreate an English Eden on the Canadian Prairie. Like Lily, his load is heavy with personal demons, and he creates his own version of the afterlife on a drought ravaged farm in Manitoba. The farm is home to fundamentalist services, where the promises of an afterlife for the faithful, sound more like veiled threats than a reward. For Lily, her childhood Prairie world melted away, as the forces of the wider world reached their fingers all the way to her home.
I highly recommend the monumental Reading by Lightning: A Novel by Joan Thomas. The book is destined to be classic of Canadian Prairie Literature, and deservedly so as well. With writing as fresh and as beautiful as a Prairie landscape, Joan Thomas weaves a tale of mythical proportions. The characters live and love, and stay with the reader, long after the book is completed. Indeed, it's a novel that can be read on several levels, from that of a personal character study, to the conflict of ideas that shape their lives, to an allegory of the Christian Lily and her world of back breaking cares seeking her heaven.
Read the wonderful, and intensely personal Reading by Lightning: A Novel by Joan Thomas, and be swept away to another time and place, with characters as real and well drawn as any in contemporary literature. The story of Lily and her family is a moving experience not to be missed.
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