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Reprinted from the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, July 11, 1998 C13

Memory and the teeth beneath the surface
By Bill Robertson

Terry Jordan remembers vividly how he started his first novel.

“I was at a writers’ colony at Emma Lake,” he says. “A few of us were sitting by the water when a beaver swam by. Degan Lindner’s dog ran into the water and gave chase. Rather than dive and get away, the beaver returned and started playing with the dog, enticing it further into the lake, then ducking away. It was an amazing sight.”

With that scene, Jordan started the novel that would become Beyond That Starry Place (HarperCollins; $26). “Of course I opened it out,” he says. “Added dramatic tension, populated a fictional landscape with fictional characters, but it started with that beaver playing with the dog.” Eventually it becomes a harrowing scene, one of many in the life of Jordan’s young narrator, Nathan Mann.

Jordan, who’s at the moment living in Winnipeg while his wife completes a contract as a costume designer, lives in Allan and is familiar to readers and the writing community in Saskatoon. His first book, a collection of stories entitled It’s a Hard Cow, was published by Thisteldown Press in 1993 and won the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award for fiction.

After starting the new novel at Emma Lake, Jordan worked on it at home in Allan, and at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., where he was the first Maragaret Laurence Fellow. Jordan has high praise for the people with whom he worked at Trent and for the program that both allowed him to work on his novel and to work with young writers at the university.

He finished the book in Winnipeg and then, as he puts it, “had to slash 80 pages out of the manuscript because the mystery I’d constructed was so intricate no one could follow it.” What readers have now is still an intricate and deeply engrossing mystery in which a boy, in the process of growing to manhood, unravels the lies and deceptions wrought mainly by his grandfather about the identity of his parents, and about, consequently, his own identity.

In a novel in which lies make up an unfortunately large part of a boy’s life, what takes place beneath the surface is usually more important than what he sees around him; like what a beaver can do to a dog beneath the surface of a lake. To emphasize the role of such undercurrents, Jordan constructs a parallel story of a dog on the move across the countryside, sometimes in pursuit, sometimes being pursued, a symbolic touchstone that is very effective in a story that has so much to do with loyalty and with cunning.

Beneath That Starry Place is a carefully wrought novel that works hard and successfully at mimicking the act of memory. Nathan Mann slides through glimpses of his life, trying to understand the terror, the abandonment, and the great soothing touches of tenderness which he always recognized and to which he always cleaved. Families are far more cumbersome, painful, and mysterious beasts than their evangelists would have us believe. Jordan’s fictional examination of a boy’s search for his true family ties is a loyal dog sniffing its hard way home, whatever it believes in its innocent heart that home should truly be.

read a review of “It’s a Hard Cow”
read the short story “It’s a Hard Cow”
return to Terry Jordan
return to Spotlights