It’s the 1950s and the peaceful, time-ordered lives of an elderly couple are disrupted when they have to fight government plans to turn their Nova Scotian fishing community into a provincial park.

What happens to ordinary people when they come into conflict with officialdom is the question underlying Deep Roots, Kathleen Tudor’s highly readable novel.

The author, who is in her 80s, said that parts of the book were written long ago, but the story began to take shape after she became interested in how provincial parks were designed and built and what happened to the people who lived in them.

”I researched these parks where people had lived and I saw these people were uprooted,” Tudor said from her retirement home in Pleasant Point Village in Shelburne County, where she was born and raised.

”I thought about how they felt about being removed and having their homes razed. It made me think, ‘My God, supposing they decided on putting a park in this area.’ “

Tudor draws on her own childhood to create the fictional community of Collupy Point. The story centres on Ira and Lydia Hardy, both in their 70s. They are beautifully drawn as are the rural patterns of life, the tough but lovely landscape and the vitality and humour of the characters’ conversations.

As the fight against the park becomes increasingly bitter, Ira, Lydia and their large family come under great stress. The older people in the community struggle to learn the language of politics. In some very touching scenes, Ira escapes his angst by exploring nature with his young granddaughter, Rosie.

Tudor is skilled at portraying the nuances of relationships. Her characters misunderstand each other, things are left unsaid, people sulk. Ira struggles to relate to his feminist daughter Sal. Lydia dislikes Sal’s intellectual boyfriend Scott.

Ira finds his American relatives, “Amusing, child-like in a way. Showing off their youth — even when they were as old as he and Lydia. . . . But he didn’t have to worry about it. He could just enjoy them, sit back and smoke one of the fine cigars they brought him. Funny crew, though.”

At times, Tudor’s layering of detail feels a little dense and she relies on telling rather than showing the story’s action but on the whole, the book is a success. The author is a former professor of literature at St. Mary’s University and has published short stories and one former novel, Getting Away, released in 1992 by Roseway, the publishing house she founded and which is now an imprint of Fernwood.

She is currently working on a murder mystery having become interested in the genre just a few years ago.

”I was very snobbish. Being a professor of literature you get very snobby about what is good literature,” she joked.

She also runs Community Books, a self-publishing venture that helps local authors publish their work.

”I want to take the vanity out of vanity publishing,” she said, “I think anyone who wants to publish is vain — I certainly am.” – Review by Carol Moreira for The Chronicle Herald, Sunday 29 November 2009. Carol Moreira is a freelance writer who lives in Glen Haven.

(Close)

With Deep Roots, Kathleen tudor manages to accomplish a lofty goal. She helps the modern reader understand why the seemingly noble goal of creating a national park could be so traumatic to a small fishing community. With rich detail, the lives and landscape of a South Shore community are explored and understood. The traditional subsistence lives and the the so-called progress of the modern world collide, leaving a rift in community and family. This tight knit community, used to banding together for survival, is now divided and wrenched apart by political decisions from on high. 

The focal point for the story is the Hardy family, a large, now mostly frown family long based in the small community of Collupy Point. Through them the reader sees the impact of change and the depth of the roots that bind people to the land and, by extension , the sea. Though slow paced and, at times, plodding, Tudor’s skillful description brings the reader to understand the devastating  impact of such change but also shows the power of the community. Patriarch Ira Hardy is particularly well drawn and is an interesting study in how a man who is master of his small environment and large family can find himself so vulnerable. His ultimate struggle speaks to a wider human fear of losing that for which we all work so hard, and the all too real fragile concept of ownership. 

”I ain’t got nothing against them men sitting up there, nothing at all,” says Ira Hardy at one point in the book, “But not one of them’s got a boat or nome or child in the park they talk about. But they’re the ones deciding everything for us. If we’re fools enough to let them do that then we’ll deserve what we get.”

Deep Roots is a picture of community, family and the srtuggle between the past and the future. Readers may find the level of detail weighs down the story at times but ultimately Tudor leads the reader to a valuable lesson.–Meghan Veener, Atlantic Books Today, Holiday 2009

(Close)