I bought Grand Parade by G. B. Lancaster because its main setting is McNabs Island, which lies in Halifax Harbour. I have had the pleasure of visiting McNabs Island on two occasions. The island however is never named, and is always referred to as the Island, with Island spelled with a capital I. One cannot mistake that it is indeed McNabs Island, for it makes reference to the row of gallows that inspired the nickname Hangman’s Beach. There are also numerous mentions of another island in the harbour, Melville, which does get the dignity of a name.
The story follows the extensive Cochrane family who occupy McNabs. Action starts in the late eighteenth century and covers the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, ending shortly after the coronation of Queen Victoria, however in the final four pages the timeline jumps to 1880, with no mention at all of Canadian Confederation. The men are fighting wars overseas, privateering and making a fortune, or working in local government. Women at this time weren’t meant to be doing anything other than making themselves visible and the Grand Parade is the promenade where all the local lovelies show themselves on strolls in an attempt to find beaux or husbands, or otherwise flaunt their wealth. Charnisay Cochrane is an early feminist who bucks tradition:
“In these days her world was full of people telling her to be seemly. They even quoted Mistress Uniacke, married at twelve years’ old and Anne married at thirteen, as though trying to turn her into a prim little miss by the mention of such stupid glories. But Charnisay would ride pigs and slide down barn roofs in spite of them.”
Anne Cochrane is the main love interest, known throughout the novel as the Beauty of Halifax. She has men at her feet, all of them enraptured by her timeless beauty and fashions. Married to her first cousin Nigel, she is left alone for twenty years without hearing so much as a single word from her husband. Nigel is off sailing and privateering and living another life with a second wife in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Anne must remain chaste yet men still try with baby steps to win her affections. Anne grows to resent her daughter Kirsty, whom she sees as an extension of her husband. I had a chuckle at Anne’s impression of her own daughter:
“She did not know what she was going to do with Kirsty, who was so very plain and freckled and with so much the instincts of a tough doormat. I don’t mind how you wipe your feet on me, if it pleases you, her beaming smile seemed to say.”
The novel is filled with unrequited romances and platonic love triangles where no one gets up to any hanky-panky whatsoever, however one can feel the passion bursting in the corsets and tight breeches. I was shocked, and more than disappointed, to read when Rupert, who is another cousin, finally admitted his love for Anne and she didn’t brush him off. His admission just happens: after the carousel of suitors laying flowers at her feet, one turn of a page and Anne and Rupert are suddenly together. It was as if someone got a hold of the book and took a knife to a chunk of pages and the story continued as if major events never happened (yet all the while acknowledging that they did). This was Lancaster’s modus operandi.
Yet I really wanted to slam the book shut when Rupert discovered that Nigel is still alive and challenges him to a duel, where the victor is awarded the prize of Anne. The buildup is made: a duel by pistol or sword? Rupert assesses his skills at both. Yet…no action. Nigel, the coward, never shows up. Lancaster undoubtably wrote this to paint Nigel as a weakling, yet after her stunt in getting Anne and Rupert together without so much as a kiss between them, this anticlimax of not writing about a duel, especially after all the buildup, made me feel swindled. Two prized alpha males good enough for the Beauty of Halifax stand off in a duel! I couldn’t wait for it…and then Nigel never even shows his face.
Characters often spoke in Scots and Lancaster rendered the language sometimes phonetically as well. I attribute my knowledge of the Scrabble lexicon for enabling me to understand such examples as these:
“It’s a chancy-like game tae play Providence tae ithers in maitters o’ the conscience. Nane but a man himself can prevent the fouling of his ain nest.”
and:
“Dinna douse it then, or I’ll no think as muckle o’ ye as I dae the noo”.
Lancaster also employed many words that are no longer heard today, and if it wasn’t my familiarity with them via Scrabble, I’d be needing to consult the dictionary often. I recorded some of these words in the order I encountered them: besom, mutch, shako, nankeens, parrels, pavisses, cantrip, drugget, martinet and epergnes. I did however have to look on-line to find out what a grass widow was, as well as a powder-monkey and a quizzing glass. Persiflage means frivolous bantering talk, and it’s also an anagram of pilferages. Assafetida is a dried fetid gum resin of the root of several west Asian plants of the carrot family formerly used in medicine especially as an antispasmodic and in folk medicine as a general prophylactic against disease. What a word to encounter in a novel.
One running joke that Lancaster used as a dig at early Halifax was its poor state of roads. Like people stepping in dog poop in the movie Ready to Wear, in this novel it’s people travelling the sorry muddy rutted roads of Halifax. Everyone was always complaining about them, and as this novel covers decades of Haligonian life, nothing is ever done about it.
In spite of the time and location, I did not find this novel appealing. It was a chore to get through, since nothing much happens, at least when the subject is romance. So much tension, so many desperate men and women exercising unbelievable self-control, yet floods of tears nonetheless. For historical purposes it was worth reading, to see the growth of Halifax from centuries ago. Grand Parade was written in 1943 and doesn’t take place in the twentieth century yet parts of it are still recognizable.
I end with a sacrilegious remark about bookstores. Charnisay, who is an early feminist and independent thinker, is reading newspapers brought over from England and learning about new books that are available:
“‘Oh, just listen,’ cried Charnisay over the lists of books in the English papers. ‘Lord Byron’s Poems, Miss Burney’s Evelina, Keats, Maria Edgeworth, Scotch novels by the Great Unknown. Shall we ever get any of them, mamma?’
“‘I hope not,’ said Bess. Halifax did not condescend to bookstores, nor needed to, since all gentlemen had their own libraries which, being principally heirlooms, must be infinitely better.”