Chapter Seven. Significant Others.

Simon, Jane and Luke. Who are/were/would have been these people?

Let me see. Simon is a native of the town of Applevale, but he hasn't lived there for years. He works for the CBC in Toronto. He owns a small farm just north of Applevale, where he used to spend the summer months when he could.

Jane is his daughter. She is a graduate student at Blomidon, she wants to be an opera singer.

Luke is an idealist. You can't quite call him a hippie, because it's the mid-seventies and nobody quite calls anybody hippies anymore. But he's an environmentally conscious, back-to-the-lander, New Age sort (in its original almost dignified sense - pre-Shirley Maclaine). He and a few of his friends have been renting Simon's farm for the last couple of years as a casual commune. They haven't been doing very well, although the carrots they grow in the best organic methods grow very large. (And very woody, I recall from trying one.)

Luke is also dating Jane, to make the circle complete. Their involvement in His unfolding story begins when Simon returns home from Toronto - to die, but of course he doesn't tell anyone this. He doesn't think much of Luke's commune and wants to take the farm back from them. He's a realist, you see. But he's shocked to learn that Jane has recently had an abortion. Very Freudian things are going on here.

They get more Freudian when Simon starts to date someone young enough to be his daughter. You've already met her, it's Elaine Pritchard. Of their first, shall we say, "coming together" (it must be a figure of speech, you see, because actually he did and she didn't), she penned the immortal lines of the poem that begins "Now the crystalline moment...."

Hmm, let me see if I remember, it went like this:

Now the crystalline moment
the solitary wayfarers meet part
in their fluid wake
instant
forms the matrix
... and so on.

In other words, he gets her pregnant. Oh, how His plot thickens!

You can guess the kinds of things that come next. Jane isn't too happy to discover Elaine's involvement with her father. Luke tries to keep the commune afloat by staging a weekend festival, which turns into a fiasco, of course. This, He thinks, will be a lot of fun to write, with almost all the characters gathered in one place; clean energy advocates chanting "Solar Power" to the tune of the Hare Krishna chant; pot smoking and nudity and concerned Baptists picketing the event. Ending in an RCMP raid. The conflict between Simon and Luke comes to a head because of this. Simon evicts Luke and gives over the farm to his daughter and a group of her female friends, who have been seen earlier in the book as members of the feminist group Motherage. They take in Elaine after Simon dies and her pregnancy has become obvious.

A note on names here: Classical music lovers might recognize Simon, Jane and Luke as the three principle characters of Haydn's The Seasons. In that oratorio, Simon's a farmer, Jane's his daughter and Luke or Lucas is his hired hand. Clearly my author thought he was being clever. Just as he was being clever in naming or renaming his university town "Applevale", which is the English for Avalon, the (take note!) Arcadia of the Arthurian legends. That must make Elaine the Lady of Shalott. And Arthur - my Arthur - is King Arthur, which must make me, Lawrence Lockwood, his Lancelot. Authors who have been English majors love working in symbolism of this sort into their books even when there's no real point to it. It's just more word association isn't it? Simon is much more like the legendary Arthur than our Arthur, in that he dies a disappointed idealist, and there's nothing knight-like in me. If the parallels were exact, Elaine should have suffered from unrequited love of me. It was unrequited all right, but on both sides.

To these people laden with the burden of dud symbolism, I infinitely prefer the company of Agnes Thompson, my no-nonsense Jane Austen girlfriend. She's been reading what I post over my shoulder as I type... A few days ago I had to explain to her what an "orgy" was. She was shocked and indignant for a few minutes, and I didn't think she was ever going to speak to me again. But she came round, and wisely and sensibly pointed out that Lord Byron was up to much the same sorts of things in her day, the wicked man, so it was not so very new to her after all. She attributes the boorishness and profanity of the men of our day to the weakness of character of our women. Would they but virtuously and loudly oppose the male's propensity to indulge in grossly sensual pursuits, they would then serve as a needful restraint, instead of an all too compliant inducement, to sin.

I cannot but agree with her.