58 pages • 1 hour read
Ann-Marie MacDonaldA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Content Warning: This section describes pedophilia.
“Everyone is dead,” the novel starts before the novel flashes back in time to explain what has happened. Using the metaphor of a photo album, the unidentified narrator introduces the setting and then each of the principal characters by capturing each in a photo. Only Kathleen is not pictured: All but one of her photos are destroyed, and Kathleen now sings in heaven.
James Piper was raised in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, by a loving mother who dreamed her son would not waste his life working in the local coal mines. She taught him to play piano and to love music. His father, a shoemaker, was abusive toward James’s mother. Because she loved the piano, one day he took a hammer to the instrument. James, determined to help his mother, taught himself how to rebuild the piano, becoming a piano tuner in the process. In 1897, when he is old enough to leave home, James heads to the island’s biggest city, Sydney, certain there were lots of pianos there.
While tuning the piano of a wealthy Lebanese family, James meets their 13-year-old daughter, Materia Mahmoud. He falls in love with her instantly, “smitten and unsurprised” (20). Although she is already committed to an arranged marriage, the two elope in a civil ceremony. When they return, James is kidnapped by Materia’s father and beaten for going against the family. The Mahmouds compel James and Materia to marry in a Catholic ceremony. The father builds the couple a big two-story home nine miles away, and with that Materia is disowned by her family.
Materia struggles to be happy. She goes for long walks along the beach and often plays the piano. Within months, she is pregnant. She does not take to pregnancy and feels lumpy and awkward as she swells. James, for his part, grows distant from his wife, embarrassed by her appearance: “Did all women get this ugly?” (37).
The neighbors are stunned by Materia’s young age and the fact that she is already pregnant. Materia finds some comfort in her friendship with the Jewish neighbors, the Luvovitzs, who run a general store, but other than that she keeps to herself, taking long strolls along the cliffs overlooking the ocean.
Kathleen is born. Materia struggles to breastfeed her daughter. James quits his newspaper job and takes on piano students. A new father, he is smitten by his daughter’s grace and beauty.
It is now 1907. Materia is aware that God is not pleased by her inability to bond with Kathleen: “God could see past her actions, into her heart. And her heart was empty” (44). James prepares to take Kathleen off to Holy Angels Preparatory School. He has taught her much, introducing her to literature, music, and history. Materia, concerned that Kathleen has never been baptized, takes the opportunity when she is washing her daughter’s hair for the first day of school to hastily perform the ritual in their bathroom sink.
The night before school starts, Kathleen looks out her bedroom window and is startled by what she thinks is a devil. She screams, and her father comes in and reassures her that it is a scarecrow he put up in their vegetable field. He calls the scary figure Pete and takes her out to the field to beat on the scarecrow to help take away her anxiety.
James boards Kathleen at Holy Angels because of the threat of influenza in town. To help bring in money, Materia plays piano at the town’s theater. James takes a job in the coal mine when the union workers strike. The work is dangerous—he is singled out as a scab—but the money is good.
James assures Materia she no longer needs to work in the theater. Materia is bothered because she does not miss Kathleen. She seeks out Confession, where “all of her badness rolled back in and enveloped her” (58). Her sins, beginning with disobeying her father and marrying against his wishes, weigh her down. She walks along the beach and talks to the stones and the sea. Left to herself, she begins to feel “her mind ebb away” (59).
When the strike ends, James is reassigned for his own safety to the mining front office. But that means he can no longer drive Kathleen to school. He hires a young Black boy, Leo Taylor, who owns a wagon and horses, to take Kathleen. James warns Leo not to touch Kathleen.
James takes Kathleen to the mainland, to a recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Halifax. Kathleen, now 12 years old, is dazzled by the performance.
One Friday afternoon, while James tunes the family piano, Kathleen comes in and, smiling playfully, strikes a chord on the piano. Startled, James responds angrily and hits the girl hard enough to jar her teeth. He immediately regrets his actions and holds the terrified girl close to him and promises never to do that again: “Sick, he decides, he must be sick” (85). Kathleen forgives her father.
Materia begins to suspect that her husband’s fawning over Kathleen threatens the child. She seduces James and gets pregnant, hoping additional children will distract her husband. With the birth of two daughters, Mercedes and Frances, in quick succession, Materia hopes James will distance himself from Kathleen. The plan does not work, and Materia’s anxiety grows. Nevertheless, she is pregnant yet again.
In July 1914, Kathleen, after working on her voice under the nuns’ guidance at Holy Angels, gives her first public performance in the Lyceum in Sydney. She performs a cavatina from Rigoletto. The performance stuns the audience. James weeps as he listens. At the end of the show, however, an announcement is made that Great Britain has joined the war against Germany.
That night, James watches Kathleen sleep, sexually tempted by the innocent child. Kathleen, aware of someone watching her from the shadows, believes it to be the devil, Pete. James resists the urge to molest Kathleen, and decides to put distance between himself and his daughter. The next day he enlists to serve overseas. Materia, pregnant, is relieved and “gives thanks to Our Lady for sending The War” (78).
Appropriately, given Kathleen Piper’s dream of being an opera star, the Prologue acts as overture to the novel, with each character presented as a photograph that foreshadows critical moments in their emotional life: Materia on the day of her death by suicide, Mercedes and her opal rosary, the twin who died before being baptized now in limbo, Frances trying to baptize the twins in the creek. The Prologue, thus, introduces The Terrifying Immediacy of Death. The novel begins, “They’re all dead now,” emphasizing that everything we are about to read has already happened—that there is no way to prevent the tragic fates of the characters, which are now a part of historical record, represented here with the documentary evidence of photography.
The novel opens with a twisted take on the marriage plot. James Piper, a dashing romantic pianist, raised by a doting mother and an abusive father, is determined to find his way to the life of an artist and not surrender his hopes to the tawdry ordinariness of working in the local mines. When James sets his eyes on the young Materia, he falls irrevocably in love: James is mesmerized by Materia’s eyes, the “darkest he’d ever seen, wet with light” and “her coal-black curls escaping from long braids” (20). Materia sees “his eyes so blue, his skin so fair. Taut and trim […] like a china figurine” (19). Separated by different cultures, and against the wishes of Materia’s Lebanese family, James and Materia elope. This love story would be romantic, except for the fact that the prepubescent Materia is only 12 years old.
This revelation jars the love story template and introduces one of the novel’s driving themes: The Conflict Between Flesh and Spirit. James’s love for Materia reflects his predatory pedophilia, a reality that becomes clear when Materia becomes pregnant. The pregnancy asserts in James’s mind that Materia is no longer an innocent girl, so James distances himself from his new bride. Once Kathleen is born, James emerges as a threat to the innocent child. For all his loving acts as a father—teaching Kathleen, reading to her, encouraging her music—there emerges a disturbing ulterior motivation: the temptation to sexually assault his own daughter.
In Chapter 9, when Kathleen playfully surprises her father while he tunes their piano, appropriate playfulness between a young girl and her father turns dark. James snapping and striking Kathleen suggests the strain of his emerging sexual attraction to his daughter: His knee-jerk reaction to her sudden presence reveals his trigger temper, his volatility, and his willingness to degrade his beautiful daughter by violence, all foreshadowing the rape in New York.
The theme of The Urgency of Sexuality manifests the night of Kathleen’s first public performance. After a horrifying scene in which James lingers over his daughter’s bed, watching her sleep while thinking, “I want to sleep with you tonight!” (78), readers retroactively understand why Materia has begun to slide into a numbing mental health crisis, seeking the help of a priest confessor but unable to bring herself to say what she fears. In an attempt to distract one sexual attraction with another, Materia humiliates herself again and again, seducing James to distract him from preying on Kathleen.
Given the novel’s motif of Catholic belief, it is telling that both Kathleen and James ascribe his pedophilia to hellish influence. Kathleen, aware that someone is watching her sleep but too innocent to suspect her father, imagines that the pumpkin-headed scarecrow that James placed in the family’s garden is a demon. Alarmed by his predatory nature, James enlists and “outsmarts the demon” (78). Of course, it is not that easy to exorcize a demon. Naming the scarecrow Peter and pummeling it does little to quell Kathleen’s fear—a failed solution that hints that James’s attempts to undo his pedophilia by heading off to war will be similarly in vain.
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Canadian Literature
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Childhood & Youth
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Family
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Fathers
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Fear
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Good & Evil
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Music
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