Author Andrew Forbes in 2020.Alice Winchester/Supplied
- Title: The Diapause
- Author: Andrew Forbes
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Invisible
- Pages: 288
Published just before the fifth anniversary of the appearance of “the novel coronavirus” in Wuhan, China, The Diapause bravely takes a run at defining the pandemic’s influence on our lives, and specifically how it will shape those who were children when it arrived. Bravely, I say, because: Is it too soon? Is anyone really capable of understanding the full consequences of COVID, and is anyone ready to read about it?
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was. But Andrew Forbes, an Ottawa-born writer who now lives in Peterborough, Ont., had, during the pandemic, become one of my favourite authors. His two collections of personal essays about baseball, and a life loving baseball, are exceptional, and cover themes beyond the game: the existence of miracles in the midst of life’s torpor, the inevitability of failure and decline, and the legacies we leave behind.
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In the baseball books, Forbes’s meditations on these topics are illustrated with anecdotes from his life, but also discussed explicitly and at length on the page. In The Diapause, the author’s third book of fiction – well, tied for third with McCurdle’s Arm, a novel about late-19th century baseball, published concurrently – he leaves his philosophies between the lines. This is true of most fiction, of course, but Forbes takes it to an extreme. The narrator, Gabe, is a middle-aged man looking back on his pandemic, when he was 10, and his story often reads like an extended imagist poem as we observe his family, slowly and precisely, through a moment, an hour, a day.
The first half of the book follows Gabe’s family from a New Year’s Eve party welcoming 2020 – a foolish celebration, we know now – to the first COVID lockdown at their home in Peterborough, and, finally, as they retreat to a rustic cottage farther north.
For anyone who does feel it’s too soon, I can reassure you that The Diapause – although an early specimen of CovidLit – mentions the virus, and the mass loss of life, sparingly. The family has escaped it, after all.
Or have they?
The Diapause, by Andrew Forbes.Supplied
Of course not. COVID anxiety infects the mood of each scene as tension builds. Gabe, an only child, gets to be with his parents all the time, and the three of them go swimming every afternoon. But it’s not real life to spend weeks on end this way. Like a diapause in nature, which is a period of extended dormancy, the days and then weeks devoid of any work – or homework – create an eerie atmosphere. And the laws of the universe seem to legislate that something very bad is going to happen.
Gabe’s mother, Kat, treats him with more compassion than his father, Artie, who wishes Gabe were more brave. Every day, Artie goads Gabe to jump from a high cliff into the lake, leaving Kat to console her anxious son when he’s barely able to get into the water at all.
On the other hand, while Kat toys with the idea of returning to town despite the dangers of COVID, Artie wonders if they’ll ever be able to go back to a society that may be headed toward collapse. This divergence about what it means to be brave leads to a climactic turning point for the family – one that’s left a mystery until the last chapter.
Even though, here in 2024, we know what happened next with COVID, the book still takes you back to that time when you weren’t sure what world awaited you outside your door. Some scenes feel like a zombie apocalypse movie, but with no zombies. Instead, it’s just a stranger who buys the land next door and drops by to introduce himself.
But as in The Shining – another story of a self-exiled family – the thing to be afraid of is already inside the home.
The second half of the novel revisits Gabe at various points in adulthood, and so it takes a near-future spec-lit turn that’s refracted through a COVID lens. This plays out in very specific ways – Gabe has his temperature taken whenever he enters a new building – but also in a more abstract and permeating sense of isolation. Gabe is often alone or, like a lockdown-era film production, there never seem to be more than a few people allowed in any one scene.
He’s a 22-year-old nomad who makes deliveries so he can charge his EV and run away with a new lover, and then he’s a 27-year-old cobalt miner near Ontario’s Lake Temiskaming. In his 40s, he sells modular housing units for use in a world with near-constant climate disasters and mass migration. Eventually, he receives an invitation from a mysterious woman who offers something that might shed some light – both for Gabe and for readers – on exactly what happened to the family back at that cottage during lockdown.
Ultimately, though, the novel doesn’t rely on this reveal. Forbes, an expert storyteller, has through his characters already elegantly shared meditations on many things beyond COVID. As with the baseball books, they include: the existence of miracles in the midst of life’s torpor, the inevitability of failure and decline, and the legacies we leave behind.
After finishing the The Diapause, whose last scenes include Gabe’s visit to his beloved, aging mother at a nursing home, I turned back to the beginning – to the author’s dedication – and realized it might also hold a clue to the emotional heart of this novel: “To my mother, Mary Uldene MacKinnon (1942-2022).”