MacDonald lets us cling to this vision, as I said, for a few pages, spinning out the fantasy that James and Materia might be happy together.
Rugged Canadian of Irish descent makes good with daughter of Lebanese immigrants, settles down, and becomes a respected piano tuner. When James marries Materia over her parents’ disapproval, it seems for about two and a half pages that Fall On Your Knees will be a love story. Even in cases where the character seems more villainous than not, like James, or more saint than sinner, like Lily, their actions bely that simplified morality. Each character takes their turn at both much as in real life, it’s largely a matter of perspective. It’s the nature of a character-driven book such as this that it’s hard to identify protagonists and antagonists. It’s always about the tension between the good and evil parts of the soul, that desire to do right by each other and that temptation to be mischievous. While the characters grow older, go to school, take or change vocations, the story that MacDonald tells never seems to change. We get to watch a town spring up, miners’ strike, the devastation of war, and the Great Depression. When James and Materia marry, their corner of Cape Breton Island is unremarkable and undistinguished. The story’s power comes from how the setting around the main characters changes, almost like a time-lapse video. Though mostly linear, there are flashbacks throughout, and a detailled accounting of Kathleen’s time in New York is deferred to the penulimate section for dramatic effect.
We don’t find out who the narrator is until the very end (though you can probably guess after a while). MacDonald’s narrative is cyclical and self-referential. Against the backdrop of Cape Breton Island and New York City from the turn of the 20th century all the way to the advent of World War II, Ann-Marie MacDonald shows us how the good and bad actions we take in life ripple outward to touch the lives of everyone around us. It is one of those sweeping multi-generational pieces of historical fiction, but at the same time it’s really just a story about four sisters. Fall On Your Knees is a difficult book to summarize, or review, in a way that could do it justice. Sometimes the best books are the books that are actually more than one story.
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