Book Review: Be Still the Water

By Brian Borgford

Historical Fiction with an Emotional Connection: Comparisons and Contrasts

Be Still the Water by Karen Emilson has

something for everyone. It takes you through a full range of emotions over the first three quarters of the twentieth century: joy, sadness, grief, anger, love, hope, despair, acceptance, atonement, fear, trust, and acceptance. No matter who you are or what your background is, it would be hard not to connect with the wide range of characters who are trying to survive in a harsh environment.

However, if you have Icelandic blood or some connection to the land near the Narrows of Lake Manitoba, the story will take on a more personal tone. You might recognize the people who are so well described and the places which are brought to life in this saga. Although most of the people are fictional and some of the places have been modified for literary effect, it all feels real, identifiable, and emotional.

Eighty-eight-year-old Asta, the main character, opens the tale while sitting on her deathbed in the Lundi (fictional town) Hospital. Asta’s failing body does not inhibit her frail mind from replaying key events from her long life—in fact, it may facilitate her recollections, as she is able to recall and enter many scenes for which she was not even present. Memories are precious, especially as we age, but memories are not always an accurate picture of what has happened. 

Asta delves into the early years of her family’s arrival in Canada from Iceland. The year is 1906, four years after their arrival on the shores of Lake Manitoba. She recalls a devastating diphtheria epidemic in the Siglunes area. 

Asta takes the reader through the years and introduces historical figures, including a politician of Icelandic birth, Thomas Johnson. She makes a connection to the newly formed IODE and meets its first president, Joanna (Johanna) Skaptason. 

In 1950, Asta, as a nurse, tended to her mother, who was dying of cancer at the time. Her mother complained about the morphine Asta was administering to combat her pain.

One major theme is Asta’s lifelong search for her lost sister, Freya. Here is where memory, reality, facts, fiction, and desires overlap. What is real? What is fantasy or desire? Will there be discovery and resolution? The suspense is woven throughout Asta’s path and that of her friends and family.

You do not need to have an Icelandic background to get the full effect of this well-told epic. But if you do, it adds a whole other layer of understanding and emotion.

My Connections

I felt the connection to Asta and her family from the opening page as I saw the overlaps with my family background, but I also saw stark contrasts as many of my family members were on a different path, although they emanated from the same beginnings.

The opening scene, June 1980, is the exact time my Icelandic father lay on his deathbed in a hospital in Regina. It is hard to get a more emotional connection when starting a book.

Asta discusses the devastating effects of the 1950 Manitoba flood. I personally recall the scenes of that flood. However, I was born eighteen months after the flood. Flawed memories? Like many of Asta’s.

Her family arrived on their new land one year after the death of my great-grandmother in her farmhouse near the same locale. Even many of the place names are the same, which is not a surprise in this well-researched historical fiction novel. More emotional connection.

The descriptions of the subsistence life of farming and fishing sounded like what my great-grandparents experienced over the previous decades. They too had brought their children to Canada for a better life, and while Asta’s family is getting started, my grandfather was already reaping the benefits of what his parents dreamed for their children. While some of the tragic events unfolded in Asta’s life, my grandfather, as a principal in a construction company, was building the first bridge across the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon. 

Only five years before Asta’s epidemic chapter, a typhus epidemic hit the same area, claiming the lives of my great-grandmother and her only daughter. The epidemic started in a camp on what they called Bird Island, which sounds like Ghost Island described in the book.

Asta described fires, deliberately started, that ravaged farmhouses in the area. My great-grandfather lost his first home in the same area due to arson by a vindictive neighbor. Asta also recalls the death of a young man traversing the lake ice with a sled and team of dogs. My great-grandfather almost died in a similar incident when he lost his dog team and equipment but was able to save himself.

Provincial cabinet minister, Thomas Johnson, whom Asta discusses, played a key role in my grandfather’s life, awarding my grandfather the contract to construct the new Manitoba Legislature in 1915. Johnson’s portrait hangs in the Althingi (legislature) in Reykjavik as a commemoration to a son of Iceland.

Asta and her friend Thora enter nursing school in Winnipeg and one evening walk along Victor Street. My grandfather owned and lived in a house on Victor Street a decade earlier. Asta reads a letter dated May 1914. At the same time, construction workers were carving the inscription “BORG 1914” in the gable of a three-story house on Cambridge Avenue in Vancouver, where my grandfather would house his large multi-generational family.

My grandparents were good friends with and neighbors to Johanna Skaptason and her family. My grandmother was party to the inception of the Jon Sigurdsson chapter of the IODE and later served as president herself. I had the opportunity to meet Skaptason’s daughter, Johanna Wilson, who was in her nineties at the time.

Regarding Asta’s mother and the morphine incident, I recall my dying mother refusing morphine for her cancer, fearing she might become addicted.

The comparisons, overlaps, and contrasts were too numerous to ignore. The story felt so familiar.