Dollybird (Shadowpaw Press Reprise)

Dollybird
by Anne Lazurko
Published by Shadowpaw Press Reprise
Review by Madonna Hamel
$24.99 ISBN 9781989398586

Dollybird is one of the few novels I’ve read more than once. I’m thrilled to see it re-released. It is always interesting to see how a second read strikes one after a few years have passed. The first time I read it I was sitting on the edge of my chair, anxious for the future of Moira, a young woman who was forced to leave her home in Newfoundland after becoming pregnant out of wedlock in 1906. A homestead officer finds her a job in Saskatchewan as a live-in housekeeper for a man looking for a “dollybird”.

Lazurko’s novel gives us glimpses into the life of a woman compromised by culture, time and place, and by poverty of both means and mercy. Lazurko does it with the word “dollybird”. A dollybird can mean a sweet young thing, but in the day of the novel’s setting, it also meant, ambiguously, a housekeeper and/or a prostitute. The novel looks at how a woman can slide from one role into another, especially when finding herself in an isolated community where she may be the only woman for miles.

I remember the first time I read Dollybird: I was chilled by the moment when Moira is told by the homestead officer that the man who will hire her to “play house” with him was on his way. She asks him when will she meet him “to decide if he’s appropriate”, to which the officer roars with laughter. “Appropriate? It’ll be him choosing whether he’ll take you. Not the other way around.” In that moment Moira realizes she has very little say over how she would conduct her life, or protect the life of her baby to come. She learns that women do what they can to survive as both housekeepers and prostitutes and the line between the two professions is often fluid and “appropriateness” has nothing to do with it.

On my second reading of Dollybird I was drawn to a conversation between the character Silas and Moira. It concerns a deeper reflection on “appropriateness”, one that takes her to a consideration of the meaning of the words “conscience and guilt”. She says she will keep her baby because she wants to, not out of guilt or shame. And Silas says that guilt and conscience are different. “Guilt is what others make you feel. Conscience is your own.”

Later in the story Moira is amazed at the subjects people like Silas broached around her, a relative stranger, and how quickly people plunged into “personal” conversations. “Small talk”, she thinks, “was like dust easily blown away by the wind. The prairie insisted that words carry meaning and people ought not to waste them.” “Intimate cares” seemed like a “reasonable backdrop to the overwhelming demands of the elements.” Lazurko wastes no words telling this intimate story with intimate care.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM