Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Written in 1989, After the Fire is British Columbia novelist Jane Rule's most recent novel. The book weaves together the stories of five very different women living on a small island off the west coast Canada, likely based on Rule's home community of Galiano Island, BC (also the setting for Audrey Thomas' Intertidal Life).

As the book begins, a fire has destroyed a house on the island and killed the young man who lived there. This turns out to be the first in a series of events that will unsettle the lives of all five women over the course of a spring and summer.

After the Fire is a self-consciously female novel, full of the emotional and physiological details of womens lives (pregnancy, miscarriage, menopause and ageing), and a feminist novel containing strong social and political messages about marriage, divorce, mothering, widowhood and lesbianism. Rule was -- and is -- one of Canada's first and most noteworthy lesbian novelists, and her experience as such is evident in the character of Karen Tasuki.

I enjoyed this book in its depiction of a slice-of-women's-lives in 1980s British Columbia, but its political messages seem slightly hackneyed just fifteen years after it was first published. On a more positive note, the conclusion of the book reads like a very sweet elegy -- one which was perhaps written for, or at least inspired by, members of Rule's own island community.

Jane Rule is the author of a number of novels, including Desert of the Heart (1964), The Young in One Another's Arms (1977), Contract with the World (1980), Memory Board (1987) and After the Fire (1989). 

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl at Starbucks 6th and Columbia in New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, July 17, 2004