Legacies, patterns, and cycles

Songs from This and That Country
by Gail Sidone Šobat

Winnipeg: Great Plains Publishing, 2025
$27.95 / 9781773371412

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

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It is one of the maxims of Canadian identity that we value both multiculturalism and our own cultural roots. Put otherwise, we value, as the title of Gail Sidone Šobat’s second adult novel would have it, Songs from This and That Country. That, at least, is one version of Canadian identity. The troubled characters in this troubled novel, no doubt like many Canadians, may not always find such “songs” to be melodious. When the protagonist says, “Music can be a healing, an elegy, a balm…,” she has no idea what is about to happen to her. As she later asserts, “Violence and terror are the songs from this and that country, the songs of her father and of her ancestors.” How the characters connect with both music that heals and songs of “violence and terror” is the stuff of this haunting novel by the part-time resident of BC’s Sunshine Coast.

It is not surprising that the author has not anglicized her name, but still writes it “Šobat.” Roots for the part-Ukrainian, part-Serbian author matter. In fact, roots, primarily Serbian, interconnect three generations of the narrative. Initially putting chronology aside, the author shifts back and forth through the sliding panels that separate the generations. As the novel develops, though, Šobat (The Book of Mary) chiefly develops her narrative through the turbulent relationship between Ukrainian-Canadian Luba, or “Lu,” and her Serbian-Canadian husband, Danillo, or “Dan.” Half a generation later, their daughter, Mirjam, takes centre stage in the narrative—literally.

It is Mirjam’s defiance of her often violent father and her vocal talent that drive her to leave family and pursue a career as on opera singer in Europe. In the process she experiences her own versions of difficult love and, tragically, broken music. An affair with an older German composer crumbles, but success on the stage, and an affirming relationship with another musician, a young cellist, reflect how much music penetrates every sphere of her life, from Berlin to Constantinople and, finally, Sarajevo. The return to Canada and her parents after a tragic incident allows Šobat to interlock key thematic elements of family, violence, cultural identity, and the possibilities of recovering lost music.

In developing these themes, the craft of fiction clearly matters to the author. She shifts not just time sequences, but also points of view to make sure her readers view the story through multiple prisms. The effect of such shifts is perhaps most poignant and powerful, for example, when she shows both the dying Dan and Mirjam reaching profoundly evolved views on their relationship—but views only the readers perceive. Father and daughter remain oblivious.

In addition, occasional, brief uses of the future tense produce stirring effect as characters move through their lives unaware of the closing jaws of sorrow or loss. Thus, for example, of Danillo’s trip to his father’s grave, the author writes, “He will make this journey but once again. In sixteen months, he will also be beneath a black marble marker.”

An additional coloured lens is cast over the narrative by the fact that Šobat repeatedly shifts perspective to a tale set centuries earlier. Experienced in writing fantasy, the author creates, through idiom and detail, an almost tapestry-like effect. A father—the “Despot”—marries off two of his three daughters. The third, Sudbina, however, has a mind of her own: “I am not anyone’s possession. No man’s slave or wife!” Her adventures take her through dangerous forests in the company of a young harpist—who turns out to be royalty in disguise. Her further adventures take her not only into the bizarre house of an apparent witch (the Baba Roga common to Slavic folklore) but also into the court of the Grand Vizier, a ruler more powerful even than her own father.

It is not Sudbina’s strong personality (and the repeated cross references to crows in both narratives) that triggers echoes in the main storyline: increasingly Šobat uses the folk tale to throw light onto the central narrative. Patriarchal abuse, the grip of culture, the power of music, the subjugation of women—some forces, it seems, never change. “You are meant to be obedient and loving. To follow Father’s guidance and direction. That is a daughter’s duty”: this conversation, from the tale, could equally be from the modern story.

Most trenchantly, however, Sudbina, we learn, is… Serbian. She is from “that country.” 

Of all such narrative techniques, though, probably the most distinctive is the way in which Šobat infuses elevated moments with musical terminology. In one of the most harrowing moments of the novel, for example, during which Mirjam is caught in a shelling attack, the author writes, “Mirjam recognizes her own wail on the minor third with ambulance sirens shrieking the final part of the triad.”

The link between music and violence in this incident is but one aspect of the complex role that violence plays in the lives of Šobat’s characters. Early in the chronology, violence is most vividly presented through Danillo’s physical abuse of his wife and daughter. The author knows how to build rage in her readers towards a man who seems—and in some ways is—nothing more than a sadistic brute.

As she later shows, though, life isn’t so simple. As the novel progresses, she interweaves Dan’s violence with three threads—first, the cycle of generational domestic violence, second, the violence of war, and, third, the violence of his Serbian culture. Above all, Šobat is concerned to deal not just with the effects of violence, but also with some of its causes. 

One of the causes is the trauma induced by war. The literal and figurative “bleeding ulcer“ from which Dan suffers will “remind him of the horrors of this war for the rest of his life.” Rather than using the narrative voice to spell out the causal connection between Dan’s horrifying experiences in World War II and his later explosions into violence, Šobat has Dan go—bitterly, reluctantly—to a anger counsellor. It is through the counsellor’s probing, insistent, but ultimately compassionate questions that, finally, Dan comes to understand “how he’d been broken by the war.”

Even more seminal to the novel as a cause of violent behaviour is that which runs through the veins of a whole culture. It is no accident that she emphasizes the Serbian blood of two of her three main characters. It is, likewise, no accident that she sets the main events of her novel during the Yugoslav Wars following the death of Tito. Names with chilling iconic power—Srebrenica, Milosovic—darken the narrative. Because he is initially proud of his Serbian identity, Dan’s violent outbursts become implicitly linked to the most infamous massacres. At one point, it seems almost as if the author allows the furious and pained Mirjam to become the voice of the novel: “What have the Serbs ever done but cement the term ethnic cleansing into twentieth-century consciousness, start world wars, slit throats, and add one apt and blood-curdling word—vampire—to the English language?” Tellingly, the mostly closely documented atrocity within the novel, one which Mirjam experiences directly, is an outrageous Serbian shelling of Sarajevo after a declared ceasefire.

Once again, however, Šobat refuses to make life simple. For one thing, she ensures that her Canadian readers can’t feel smug believing Canadians are immune from ethnic hatred. Luba, Mirjam’s mother, bears pained witness to the contrary. Even as a young girl, she suffered such slurs as, “Go back where you came from, you dirty bohunk.” 

More significantly, though, she tangles and twists Marjam’s own emotional development with her Serbian identity. In her early career as an opera singer, Marjam steadfastly sings the music of many countries—but refuses to sing the Serbian folk songs of her father. Years later, she determines to take music and, she believes, healing to the beleaguered citizens of war torn cities. What follows is devastating. “What exactly was she trying to accomplish?” she asks. “Was this something to do with defying everything her father stood for?“ More trenchantly, she realizes, “cursing what she hates, she curses herself, daughter of Serbia. Violent thoughts, ugly dreams, atrocious wishes course through her veins, through the blood of her people. She is a Serb.” Far from distancing herself from her father’s Serbian-tainted violent tendencies, she has, she feels, absorbed them. And they have virtually destroyed her.

Mirjam’s connection with violence is twofold, however. She is not just her father’s daughter: she is also a woman. In the folktale, Subdina says to her sister, “He beat me. Do you know this?” Her sister answers, “Sometimes a woman—well, sometimes we deserve it.” It takes Luba and her more defiant daughter decades to stifle this assumption—and to contain Dan’s domestic abuse. Using Dan’s anger counsellor as her mouthpiece, Šobat drives home the fact that male violence towards women is “a perversion of manhood,” at core a “definition of masculinity” that Dan has unthinkingly accepted.

She takes care to make clear women aren’t the only victims of domestic abuse: Danillo’s father was the one who suffered most in his generation. Still, the females in contemporary life are as vulnerable in modern times as they are in the folk tale.

It is one of the more complex ironies of the novel that, in order to be free of oppression, it seems women have to become what society has long considered perversions of women. As a child, Marjam felt enormous guilt for causing a bullying boy permanent injury, simply, she felt, through the power of her mind. This suggestion of the dark magic linked to women is echoed in the folk tale where the defiant and freedom-loving Subdina seeks out the company of a witch. Even more strikingly, she agrees herself to become a witch—and, more important, to embrace what it means to be a witch. (Intriguingly, Šobat has identified herself as a witch.) “Choose to be hideous? How else to keep the cutthroats and rapists from my door, but with illusion and trickery? How best to keep my own company, my own liberty? How better to survive in this world of men and swords and might?”

Mirjam is not quite as confident as Sudbina: as a grown woman, she has to be reassured by her mother that she has not, in fact, given in to the violence and hatred within her and brought on, by a kind of terrible magic, her father’s death. 

At an even lower moment,  everything changes.

In a novel where there seems little to celebrate and a lot to grieve, Šobat chooses in the end to draw a veil, slowly, gently, over the darkest sorrows of the novel. For Luba this means she and a Kenyan man, Hodi’—both of them “refugees of conflicts born of domination and intolerance, and immigrants to Canada”—may have a future together. For Mirjam, it possibly means something more remarkable. Careful to keep her readers sensitive to the disturbing currents running through a disturbing social reality, she nevertheless allows that songs can be redemptive. The last note in the novel is, movingly, the song of a skylark. 

Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo’s recent book, Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, Volume 2: Nanaimo North to Strathcona Park, was reviewed by Amy Tucke). Among many others, he has reviewed books by Alan Twigg, Ian Williams, Jason A.N. Taylor, Tim Bowling, Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, and Frank Wolf for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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