‘Odd things’ and dream-quests
The Unfinished World
by Marilyn Bowering
Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2025
$26.95 / 9781773901800
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
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In coastal BC, autumn means the salmon run. The massive migration of fish from the cold Pacific Ocean that reaches bright silver fingers deep into the land, turning every river and stream into a boiling artery of death and life.
As Victoria-based author Marilyn Bowering (More Richly in Earth) writes in her fifth novel The Unfinished World, “thousands of ordinary people understand the relationship between the human and natural world instinctively…. Because it is an unfinished relationship.”
Our ecology and economy are built on this ancestral migration, whether we recognize it or not. But there’s more than that at stake. And it’s these threads of memory and inheritance that Bowering sets out to explore in a book that blends the real and the unreal into something more myth than fable, more real than magic, for all its occasionally fantastical elements.
The novel follows Pearl, a young woman from a family that has lived among the islands and inlets of the west coast since the colonial settlements were Spanish, not British. But Pearl is lost. Broke and alone, living in a camper van she stole from her ex-boyfriend, avoiding contact with her family until her grandmother Nora arranges a meeting to tell Pearl something important.
She has her reasons for this self-imposed isolation. Nora raised Pearl in a house made of driftwood salvaged from the sea. Her parents have been absent most of her life, pursuing their own writing careers and leaving Pearl to help Nora run her refugee charity, Refuge House. Nora wants Pearl to write the stories of a collection of ancient dolls that have been passed down through the family seemingly forever, each with a story attached—“Do you remember the stories that went with the dolls? You promised you wouldn’t forget them…,” she says, “The stories don’t stop growing, Pearl, they’d be your own work too.”
Like any good mythic heroine, Pearl’s first instinct is to refuse the call. But Nora has her own reasons for suddenly wanting to bring this legacy of inheritance back to life, and Pearl’s inability to connect her grandmother’s newly bony frame when they hug goodbye to what is going on with Nora doesn’t mean the reader can’t.
“Odd things happen in Nora’s house.” That’s how Pearl explains the vision she has of the dolls, transformed to life-sized people sitting around the kitchen table while something unseen moves ahead of her into her grandmother’s room. “What do they want? Why do I see them, Gran?” Nora replies, “We weren’t born just to pass the time, Pearl.”
The magical realist elements of the story give the book a dreamy quality that is enhanced by the understated prose. The fantastical sits side-by-side with the commonplace, Pearl seemingly used to strangeness. Or maybe that’s just another expression of her passivity, her avoidance. But Nora’s death forces her to confront what she lacks and what she has it in herself to be, and as she tells the stories of the dolls one by one, she discovers her place in an unbroken chain.
The dolls collapse time: “The dolls were like footprints…. A palace of memory…. All you had inherited was stored in them, but you had to make a map to find your way through.” They serve as repositories of memory, of trauma, of healing, allowing the dead to communicate with the living and the past to resurface and swim back up those bright rivers into the present. In writing down and reinventing their stories, Pearl discovers the alchemical magic all storytellers know: that you can transform pain into meaning through narrative, finding your place in the world by the truth that fiction uncovers.
Pearl belongs to the water. The sea, after all, is where pearls come from, an irritant coated in layer after nacreous layer of iridescence until it becomes luminous. Pearls are made, not born, or at best, born unfinished. And Pearl’s relationship with the natural world is reciprocal, not exploitative. She makes YouTube videos of foraging for food in coastal caves and tidal pools. She swims in cold, dark ocean waters without fear, even instinctively leaping into the water for protection after receiving bad news. As lost as she is, the rich waters of the coast give her and her ancestors, told through the stories of the dolls, an anchor in a world that is forever changing, always becoming.
The Unfinished World follows Pearl on a kind of scavenger hunt as she retraces Nora’s final journey, retrieving more and more of the dolls and recapturing more of her inheritance. Her stories tell the tales of women mostly erased from history, from the Iberian peninsula of 3000 years ago through ancient Greece to the Spanish Reconquista and the colonization of the west coast of North America.
Pearl feeds herself on what she finds, and as she retraces Nora’s last journey, she finds her grandmother everywhere. And her own quest makes her experience the stories as part of a living continuity rather than a stale dead history, a continuity in which she begins to experience her own story as one more link in the chain.
The salmon run gets smaller every year. Habitat loss, industrial pollution, and overfishing are depleting the richness that has fed this coast, Pearl’s coast, for millions of years. Maybe we are in danger of losing our stories just like the salmon are losing their spawning streams. Maybe it’s only the stories we tell ourselves, that unbroken link that stretches back into the invisible past, that makes us what we are.
But maybe we can find our way back.
In The Unfinished World, the boundary between humanity and nature is as porous as that between past and present, between memory and myth. This world is unfinished until we finish it. Just like the salmon, just like the unfinished world, just like Pearl, we find ourselves at last through the act of creation.
*
Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Marina Sonkina, Dennis E. Bolen, Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in 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.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster