Miriam Toews has written an impressive novel of a Mennonite girl ostracised by her community
This novel by Miriam Toews, a Canadian of Mennonite descent, is her second to be set within a Mennonite community. Her first about this tight, fundamentalist Christian group, A Complicated Kindness (2004), was an award-winning hit. In Irma Voth, she gives just enough description of Mennonite life to pique interest and send the reader off to find out more. Mennonites live much like other set-in-stone religious groups: frugally and with a lot of hard labour and strict piety. They share the Anabaptist umbrella with the Amish, among others, and their lifestyle has parallels with those of other faith groups, such as the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim. Like them, Mennonites aren't concerned with material matters; the absolutists among them don't want any contact with the tainted modern world and therefore shun TV, film, internet and other portals of the present.
This austere setting is a wonderful canvas for Toews's mood-rich writing. Irma Voth is a late teen living in a Mennonite community camp in the Chihuahuan desert scrublands in Mexico – her family moved, suddenly, from Canada and we don't know why. Irma is ostracised because she married a Mexican outsider (we don't know why that happened, either), but he leaves her because she doesn't know "how to be a good wife". Barred from contact with her family by her cold, intolerant father, she is drowning, almost disappeared – but is saved through encounters with a film crew that rolls into the camp to shoot a Mennonite-based movie.
Seeing into their shambolic, creative world acts as a catalyst for Irma, a woman who has poetry in her bones and a polyglot love of languages but lacks the capacity to articulate it. This banned world of the cinema, and its inevitable clashes with the community, help Irma make sense of her own story, in part by seeing through the limitation of fictional narrative – which she finds as absurd in its dictates as the God-fearing one imposed by her father. Irma sends up the film by distorting its dialogue, thanks to her role as translator for the film's female protagonist. But her involvement with this cinema crew forces her escape, taking her two sisters with her – one just a baby.
The story is an unexpected mix, switching, sometimes in one sentence, from trapped despair to warm, wry humour. It chills and soothes the heart at the same time. When Irma literally runs for her life to the big city, the sparse, stifled passages of the early chapters give way to more detail and colour and it feels as though the reader is given the chance to breathe deeply again. There is a beautiful description of a friendly exchange with a stranger in Irma's new surroundings: "I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate," Irma says. "It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know." And running through the book is an unanswered question about another sister – something unmentionable that keeps beating out a refrain of guilt and forgiveness until it is finally dealt with and disarmed.
Funny and skilfully drawn, this novel shows the real appeal of tales set in unknown communities: that underneath the unfamiliar surfaces are the exact same people – a teenage girl trying to find out who she is and how to live, driven by familiar dreams and desires, and the same need for security, love and some sense of fulfilment.
Rachel Shabi is the author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands (Yale).