The Way the Crow Flies: A Novel

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Overview

A murder in rural Canada has shocking implications for an RCAF officer and his young daughter in this "absorbing, psychologically rich" Cold War thriller (Publishers Weekly).
The optimism of the early sixties, infused with the excitement of the space race and the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through the rich imagination of high-spirited, eight-year-old Madeleine, who welcomes her family's posting to a quiet Air Force base near the Canadian border. Secure in the love of her beautiful mother, she is unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in a web of secrets.
When a local murder intersects with global forces, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine will be forced to learn a lesson about the ambiguity of human morality—one she will only begin to understand when she carries her quest for the truth, and the killer, into adulthood twenty years later.
"One of the finest novels I've read . . . beautiful in its conception, its compassion, its wisdom, even in its anger and pain. Don't miss it." —Washington Post Book World

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061840999
Publisher:	HarperCollins e-books
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	848
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Novelist and dramatist Ann-Marie MacDonald is the author of the internationally bestselling and award-winning novel Fall on Your Knees. She is also the playwright of Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, which won the Governor General's Award for Drama. She lives in Toronto.

Hometown:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Date of Birth:

October 29, 1958

Place of Birth:

Baden Baden, West Germany

Education:

Graduate, National Theatre School of Canada Acting Program, 1980

Read an Excerpt

The Way the Crow Flies
A Novel

Chapter One

Many-Splendoured Things

The sun came out after the war and our world went Technicolor. Everyone had the same idea. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Let's be the ones who do it right.

It is possible, in 1962, for a drive to be the highlight of a family week. King of the road, behind the wheel on four steel-belted tires, the sky's the limit. Let's just drive, we'll find out where we're going when we get there. How many more miles, Dad?

Roads are endless vistas, city gives way to country barely mediated by suburbs. Suburbs are the best of both worlds, all you need is a car and the world is your oyster, your Edsel, your Chrysler, your Ford. Trust Texaco. Traffic is not what it will be, what's more, it's still pretty neat. There's a '53 Studebaker Coupe! -- oh look, there's the new Thunderbird ...

"'This land is your land, this land is my land ... '" A moving automobile is second only to the shower when it comes to singing, the miles fly by, the landscape changes, they pass campers and trailers -- look, another Volkswagen Beetle. It is difficult to believe that Hitler was behind something so friendly-looking and familiar as a VW bug. Dad reminds the kids that dictators often appreciate good music and are kind to animals. Hitler was a vegetarian and evil. Churchill was a drunk but good. "The world isn't black and white, kids."

In the back seat, Madeleine leans her head against the window frame, lulled by the vibrations. Her older brother is occupied with baseball cards, her parents are up front enjoying "the beautiful scenery." This is an ideal time to begin her movie. She hums "Moon River," and imagines that the audience can just see her profile, hair blowing back in the wind. They see what she sees out the window, the countryside, off to see the world, and they wonder where it is she is off to and what life will bring, there's such a lot of world to see. They wonder, who is this dark-haired girl with the pixie cut and the wistful expression? An orphan? An only child with a dead mother and a kind father? Being sent from her boarding school to spend the summer at the country house of mysterious relatives who live next to a mansion where lives a girl a little older than herself who rides horses and wears red dungarees? We're after the same rainbow's end, just around the bend ... And they are forced to run away together and solve a mystery, my Huckleberry friend ...

Through the car window, she pictures tall black letters superimposed on a background of speeding green -- "Starring Madeleine McCarthy" -- punctuated frame by frame by telephone poles, Moon River, and me ...

It is difficult to get past the opening credits so better simply to start a new movie. Pick a song to go with it. Madeleine sings, sotto voce, "'Que será, será, whatever will be will -- '" darn, we're stopping.

"I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream," says her father, pulling over.

Utterly wrapped up in her movie, Madeleine has failed to notice the big strawberry ice cream cone tilting toward the highway, festive in its party hat. "Yay!" she exclaims. Her brother rolls his eyes at her.

Everything in Canada is so much bigger than it was in Germany, the cones, the cars, the "supermarkets." She wonders what their new house will be like. And her new room -- will it be pretty? Will it be big? Que será, será ... "Name your poison," says Dad at the ice cream counter, a white wooden shack. They sell fresh corn on the cob here too. The fields are full of it -- the kind Europeans call Indian corn.

"Neapolitan, please," says Madeleine.

Her father runs a hand through his sandy crewcut and smiles through his sunglasses at the fat lady in the shade behind the counter. He and her brother have matching haircuts, although Mike's hair is even lighter. Wheat-coloured. It looks as though you could remove waxy buildup from your kitchen floor by turning him upside down and plugging him in, but his bristles are actually quite soft. He rarely allows Madeleine to touch them, however. He has strolled away now toward the highway, thumbs hooked in his belt loops -- pretending he is out in the world on his own, Madeleine knows. He must be boiling in those dungarees but he won't admit it, and he won't wear shorts. Dad never wears shorts.

"Mike, where do you think you're going?" she calls.

He ignores her. He is going on twelve.

She runs a hand through her hair the way Dad does, loving its silky shortness. A pixie cut is a far cry from a crewcut, but it's also mercifully far from the waist-length braids she endured until this spring. She accidentally cut one off during crafts in school. Maman still loves her but will probably never forgive her.

Her mother waits in the Rambler. She wears the sunglasses she got on the French Riviera last summer. She looks like a movie star. Madeleine watches her adjust the rearview mirror and freshen her lipstick. Black hair, red lips, white sunglasses. Like Jackie Kennedy -- "She copied me." Mike calls her Maman, but for Madeleine she is "Maman" at home and "Mum" in public. "Mum" is more carefree than Maman -- like penny loafers instead of Mary Janes. "Mum" goes better with "Dad." Things go better with Coke.

Her father waits with his hands in the pockets of his chinos, removes his sunglasses and squints up at the blue sky, whistling a tune through his teeth. "Smell the corn," he says. "That's the smell of pure sunshine." Madeleine puts her hands in the pockets of her short-shorts, squints up and inhales ...

The Way the Crow Flies
A Novel. Copyright © by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Reading Group Guide

"The sun came out after the war and our world went Technicolor. Everyone had the same idea. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Let's be the ones who do it right."

The Way the Crow Flies, the second novel by bestselling, award-winning author Ann-Marie MacDonald, is set on the Royal Canadian Air Force station of Centralia during the early sixties. It is a time of optimism -- infused with the excitement of the space race but overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War -- filtered through the rich imagination and quick humour of eight-year-old Madeleine McCarthy and the idealism of her father, Jack, a career officer.

As the novel opens, Madeleine's family is driving to their new home; Centralia is her father's latest posting. They have come back from the Old World of Germany to the New World of Canada, where the towns hold memories of the Europeans who settled there. For the McCarthys, it is "the best of both worlds." And they are a happy family. Jack and Mimi are still in love, Madeleine and her older brother, Mike, get along as well as can be expected. They all dance together and barbecue in the snow. They are compassionate and caring. Yet they have secrets.

Centralia is the station where, years ago, Jack crashed his plane and therefore never went operational; instead of being killed in action in 1943, he became a manager. Although he is successful, enjoys "flying a desk" and is thickening around the waist from Mimi's good Acadian cooking, deep down Jack feels restless. His imagination is caught by the space race and the fight against Communism; he believes landing a man on the moon will change the world, and anything is possible. When his oldwartime flying instructor appears out of the blue and asks for help with the secret defection of a Soviet scientist, Jack is excited to answer the call of duty: now he has a real job.

Madeleine's secret is "the exercise group". She is kept behind after class by Mr. March, along with other little girls, and made to do "backbends" to improve her concentration. As the abusive situation worsens, she is convinced that she cannot tell her parents and risk disappointing them. No one suspects, even when Madeleine's behaviour changes: in the early sixties people still believe that school is "one of the safest places." Colleen and Ricky, the adopted Metis children of her neighbours, know differently; at the school they were sent to after their parents died, they had been labelled "retarded" because they spoke Michif.

Then a little girl is murdered. Ricky is arrested, although most people on the station are convinced of his innocence. At the same time, Ricky's father, Henry Froelich, a German Jew who was in a concentration camp, identifies the Soviet scientist hiding in the nearby town as a possible Nazi war criminal. Jack alone could provide Ricky's alibi, but the Cold War stakes are politically high and doing "the right thing" is not so simple. "Show me the right thing and I will do it," says Jack. As this very local murder intersects with global forces, The Way the Crow Flies reminds us that in time of war the lines between right and wrong are often blurred.

Ann-Marie MacDonald said in a discussion with Oprah Winfrey about her first book, "a happy ending is when someone can walk out of the rubble and tell the story." Madeleine achieves her childhood dream of becoming a comedian, yet twenty years later she realises she cannot rest until she has renewed the quest for the truth, and confirmed how and why the child was murdered.. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called The Way the Crow Flies "absorbing, psychologically rich…a chronicle of innocence betrayed". With compassion and intelligence, and an unerring eye for the absurd as well as the confusions of childhood, , MacDonald evokes the confusion of being human and the necessity of coming to terms with our imperfections.

1. We learn in the beginning that the girl who is murdered wears a charm bracelet. Why does the author introduce another charm bracelet, given by Mimi to Madeleine?

2. What does it tell us about Jack that he still thinks of his old teacher Simon as his best friend although he's hardly seen him in twenty years?

3. Jack realizes long after other people that Froelich is Jewish. He thinks Madeleine is "sunny and light," and he thinks school is a safe place. Like Madeleine, we start to feel sorry for him. Jack and Madeleine are shown simultaneously as innocents who are taken advantage of. As the parallel plot threads unfold, how do our feelings change about Jack?

4. Centralia is called "God's country." Madeleine muses on the idea that God loves the souls of children best of all: "They are his favourite. Yum. Like the giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk'." She thinks guardian angels wait for something bad to happen to you and saints watch children being murdered. How do her observations of the cruelty of life affect our sense of justice in the world she inhabits?

5. How does keeping the secrets affect Madeleine and her father's characters? Do you think there is a moral message to be found?

6. "There was actually quite a bit of intermarriage between the Acadians and the native Indians, wasn't there?" asks Karen Froelich. It gradually becomes clear that Mimi, the Acadian who sings "un Acadien errant," and Colleen, whose father played Cajun music and who says, "Chu en woyaugeur, ji rest partou," have a shared ancestral past. What is the significance of this? How does the story of Ricky and Colleen reinforce the theme of government-sanctioned atrocity during war?

7. The way people dress seems to tell much about people's characters in the novel. Discuss with reference to the Froelichs, Mimi, Marjorie Nolan and Madeleine.

8. Mimi says men understand less than women, and women have to work to make them feel good. How does Mimi's insistence on femininity and looking after men affect the unfolding of the plot, if at all?

9. One reviewer has said "The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader's vision of everything that has gone before." Do you agree with this statement?

10. What does the novel say about the nature of family love?

11. How did you feel about the "fairy tale" of the slaves in the mountain?

12. How do you interpret recurring animal symbols such as the deer (Bambi, the deer that appears when Madeleine and Colleen visit the place where Claire was killed, the deer that inadvertently killed Colleen and Ricky's parents) and the dogs (Rex, the dog killed in the space Sputnik satellite, the dog in the drain the night Claire goes missing)?

Interviews

1) Can you tell us how you became a writer?
I became a writer through the theatre. As an actor I started collaborating -- writing shows collectively until I started writing plays on my own. Then I wrote a book. I started writing it as a play until I got stuck and realized a play was the wrong form.

2) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book?
Have a drink. Enjoy. Yell.

3) Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?
Charlotte Bronte, The Beatles, Northrop Frye. I love authors and books but I get influenced by life.

Editorial Reviews

A novel of the cold war whose main characters bear the name of McCarthy? Sure. As we are cautioned in Ann-Marie MacDonald's new novel, some things can only be ''caught by the corner of the eye. Like phosphorescence in a cave; look away and you will see.'' And so these characters hail from Canada, have nothing to do with Senator Joe, and their baby-boom family gives us a parallax view of sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis, the arms race and the space race, the brain drain from East to West, even military intelligence games, from the shadow of empire. — Art Winslow

The New York Times

The Way the Crow Flies is a brilliant portrayal of child abuse and its consequences, but it is much more than that. It is a fiercely intelligent look at childhood, marriage, families, the 1960s, the Cold War and the fear and isolation that are part of the human condition...it is not only beautifully written; it is equally beautiful in its conception, its compassion, its wisdom, even in its anger and pain. Don't miss it.— Patrick Anderson

The Washington Post

An ambitious tale of a once-happy family changed forever by one year in the 1960s when the father's participation in Cold War intrigue goes tragically awry. Bestselling MacDonald (the Oprah-picked Fall on Your Knees, 1997) interweaves Cold War tensions and the space race to give her story an intriguing, if at times overreaching, plot, but that also makes for a long and padded read. The McCarthy family is posted back to Canada in 1962 after serving in Germany. The Cold War is at its height, the Cuban Missile Crisis is heating up, as is the race to the moon, and Jack McCarthy has been picked to head an officer's training school in Ontario. His French-Canadian wife Mimi and their two children, Mike and Madeleine, are happy to be home, but must soon face unexpected challenges. Eight-year-old Madeleine is close to Jack, but she doesn't tell him or Mimi about her teacher Mr. March, who makes her and other girls stay after school to perform sexually abusive "exercises." Jack soon has his secrets, too, when an old friend, British diplomat Simon Crawford, asks him to look after a defector, an East German scientist, now in transit to the US. Then Claire, a classmate of Madeleine's, is brutally raped and murdered, and both Madeleine and Jack face a moral crisis. Rick, the adopted son of a Holocaust survivor, is arrested, and Jack could save him-but that would blow his cover. And Madeleine won't lie, as requested, about where she saw Rick that day. Rick is sentenced, and a stricken Jack, who never recovers from the guilt, requests a transfer. Madeleine, a lesbian now in her 30s, takes up the narrative. Though a successful comedian, she's suddenly experiencing panic attacks that lead her to find outwho really killed Claire that long-ago afternoon. Strained at times, but, still, a grand, sweeping saga. Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency

Kirkus Reviews

Both terrifying and moving.” — New York Times Book Review

“Astonishing in its depth and breath, it artfully weaves one family’s struggles into the fabric of the Cold War.” — People

“A powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“MacDonald’s most impressive accomplishment is her uncanny ability … to vividly re-create the wonder, humor, and fears of childhood.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Ambitious … intriguing … A grand sweeping saga.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Rich and complex … hard to put down … MacDonald deserves another prize for THE WAY THE CROW FLIES.” — San Diego Union-Tribune

“Beautifully crafted … To submit to … THE WAY THE CROW FLIES is to be both transported and haunted.” — Seattle Times

“Ambitious … interesting …tender, generous …[THE WAY THE CROW FLIES] is both an unblinking and a big hearted book.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Heartbreaking, startling, profound.” — New Jersey Courier Post

From the Publisher

Heartbreaking, startling, profound.

New Jersey Courier Post

Both terrifying and moving.

New York Times Book Review

MacDonald’s most impressive accomplishment is her uncanny ability … to vividly re-create the wonder, humor, and fears of childhood.

Booklist (starred review)

Ambitious … interesting …tender, generous …[THE WAY THE CROW FLIES] is both an unblinking and a big hearted book.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Astonishing in its depth and breath, it artfully weaves one family’s struggles into the fabric of the Cold War.

People

Rich and complex … hard to put down … MacDonald deserves another prize for THE WAY THE CROW FLIES.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Beautifully crafted … To submit to … THE WAY THE CROW FLIES is to be both transported and haunted.

Seattle Times