Debut novel ‘Burr’ by Toronto writer Brooke Lockyer resounds with comic mayhem

In a charming and appealingly atmospheric debut novel, Toronto’s Brooke Lockyer looks back a few decades and travels about three hours southwest.

In chapters that typically focus on one of three characters, Lockyer introduces serious plights and traces her protagonists’ unique, quite wrong-headed approaches to becoming unburdened. Now and then, though, chapters titled “Burr” appear. They portray a middling town that might view Alice Munro’s Jubilee and Robertson Davies’ Salterton as literary ancestors:

“Unlike unassuming Paris, or the nearly village of Dublin, Burr lives up to its name. The prickly fruit is everywhere in this flat Southwestern Ontario town, clinging to socks and sleeves and hair. Dogs’ tails wag low and heavy. Cats flatten their ears as they bite at the spikes caught in their fur, trying not to pierce their tongues.”

Adolescent Jane (precocious at 13) and her mother Meredith (overwhelmed) are bereft as “Burr” opens. The anchor of their family, Henry Blackburn, has died unexpectedly and the survivors’ grief has taken toxic forms. Suddenly strangers to one another, Jane and Meredith sink into themselves and languish with home-brewed coping strategies. Each loses herself in treasured memories; and both find themselves wandering on some of Burr’s quirkier byways.

Questioning whether she’s losing her grip, Meredith winds up in Louis Carroll forest. Jane, meanwhile, itches to escape Burr (which “seizes you by its prickly mouth when you’re not paying attention”), dreams of rock stardom in New York City, and pines for her father (“If I could, I’d dig myself into the ground to be with him,” she exclaims, Wednesday Addams by way of Avril Lavigne in her every gesture).

Jane happens into the company of Ernest Leopold, scion of a once wealthy and later scandal-sieged family. Turns out, Ernest — the town’s certified weirdo, who resides in a mansion fronted by “bobbing weeds and gnarled crabapple trees” — has experienced his share of grief. For a time, he thought of a ward in Meadowbrook Centre as home.

By virtue of a chapter organization that effectively isolates characters, momentum flags on occasion in “Burr.” That all changes with Jane’s impulsive decision to pursue Ernest and decamp to Toronto with him for an audience with A.D. Drood, a “true medium.” Ill-equipped for the city, the unlikely duo stumble into comic mishaps.

Shadowy, enchanted, and a touch feral, the city highlights Lockyer’s humour and gift for mirthful set pieces — not least of which is a séance where the out-of-towners meet Eloise (a “Thanadoula”: “Thana comes from the Greek word thanatos, meaning death. And doula mean(ing) servant,” she handily explains), her brother Allan, who’s in “death tech,” and Alabaster, a legend in his own mind.

Back in Burr, the story of Jane’s ‘disappearance’ takes on a life of its own. Locals sharpen their proverbial pitchforks in anticipation of the capture of Ernest, whose eccentricity is rewritten as Amber Alert material.

Once Lockyer lets loose and turns screwball-y, “Burr” resounds with comic mayhem. Yet, the wonderfully, infectiously silly scenes in Toronto aren’t entirely frivolous. Lockyer accepts the pain and unknowability of grief, even as “Burr” reveals her as a sucker for a happy, albeit decidedly left-field, ending.

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