Finding Edward

Sheila Murray

Fiction

Cormorant Books, 2022

330 pages

ISBN: 9781770866263

$24.95

 

Reviewed by Casey Tweedy

 

Finding Edward, Sheila Murray’s debut novel, explores Canadian history through the eyes of a Black man in his 20s named Cyril Rowntree who immigrates to Canada from Jamaica in 2012. Cyril works while attending university until a chance encounter with an underhoused woman named Patricia,  whom the pastor calls “an unlucky penny,” changes the course of his life.

Meeting Patricia leads Cyril to a suitcase of photos and letters written in the early 1920s by a white mother forced to give up her mixed-race baby, Edward. “This is how you know yourself,” the ghost of Cyril’s adoptive grandfather lectures, “through history and language—this is theirs, but take what you need, make it your own.”  

Cyril sees himself in Edward, the young boy in the pictures, as he has been abandoned by his own white father. He begins to research Edward’s itinerant life as he crisscrossed Canada reliving landmark moments in Black history.

Murray integrates the experiences of Black women like Mary Ann Shadd, the first Black newspaper publisher in Canada and an abolitionist in the 1850s. She also recounts the formation of the Black labour union for sleeping car porters, the demolition of Africville, and the 1938 Spadina March for union solidarity. Africville is along the “worn dirt path … into the town of little houses scattered higgledy-piggledy around the hill,” a place where “after a few days, it was as though [you’ve] been there for years.”

Cyril is a straitlaced, clean-cut young man who says he refuses to define himself “as an outsider, though that is what [he] feels.” He navigates the immigration and education systems encountering racism in both.

Meanwhile Edward Davina, now in his 90s, lives alone as a shut-in in a single-room apartment with few friends. He recalls pivotal memories that parallel clues Cyril finds in local archives. As Cyril shuffles the remnants of Edward’s life, he forges an imaginary relationship with him, talking with him on the page. 

Edward’s story is one of hard labour after a children’s home, a relief camp, and riding the rails. He joins the Navy, works at the CPR, and at a logging camp in BC. Cyril’s story by contrast is anchored in Toronto – Trinity Bellwoods, Dundas Square, Toronto Metropolitan University, Mount Dennis.

Murray’s story is a mystery and a history and an alternative to the isolation and loneliness that characterizes both men. As the POV alternates between Cyril and Edward, their lives merge and contrast, calling attention to parallel sources of grief, romance, and trauma. Their echoes haunt each other’s stories.  “Cyril dreams about Edward’s life, becomes so connected he even talks to him when he wakes.”

Murray’s writing is poetic as in this passage when Cyril describes how he walks to find calm: “The dark took the tall trees that were his landmarks, the way he measured how far he’d come, how far yet to go. Cyril had taught himself to find his way by holding onto the night.” Walking offers solace until it doesn’t one night in Toronto when “walking while Black” ends in violence. 

“I want to engage people with this Black experience. It’s not just what we’ve learned since the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been so important and remains so, but before that, there were lots of other moments — and a tremendous amount of Black experiences, contributions and accomplishments,” Murray said in a CBC interview.

Finding Edward was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, longlisted for the Toronto Book Award, longlisted for Canada Reads 2023, and is a Globe and Mail Best Book. Murray’s short stories have appeared in Descant, The Dalhousie Review, Exile, Room and The New Quarterly and she has worked as a documentary filmmaker and television sound editor. She is now an advocate for climate justice and lives in Hamilton. For more information visit www.sheilamurray.ca.