by Manjit Handa

The jacket appealed me. Then I read the title. It was reminiscent of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Only I was wrong in imagining a plot woven around these period novels.

A modern novel, Lambsquarters is a sketch of Barbara McLean’s life at the farmhouse, her affair with the land and soil, the animals she rears that keep her company and above all her passion for the rustic lifestyle in all its simplicity. No sham, no glitter, no facades. Just being close to the mother earth, to life itself, in all its starkness, plainness and crudity.

The novel begins with the author in her early 20’s settling in an old-fashioned derelict farmhouse near a village called Alderney in Grey County, Ontario with her husband, “the careful guardians of a property that dreams are made on.” She names it Lambsquarters because the “land here was destined for sheep. . . (t)he barn, housing mothers and babes in a giant nursery, fills with the sweet bleats of lambkins. Mothering-up pens rang in perfect order against the walls. A woolly barracks. Lamb’s quarters.”

Her husband, fresh out of medical school is keen to start a country practice and is an instant hit. While he remains serving the patients in the community, we stay at the farm with Barbara right from the day she starts to renovate it, to her first pet sheep, encounters with a snake, a turtle, a fox, a raccoon or her introduction to various farming tools and terms like crowbar, hay cutter, shovel, trowel, shearing, spinning, stiles or poultry podiatry. Wordsworth seems to be lurking in the content as we witness nature and the writer always in tandem, exclusive of the difference of genre.

Mothering ad Birthing becomes the leitmotif and McLean gives extended descriptions on the subject. Herself a good nurturer, she venerates the same in her world of farm and takes pleasure in watching the marvel of birthing in her fauna, be it her sheep, hens and bluebirds; (herself?) or even the soil itself, mothering and nurturing the bounty of produce.

It would not be far fetched to perceive McLean’s work along the lines of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of an embrace of motherhood as the model for psychic health. She believes that, ‘”A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh.” The experience of giving birth paradoxically “wounds but increases” with “the calm of another life, the life of that other who wends his way while I remain henceforth like a framework”.’(Handbook of Critical Approaches, 205)

How paradoxical! How Cyclical!

We come out of the writer’s farm not devoid of the perspicacity of these lessons. As she articulates: “So much of what I do here is contradictory. Sheltering and slaughtering. Planting and harvesting. Conservation and consumption. Solitude and community. But perhaps that’s exactly what this life is, a delicate balance of disparate and warring concepts, brief moments of harmony in the dissonance of nature and culture.”
And again,
“The mosquitoes’ life cycle: from swamp to us to swamp. The farm’s life cycle: from spring through winter to spring. Our life cycle: from child-free to parents—of newborns through youth—from peace through trauma to planting to harvest. And all over again. And again.”

The all known themes, but not once wearing out or losing charm. The book makes a good reading not only for a literatus but also a neophyte in farming who would want to reconnect to the roots. And McLean addresses both the readers incredibly well.

Lambsquarters
Scenes from a Handmade Life
Barbara McLean
Random House
Hardbound, 2002, CAN $ 32.95, Pages 297

About the Author
Barbara McLean holds a Ph.D. in English literature, which she acquired while she and her husband, a country doctor, were running Lambsquarters and raising their two children.