Spanning generations and geography

By Christine Welsh
"Lost Geography" by Charlotte Bacon, 2000, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 259 pages

What an exquisite storyteller is local, award winning author Charlotte Bacon! Her "Lost Geography" leads us through time and place, painting four generations of history for her readers to travel with all around the globe.

The family tree of "Lost Geography" incorporates a world of geography by assigning each character a past. While one character is busy fleeing the land and culture of his or her birth, a second character is unknowingly preparing for (his or her) arrival. Thus, through each generation we are not only introduced into the marriage of man and wife, but the subsequent wedding of two countries as well. Each story unfolds from the woman's point of view.

A young Canadian nurse (Margaret) weds former patient and ex-Scotsman (Davis). Like many of us, they live a financially bankrupt life and run their farm and their house at peace with one another. They have three children, first a girl and later two boys. Their life together - and their death - lead to the next chapter, the next generation; specifically, Hilda, their eldest child.

Hilda is eighteen at the time of her parents' death and she finds in the tragedy a skeleton of a key - to her own independence and personality. She trades in her farm girl gig for a spot in a nearby city. Here, she soon finds herself unwed and pregnant with Danielle, the third generation. Then, with the eventual maturity of Danielle, Hilda is left alone while Danny goes off in search of her future. She gets a job working, like her mother, with history itself in the form of furniture and books at antique auctions in Paris.

So far, Bacon has run us from Scotland through England to Canada, from farm to city lights, and from there across the waters to Gay Pareee. Here in Paris, as it should be, Danielle and Osman meet. Osman brings a Turkish branch to the family tree, and three more children. Osman and Danielle's daughter Sophie becomes the forth and final generation we read into. With her, the journey comes neatly around to North America once again, this time to New York City, making a full circle of more than just the geography of the novel.

The work that each character does for a living is consistently important to the individual's life and to the story as a whole, representing a great part of it. Osman and his work may be of the utmost importance to the tale, however, embodied in at least two ways.

Os' work is in selling rugs. He can tell where a rug is from by how its dust smells. The characters come from all over; the rugs come from all over.

Os' passion lies in storytelling. He loves to tell tales to his children and one of his final stories summarizes the novel; it is the tale of the weaving of a rug. This rug is woven for the king, of the finest material the townsfolk can produce. Each thread, color or design on the rug represents one character or his or her part in "Lost Geography". And, what makes a rug special is not perfection, but inconsistency or occasional imperfection. For that is what makes character; it takes all of the components, both the abundant and the dry, to weave a rug, to make a family, to make a life.

Charlotte Bacon is responsible for creating a fine work of literature with "Lost Geography". We can be proud to brag that she is currently a New Hampshire-ite. Bacon is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire at Durham.