Lynn Coady won the 2013 Giller Prize for Hellgoing, a collection of short stories. "Batter My Heart" <1> is from an earlier collection, Play The Monster Blind (2000).
II.
Coady was born and raised in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. In "Batter My Heart", Coady's Katherine Leary has three different Island men to deal with, and at times, try her patience.
Katherine's boyfriend has a drinking problem that he's trying to kick, in a monastery that now also serves as a detox facility. The cloistered setting has him advising prayer and piety to Katey. "'You just have to learn to pray. I mean really pray. What that means is accepting God'. Well, you are certainly too much of a hardened and worldly wise seventeen-year-old to go for that." <2>
Katey perceives her father at contradictory angles. Mr. Leary is a "good man", a "honest man", even a "saint", Katey tells us. She then adds that he is also "stark raving mad", and "one mean son of a bitch". It's in relation to one of Leary's neighbourly qualities, the ability to "do anything for you", that we meet Martin Carlyle.
Martin is the town drunk. Carlyle has been set on a bruising, not to say battering, course. He comes to Katey's attention by her father's efforts to help the man. Mr. Leary personally drives Martin to AA meetings; Martin uses the trip into town to visit a bar, and a liquor store. Leary convinces social services to increase Carlyle's allowance, so as to help him land a job; Carlyle takes the money, and doesn't bother to show up for the job Leary helped him get. Instead, Martin's drinking buddy, Alistair, tells Leary that he and Carlyle have been having "a regular ceilidh" with Martin's "extra welfare".
We sympathize with Mr. Leary when he loses his patience with Martin Carlyle.
III.
But Coady won't have us draw only the easiest conclusions. Consider that she also relates Martin Carlyle's regular Sunday attendance at church, "singing in the choir, his voice even more off-note than the ladies". It is just another detail of her Cape Breton, that Lynn Coady presents with such understanding, in "Batter My Heart".
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<1>Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 (1633).
<2>Coady, Lynn. "Batter My Heart". Play The Monster Blind. Doubleday Canada, 2000.
