I feel like I've written about this before. It''s an obsession of mine, the question that many potential readers of Shelter have asked me, before reading: Is it sad? They don't like sad, they say. I try to be honest. I don't think Shelter is a sad novel. Sad things happen, but what life is free of sadness, even a young life? I remember my son's first experience of real, deep sadness, the kind that wouldn't go away in a few minutes. It was when he was about eight and one of his beloved cats, who he had grown up with his whole short life, died, presumably of a heart attack, while curled up in her favourite spot on his bed. I tried to tell him that as sad as it was, it was good to feel so deeply about something he had loved so dearly. I still tell him the same thing now, when he's sixteen. I believe he gets that. That's why he loves some profoundly sad songs that sing of experiences he's too young to really know yet. (He's in the next room right now listening to Mumford and Sons' Broken Crown, loud.)
To me, there is a beauty in sadness. It interests me. When I was writing Shelter, I used to go to my desk and turn up a Mozart Piano concerto, No. 17, something my grandpa and dad both loved. The album I have belonged to my grandfather and was passed down to my father and then to me. Alfred Brendel is on piano. (I can't find a link to the recording I have or I'd post it). I've heard other performances, but this one is special. During the andante movement, the music builds and builds to this tender, trembling beauty and then breaks in what seems to me almost like a sob. But it's a joyful kind of sob, of someone overwhelmed with the beauty of his world. I feel the same thing some early mornings on the shore of a small BC lake I love. The water is so still, the surface a skin of light and shadow. I think, I could have missed this. I will miss this.
