The Diamond House by Dianne Warren

The Diamond House by Dianne Warren

HarperCollins, June 2020

Audiobook (11 hours, Harper Audio) read by Marisa Blake

A family saga centred on two nontraditional white women.

The narrative follows a family line for more than a century, from Ontario to Saskatchewan, where Oliver Diamond establishes a brick-making factory in Regina. Secrets revealed in old letters, the succession of a family business, daughters not accorded the same respect as sons, elderly people asserting their rights to independence: it‘s got all the stuff for an absorbing read. 

The two women who take centre stage are vivid, engaging characters. One is Salina, an aspiring ceramics artist and Oliver Diamond's first wife. They first meet each other in 1902. The other is Estella, the youngest of Oliver Diamond's five children by his second wife. We experience Estella's life from early childhood into her nineties. I love indomitable old women in fiction, so the contemporary part was my favourite.

The opening paragraph:

     For all the years there were children in the Diamond house, and long before a woman named Emyflor Santos lost control of a rogue vacuum cleaner hose, a white, hand-thrown teapot sat on a corner shelf in the dining room. It was clearly the work of an amateur: oversized, indelicate with its evident throwing lines, and heavy as a ten-pin bowling ball. The children had a vague idea that it had been made by an Aunt Salina they'd never met. They imagined a woman bent over a muddy potter's wheel, an eccentric old relative back east in the town their parents had come from. They knew nothing of that town. To them, East was a foreign country.

Estella is intelligent and curious, always chafing against expectations of her family and society. When she hadn't yet started going to school, her mother asked her what she was doing under the table.

     "Thinking," Estella said.

     "Don't think too hard. You'll ruin your brain." 

Besides the role of women in society, another aspect that hooked me is the portrayal of lakeside summer holidays. The Diamonds spend time at the same cabins every year, a ritual familiar to a certain cohort of Canadians. This tradition realistically shifts over the years, as the younger generations grow up, have children of their own, and move to other parts of the country. In the contemporary part of the novel, the land on which the cabins sit, which had been a 99-year lease, will soon be back in the control of a Cree band, its original owners.

I recommend picking up the text version, rather than the audiobook. It's read by Marisa Blake, whom I assume is an American because she doesn‘t know how to pronounce Regina, Métis or Tagalog.

Speaking of Tagalog, it's an interesting reflection of contemporary reality that women from the Philippines are caregivers for the aged in two novels that I read recently, this one and Misconduct of the Heart. The Filipinas are portrayed as selfless and hardworking. While in both cases they are secondary characters, their inclusion made me reflect on the situations for many women who travel to Canada with aspirations for a better life, spending years apart from their families while sending their earnings to the Philippines.

Giller chances: LOW. I had high expectations because of Warren's earlier, Governor General award-winning novel, Cool Water. While The Diamond House is enjoyable and grapples successfully with the issue of gender inequality, it doesn't quite have the spark to lift it into award territory.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.