‘Away from Her’ by Alice Munro

‘Away from Her’ is a story written by Canadian short-story diva Alice Munro, originally published under the title, ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.

The story has been repackaged into a ‘new’ paperback collection of Munro stories, in order to capitalize on the release of the film based on the story. It also comes with a gushingly earnest foreword written by Sarah Polley, the actress who has directed the movie.

Polley’s notes are not just marketing-speak. She seems truly filled with passion about the Munro story she read as a passenger flying out of an Icelandic film shoot. Polley tells a meandering tale of her own quest for love and a meaningful relationship, and makes the claim that the story helped her achieve a better understanding of the difference between enduring love and passion. Polley also writes that she immediately saw fellow actor Julie Christie playing the role of Fiona, the main female character of the story. This is convenient, of course, since Polley had just been acting in a film with Christie. And there’s also the coincidence of Fiona’s Icelandic heritage, which appeared almost spiritually coincidental to Polley.

One wonders if Alice Munro will one day be inspired to write an insightful look at the folly of a youthful actress attempting to write and direct a movie based on a story that is about a relationship that endured more years than the actress has been alive.

Polley has made a movie that, at least judging from her words and the film’s promotional material, focuses on a theme of love and loss. The short story, for example, barely mentions the word love, and never in the context that Polley imagines. Munro is more concerned with memory than love. It is memory that defines a life. It is memory that constructs the edifice to support a relationship. It is memory that provides the context to nurture or destroy the fragility of the bonds holding two human beings together. Memory is the bear of the original title, it is the frail construct that bears witness to the drama of existence.

Munro’s story tells of a forty-five year marriage that is lurching to a miserable end, precipitated by the onset of a debilitating disease. Fiona, the wife, experiences the effects of Alzheimer’s, leaving her memory in tatters and robbing her of the ability to cope with a daily routine. She is convinced that she must remand herself to a nursing home. In a noticeably authorial (and hard-to-believe this was ever done) device, husband Grant is forbidden to see her for a month-long settling in time. In that time, the fragility of memory conspires with the apparent forces of karmic retribution to present a heart-wrenching conclusion.

The genius of Munro’s story lies more in what she doesn’t write. Her narrator’s voice steadfastly avoids any hint of judgement, yet allows Grant to recount his life in all its damning, adulterous details. Despite his rationalizations and implied protestations of innocence, his memory exposes an ordinary life filled with human failings. He was a hard-working and learned professor, attempting to dissuade the attention of the lonely wives and available co-eds. But it was impossible to ignore the adventures of other faculty members. It was the norm. The sexual revolution was roaring all around him, all around campus. It could not be denied.

Grant was lucky to have originally attracted the attentions of Fiona, the narrator subtly notes. She had ‘the spark of life’, therein implying his deficiencies. He obtained tenure with the help of his father-in-law’s money, yet he blithely risks his career and marriage. He was fortunate not to have lost everything. He and Fiona were borne of a different generation and instilled with a more inviolate sense of marriage. In any case, their relationship prevailed. Fiona ignored the infidelities, though the details are left unsaid.

And when his wife no longer seems to recognize him, he hangs on with dogged loyalty. His last shot at caring for Fiona invokes the memory of his failures with exquisite, piercing precision.