This review is based on a NetGalley ARC, for which I thank the publishers and NetGalley.

It has been some time since I read a book straight through the night. Yet this is not a thriller, nor a novel that, is especially exciting or suspenseful, or anything other than what it sets out to be—an account of ordinary everyday life, set in rural Alberta. The setting, except for occasional prairie references and mentions of Edmonton and Calgary, could be any rural town where people work hard, struggle to raise crops and livestock and children, succeed and fail. Even the period is vague, though a few details, such as the absence of cellphones, the sparseness of the internet, the introduction of car phones for police and emergency response workers, and some historic events, establish that most of the story unfolds in the 1990s.

The female, Julia, is ‘the observer’ of the title, which is also the name of the small weekly newspaper that she edits intermittently. She takes the job with no experience (she is a script editor and playwright by profession), but because she and her husband and a bit later, their son, are always in debt and always cash-poor. In the latter role, she becomes the official town observer, interviewing, photographing, and thoroughly taking notes to write the stories that will tell the people about each other.

Observation is Julia’s approach to life as well as her job. Fiercely committed and deeply attached to her partner, Hardy, he is the central character of her own life. A cerebral former journalist, Hardy is posted to the town of Medway to finish training with the RCMP, to which he is a relative latecomer. He is everything one could dream of in a Mountie—a term never used. The officers and their families have their own code word, calling themselves ‘members’, a weighty category that signifies their difference and exclusivity from the community they serve. In many ways, the wives and partners—there is on,y one female officer and she is unmarried—are only honorary members, peripheral to the men they love (and serve). They are all portrayed as intelligent and capable, most of them also working in their own careers while ‘serving’ husbands, families, and the force. They are also members of their own group, in which they give each other the support, emotional and practical, that being attached to a member of the force demands. They fill in the missing details, as much as they can, about in the nightmare work their men perform every day but withhold from their wives, adhering to a dysfunctional code of manly stoicism. And their wives, adhering to a womanly code of silent unquestioning support, suffer the more for having to imagine what they do not know and passing their days in fearful waiting. The women are friends but the sense is that this friendship is born of their husbands’ connection and their understanding of the roles they are meant to play. They rarely bond except as wives or former wives of members.

The men tell few details of their own daily lives, which are regularly filled with death. Most of these deaths are themselves mundane-the toll of highway accidents is horrific, and ‘domestics’ are the most likely source of shooting injuries and deaths. Depression and PTSD come on suddenly and hold on tenaciously. They are caused by the pile up of these mundane terrors and triggered by what often seems insignificant. And every male victim, like every victim of crime or accident or mental illness, leaves many other victims.

Endicott, an acclaimed and much published author, tells a story based on her own long experience as the wife of a member. Much of the protagonist’s story is woven from her own memory fragments, and this is captured in her shifting perspective, sometimes directly present and observing, sometimes speaking from the future as she, correctly or not, remembers. I’ve always enjoyed her work, it’s attention to both the most ordinary of things and lives, and also to larger questions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, love and death. Her characters are not always likeable or admirable—Julia is at times annoyingly peevish, dependent and prone to bouts of overwrought self-disdain, as she calls it, while Hardy tends toward a remarkable self-centredness—but they’re very human, at once ordinary and heroic.

This was exactly the kind of well-written, insightful novel I've come to expect from Marina Endicott. Reading it, I felt completely immersed in the town of Medway - its charm and its dark side. As someone who has lived most of my life in rural Canada and worked at a small-town newspaper, I felt the truth behind the main character's observations and the events that unfolded.

Knowing that this story is rooted in Endicott's own experience in Mayerthorpe, Alberta (and knowing about the tragedy that later unfolded there), gives the story an additional unsettling pull. I'll definitely be recommending it.

The Observer reads as chatty and candid — as though the main character, Julia, is conversationally recalling the highlights of a past experience — and that is fitting as this is a novel based on Marina Endicott’s own early years as the spouse of an RCMP member in 1990s rural Alberta. As Julia puts her career as a playwright on hold in order to join her partner, Hardy, on his first posting, she’ll find herself not only distanced from the long-term residents of this tight-knit community but also increasingly distanced from Hardy as he struggles to deal with his policing duties (from domestic disputes to countless fatal car accidents) on the understaffed force. Salvation comes for Julia in the form of an intermittent job with the local newspaper, The Observer, and as she gets out into the community, she makes friends with both locals and other RCMP spouses, growing to understand what pressures the stoic Hardy is truly suffering with. Set in a time before a Mountie would have felt comfortable asking for mental health supports, this novel admirably exposes the stress and sacrifices historically expected of RCMP members, and their families. The chatty style makes this seem like a breezy read but Endicott uses it to creeping and devastating effect; this is true and tragic life exposed and I loved the whole thing.