Abstract

Lockburn Steady is the story of a fictional farming community in Central Ontario, told through the perspectives of four dissimilar figures. Ramsay Lockburn, the novel's central figure, returns to Garland after an absence of nearly six years, weighed by the news that he has promised his family's abandoned farm to a team of investors hoping to establish a profitable recreational ranch. His very presence threatens the fragile community and aggravates the tensions between Garland's various inhabitants, including Jimmy Loeber, once a teenage farmhand on the prospering Lockburn estate, now an apprentice in a failing junkyard business. Like Ramsay's young niece and nephew, also narrators of the novel, Jimmy fosters private reasons for wanting to keep the farm away from Ramsay. Rivalling interests intensify in Garland until an impulsive act of arson, and its resulting tragedy, violently reunite the community and restore in Ramsay a forgotten sense of belonging and responsibility. Each chapter of Lockburn Steady is told in the third person but from the alternating perspective of one of four characters. This technique of rotating subjects is often employed by writers as universal as William Faulkner ( As I Lay Daying is one example) and as precise and devastating as Kent Haruf, whose novel Plainsong closely informs this text. By revealing Garland through these contrasting figures, this novel builds a rural community from the perspective of both the inexperienced child and the insecure adult, and attempts to explore the possibility of reconciliation between these divergent, often adversarial figures