Sibling rivalry, plus one

BROTHERLY love may be a beautiful ideal, but a curiously difficult one to achieve. Rivalry between siblings, particularly boys, is a pattern so ancient, it can be found in the Bible all the way back to the tragic tale of Cain and Abel and the more cheerfully resolved story of Esau and Jacob.

The fierce rivalry between Arthur and Jake Dunn, brothers growing up on a farm in the remote countryside of Northern Ontario, is one of several themes in Mary Lawson’s second novel, “The Other Side of the Bridge.” Author of the critically acclaimed bestselling novel “Crow Lake,” Lawson herself grew up in a Canadian farming community. So it’s not surprising that in this new novel she writes vividly of the joys and hardships of rural life, the harsh but sublime beauties of the natural world, as well as the threads connecting one generation to the next and the depredations wrought by the flow of man-made history.

Of the two sons born to farmer Henry Dunn and his wife, Mary, the older lad, Arthur -- steady, honest, reliable, but taciturn -- is his father’s right-hand man around the farm. Mary, however, much prefers the younger one, Jake, born five years later, a frail baby needing her constant care who soon grows into a vigorous, very handsome little boy: quick-witted, charming and good at his schoolwork. The problem with Jake is that he is sneaky, conniving, cold-hearted and fiercely competitive.

Indeed, the novel opens with a chilling scene in which little Jake challenges Arthur to a game he’s invented involving the two of them throwing knives at each other. Although he has no interest in physically exerting himself on the family farm, young Jake is particularly adept at this kind of activity -- more so than Arthur, despite the latter’s five-year lead on him. And as adolescence approaches, Jake is also much better at getting girls.

Whereas Arthur proceeds through life peacefully, thoughtfully, steadily, Jake is a born gambler. Coupled with his competitiveness, this makes him a terrible trial to his older brother, who feels the only way of earning his mother’s love is to function as protector to her precious golden boy. Arthur does what he can, but understandably resents the whole situation:

“Bet you. His favorite phrase since the day he was born. He turned everything -- everything -- into a competition. It seemed so pointless, since he was better than Arthur at everything anyway. But he just had to keep proving it.”

And naturally, Arthur has to cast only a shy, sideways glance at a girl for Jake to suddenly take notice of her and pounce on her.

The Dunn brothers arrive at young manhood just around the time of World War II. But there’s a second story, intimately entwined with theirs, that unfolds from the viewpoint of a teenage boy growing up in the late 1950s, sharp-eyed Ian, the only child of the town’s trusty, devoted general practitioner, Dr. Christopherson. Ian’s mother, unhappy with their isolated rural life, left her husband and son for the lad’s high school geography teacher and a new life in the big city. Ian has never gotten over the hurt and cannot forgive her desertion.

Although everyone seems to expect Ian to follow in his father’s footsteps and become their town’s next doctor, Ian longs for ... freedom? The wider world? He’s not sure exactly what, but that it is something different. In his summer vacations and spare time, Ian likes working with Arthur Dunn on his farm, not least because he has a terrific crush on Arthur’s wife, Laura.

And so it comes about that Ian is on hand to see what happens when Arthur’s long-absent brother, Jake, got up in spiffy city-slicker duds and driving a plush Cadillac, returns to the farm for a visit of uncomfortably indefinite duration.

The two story lines -- Arthur’s and Ian’s -- draw perilously closer, a combustible convergence with life-altering consequences.

Lawson clearly knows and loves her terrain -- the countryside, its people and their way of life -- and she tells this story without sentimentalizing anything about it. Although the female characters are portrayed in much less detail and depth than the male characters, this is not a serious drawback, since the story is told primarily from the viewpoints of Arthur and of Ian. There’s an occasional awkwardness in pacing as the narrative shifts back and forth between the two time periods, but by the time you’ve come to the end of this deftly restrained yet intensely dramatic book, you’ll have been taken out of yourself into a world most of us have never known.

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Merle Rubin is a critic whose work has appeared in several publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.