The beauty and joy in an ordinary life

Meet the Larkins: Rosie, Scotty, Christina, Claudio.

As portrayed by Roselle Camilleri, formerly “a plump village girl with stumpy fingers and unmanageable hair,” the family’s experiences illustrate the absolute unknowability of life.

Life comes in “peaks and troughs,” Rose remarks, it’s “governed by surprise.” As “The Marriage of Rose Camilleri” opens, life has grown incomprehensible. Rose has reached mid-forties, her “memory is galloping,” and she’s peering at her long marriage with curiosity, like it’s an “old movie reel.”

“Your cooking is one thing I’ll miss,” her ailing husband recently told her, and she’s conscious of a pending trip to Vancouver — where her husband has “sinful” plans for managing illness on his own terms. In “five days,” Rose knows, “all of it will come to an end.”

Confounded, sad, and afraid, she’s contemplative: “But life is like that: it’s a flicker, an instant, the ignition of a match.”

As the novel unfolds, Toronto’s Robert

Hough depicts the family on its fateful trip west while surveying a few decades of Rose’s singular life. Hough’s Rose is a terrific storyteller, a natural. Wry and thoughtful, she’s especially gifted at animating quotidian family upsets and setbacks.

Rose begins in Gozo, part of the Maltese archipelago, where she resided with her parents in a dry and dusty town (pop. 187) too small to have a name. Restless and eager for life’s path to reveal itself to her — but also “[r]abid … with biological imperative,” which meant pursuing “slim pickings” who “smelled of goat” — Rose’s revelation occurred when a locust swarm decimated local greenery.

She was soon lonely and dislocated in southern Ontario, baking delectables at a cafe. Although in an orange and yellow polyester uniform Rose felt “unfeminine, and undesirable, and unlovable,” her fortunes were about to change. She caught the eye of a printer named Scotty, a former Cape Bretoner with a checkered past.

A pregnancy followed a pregnancy scare; and a dating arrangement became a hasty marriage proposal, a hastier marriage, and a second child.

“So began one of the nicest times of my life,” plain-spoken Rose recalls.

The pleasures of an ordinary story of family come with the telling. Though Rose’s observations aren’t exactly profound and her up-and-down experiences of love, parenting and loss are known by millions, her relating of them is an unmitigated pleasure. That’s because she’s so agreeable as she navigates the obstacle course she knows as life.

“My Two-Faced Luck,” the fifth novel by Salt Spring Islander is out now.