READING
CANADA
READS 2008
PREVIEW
Steven:
The 2008 Canada Reads list is
remarkably strong, and displays a
wide range of subjects and styles,
from a fantastical retelling of the
Biblical story of Noah and the flood
to a series of naturalistic stories
set in Europe before, during, and
after the Second World War, to a
dystopian vision of Toronto in the
near future. There's an historical
novel set in Jasper at the turn of
the 20th century, and a
hockey novel. The five selections
collectively put the boots to the
notion of the "traditional
Canadian novel (or short story),"
exploding it outward to encompass a
variety of different forms, styles,
and approaches.
The
books under consideration this year,
in alphabetical order by author,
are: Not
Wanted on the Voyage, by Timothy
Findley. Defended by Zaib Shaikh,
from CBC
's Little
Mosque on the Prairie; From
the Fifteenth District, by Mavis
Gallant. Defended by Lisa Moore,
author of the Giller-shortlisted
novel Alligator;
Brown
Girl in the Ring, by Nalo
Hopkinson. Defended by Jemeni,
hip-hop poet and culture commentator;
King
Leary, by Paul Quarrington.
Defended by Dave Bidini, author and
Canadian rock god; Icefields,
by Thomas Wharton. Defended by Steve
MacLean, retired Canadian astronaut.
Not
Wanted on the Voyage, by Timothy
Findley
Steven:
Unlike most Canadians with a
university degree in English, I
managed to escape reading this book
in school, which created kind of a
hole in my literary background, but
not so much that I felt I needed to
go back and plug it. Which is a
shame, because Findley's novel is
really strong, and not at all what I
expected.
Far
from being a straight retelling of
the Biblical flood story, Not
Wanted on the Voyage is a
delirious phantasmagoria featuring
talking cats and lemurs, an
ill-fated unicorn, singing sheep,
and even the presence of Yaweh
himself.
It's probably the presentation of
Yaweh in the book that gets
religious groups most riled. Findley
anthropomorphizes the deity and
shows him doing all sorts of
typically human things: eating,
sleeping, getting depressed. He's
also not terribly nice, given as he
is to petulant fits of solipsistic
self-regard. But then, neither is
the tyrannical patriarch Noah
presented in anything resembling a
sympathetic light. Yaweh's
handpicked survivor is vicious and
condescending towards his wife and
his daughter-in-law's sister, whose
death is one of the most brutal
scenes in the novel.
In other words, this is a very dark book. It's violent and frightening, but it's also infused
with scenes of startling vividness
and a kind of linguistic play that
is rare in Canadian fiction these
days. Its fantastical mode belies
its serious intent and, in a world
increasingly rent by the
intolerances and hatreds of
fundamentalist religion, its central
message is one that needs to be
heard.
Alex: I
didn't escape reading this book in
school. It caught me in a first-year
introduction to literature course
back in 1986. I even went
to hear Findley that year when he
appeared on campus - reading from The
Butterfly Plague - and got him
to sign my paperback. Which I seem
to have lost.
I found
I liked it better this time around. I've never
thought Findley a
strong enough stylist to be in the
front rank of Canadian authors,
especially considering his
dreary later efforts. But re-reading
Not
Wanted on the Voyage reminded me
of what a powerful dramatic
imagination he had. There are books
I've read in the last couple of
months that I've already completely
forgotten, but scenes from this one
have stayed with me for over twenty
years. It has such a lush visual
texture to it. Just think of the
wonderful costumes. And the
animal stuff is very well handled
too.
It's an
interesting coincidence that one of
the other authors on this program,
Paul Quarrington, wrote the
introduction to the new Penguin
Modern Classics edition. And he
makes a reference to Findley
characterizing the book as an
anti-fascist statement. I agree with
you Steve that today it's more
likely to be read as
anti-fundamentalist. Which I suppose
can be just as limiting, but also
makes it seem all the more relevant.
From the Fifteenth District,
by Mavis Gallant
Alex:
As part of a discussion in Shut
Up He Explained of the best
Canadian short story collections,
John Metcalf has this to say about
Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro:
"There is little doubt that
they are the commanding writers in
Canadian short fiction - and
therefore in Canadian literature;
the debate amongst writers concerns
which is better than the other.
Alice Munro's career has been more
visible but many readers and writers
think that Mavis Gallant's rather
cold eye and stringent intellect
will age better."
I
think that "rather cold eye and
stringent intellect" are dead
on. And they help explain why I
don't find Gallant a very congenial
author. In the Munro/Gallant debate
I side with Munro. I respect
Gallant, but that cold eye, the way
she seems to despise so many of her
characters, puncturing their
selfishness and snobbery in
disdainful, ironic prose (a
bit of the New Yorker house
style?), gets to me. Especially when
the stories themselves aren't
exactly page-turners. And, as with
so many literary authors, the
dialogue can be downright dreadful.
Maybe
I'm casting a bit of a cold eye here
myself. This is a good book. But I
have to say that while Gallant may
be the most commanding writer in all
of Canadian literature, she's not a
personal favourite.
Steven: It's interesting to
me that Metcalf equates Canadian
short fiction with Canadian
literature. I've always felt that
Canadian culture excels in two
specific areas: comedy and short
fiction. And in the latter category,
the heavyweights are undoubtedly
Munro and Gallant.
It's always struck me as unfortunate
that when a conversation turns to
Canadian short fiction, the default
setting is to assume the subject is
Alice Munro. To me, this gives
Gallant short shrift (which is not
to say that there's anything wrong
with Munro; to the contrary, there's
a hell of a lot that’s right with
her). I agree that Gallant can come
across as colder and more
intellectual, but she also has an
extraordinarily subtle aestheticism
(which may be part of what attracts
Lisa Moore to her writing) and an
acerbic sense of humour. Her
characterization of Wilkinson, for
example, in "The
Remission" (my favourite story
from the collection): "If he
sounded like a foreigner's
Englishman, like a man in a British
joke, it was probably because he had
said so many British-sounding lines
in films set on the Riviera."
No, the stories aren't page turners,
but they are carefully wrought, with
a distinctly ironic bent, and all
richly reward rereadings. I'm loath
to choose sides in the Munro/Gallant
debate, but every time I read
Gallant, I'm reminded of what an
extraordinarily gifted writer she
is. From
the Fifteenth District isn't an
easy book to like, but the stories
are brilliantly conceived and
executed, and on a technical level
it's the best of the five books on
this list.
Brown
Girl in the Ring, by Nalo
Hopkinson
Steven: The first time I read Brown
Girl in the Ring, back in 1998,
it surprised me, because I don't
read a lot of speculative fiction
and most of what I do read I don't
enjoy. But Hopkinson's dystopian
vision of a near-future Toronto in
which the rich have fled to the
suburbs and barricaded the poor, the
sick, and the deranged in the
burnt-out downtown core, where they
occasionally serve as unwitting
organ donors for ailing members of
the suburban well-to-do, seemed
eerily prescient during the heyday
of the Mike Harris Conservatives.
Rereading the book in 2008, it still
holds up, in part precisely because
the legacy of the 1990s in Toronto -
amalgamation and the disastrous
downloading of social services in
the name of Harris's so-called
"Common Sense Revolution"
- has had the effect of widening the
gap between the rich and the poor in
the city, and has helped to create a
new underclass of working poor.
In part, though, Hopkinson's novel
feels so fresh because it manages to
successfully marry tropes from
traditional speculative and horror
fiction genres with elements of
Caribbean mythology. Soucouyants and
the mythical Jab-Jab haunt these
pages, as does the evil magic of
obeah, and its positive healing
counterpart as practised by Mami
Gros-Jeanne, the grandmother of
Ti-Jeanne, the book's protagonist.
By layering traditional Caribbean
folklore onto a not-entirely
implausible dystopian tale of urban
decay and social unrest, Hopkinson
has created something entirely new:
a vibrant, fast-paced, engaging
hybrid novel that vigorously defies
characterization. It's not as
self-consciously literary as some of
the other books on this list, but it
may well be the most enjoyable.
Alex:
Wow. We really parted ways on this
one.
My
first impression: It certainly had its work cut
out to overcome both a truly
terrible title (I'm still not sure
what it means) and a cover design
that simply screams YA. As
far as the premise goes, I was
looking forward to an updated,
Canadianized, Escape From New
York. And I guess I got it.
Unfortunately, even for a work of
speculative fiction it didn't seem
as plausible as Carpenter's
"Manhattan-as-prison-colony"
idea. Obviously imagining Toronto's
downtown as an ethnic ghetto is a
metaphor for white flight, but what
triggered it? A dispute over native
land claims? And really, if you were
Toronto's top dog and could have any
office space you wanted in the city,
would you take up residence in the
CN tower's observation deck?
Some
of these are little things, and
maybe they're only rookie mistakes.
What I found most hard to take about
this book was all of the violence,
which manages to be both horrific
and cartoonish. I don't want to
sound like a prude, but an author
had better have a damn good reason
for making me read a description of
a drugged woman being skinned alive, or an
old lady being hammered to death.
Here it just seems gratuitous. And
the dialect drove me crazy. I never
got into the rhythm of it, and was
still grinding my teeth over lines
like "I ain't know what I go
do" right to the end.
I
did like the voodoo angle,
especially the skeleton guy with the
top hat. It was fun watching him
kick ass. And I'm sure some people,
I think young people mostly, would
enjoy this book. But there's no
denying this is low-concept stuff,
and the writing isn't that good,
again in an amateurish, obvious kind
of way. When a door shuts behind
someone "with a hollow thud,
like a coffin lid slamming
down" do you think they're in
trouble? Damn right they are. Ugh.
King
Leary, by Paul Quarrington
Alex: Paul
Quarrington caught a break with the
timing of this program. King
Leary is discussed on national
radio as the same time as his
latest, The Ravine, is
hitting the stores. Or is it really
just a coincidence . . . ?
It
is certainly a very funny
book. Peppy (and almost
toothless) octogenarian Percival
"King" Leary is one of the
most original and alive comic
characters in Canadian fiction. His
voice drives the narrative like an
Old School hardstep, knocking CanLit
conventions flying into the boards
as it powers forward. (Sorry, I
won't do that any more.) Like all
great comic writers, Quarrington
knows that timing is everything when
it comes to jokes, and the
hellzapoppin pace here rarely misses
a beat. He also has the best
dialogue on the list. Indeed he is
the only author on this year's
program who even attempts to sustain
a scene of any length with dialogue.
And he does it with speech that is
natural, individualized, and
rhythmic. Being a musician and a
screenwriter probably
helps.
Alongside
Leary are a cast of unforgettable
supporting characters, like the
newspaperman Blue Hermann, the
gormless Clifford, and most notably
the four monks of the Bowmanville
Reformatory, whose supernatural
hockey skills appear to be divinely
inspired. I'm not sure there's
anything profound to any of it, but
Percival is a complex figure, even
perhaps a little grotesque after a
lifetime of self-mythologizing and
denial that we come to understand
the full extent of before he does
(if he ever does). The naive
narrator is a difficult trick, but
fascinating when, as here, it's done
right.
In brief: I
really liked this book. And I'm not
even a hockey fan!
Steven: Okay,
I admit that "virtually
unreadable" is a bit strong,
but King
Leary is definitely the book I
enjoyed least out of the five.
I agree that it has a couple of cute
one-liners (e.g. "Clay
Clinton said, with uncommon
understatement, 'Shit.'"), but
these rarely rise above the level of
sitcom-style humour. And as for the
dialogue, I found it to be
frequently stilted, wooden, and
clichéd:
"I'm game," croaks old
Blue. "I'll go on a pub
crawl."
"Hey," says Duane
Killebrew, "tomorrow’s my day
off. I got all night."
"Weary as I am,"
says Claire, "I must look after
my charges."
"This is
excellent!" Iain screams.
"Mobilization!"
"I am agèd and infirm!"
says I. "I shouldn’t be kept
out past eight-thirty or nine. Here
it is almost eleven."
"Oh, King mine,"
says Iain, "what good is your
health if you don’t live?"
Iain presses his lips to my wrinkled
brow.
"You are drunk."
At the very
least, an octogenarian hockey
player would have used the
contraction "you're"
instead of the more formal "you
are." And let's not even get
into that accent on "agèd."
(I realize he fancies himself the
King, but come on!) Elmore Leonard
this ain't.
As for the "hellzapoppin
pace," I found that sections of
this novel positively dragged,
and a number of the jokes were just
too clever by half. Yes, there is
the gormless Clifford, who Leary
always describes as "the
gormless Clifford." This didn't
strike me as substantial enough to
warrant a running gag, and began to
stick in my craw after not too long.
And the entire narration smacks of a
kind of down-home folksiness that
feels like nothing so much as a
warmed-over Southern Ontarian carbon
copy of Stephen King.
As for it being a great Canadian
hockey novel, in my opinion it
doesn’t hold a candle to either The
Good Body by Bill Gaston, or Salvage
King, Ya! by Mark Anthony Jarman,
both of which are more engaging,
more complex, and, not incidentally,
funnier.
Icefields,
by Thomas Wharton
Steven: Of all the books on
this list, Icefields was the one that crept up on me. It's a piece of
historical fiction set in the rugged
Canadian north, which lands it
squarely in the arena of books I
generally run screaming from. The
tale of a British doctor, Edward
Byrne, who falls down a crevasse in
a glacier on an expedition in 1898
and experiences a vision that will
haunt him for the next twenty-five
years, the novel sounded like one
gigantic snore and I admit that I
approached it with a great deal of
trepidation.
Imagine my surprise, then, to
discover that it is in fact a
compelling story about geography,
spirituality, and the relationship
of the land to its inhabitants.
A large part of the book's appeal
resides in Wharton's descriptive
powers, which are rich and lush,
verging on the poetic:
A
wide crater-like depression on the
glacier slowly fills with water. By
early evening it has become a lake,
perfectly transparent, filled with
the purest water on earth. There are
no fish in its depths, no sedges or
grasses along the shore. No geese,
no shore birds gather here at dusk.
Each night, as the meltwater
lessens, the lake subsides. In the
morning it has vanished again.
As the glacier flows forward, its
topography will inevitably change,
and the lake will vanish. For that
reason, its ephemerality, I see no
reason to give this body of water a
name. It will remain the ideal lake.
Wharton effortlessly conveys the
grandeur of the icefields north of
Jasper, Alberta, and their
simultaneous beauty and danger. This
is a novel that engages with its
geography in a way that is never
boring; it is easy to get lost in
the beauty and suppleness of Wharton's
prose. It is also utterly
appropriate to be reading this novel
during one of the most punishing
Toronto Februarys in recent memory,
since Icefields
is a bracingly cold novel, one of
the coldest I've ever read.
Early on in the novel, as if to
underscore the frigid, desolate
nature of its story, Wharton has
Byrne quote the opening line from
"The Eve of St. Agnes":
"St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter
chill it was!" Recalling the
frosty opening of Keats's poem,
Byrne thinks, "That damn
poetry."
Indeed.
Alex: I know what you
mean about the arena of books one
generally runs screaming from. Let's
face it, this is the CanLit
title on the list. I had a deep
foreboding as soon as I saw the
epigraph from Michael Ondaatje. The
worst thing to ever happen to
Canadian literature, in terms of his
pernicious influence? The argument can
certainly be made. And there's no
denying this is a book that was
written very much under that
influence.
And yet . . .
It's very good. I think what makes
the difference is his writing about
a place he grew up in. You have the
sense that this is a real place, not
just in terms of the natural setting
and geography but the history as
well. The people and their stories
are all a part of it. And so it's
not generic CanLit but a book with
its own identity. Even the other
texts he brings into the fold take
on a special meaning reflective of
the unique spiritual geography
Wharton has created, and aren't just
for show.
The language walks a very fine line.
The spare, evocative, descriptive
stuff could easily cross over into
the land of vague, but it very
rarely does. And in the end it won
me over as well. Though when you put
it up against King Leary . .
.
Alex: Now that we've quickly
gone through the list, it's time to
make our own picks. Who do we think
is going to win? Who do we think
should win?
My guess as to how it will shake out
goes like this: I think the first
books to go will be the high and
lowbrow choices. That means the
Gallant and the Hopkinson. This is,
after all, a popularity contest, and
I think those two books appeal to
the narrowest readerships.
After that I see it as wide open.
Findley is an icon.
Wharton may have the most
classically "Canadian" book on the
list (no offence, this time). But King
Leary is also filled with
Canadian touchstones, like Vimy
Ridge and of course the history of
our national game. And it's
funny.
Even though there's been said to be
a bias against comic novels on this
program in the past (something that
blew up when Cocksure was
voted off) I'll go out on a limb and
say King Leary is going to
buck the trend and win. Is it the best book on the
list? Well, I thought it was at
least the liveliest. In any event, I think it's
the book most people would enjoy the
most. And maybe make them want to
keep reading.
So King Leary will win, and
somewhere under a silver moon the
monks will smile on their circular
skating rink, while Steven W.
Beattie howls in agony.
Steven: I do think that
Gallant will be the first to go.
Hers is the least approachable book,
and I can't see, for example, a fan
of King
Leary or Brown Girl in the Ring digging it. Hopkinson will probably go next,
because it's (clearly) not to
everyone's taste, and it is at its
core a genre novel.
What do I think will prevail? I'd
lay even money on Icefields,
simply because there's precedent for
choosing the regional or
"traditional" Canadian
novel (Rockbound,
A Complicated Kindness). And
you're right, Alex, comic novels
don't tend to come off well. In
addition to Cocksure,
Barney's Version was voted out in the early stages. Of course,
this may just indicate a bias
against Mordecai Richler, who's to
say?
As for my personal choice, I think
it's a toss-up. If the criterion
is technical mastery, then without
question the brass ring should be
bestowed upon From
the Fifteenth District. However,
if the criterion is which book did I
most enjoy, I'd have to say, sorry,
Alex: Brown
Girl in the Ring.
Up next: The Wrap-Up!
