Category Archives: Canadian Literature

December 24, 2014 · 8:36 pm

All True Not a Lie In It: In which I do not brag about reading historical fiction (that’s a lie)

[Here’s something true: if you’re not me, you’re looking at this picture and you’re thinking, wait, is that Fess Parker playing Daniel Boone? If you are me, you’re thinking, Daniel Boone, now that name sounds faintly familiar, but who names their kid Fess?]

Here is something else true (and its not much of a brag, but it’s a bit of a brag): I’ve read a lot of Canadian historical fiction. I’m being loose with what counts as Canadian here. And with historical. And fictional (think Pierre Berton). I’m not reporting my historical fiction habit for the congratulations and admiration (though I’d take both), but more to say that when I read a new novel in the genre, I’ve got a lot to compare it with. Like if you’re a wine drinker (looking at you C & R) you can describe the subtle differences and tasting notes because you pay attention and you’ve had a lot of it. Really what I’m saying is that whatever you do or consume a lot of, you get to know the qualities and characteristics that make one thing great and another just okay. And that if maybe you didn’t consume so much of that one thing, you’d be more likely to think the thing that was ‘just okay’ was really great. Like without so many reference points for comparison you’d confuse vinegar for wine, right? I guess I’m just saying that historical fiction is my go-to wine, it’s the thing I’ll read because I can be certain I’ll enjoy (at the very least) its genre conventions and I can tell when my usual table wine has been swapped for a serious vintage or for something cheap and watery.

In the case of Alix Hawley’s All True Not a Lie In It I’d say we’ve got something of a ‘pretty good ‘ wearing the label of ‘really fucking awesome’. Take the title – great, right? If I were going to go back and re-write my thesis (an act of revisionist history in itself), I’d probably use the novel’s title to unpack the spectrum of history telling and the conventions of historiographic metafiction. I’d use the novel’s use of the present tense (which is actually obnoxious to read for 400 pages) to talk about the ways the genre blurs the boundary of issues and questions of the past with those of the present, making ‘present’ in its tense choice concerns about treaties and land rights, colonialism and the ‘post’-colonial and heredity and belonging. Except, well, the novel makes these concerns present, but without doing much more than showing them to the reader. To say ‘ah, I think maybe white settlers stole indigenous land and murdered people’ and ‘umm maybe Daniel Boone was a complicated man’ -so what? Why, after walking around with him on seemingly interminable journeys from one part of Pennsylvania to another part of Kentucky, does his story resonate, beyond being an interesting tale about a ‘American frontiersmen’?

So sure, the novel has some compelling plot bits and some decent descriptions of setting. It has the key features of the genre that I love – a playing about with truth and fiction, omission and imagination, opportunity for reimagining and awakening. Yet, with its historical star for a protagonist, he’s flat in the narrative (perhaps a relationship here? because he was ‘real’ there was less need to make the imaginative leap to make him a fully realized character on the page?). I didn’t believe his pain and didn’t much care for his survival. (I did appreciate that we see the mechanics of how his accidental heroism is constructed and glorified into a story of the nation and rugged American pioneering).  And the very key element I look for in great historical fiction – the resonance to the current moment – is made only tenuously through tense (or tense!ously) and without any of the potential punch it could deliver.

All this to say: go! read it if you’re interested in Daniel Boone’s biography. Read it if you have a passing interest in Little House on the Prairie (it reminded me a lot of the series, actually). Read it for the joy of the genre. But read it knowing you’re drinking a $12 bottle that’s being sold for $25.

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December 20, 2014 · 7:19 pm

Emancipation Day: Race, Passing and Why Read Historical Fiction

I grew up in a small town. Think 800 people. Think rural Ontario. Think white. For a couple of elections, we were the only riding to vote for a Reform Party (the precursor to the Conservative party) candidate in all of Ontario. So imagine the Stop Racism! campaign in my elementary school: when all of my class, including the two black kids in the school (siblings), staged an assembly to declare to the rest of the school that we were stopping! racism! And I really did feel like we were – united – putting an end to the scourge. Whatever it was. Wherever it might be. Around the same time (or perhaps only in my memory) I read Underground to Canada, a YA novel about the underground railroad and Canada’s role in ‘saving’ and ‘rescuing’ American slaves (imagine my dismay in reading The Book of Negroes to be reminded again that the sainted image of Canada as a safehaven might be a tiny bit (just a smidge) exaggerated). All this to say I grew up with an idea that not only was racism somewhere else (America), but race was somewhere else (I certainly didn’t have one).

As I’ve grown this taken-for-grantedness about my race – and race in general – has, of course, changed with the introduction of different experiences, people (and critical theory). And has changed (most perhaps) in the reading of fiction. For instance, in a fourth year seminar (with the great M O’C) I read Nella Larsen’s Passing which shares plot threads and thematic questions with Wayne Grady’s Emancipation Day: what is the difference between race enacted and race inherited? race felt and race imposed? I hadn’t considered the set of questions in this way before reading Larsen, it hadn’t occurred to me that race might be something you could put on yourself, or have put on you by others. Or that being recognized as white – and being seamlessly comfortable being recognized this way – afforded all sorts of privileges, recognized and invisible.

All that said, I’m not sure I’d recommend Grady’s Emancipation Day. While there’s a central conflict – what will happen when Jack(son)’s new white wife discovers that his family is black? – and some interesting detours in discussions of race and music, I wasn’t, on the whole, all that invested in Jack and his journey (perhaps because Jack is an unlikeable character, or maybe because I’m an unsympathetic reader). Though maybe Emancipation Day is worth a read as historical fiction – set at the end of WWII in Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada), Windsor and Detroit – its imagining of post-war era gender politics and economies is rich, so too, its explicit engagement with the ways Canadian (Windsor) race relations differ and don’t from American (Detroit). Or maybe not. (Maybe instead you should read one of Lawrence Hill’s other amazing books, Any Known Blood, which asks – and tries to answer – many of these same questions in a (for me) more engaging or nuanced ways. Just saying.)

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November 3, 2014 · 3:21 pm

Punishment: Retribution and Reconciliation

This past week the Canadian press – and Canadian communities – have been asking a lot of questions about crime and punishment. With the very public revelation of Jian Ghomeshi’s criminal behaviour, the public conversation includes calls for criminal prosecution all the while enacting a sort of collective trial, sentencing and punishment in the press and social media. While listening and reading stories of his violent and repugnant behaviour, I was reading Linden MacIntyre’s new book, Punishment.

Punishment is not about sexual and physical violence. Nor is it about the CBC or the media (though MacIntyre long worked for the CBC). Instead it’s a book about a former prison officer, Tony Breau, who gets involved – is made to be involved – in a small town murder investigation. It’s also about the consequences of telling the truth: the violence, threats and shame that attach to those who speak out (you can see, then, why it might be a book that resonated with what I was reading and hearing in the cultural conversation around violence against women). So it’s a novel that takes on the ‘big’ crime of murder, but it’s also a novel that explores the slippery boundary between what is considered criminal, and the ‘crimes’ outside the criminal code: betrayal in friendship, adultery and the wilful withholding of truth from others.

Punishment offers readers as nuanced and complicated exploration of guilt, punishment, retribution and reconciliation. Early on in the novel it explodes the idea that all those in prison are criminals and that all those on the ‘outside’ are innocent; the novel does not belabour this point, it simply makes the observation that many crimes go unrecognized and unpunished and that many criminals are in prison for complicated reasons. Much of the novel is concerned with how and if Tony can reconcile his past with his present, his moral position with an unjust society, his care for others with the certainty that the truth can be painful. (In a quintessentially Canadian literature way) this struggle is worked out in the small and isolated community, where the big bad criminals come from the United States and the city, where outsiders are suspect and when guilt is both the prelude an apology and an unavoidable state of being.

What the novel does incredibly well (and with a sort of bravery, I think) is to ask readers to consider – just consider – separating the crime from the criminal; the behaviour from the person. It can be hard to empathize. It can be hard to consider empathy. When we are betrayed by lovers or friends, when a singular crime is perpetrated against us or when we are wronged by systemic and entrenched systems, the impulse is not to empathy. The push is to retribution, to punishment. As if in the punishment itself we might understand the crime or feel differently about the criminal. I am not making a novel argument in suggesting that there might be a difference between retributive and restorative justice.  Rather, I’m making an argument that this novel shows – with great care and nuance – how these forms of justice differ and what is at stake for us as individuals and as communities in taking one approach or the other.

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October 30, 2014 · 8:24 pm

Mister Sandman: When No One Else Is Looking

I’m headed to a dinner party tonight where I will, almost certainly, have to talk about Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman. S., who lent me the book, will be there, and so I’ll return it and have to say whether I liked it or not, what I thought of the writing. What do you do when a book recommended is one you just don’t like? I feel like I ought to apologize for not taking the same pleasure she did, or reexamine my own taste for its deficiencies, or pretend to have liked it more than I did.

Alas. I thought Mister Sandman was just okay. In short: It’s a book about the disparity between ‘true’ selves and what we reveal to those we love. The secrets we keep from our partners and children; the secrets we keep from ourselves. The reverberations of these secrets are detected by the changeling child of the family, Joan, who, because she is ‘brain damaged’ and assumed to be mute, absorbs (and records) the secrets she hears, only to echo them back in (magical) and transformative ways. No question the novel is inventive in form and in some language. There’s a playfulness and humour that underlines the ‘heavy’ themes of betrayal, self-awareness, sexual awakening and identity.

And yet I didn’t care much about what happened to any of the characters or if they were ‘found out’ for who they really are/want to be. This lack of care wasn’t because I didn’t appreciate their specificity, rather I found that the opacity they present to the world (and in many instances, to themselves) made it a challenge – if not an impossibility – to connect or empathize with any of them myself. Moreover the characters – while undergoing significant ‘change’ in plot and experience – do little to evolve in their temperament or approach to one another. It’s as though the significant changes happen at them and around them, rather that to them in a way that might transform, complicate or enrich them (and so the reader’s understanding of who they are and their connection to us).

The particular book aside, as I read more books recommended, or review copies, I’m beginning to think this blog – or my thoughts – ought to move past the ‘did I like it’ / ‘didn’t I like it’ binary (thus sparing me the discomfort of having to publicly declare whether I liked a book recommended, when I could, instead, just talk about images of grass and angels). It’s tiresome to write (and so I suspect tiresome to read) the reasons why I liked or didn’t like a book (maybe). What to do instead? Close reading of passages? Exploration of themes? Discuss.

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