Category Archives: Canadian Literature

April 25, 2013 · 8:52 pm

The Purchase: Unlikeable Characters

In my biased view, Linda Spalding had an exciting plot to work with: Quaker settlers head to Virginia to set up house and farm and have to reconcile their beliefs with slavery, greed and “American” individualism. All the trappings of a terrific plot: cold winters, butter churns, trading pigs with neighbours and miserable wives. And gosh darn’it but those settlers make the most of their tired (but well loved by me) plot line: they struggle, they suffer loses, they compromise, they prosper. Oh sure, the compromises are meant to be fraught and compelling: how does the Quaker father make sense of his sons enlisting? or buying slaves? or his daughter engaging in sex out of wedlock?

But because We Don’t Care At All About the Characters it’s hard to care about these apparent moral/plot crises. We’re meant – I think – to be horrified that Mary continues to enslave Bett when she’s bound, by faith and promise, to free her. But I don’t know anything about Mary – what does she like? why does she fall in love with Wiley? what makes her happy? sad? – and so her decision is just as believable to me as if she had carried Bett to freedom herself (which, by the way, she ends up doing – with no apparent change in character to make sense of this radical shift). Instead the novel makes heavy handed declarations like “this (moment) (bird on the window) (breakfast of porridge) changed everything for Mary” and then suddenly she’s off doing something entirely different. I can’t even say something “out of character” because I don’t know anything about her character. And then! The father, Daniel, I only know to do the exact, predictable thing his character is set up to do. So if the characters aren’t entirely opaque they are entirely wooden. Blerg.

I may be belabouring my argument now, but let me just say again that the potential of this plot – and there is potential! – is all but lost in the mire of terrible character development. Too bad.

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April 23, 2013 · 12:57 am

Death in Summer and The Love of a Good Woman: I Expected More

So two books and one post ought to tell you something (and yes, the something is that I’m a little behind on posting). 

First up – The Love of a Good Woman

So you know my deal with short stories and my deal with Alice Munro (hate the former, love the latter, the complexity of this hate-love keeps me up at night). So why did I find this collection to be… less than satisfying? I don’t know. I think maybe I had some weird and misplaced expectation that these stories were going to link together more – I kept waiting for a bit more resonance. Of course the usual Munro things stayed true: her genius, the capacity for a single sentence to capture an entire character/setting, the thrust of a verb… so no complaints with the stories themselves, more a complaint with the stories as a collection. I just wasn’t thrilled.

Cue – Death in Summer

I’ve been meaning to read more of William Trevor since discovering him with “Love and Summer” (like discovering “Madonna” as a pop star – I must have been living under a rock not to know about him). So on a recent used-book-store adventure with S. I bought a couple of his books. I was giddy with the prospect of more genius (maybe my problem with both writers is that I expect perfection and am crushed when I read only really, really, utterly, brilliant, genius?). The book delivers knockout descriptions, but is lacking in plot coherence. It sets itself up as a murder mystery, but unfolds as a Sunday tea in the heat of summer: lazy, oppressive and plodding. That reads a bit cruel, and I’d take it back, except I didn’t like the book (gasp! did I say it? yes, I did) – I love Trevor, think he’s genius, but wasn’t at all captivated by this one. I’ll try the other one I bought and hope for better things. Until then…

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April 19, 2013 · 7:27 pm

Under Budapest: Breathtaking

                             It is such a pleasure to write this post. My former McMaster colleague (I suppose we’re still colleagues? alumni colleagues?) and occasional writers group members Ailsa Kay has published a breathtaking novel that I just loved. It’s something of an odd relief to love it – there’s a bit of nervousness in reading a novel written by someone you know (what if I don’t like it?) – with the only risk now that I won’t do anything close to justice to how great of a read it is (and note that I’m not often one for reviews filled with effusive praise).

The plot is described on the back of the novel as a “jigsaw puzzle” and I suppose that’s an apt comparison (with a caveat): the early chapters offer apparently discrete plot pieces with separate settings and characters. As each subsequent chapter unfolds, however, the reader finds edges to the pieces that echo earlier chapters in a way that confirms the pieces do in fact fit together. For instance, I was amazed how the repetition of a single word “veritable” proved enough of a narrative cue to pull this reader back to the earlier narrator and connect the two pieces. The caveat is that I think the puzzle comparison makes too much of discrete parts. The only real gap is from the first chapter to the second and from there on this reader felt quite sure that the unfolding plot was crafted in such a way that the pieces were not “scattered” so much as deliberately and thoughtfully placed – one following the other. I suppose, though, there is some of the triumph that comes from assembling a puzzle – in watching as the whole picture takes shape and in seeing the connections. 

What is most remarkable is the way Kay achieves this pulling together. The seamless (and truly remarkable) ease in which the third person limited narration moves allows the reader to know more than any one character and so to see the whole in a way the characters themselves cannot. For this reader I felt an agonizing frustration as I wanted to share – to yell! – at the characters what I knew so that they might avoid making mistakes and poor choices.

This care I felt for the characters is somewhat surprising given that they are, for the most part, not overly sympathetic. Tibor, in particular is just. so. sad. His anxiety combined with his fumbling attempts at coming across as self-assured are cringe-worthy. His mother (name escapes me at the moment) oh wait – Agi/Agnes – is superbly drawn with her different modes of being in Toronto/Budapest as clearly marked as the change in her name. 

Oh! Speaking of Toronto/Budapest: what a novel for setting! Think back to *The Night Circus* and the brilliance of setting there – this book sees setting (as the title suggests) as integral to the plot and characters, and is a character in and of itself. Budapest has a personality just as much as Tibor or Agi (and to a lesser extent Toronto) that makes the unfolding history/mystery all the more compelling as it reads like a biography rather than simple description. 

**Some spoilers**

While I could gush all day I ought to register my few complaints – I was not totally sold on the betrayal of Agi by Gusomethingsomething for Zsofia. Gu***’s explanation of his sudden devotion reads a bit thin, and I might have rather the affair been an ongoing thing rather than something that emerged in the moment of the revolution. Though as I write this I see some symbolic merit to this origin point, I still feel the treachery to be too sudden to effect the kind of torment Gu*** goes on to feel.

**spoilers done**

That said I cannot – I can’t! – recommend this book with any more urgency or conviction. Go read it! The combination of genius plotting, masterful character development and an utterly rich setting makes it impossible to put down and a true delight to read. 

(note: I’m predicting a bestseller – so read it now while it’s still hip to be in the know about the hottest new read) 

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March 1, 2013 · 9:18 pm

Indian Horse: Hockey Heroes

I’d heard of *Indian Horse* from CBC’s “Canada Reads” competition and from a few fellow readers who told me it was about residential schools and the crimes committed there. So I picked up the novel prepared to encounter a narrative of abuse and its reverberations across generations. 

I suppose that feeling of preparation is indicative of my arrogance – my sense that ‘oh yes, i’ve heard about residential schools, I have leftist politics, I’ve been educated’ – as if a textbook could do justice (ha! what a telling phrase) to the complex narratives and somehow prepare (which is to say, neutralize or assume enough knowledge that I won’t be surprised or learn anything) for the reading.

The novel demanded a different kind of reading. From the opening pages of Saul in a rehab facility, this reader can predict the trajectory of the plot. And, to some degree, the plot follows a line from early childhood spent with his family in the bush, to residential school and the abuse perpetrated there, to the beginning of a life after the school, to an examination of the permanent effects of such abuse, to the investigation of what it might mean to heal. Where the narrative offers deviation from this prepared plot is in its exploration of the pervasiveness of abuse and the exploding of an idea of abuse as a crime committed by one person against one other.

 It would be a mistake, I think, to read this novel as “simply” an exploration of the abuse of residential schools. Instead it is a painful and unrelenting journey through the layers of abuse that make up the nation. Saul’s life and his telling of it explores how single individuals can commit crimes – in the case of the priests and nuns at the school or the white children at hockey games who hurl racist slurs – but also the abuse and crimes of the nation.

As hockey comes to stand for Canada – the game is claimed by other white people and is imagined by Saul as “their game” – Saul’s attempt to make a place for himself – a glorious, gifted player, truly exceptional – and his subsequent rejection and expulsion from the game presents a powerful and depressing metaphor for the nation as a space or idea that cannot allow compromise or inclusion, that rather derives its existence from exclusivity and rigorous defense of its borders even while it needs the demonized other for success. That Saul is the gifted hero and cannot make his way in this bigoted white world – in the metaphorical Canada – compounds and amplifies the injustice because if the white population can see no worth in the hero than what expectations should the ordinary carry? 

The passages of hockey games – and of Saul’s talent – are breathtaking.  The casual descriptions of sexual, physical and emotional abuse are devastating. Saul’s voice – his open admission that the story is his attempt to give voice to his history – demands to be heard; in his demand for an audience that listens to his story he makes each reader consider his/her complicity, but also to what extent the story will be finished when the book closes.

*spoiler alert*

And I suppose this is my only complaint – that the narrative ends with redemption. With Saul’s spiritual healing, with his reconciliation with the game of hockey (and so with Canada) and his decision to continue to engage with those who have, and would like to, continue to dismiss him on the basis of his origins. It’s an odd complaint, but I felt the ending let this reader off to easily. As if to say I need not consider my role in this history any further because Saul – and those like him – have the sole responsibility themselves to heal. And I think that’s its own kind of injustice.

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