Category Archives: Canadian Literature

May 24, 2010 · 2:34 pm

The Book of Negroes: Second time, Still terrific

                            When my supervisor suggested I read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes I was delighted. Delighted because I had already read the book in 2007, and enjoyed it a great deal; and delighted because the narrative aligns nicely with ideas about historical fiction I am working on. So this post begins with the caveat that I already liked the book when I read it, and that I wanted to like it again while I was re-reading it. No surprise: I liked it.

The novel has won spades of awards and garnered Lawrence Hill the kind of critical attention he has deserved for years (his novel Any Known Blood is also terrific and well worth the read). The protagonist, Aminata Diallo, speaks with a captivating voice as she recounts her experiences being captured and kidnapped in Africa, transported to America, enslaved in the indigo fields and later in a domestic setting, escape to New York and then Nova Scotia, a return to Africa (Sierre Leone) and finally a journey to England to work with abolitionists. The epic journey is signaled from the first few pages, so it is not necessarily the particular destinations that strike the reader as remarkable, but rather the tenacity and grace of the speaker.

I did find the first time that the section on Aminata’s return to Africa dragged because there was no close relationship between Aminata and anyone else to follow; and perhaps because unlike the other sequences, time passes very quickly, whole years disappear in pages. In the earlier sections a year or two is given a fairly large chunk of text, allowing the reader to become fully immersed in the setting and relationships. This second time through I did not find the section dragged as much, but it still stood out because of its different narrative scope.

The descriptions are vivid and detailed; the voice is consistent and engrossing; the plot is painful, yet important for bringing to readers a story not often told in popular fiction and for doing so with great effect.

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May 24, 2010 · 2:18 pm

The Bishop’s Man: Good.

     Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man is a good read. Also timely. It came out just after Nova Scotia priest Raymond Lahey was arrested on allegations of sexual abuse. Unfortunate circumstances for a novel to be timely to be sure, but it certainly gave the reading an added resonance and urgency.

The novel’s first person protagonist, Father Duncan, is a “fixer.” He arrives in towns with a “wayward” priest and deals with the situation. To this primary narrative is added the flashbacks of Duncan’s time spent in Central America and his fraught relationship with his own father.

My only complaint comes from these flashbacks. I found the “mystery” element of them (the reader only becomes aware of what exactly happened in Central America and with Duncan’s father in the last pages of the novel) to be distracting. The influence of the protagonist’s past on his present can be mysterious, but in this narrative I felt the past was being held back for the sake of mystery alone (and perhaps to keep the reader engaged), and not to add anything to the complexity of the present. And the big “reveal” was not revelatory at all, which suggests to me that the information about Duncan’s past might better have been told from the start so that the interpenetration of past-present might be experienced by the reader, too.

That said, I did enjoy the sequencing of the novel: past and present blended together – at times, almost indistinguishably such that it took several paragraphs to locate the action “in time.” I also enjoyed the contemporary plot and the relationships among Duncan and the town people. If you enjoy mystery-for-the-sake-of-mystery, and even if you don’t, this novel is worth the read.

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April 26, 2010 · 1:53 pm

The Trade: Dressing up colonialism

                           Fred Stenson’s 2000 novel The Trade was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, which I think is pretty neat considering the novel focuses on the fur trade, and as you might well imagine, the fur trade is not usually a sexy or glamorous topic. I say “usually” because Stenson does include some sexy-glam, but not nearly enough to titillate a Giller jury (though maybe I’m projecting here, as the Giller has recognized a fair number of novelists writing historical fiction: Margaret Atwood, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Anne Michaels, Wayne Johnston, Jane Urquhart, John Bemrose, Elizabeth Hay, and most recently, Joseph Boyden). So maybe my point is less that historical fiction is unpopular and unrecognized, and more that it is a triumph of the Canadian h.f. novelist. In this case Stenson takes what grade seven history turned into a mind-numbingly-dull exercise in remembering that the NorthWest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company merged in 1822, and turns it into a fascinating and engaging narrative of deceit, violence, betrayal and madness. 

My favourite part? When a cat adopts orphaned bunnies only to watch while the bunnies get eaten. A microcosm for the rest of the narrative that sees (somewhat unconvincingly innocent) good-hearted and sincere men turned violent, or become objects of extreme and disproportionate violence. Stenson ultimately lays the blame for the violence of the fur trade at the hands of “colonialism,” but does so by personifying the ruthless economy of colonialism in the HBCo governor. This sleight, whereby colonialism is not blamed for the devastation of the land, the buffalo and indigenous people, but rather the governor is, remains a problem for me.

That said, Stenson does well to draw attention to the complexity and pervasiveness of colonial violence by including a missionary and an artist-in-the-field-reporter (I should say that the epistolary narratives of the missionary and artist are distracting and awkward inclusions at the end of a narrative that has otherwise been third-person omniscient) as a way of gesturing to the ways colonialism, Christianity and archival “truth” (in the form of paintings and written histories) sustain one another.

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April 19, 2010 · 2:13 am

The Man Game: Really about women

      M. introduced me to Lee Henderson’s The Man Game. He read it for fun this summer and it ended up part of his comprehensive exams (Canadian literature). I’m not sure why, but unless my mum recommends it, I have a hard time reading “suggested” books. The problem is a combination of doubt and arrogance: doubt that other people know books; arrogance that I do. In any event, M. was right, and The Man Game is terrific (though it has some difficulties, the least of which is unnecessary length – 500+ pages could have been trimmed to 400).

A work of historical fiction (set in both 1885-87 and 2008) The Man Game is unusual because it does not attempt to cover a sweeping period of history, but rather chooses to focus on a limited period of time and a limited location (downtown Vancouver). At first this limited scope bothered me, but once I stopped waiting for events to speed up and more “time” to be covered, I settled in and enjoyed the vivid descriptions of naked men fighting one another.

The fight descriptions are remarkable for the complexity of the physical movement described. While most of the fight scenes are accompanied by an illustration, these illustrations actually detract more than they add: forcing the reader to try and reconcile the imagined image with the illustration. That said, the fight scenes are long, detailed and rich.

The fight scenes, or perhaps better termed dance scenes, are the physical expressions of “the man game,” the ostensible focus of the novel. The background for the game – invented and choreographed by a woman (Molly Erwagen) – is the fictionalized 1886 Vancouver Riots (perhaps a fictionalization of the 1886 Seattle riots (?) – Vancouver did not have major race-related riots until 1907) and the immigration of Chinese labourers to Vancouver. The novel introduces the idea that white settlers did not like relying on inexpensive Chinese labour, but were in fact, reliant upon it for construction projects and industrialization. It points out that the contemporary Canadian nation continues to function on a two-tiered labour market and that considerable tension continues in the present between non-racialized and racialized Canadians. But while the elements of race, immigration and nation building deserve attention, I found the women in the novel to be the most interesting and complicated element.

There are six noteworthy women in a novel of thirty-two characters listed on “The Cast” page (a page that nods to historiographic metafiction and that I could have done without). The women fall into two groups: the hapless and the fierce. Mrs. Litz (imprisoned in a cabin in the woods by her hero man-game winning husband, Litz), Mrs. Alexander (who, despite the school-marm lecture she gives rioters, remains dependent on her husband for everything – including her opium supply) and the Whore-without-a-face, allow others to dictate the terms of their movement, desires, and satisfactions. Whereas Molly (the inventor of the man-game), Minna (the contemporary female protagonist who directly mirrors Molly, to a degree that the two might be thought of interchangeably) and Peggy (the whore-house madam) routinely use the promise (or threat) of sex and love to manipulate men. Such is the power of female seduction and manipulation in this novel that the men perhaps only ever fight in the “man” game for the purpose of proving their manliness to Molly (or Minna) and in so doing to earn their favour. The fierce women know the power they wield, and do so with exacting precision, and, I think, with little care or remorse.

Molly joins the ranks of Cathy (East of Eden) and Xenia (The Robber Bride) in the category of “manipulative women in fiction.” For while she is strikingly beautiful and devoted to her (paralyzed-not-paralyzed husband), I can’t help but feel that every action she takes, every thought she has, originate from her desperation to being loved and needed. The novel (problematically) suggests this does not make her cruel or selfish, just, a woman. 

Next book? Maybe I’ll take another suggestion. But I’ll whine about the length. I’m tired of propping up 500 pages in the tub. (Wa.)

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