Category Archives: Fiction

January 24, 2013 · 8:49 pm

The Birth House: Caricatures

     A note of caution if you’re looking for images to accompany a blog post on Ami McKay’s “The Birth House”: do not type “home birth” into google images and eat your lunch at the same time. Particularly if you are, as I am, a 28 year old woman who spends altogether too much time thinking about babies already. I’m suddenly much less keen to be pregnant. Does it have something to do with the looks of agony of labouring face? Yes. Yes it does.

You might have thought the novel would be the thing to turn me off – mothers and children dying in childbirth – but in this particular account of maternity the women who choose (or are able to choose) to have home births appear to have remarkably comfortable times delivering their babies. This remarkable ease contributes to my dissatisfaction with this novel. The midwife – Dora Rare – is characterized in the most uncomplicated of ways as the healing, caring, gentle, kind, understanding and empathetic midwife. The doctor – the strawman for the evils of modern medicine – finds himself (unfairly, I think) characterized as cruel, insensitive, cold, indifferent to the needs and desires of women.

Both characters are naught be caricatures of their professions. It is a novel that pits Midwife against Doctor; Women/Feminism against Medicine/Patriarchy; Women against Men. While the novel does well in exploring the challenges women encounter in deciding and declaring their desires for their bodies, the challenges in controlling their own bodies – both in the early 20th century and now (as good historical fiction always offers parallels to the present) – the strength of the critique of Science, Reason and Patriarchy is blunted by the overly crude representation of the Doctor and of Dora. 

Had either Dora or the Doctor some degree of complexity – something surprising about their reactions, an unanticipated decision or line of dialogue – I might have found the narrative more compelling, but as it was the story unfolded much as I expected and only as it could, ending in a near gag-induced “and they lived happily ever after-esque” conclusion. 

One of the most interesting questions the novel *could* have raised (but didn’t because it was so wedded to a staunch binary between Science and Women’s Traditional Healing Knowledge) is the space for overlap or collaboration or cooperation between science and traditional healing. No doubt the approach of the doctor – to dismiss women as hysterics – suggests that Science can only ever be a bane to women’s control of their bodies. And this representation did little to invite speculation about the opportunities for “medicine” to involve both institutionalized and individualized practices; however, I couldn’t help but place the historical narrative in the contemporary context and wish (oh how I wished) that McKay had done something to suggest the resonances in the present. For a quick search of “birth” will reveal a heated debate – one charged with judgements and dismissals as either “dangerous,” or “hegemonic” – around where and how a woman should give birth. To forget the contemporary resonance and to reduce the complexity of this narrative to one of Right and Wrong, Good Woman and Bad Guy doesn’t do justice to the questions of the reader and the potentials of the topic.

A pity, as I think there’s much room in this plot to offer something complicated and current. Too bad. 

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January 21, 2013 · 9:04 pm

The Lock Artist: It’s a metaphor!

                    I’m not actually sure that *The Lock Artist* is young adult fiction, but the protagonist is a young adult (okay, so clearly not genre defining) and the approach to plot and metaphor – accessible – suggests the genre. 

Digression on genre:

What makes a book young adult fiction? I’m sure there are theoretical responses and I could do some Research (as I’ve been trained to do) or recall what I learned in my Children’s Lit course (ha! a laughable, terribly run disaster of a course), but I’d rather think about the question based on what I’ve read of the genre. And I’ll think about it with some other questions: what makes a novel *not* young adult? A maturity of theme? (and yet we call *The Diary of Anne Frank* young adult NONfiction) The age of the protagonist? (No, says *The Life of Pi*, *The Kite Runner* and *Room* to name some recent examples). So perhaps then it’s the themes? The coming-of-age? Identity formation? And perhaps, too, the pitch of the narration: something not quite as dense and demanding, something shorter on irony and cynicism, something more approachable and welcoming? I welcome responses to this question – and I’ll keep thinking about it.

Back to The Lock Artist:

Given  my tentative claims to the genre specifications of YAF, I’ll say that The Lock Artist fits in there. The protagonist is mute and so there’s a surprising pleasure in reading his first person account because the reader is (explicitly) called into the unique role of listener/audience that our protagonist is otherwise without in his life. We are the *only* people privy to his thoughts because no one else is capable of hearing them. 

The metaphor of “locked up” words plays out in the plot of the novel as our young protagonist learns how to be a “boxman” – the safe cracker in a burglary. The story begins with our narrator in prison for burglary so we *know* how the story is going to end – back in prison – but as his version of events unfolds I found myself willing the ending to be different from what I already knew it to be. That is to say, I found the narrator utterly compelling as a narrative voice and as a person: I genuinely wanted things to work out well for him.

The plot has three foci: how he became a boxman, the relationship with his one true love and how he came to be mute. Of the three the relationship story is by far the most compelling. The boxman stuff is *interesting,* (I tried to pick my gym locker!) but it reads as a procedural crime drama rather than as a story of character change. The trauma/mute thread is slightly more compelling, but suffers from over-hype. For so much of the novel the reader is led to believe that this is The Most Traumatic Thing to Happen to Anyone Ever. And while the event *is* awful – and very well told – it can’t help but to fall short of expectations, if only because it’s been projected as the climax-to-end-all-climaxes. And as it turns out this reader would much rather the climax have been something to do with the relationship with Amelia. And it sort of is. So maybe that’s the problem; a divided climax?

In any case, I’d recommend this one if you’re keen to consider things like genre, if you’d like to learn about the life of a boxman, or if you’re looking for something suspenseful but not all that demanding. Oh and I just really liked – like wanted to befriend – our protagonist. So there’s something there, too, for character lovers.

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January 14, 2013 · 2:08 am

Canada: Plodding

I expect Richard Ford thought he was writing some substantial when he penned *Canada,* and if the weight of the book is to be the sole judge of success, it is indeed of weighty matter. Alas, we readers take more into account than the weight of the book (and perhaps this will be of increasing truth as the ebook encroaches on our habitual Sunday effort of hoisting books above our heads while sprawled out on the couch with the concomitant cognitive dissonance where we think the book incredible if only to justify the sheer physical effort of reading it) and find this book curiously short on the vital elements we might expect from a Pulitzer prize winner such as a compelling plot, developed characters or something approaching a complex or compelling thematic question. 

Instead we’re left with 300 odd trying pages about the parent’s bank robbery (no spoiler, it’s all revealed on the first page). In fact, I’d rather it was a spoiler because then it might feel like the 300 pages were leading up to something, rather than, as they are, a painful effort to cloak plodding plot in weighty short sentences that herald the end of another short chapter: “I felt it was so.” “I never saw him again.” “I wanted it that way.” etc. etc. that all culminate in what we knew was coming the whole time and had only hoped would be done already.

The second part – the murder early alluded to (also on the first page) – might be expected to be more interesting were it not for the improbability of the events, the lack of interest I had for the protagonist and the total inconsequence of what transpires: it appears that even Dell doesn’t care what takes place, so much so that the novel – in another demonstration of heavy-handed abrupt chapter ending – moves off to the “epilogue” third chapter that (I suppose) is meant to deal the blow of “we all have ordinary lives” or perhaps “there are stand-out moments in our lives, but they happen early on and are often not of our doing.” So that, in the end, the moments that make our lives consequential – at least for Dell (that’s another problem! the book doesn’t in any way speak to a “human” condition or create a character believable enough for me to think it could happen, more a well physically described, but poorly realized character)  – are not our own, but happen *to* us. 

This book happened to me. And I’m hopeful that nothing of consequence will come from it. 

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January 14, 2013 · 2:07 am

The Impostor Bride: Well-Intentioned

I think Nancy Richler wanted to write a *good* book. *The Impostor Bride* dances around being good, but lacks rhythm and grace and so slouches awkwardly around the dance-floor, making it awkward for everyone reading, but the effort at goodness is altogether too sincere to turn away.  

The plot offers originality – a war-bride shows up in Canada, is scorned by her betrothed because he sees “something” amiss in her, she marries his brother, gives birth, abandons the child and runs away. We learn over the course of the novel the practical reasons for her abandonment (the titular “impostor”), and are meant, I think, to also contemplate the psychic and affective reasons she might also leave. The book makes a sincere attempt to point the finger at the (oft suggested “unspeakable”) atrocities of the Holocaust as being “too much” for the young bride, but without entering these events – or even shadows of them – into the plot *and* without offering Lily’s narrative point of view (even a third person limited would have gone a long way) these “unspeakable” reasons are left to the reader’s speculation and are not, as Richler might have hoped, compelling enough to justify the abandonment of a child. Indeed, our first person protagonist – the abandoned daughter – rightly points out that many of her peers have parents of this generation of “unspeakable” events who did not leave (even if they do exhibit erratic behaviour), so why did *her* mother leave?

For this reason the plot events that supposedly explain the abandonment do not hold water. Nor does the eventual explanation of how members of her family knew, and didn’t tell her. Nor, too, the hastily and inexpertly constructed reunion scene (not a spoiler, I think, because the progression of the plot is such that it can *only* resolve in a reunion). A note on the reunion (as it particularly irked me as it’s the climax and the apparent justification for so much weaving in and out of time – we’re meant to get *here*): not only were the scenes rushed, especially when contrasted with the earlier scenes that explore in great length everything from depressed smoking to school yard bickering, but the explanation offered by Lily which is in effect the explanation of “I have no explanation,” would be fine, indeed, it would be complicated and profound, if we had Ruth *do* something with the explanation, think something about it, reflect on it, reject it, respond, react. Instead we witness the reunion, hear the paltry account of why she left, find no explanation of the mysterious rocks, hear nothing of Ruth’s reaction or thoughts. 

A plot climax without an attendant climax in character development or theme. And a frustrating plot climax at that because it doesn’t bring a satisfactory explanation (maybe because there isn’t one? not that there isn’t in the world, but because Richler hadn’t imagined what that could be?).

And so I wanted to like *The Impostor Bride* – it had all the elements of Can Lit that I adore: historical fiction, strong female protagonists, World War Two, family drama. And yet, it’s not a book I’d ever take on a second date: far too awkward for the effort.

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