Tag Archives: book club

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 13, 2014 · 1:56 pm

The Rehearsal: Unravelling (form and content) (real from artifice) (my memory)

The whole point of this blog is to not forget what I’ve read. Listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour on the way to Thanksgiving, one of the commentators described his memory of books – impressions, phrases, characters – and that he didn’t ever remember plots because plots didn’t matter to him. I’d like to believe that my own absent recollection of plot is due to a similar disinterest (or perhaps lack of active interest), but I do enjoy a good plot when I’m reading it, so it seems more likely the case the I just don’t have a memory that supports linear recollection (ask my friends and they’ll tell you the frequency with which I have to be reminded that we’ve done X or Y together – thank god (not really) for FB and its timeline to tell me where and what I’ve been doing). Do plots matter? Do our recollections (or lack of) impact our ability to retrospectively appreciate a book? If all I can tell you about *The Corrections* (pre-blog era read) is that I loved it and that there’s a scene with a frozen fish down someone’s pants, I’m not much of a reader, or am I? Maybe it’s my saturation with novels – that at some point I hit critical mass and my memory couldn’t be bothered accommodating another. Let’s go with that.

All this to say I neglected to write this review right away. I waited ten days and in so doing started another novel (and did the usual daily things of work and play) and in the in between have lost the thread of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal. Let’s ascribe some of the blame to the book itself. Seems fair. From what I remember there are two interwoven plots both preoccupied with sex, moral maturation and above all what we act for others and what is true to ourselves. Or more, that it’s impossible to separate “who we really are” from the face we put on for others. That much as we’d like – now and in our formative years – to believe we have an inner self and the self we project to the world around us, we are all entirely artifice and surface. Peel away the layers of acting and acted-upon and you’ll just get to further obfuscation. So the one thread is a young boy, enrolled in an avant garde acting school where the teachers deliberately break down the accepted walls between theatre and life (staging all sorts of instructional interventions wherein the students themselves can’t be sure what is acted and what is real). The other thread has a young girl sorting out her personal and sexual identity amid a sex scandal (her sister has had an affair with the high school teacher) – her story becomes the plot for a play developed by the young boy’s acting class.

Catton achieves this well executed thematic punch (you’re only ever artifice!) through brilliant interplay of content and form. As the two disparate narratives pull together this reader found it increasingly impossible to determine what was “on stage” and acted from what was “real” (that is, the main thread of the plot). In fact, this novel – as I recall – has one of the best demonstrations of the power of the novel’s form to exaggerate or illuminate the novel’s thematic content. I harp on about form and content in historical fiction all the time, but in this instance it was the ability of narrative point of view, short sentences, absent chapter divisions, quirky tense shifts and misplaced modifiers to make this reader uncertain about the nature of the chapter: was this real? was it part of the play? did it matter?

So read this one if you like formal play and a single note theme (I admit to being sufficiently saturated with the all-is-artifice theme by the end). Or if you’re into avant garde theatre. Or if you want to help me remember what it was about – feel free to send me a plot summary. I promise to read it and then promptly forget.

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September 2, 2014 · 9:44 pm

The Bone Clocks: Extraordinary

I know I rave about books all the time. I’ve been called out more than once by N. for overselling a book that’s only really good. Not the case with David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. This novel is genius. Extraordinary in so many ways: in its approach to genre, to plot, to character.In its hyper-imaginative renderings of the near future world and of the past.  It’s a book that asks about mortality, familial-responsibility, ecological-responsibility, identity and grief. It’s a book that gives the finger to genre tick-boxes and plots made-for-movies. It revels in the brilliant beauty of its own writing without being showy. It’s exuberant in the possibilities for the novel as a form and for readers as enthusiastic consumers of imagined worlds and people. Continue reading →

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June 16, 2014 · 2:35 pm

A Land More Kind Than Home: Acknowleding Faith

Im an atheist. Telling you this will reduce your trust in me, but it should also help you understand my reaction to Wiley Cash’s (excellent) first novel A Land More Kind Than Home. I loved the book. Found it moving, brilliantly paced and narrated, complex in its themes and written with an even, understated beauty. I loved the book, too, because the book directly engages with the consequences of belief and ideas of fate and free choice.

As an atheist I really ought to consider the actions and predispositions that come attached to belief in God more than I do. Atheism is a belief structure (if only a negative belief structure) that warrants a thoughtful engagement with justice, choice and morality just as living within a religious framework does. But I don’t think about these questions within the context of faith (or its absence) very often, and when I do, it’s usually because I’ve been prompted by a book (yet further evidence of the importance of reading). And so I loved A Land More Kind Than Home for both its complex presentation of these questions and for prompting me to reframe the questions within the context of my own life: what do I hold as dogmatic? when/how do I follow/resist authority? Under what circumstances will I take a principled stand?

Enough circling: what’s the book actually about? Set in the American South, the novel follows the Hall family before and after the oldest son, Christopher/Stump is killed during a revival meeting at the local (Baptist?) Church. More complex than following just the family, the interwoven narrative voices of the town sheriff and a local spinster (crone?!) bring forward the ways in which faith and fate impact those within and outside the Church itself. In some ways a mystery, the novel slowly unfolds what properly took place in the Church and who might be held to account for the crimes (a mild complaint, but this “mystery” element wasn’t necessary from my point of view and added little complexity so much as frustration with just wanting to know what had happened). It then does (really remarkable) work in expanding the scope of time and place around this central plot line by weaving in histories of the families and town in ways that add depth to both the characters, but more importantly to the central conflict/crime. As the novel unfolds and these lives and their histories are explored, the death of Christopher/Stump comes to resonate with whole new sets of questions (how are crimes of fathers inherited? is it possible to change our nature?) in a way that lets the reader circle back to the instigating plot moment with new intensity and feeling.

Finally it is a novel about what we do and do not say or speak. Christopher/Stump is a mute – attention metaphor hunters! – and his brother, Jess, attaches responsibility for Stump’s death because of what he – Jess – didn’t say when he could have. There are other moments where silence/speaking surfaces as significant, but for me it crystallized questions around bystanders and bystanders of faith: what do we allow under the auspices of religion that would not be borne under other circumstances? what do we say and not say under the banner of faith or freedom of expression? Certainly questions in 2014 Canada, with different levels of government trying to legislate what kinds of religious accommodations will be “tolerated” within the framework of multicultural Canada and different community groups and individuals muddling through what can and cannot be “said” with reference to belief structures and practices. And certainly questions worth asking and exploring for ourselves – through reading this book! – to know, regardless of – or rather precisely because of – the belief systems we hold to be most true.

So yes, definitely a book worth reading. A book worth talking about with others, but certainly a book worth talking to yourself about.

(Aside: Also! This book has some of the best “acknowledgements” of any I’ve recently read. I’m a sucker for book acknowledgements – I love a taste and tease of the “real life” behind the author. Wiley Cash writes sincere and sweet – but not saccharine! – acknowledgements and I just loved the apparent genuineness of his appreciation).

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