Tag Archives: canadian literature

December 26, 2013 · 4:38 am

Road Ends: Charming

For some reason I forgot about Mary Lawson. I read *Crow Lake* and *The Other Side of the Bridge* and liked them both, but then forgot who she was. And so this summer when I moved to Guelph, ON and saw ads at the (charming) local bookstore that Mary Lawson was coming to read I sort of shrugged. The ads billed her as “local” and I somehow didn’t connect that “local” in this instance could have been replaced with “international bestseller.” So imagine my delight in hearing her read and putting the two together: ah! Mary Lawson + Crow Lake! And then my enthusiasm to pick up Roads End – expecting (and receiving!) a Christmas read of the same kind of great character and plot of her earlier work.

What makes a great character? I’ve argued elsewhere for a character that makes believable – if difficult – decisions, characters who develop, change, regress, over the course of the narrative. In this instance its the development *after* the narrated plot that I’d highlight as an indicator of a successful character. This novel takes the narrative point of view of three characters — Megan (third person), Tom (third) and Edward (first) — and lets the reader alternately inhabit their perspective on past/present events. Overlapping chronologies require the reader to piece together plot through the disparate narration in a manner that rewards attentiveness and lends a certain (perhaps unnecessary?) suspense. In effect the decision to narrate in this way allows the reader to get “close” to all three and imagine their conflicts and aspirations continue after the book ends. For me – and perhaps an indication of my proximity to the character more than anything else – I was most interested in Megan’s journey and her ultimate decision. Since finishing the book a few days ago I’ve been lamenting that I don’t know – for sure – what happens to her next. And hoping that in Lawson’s next book (as in this one!) characters from past novels will reappear to provide a soothing “it works out fine for her” kind of answer.*

The plot itself doesn’t demand grandeur, instead it takes quotidian drama, adds the tragedy unique to small towns — the suicide/affair/birth/illness/injury/crime that everyone both knows about and is affected by — and allows characters the space and time to fully respond to the events. The book is worth reading if only for the way it lets the reader argue against the character’s decisions, seeing in all the ways their lives could be easier, more satisfying, more… something.

And it’s there – in the wanting what’s best for the characters – that I come to my minor complaint with an otherwise terrific read. It’s that it read to me like Lawson couldn’t quite leave her characters as hurt and as bewildered as they deserved to be. Which is not to say the changes they experience are unjustified or rushed – they’re not – but rather that the “roads end” for the characters, while not quite headed to the sunset, is decidedly smoother than I found believable or fair. Am I sadist? Maybe (count me in with Munro there), but I expect that for all the effort spent making the characters utterly believable, fallible, frustrating and *human* they might have done better to end with a little more bleak – and not the hope of the (literal) spring on which the novel concludes.

*My caveat: So I loved *Gone With the Wind* as a teenager. I loved the sex and the brutality of the ending. (I tried to re-read it in my early 20s and discovered I couldn’t make it through the racism). So, of course, I devoured the sequel (authored by Alexandra Ripley) *Scarlett* as I wanted – desperately – for the characters to live on and to find love, reconciliation, etc, blah blah, love. But, of course, the novel was terrible. It had to be terrible. Readers didn’t deserve and shouldn’t get “answers” or “solutions” to what-happens-to-characters-after-the-last-page. That should be the work of the novel itself. If readers can’t predict, or at least imagine, what the next decisions will be then perhaps the novel and its characters weren’t very good in the first place. Which is not to say I don’t want to see Lawson’s characters reappear, just that I know my desire to see them again is a selfish one borne of liking them, and not a literary one.

Leave a comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction

Tagged as , , , ,

November 25, 2013 · 8:40 pm

Lost Girls: Ice Cold

Rating: If you’re so inclined, or you shouldn’t

I love thrillers and police procedurals. So much. Law and Order is a staple in my life – feeling anxious? watch the predictable unfolding of 44 minutes. With Andrew Pyper’s *Lost Girls” (see a few posts ago for his Demonologist) I wanted to be swept up and riveted by the book. The back cover made me hopeful. The early chapters even more so. But, like the Demonologist, the premise and the opening salvo left so much to be desired.

In reading the acknowledgements (aside: I *love* the acknowledgements in novels. I wish they were longer – see Dave Eggers’ acknowledgements in AHWOSG for a good model – just kidding, but not really) I noticed that Pyper had previously published sections of the novel in journals. I suspect (because the book makes me a detective?) that the few chapters at the beginning – briefly returned later in the novel – focused on the young kids at the lake was a brilliantly written and published short story. But the rest of the novel that tries to take this exceptional opening premise and extend it is just… not good. 

The suspense isn’t suspenseful. I don’t care about our protagonist. I don’t believe his fear. Even if I did, I don’t care whether he’s scared. The unbelievable elements – ghost woman at the lake who steals children – is introduced as a ghost story within the narrative, not as something compelling or real in her own right. As a result the story-within-a-story that lacks the thematic depth that you might expect from a story-within-a-story and instead serves a simple plot purpose: to introduce the complicating “ghostly” element of the murder mystery. It’s a weak way to introduce this element and that the rest of the plot is premised on this weak element means that well… the rest of the plot is similarly shoddy.

So no, I won’t read anymore Andrew Pyper. Even if all the Canadian presses keep telling me he’s all that. I get it. He’s got some great components, and I’m guessing he’s a brilliant short story writer. But going 0-2 makes me less willing to climb on board again.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Worst Books

Tagged as , , , ,

November 7, 2013 · 2:36 pm

The Demonologist: Plot comes first

I’m generally wary of self-described “literary” texts. It feels like a bit of a pre-emptive strike or (to mix analogies) like arrogance masking insecurity to claim “this is a literary thriller.” All the same, this is getting close to a literary thriller (note I said *close*).

There’s certainly the pacing and plot of a thriller: Kidnappings, women in fashionable suits, private jets and fancy hotel rooms, hitmen and demons Not surprising the acknowledgements of the book point out that this book is being turned into a movie. And this is one of my complaints with the plot: it reads like it wants – desperately – to be turned into a movie. Forget spending time examining the thoughts and beliefs of any one character – or how they might change! – we! have! plot! to! consider! It is a gripping plot, though. I made it through the book in two days and wanted, very much, to be reading it. 

I do have other complaints though – are these outweighed by the compelling plot? hard to say. I was okay with the demons and the parallels with the Da Vinci Code (mostly because this was much better written). I was less okay with the various explanations for why our narrator was beset with demons. The novel suggests that demons are all around us, and those suffering from depression may be more likely or more able to “see” these demons. Okay. I’ll accept. But then the novel trots out – almost on a chapterly basis – different hypotheses for why the demons have decided to wreak havoc with David’s life. Not that I’m not interested in the theories, but that each one was presented as “the” reason, so I’d try to absorb that reason and make it fit with the bizzare plot elements only to have “the” reason change a chapter later. It made character motivation and action hard to believe and it made subsequent “reasons” for the demons feel like they were created to suit the particular plot point.

That is to say, the plot was so overpowering that everything else – including reasons for plot points – had to be subsumed to the whim of plot. 

So there’s no real character development – David doesn’t come to understand his father, brother, lover, wife, daughter or self any differently than he did before, now he just accepts demons exist because they showed up and ate his face (not really) – no sense of setting (they drive across the continent and it reads like a movie script describing them in a car rather than the setting having any meaningful relationship to the story). No real thematic or moral question, except perhaps “what would you do for a demon?”

So yeah. “Literary”  if you take literary in the sense that the writing wasn’t terrible – there were some okay descriptions and useful figurative language. And for all those complaints, still undeniably readable. LIke gobble it up readable. I might even read Pyper’s other – more famous – “Lost Girls” if only to see if the idea of “literary thriller” exists or if my bias against the genre outweighs any strength in the writing,

Leave a comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Mystery

Tagged as , , , ,

October 1, 2013 · 1:24 pm

The Orenda: Ambivalent

The Orenda* is well plotted historical fiction with reasonably complex characters, but its thematic questions are muddy. The plot, narrated from the three, alternating first person perspectives of Bird (the warrior), Snow Falls (the damsel) and Christophe (the Jesuit) has a classic development. In a three act structure the plot introduces our three characters and their relationships, sets the conflicts and sees the climax and resolution. The structure appropriately mirrors what Boyden has setup as a climactic moment in indigenous-settler relationships – that is, the historical period narrated is imagined as a “tipping point,” to borrow from another Canadian writer. The “resolution” bleeds into the reader present with a concluding paragraph from the chorus of the novel who reminds the reader that while these events took place in the historical past, the relationships/resonances continue.

The chorus also makes the argument that what appears from the present as obvious mistakes on the part of Wendat, were not at all obvious at the time. I suppose this is where my ambivalence emerges. If the narrative wants to ask questions about historic responsibility for the death of indigenous peoples and cultures – and indeed the book offers this up as a sort of genocide – and if it wants to ask these questions in a complicated way, it aims to do so through narrative point of view. By showing three different perspectives on events the text weaves form and content to emphasize not only multiple perspectives in historiography, but multiple perspectives in “present” events: that even while, or maybe especially while, an event unfolds the outcome – (the reader’s present) is not at all known or certain. That individuals act in the immediate moment in ways that best align with their personal and cultural values and beliefs, and that to hold any one person accountable for not foreseeing the future is unfair.

As unfair, perhaps, as not assigning *some* accountability within the text for what can only be read as unjust values and beliefs. If the text holds that personal values and beliefs dictate behaviour, the text also introduces as sort of moral relativism that excuses behaviours and beliefs that cause harm and stem from arrogance. In particular I’m referencing the text’s position on the Jesuit priest Christophe. While we can see that his behaviour is guided by his beliefs, the text passes no judgement – to a fault, I think – on these behaviours/beliefs, instead suggesting that Christophe acts in the only way he possibly could based on his belief structure. Historical blame gets diffused into this sort of relativism and happenstance. Except that the Wendat people Christophe lives with change *their* behaviours and beliefs – so change is possible! – in response to living with him for years. Why then, can we we not see some change in Christophe? 

The unwillingness to adopt or present a *position* on the history can be seen again in the descriptions of torture. The Haudenosaunee and Wendat routinely torture one another; in a few lines the Jesuits compare this torture to torture occurring as part of the Spanish Inquisition, as a way, I suspect, of suggesting that neither is more “savage” than ther other, just practicing their particular beliefs in ways appropriate to their respective (cultures). This point is one Boyden raises in interviews, too, I suspect as a way of diffusing criticism that the narrative presents the indigenous as “savage torturers.” Except by equating one form of torture with another the narrative repeats this kind of moral equivalency and so, moral ambivalence. I’m dissatisfied with this equivalence/ambivalence because it seems to me from the perspective of the present – and from the present reading into this past – the events that led us to today are not (at all) open to relativism and ambivalence. Responsibility ought to be assigned in the past, and responsibility ought to be acknowledged/taken in the present.

That said, I’m excited and curious to hear how the book gets taken up by the reading public. With all the “buzz” the book is getting I’m confident it will be on many reading and prize lists and it will most certainly stimulate lively conversation – an outcome the book well deserves. I look forward to hearing what you think and to talking about the book and the history-present it describes.

3 Comments

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , ,