October 9, 2012
Wild Writers in Waterloo, November 2-3
I’m looking forward to the Wild Writers Literary Festival next month in Waterloo, where I will be running a class called “The Art of Blogging”. Other excellent events are scheduled throughout the festival, featuring readers including Terry Fallis, Merilyn Simonds, Alison Pick, Miranda Hill, Carrie Snyder, Diane Schoemperlen, Helen Humphreys, Alexander Macleod, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Redhill. and Michael Crummey. You can check out the full schedule here. Hope to see you there!
October 7, 2012
On mothering and books
“I don’t really feel I have to analyse my own motives in wanting children… It’s like (to me) asking why you want to write. Who cares? You have to, and that’s that. But the kids, like the writing, belong ultimately to themselves, and not to you. In fact, they’re very like the writing. A gift, given to you by life, undeserved like all grace is undeserved by its very nature, and not to be owned….” -Margaret Laurence in a 1971 letter to Margaret Atwood, from A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers (ed. J.A. Wainwright).
“There was babbling I forgot to do, stimulation they never got, foods I meant to introduce and never got around to introducing. If a black-and-white mobile really increases depth perception and early exposure to classical music increases the likelihood of perfect pitch, I blew it. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.” -Anna Quindlen, “Goodbye, Dr. Spock”
October 4, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads Incendiary by Chris Cleave
We met in the Annex on the last day of September, over scones and triangle sandwiches. Two of us had read the book previously and loved it, one of us so much that she couldn’t bear to read it again and mar the experience. We’d all enjoyed the book, except for one of us who found it ridiculous, but then noted that she’d still got through it easily. It’s that kind of book. One of us read most of it on a plane journey with a toddler. It’s a book you can read with a lot going on in the background.
It wasn’t quite what we’d expected. Primed for a “heartbreaking novel about loss and grief”, we were surprised to be immediately captured by the narrator’s voice, which isn’t the kind of voice that turns up in the Ian McEweny books set in London that we usually read. We were surprised by her biting wit, her fierce intelligence, that although the character is damaged from the outset, she is not a caricature of such things. We appreciated this presentation of a working class character, and how much of the novel is about class after all (and quite up front about this). We disagreed over the upper-class characters, who seemed so unreal that some of us had supposed they weren’t actually meant to be real, in a Fight Club set up, but it seemed that they were. “I don’t know,” said a few of us who knew what she was talking about when it comes to toffs, “they seemed pretty real to me.”
We wondered why the narrator was so detached from the world around her, even before the tragedy that claimed the lives of her husband and son. Though insights into her background provided clues to a sordid world she might be grateful to be detached from. By the end of the novel, she is clearly unhinged (though how unhinged is not altogether apparent– a fair amount of ambiguity is at work here), but we wondered how sane she was when the book started. She displays symptoms of OCD from the beginning, though we note that Chris Cleave doesn’t do this stereotypically.
We love the part where she throws up on Prince William’s shoes. How she is able to look at Prince William with a broken Britain all around him, and think, with sympathy, “You are going to be the king of… this.” She has an understanding of everybody around her, which is what allows her to step into other people’s roles, into men’s hearts and fantasies. We thought that the novel had some weak plot points, but one of us supposed that we were coming to this book with different expectations when we were meant to. That this book was written in a world in which a terrorist attack on London was thought to be a dark fantasy. And, as the story goes that is always attached to Incendiary, the 7/7 attacks were launched the very day this book was published. So now readers approach this book expecting the verisimilitude promised by happenstance, but it was never meant to be a documentary. What happens to London at the end of this novel is more dystopian than anything else, and perhaps we’re not to measure it against the world we know.
In the readers’ notes at the back of the book, Cleave refutes allegations that he wrongly predicted the outcome of terror attacks on London. The chaos and horror portrayed in the novel failed to emerge in reality, but Cleave says that the parallels are not so off. They’re just more subtle: civil liberties curtailed, entrenched racism, a war abroad whose cost is bankrupting British society. To which one of us argues that Cleave is wrong, not because the others are right, but because the “changes” he outlines in his argument have always been part of England. That the terror attacks, if anything, had only brought to the surface what was there all along.
Incendiary was an absorbing, undemanding novel, more interesting than it was good. We note that all of Cleave’s books have been ambitious and well tuned into the zeitgeist, but as literature, they’re lacking. That those of us who loved the book and were encountering it again were probably wise to have abstained from a second read.
October 3, 2012
Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen
There is something distinctly un-Canadian about Sussex Drive, the new satire by Linda Svendsen, a funny, impolitic novel written in the tradition of Joe Klein’s Primary Colours and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. Sussex Drive doesn’t quite probe the depths of the latter, with its confined chronology and a relationship to reality more along the lines of the TV show Spitting Image, but it is certainly entertaining. Sussex Drive examines the 2008 proroguement of Canadian parliament through the relationship between the Prime Minister’s dynamic blonde wife and the exotic, unlikely Governor General who lives with her own family just across the street.
But it’s not exactly that PM’s wife, and that Governor General. Svendsen’s novel takes place in an alternate reality, which we know because Queen Elizabeth has not so recently stepped down from the throne and her son Charles is now King. The Prime Minister of Canada is Greg Leggatt, hard-right politician from the Yukon, and his GG (a legacy from the previous government) is Lise Lavoie, an immigrant from the (fictional) African nation of St. Bertrand, the removal of whose first democratically-elected president Canada had been complicit. She was a renowned charity fundraiser, her first husband a First Nations environmental crusader who’d been mysteriously drowned, and her second-husband a Quebecois movie star (whose lead role in the TV movie Jeune Levesque would come back to haunt him).
Becky Leggatt supports her husband, so much so that she walks around 24 Sussex singing, “Ma-jor-itty!” (to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”). She uses her own covert manipulations to play GG Lise Lavoie right into her hand. However, when she discovers that her eldest daughter has become pregnant after a relationship with a member of her husband’s RCMP security team (a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who’d lost part of his leg), she realizes that her household is not running as smoothly as she might have imagined.
Meanwhile, Lise is on to Becky, but Lise is too distracted by multiple demands on her attention to properly fend her off. Lise is wily, but the Leggatt political machine is even more so. Lise tries to balance the roles of wife, mother, international peace ambassador, head of state, but the routine becomes overwhelming and soon standing up for her principles and the honour of her position is no longer possible. Eventually, she is fearing for her own life as it becomes clear that the increasingly terrifying Canadian Prime Minister will let nothing stand between him and the power he lusts for– not even the members of his own family.
Sussex Drive is a silly novel, but also an important one, an effective satire which asks important questions about our political system, all the while it thoroughly entertains.
October 2, 2012
On awards lists, malarky and various apes
The Giller shortlist was announced yesterday, the nominees for the Governor General’s Awards announced today. Writers Trust last week too, and in general, I’m not so grumpy anymore. I love that The Juliet Stories is getting props. I don’t love that Malarky still isn’t, but I’m confident that it’s a book that will hold its own. Its enthusiastic readers will do its propping for it. I look forward to reading some of the other nominees.
Last week I read the Giller longlisted My Life Among the Apes by Cary Fagan, which I enjoyed a lot. Also was pleased to interview Fagan on 49thShelf, and I hope you’ll check it out because I’m really proud of this one. I’ve also been inspired to create a list of books with monkeys on their cover–a most worthwhile endeavour, I think.
Check out also recent #Fest2Fest interviews with writers Andrew Larsen and Sarah Tsiang.
