November 10, 2008

Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio

For some reason, I thought I knew LM Montgomery. The spiritedness of her characters probably gave me that impression– their voices spoke so true, it seemed some part of them had to be their creator. And then there were the myriad ways their stories paralleled her own– the lonely childhoods, the dead mothers and lost fathers, a love of books and a desire to write. I’d visited the Green Gables House in Cavendish PEI (and I’m not sure now if I didn’t know then that Montgomery had never lived there). I once even came across the home in Leaskdale Ontario where she’d lived for many years as the Rev. Mrs. Ewan MacDonald– the house was identified by a historical plaque, and an older man who was walking by told us that he knew her. And all I remember of that conversation now is that he mentioned her bad son, Chester.

It never occurred to me that there would be more, as her books always seemed quite enough. I never thought though, in particular, to consider Montgomery within the literary context of her time. Or the social context either– that she was a woman with no parental support who didn’t marry until her late thirties. That she launched her own career with sheer gusto, knowing early that she would devote her life to writing. Managing to make a name for herself publishing short stories to North American journals before she finally sold her first novel– Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908.

The Gift of Wings shows Montgomery is a complicated woman with a complicated story, made all the more mysterious by the nature of her sources. Her biographer Mary Henley Rubio had been co-editor of the five volumes of her selected journals (published from 1985-2004) which become central to this text. Henley Rubio explaining that these journals were as much a literary creation as any of Montgomery’s novels– she kept notes, and often didn’t write entries until months after the fact; later in her life she would completely rewrite all of them with eventual publication in mind, and so they’re often censored, granted the insight of retrospect, and slanted to tell the story she wants the public to know.

Montgomery’s true nature was as various as her journals, this reflected in her dual lives as world-famous novelist and respectable minister’s wife. Her journals revealing a deeper darkness to her personality that was not detectable in either of these lives– Henley Rubio suggests that today Montgomery would have been diagnosed with a mood disorder.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Prince Edward Island to two families proud of their Scottish heritage. After her mother died when she was very young, Maud would be raised by her maternal grandparents. Henley Rubio positing that her upbringing was particularly spun for its hardship when Maud revised her journals, but that she came of age in a wonderfully close community she’d hold dear for the rest of her life, and she was surrounded by a wide extended family.

She did well at school, displaying her writing talent early. She did not have the financial support to pursue her education, however, and was only able to complete teacher training. After which she was unable to venture very far to work, because her grandfather would not allow her to drive to interviews. It was only after his death that her writing career began in full force, as she moved back home to live with her grandmother and was able to write full time.

She married Ewan MacDonald after her grandmother’s death, and then they moved to Ewan’s appointment in Leaskville. Montgomery had long wanted to be married and she was anxious to be a mother. Henley Rubio quotes interviewees noting the MacDonalds as a well-suited couple who were fond of one another, though dissatisfaction in her marriage is evident in Maud’s journals from early on. Part of this was due to Ewan’s bouts of “melancholia”, culminating in full-fledged breakdowns a number of times. Though it is noted that this was not so apparent to outsiders, and so either the family either took great pains to hide these problems, or Maud exaggerated them in her journals, or both.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this biography was the insight it provided into the creation of Montgomery’s fiction. How her romance with Ewan provided the spark and energy of Anne of Green Gables, for example, or how much her work was influenced by cultural changes– Rainbow Valley penned in the midst of WW1, Emily portraying the struggle of a woman to be taken seriously as a writer, aspects of Magic for Marigold written pointedly to challenge gender roles, and the furor over taboo subjects in The Blue Castle.

Also fascinating is Montgomery’s publishing history– how she was taken advantage of by her original publisher and deprived of substantial income, which ended up in lawsuits that lasted well into the 1920s. And her place in Canadian letters– how her success served to promote Canadian literature, and she devoted considerable amounts of her own time for the cause. It was fascinating also to see the range of readers touched by her work, with famous writers and statesmen the world over contacting her and wishing to meet her. However in spite of this, her credibility diminished throughout her life and she was frustrated to find herself increasingly marketed as a children’s author, or a writer of merely sentimental novels.

Henley Rubio has done formidable work with materials on which she is expert, though I might criticize the biography’s over-reliance on Montgomery’s journals. Not that I’ve a more suitable source in mind, of course, but some parts of the book do read much like a retelling of the journals themselves. Moreover the journals are so patchy at times and the holes are often left unfilled– we read of Friday January 29, 1937 from her journals, “On that day happiness departed from my life forever…” Imagine my frustration then as Henley Rubio goes on to recount, “We don’t know what she learned [that day], but it seems to have been about Chester.”

Which was a fair guess, as Montgomery’s son Chester was a nasty piece of work. His misbehaviour would be a blight on her existence from the time he was young until her death– he lied and stole, took advantage of his parents, had two children with a woman he’d barely support, spent years and years failing law school on his mother’s dime. For a woman much concerned with images (she was the minister’s wife, of course), Maud’s oldest son caused considerable heartache.

The later years of Montgomery’s life were a sad decline, in health, happiness, and literary reputation. For many years she was much involved in the Canadian Authors’ Association, but was eventually sidelined from this organization. She remained busy with speaking engagements and responding to her fan mail, but her diminishing reputation was a blow. Her journals portray her husband as sinking deep into his mental ailments, though Henley Rubio speculates much of that might have been caused by over-medication, and Montgomery herself probably experienced something quite similar.

And so her books had always been quite enough, but Henley Rubio has illuminated them and their author even further. Providing Montgomery with a context she sorely lacks in all her singular fame– so s
he had contemporaries, a place in literary society, a family. Underlining the importance of her work within this larger context, which goes far to explain how she has come to occupy the singular place she does.

October 29, 2008

Upcoming

Well, though I was a little bit concerned, I’ve enjoyed John Updike’s Too Far to Go, though it served to underline my prejudice towards 1970s marriage as Ice Stormy as you like– how boring the suburbs really must have been, that so many unattractive people kept having sx with one another. Did that end with the ‘eighties? As I assume everyone settled down a bit with the advent of interlocking brick driveways and The Twenty Minute Workout. Plus the widespread use of microwaves.

So I’ll soon start reading Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio. I can’t remember the last biography I read (and so it is fortunate that I keep track of all the books I read– note, I’ve not read a strict biography in the three years I’ve been keeping track, though I’ve read plenty of non-fiction, memoirs, biographical memoirs, but…) and so this will be a change of pace. Not so much thematically, however, as this has been a very Montgomery filled year– Anne Shirley turned 100 this year with all kinds of fanfare, and this very summer I reread both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. But I continue to know very little about Montgomery’s life, particular her later life (except what I picked up from As Ever, Booky). So there is a lot to get to know.

October 26, 2008

Pickle Me This reads about werewolves

I would never have read Living With the Dead had I not heard Kelley Armstrong read as part of the Kama Reading Series last year. “New York Times Bestselling Author” though she is, Armstrong did stick out in this group of literary writers. The first story she read that night had been published in an anthology about Vampire birthdays– “Really,” she had to say, because no one in the audience would have believed in such a thing (in vampires or anthologies about vampire birthdays). We weren’t exactly her kind of crowd, but Kelly Armstrong wooed us. Self-deprecating, hysterically funny, and a wonderfully engaging reader, she was a star of the show that night, which was something for a woman who’d had a problem with her GPS and ended up in Mississauga instead of at the ROM. I was very glad she made it to the right place eventually.

So I wanted to read her latest book, from her “Women of the Otherworld” series, because Armstrong herself seemed terrific. But also because I never would have read it otherwise, and I am eternally curious about my own tastes and prejudices. I have an appreciation for popular fiction, but I avoid “genre” like the plague, which isn’t entirely fair, because I’ve never even been exposed to it.

It’s not strictly bookish, though, my aversion to genre and fantasy. I don’t even like The Princess Bride, which frustrates some people to no end. I think it all stems from when they made us watch The Neverending Story one rainy day in grade one, and after being traumatized by the horse sinking into the quicksand, I wanted nothing imaginary ever again. Which is strange considering how much I love fiction. The truest literary form I know, but I like fiction to recreate the world I live in and not make itself another one.

I never got into watching Buffy or Angel, until we moved to Japan. There was only one English channel on TV, so you could take it or leave it, but even when I left it, my husband didn’t and as our apartment was only one room, I couldn’t help overhearing. I couldn’t stop paying attention either, because Buffy and Angel were really good shows. Well, except for the vampire/fantasy stuff, which I tuned out to. Without those elements, these would have been perfect shows for me.

Which was the way I felt about reading Living With the Dead. That it was a fun, plot-driven novel, and I could even overlook the werewolves and half-demons when they weren’t integral to the story. The story of Robyn Peltier, PR rep. for an obnoxious celebutante for whose death she has just been framed. She enlists her friends– said werewolf and demon (though Robyn doesn’t know this about them)– for support as she tries to prove her innocence, and also tries to avoid a strange violent woman who is determined to stay on her trail. The woman wants something from her, but Robyn does not know what. For there is so much she has to discover– including the true identities of her friends, who she can trust, and who she can’t.

That I wasn’t in love with Living With the Dead isn’t the book’s fault, for I don’t suppose I was ever meant to be its ideal reader. For some people, I think, the demons and werewolves would be main attraction, but I still don’t get that. That I read the book all the way through and enjoyed it, however, is a credit to Armstrong’s excellent plot. So it’s not the book, it’s the genre. Could be that such books require significant investment? Living With the Dead— a pretty long novel at 372 pages, containing a folklore and vocabulary all of its own– demands more effort than I would typically allot to my pop-fic. You really have to want to get this stuff, the werewolf nitty-gritty, but unfortunately I just wasn’t that determined in the end.

October 21, 2008

Dad-Lit, it seems

This weekend I read The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, which I was surprised to see acknowledged itself as indebted to Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies. I’ve not read my copy of Dream Babies yet, but will do soon due to the rave reviews I’ve seen by others. Anyway, the McEwan book was really wonderful, and perhaps my favourite of his since I read Saturday. (I really didn’t like Atonement that much; is there a terrible place where they put away people like me?). I don’t know that I’ve read such a thoughtful book by a man about parenting and childhood. And then without even thinking, I picked Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York to read next. It seems I’m really on a Dad-lit kick, but I am loving the perspective. “Whatever the origins– and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all– what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it– less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us… [Children] compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.”

October 17, 2008

Entitlement by Jonathan Bennett

I’ve been trying to think of a more suitable avenue into Jonathan Bennett’s novel Entitlement than the fact while I’ve been sick in bed these last two days, it’s been my dearest companion. But you see, as I’ve been sick in bed for two days, my capacity for thinkage is stunted. Which is unfortunate because as much as “the book’s got plot” (a quote from Bennett, interviewed at Bookninja), Entitlement offers much more to remark on.

Interestingly, however, that the book would be so plot-driven was not so obvious until about two thirds of the way through. What hooked me from the very start was premise– an outsider’s perspective onto absolute wealth and affluence. “The rich are different from you and me.” Which was, of course, a bit Fitzgerald, but also reminded me of one of my favourite paperback guilty pleasures which is A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne. Except, set in Canada– what a twist indeed for Canadian Literature. Do we even have rich people in Canada anyway?

The “outsider” is Andy Kronk, who enters private school through a chance hockey scholarship, and becomes swept up in the drama of the Aspinall family. An awkward triangle forming between Andy with the Aspinall children, Colin and Fiona. When his father dies, Andy becomes a surrogate brother, privy to the intimacies of the Apsinall world. Discovering the heightened power of the wealthy in Canada– a country determinedly blind to class distinctions. This blindness allowing the rich to have control unchecked, without notice or acknowledgment of the extent of their reach.

This reach has been apparent to those who’ve tried to touch the Aspinall’s before. Biographer Trudy Clarke is having trouble getting interviews for the book she is planning, and she is warned to abandon the subject altogether– of the father, Stuart Aspinall, she is told, “He ruins people he doesn’t like.” However, Trudy will not be deterred. When she is granted a connection to Andy Kronk, she sees it as a prime opportunity, leaving her daughter and all other responsibilities behind to travel north to Kronk’s isolated cottage. Andy proving particularly candid, for his own reasons. Bennett’s multiple points of view showing both characters believing themselves fully in control, but we soon discover that neither is at all.

It is from this point on that plot takes hold, complete with twists, audible gasps (mine) and crooked cops. Clues from the beginning I hadn’t even picked up on becoming significant, and this book of so many points of views taking on a cohesive shape. A race to the end, for sure, but then this is a plot-driven book written by a poet, so this isn’t a guilty-pleasure either. The very best of all number of worlds and influences, and so thoroughly enjoyable. Fiction to get lost in, and once you’ve found your way out, there’s much to reflect on about where you’ve been.

October 13, 2008

My turn for Whats and Whys

Rebecca Rosenblum ponders why she reads the books she reads, the last ten books she has read specifically, concluding that reading is social, however solitary in practice. Her post inspiring Naya V. to consider some of her own bookish choosings. And inspiring me as well, though findings may not be so revelatory as I’ve written here about how I came to some of these already. Nevertheless.

• Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen (now reading), because Rebecca Rosenblum gave it to me for my birthday and now it is time.
• The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, because it was a paperback portable for vacation, and because it came recommended via the impeccable taste of Rona Maynard.
• The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, also because it was a paperback. Because it was longlisted and shortlisted for the Giller. Because it was Rona-recommended, and recommended by Maud Newton and Stephany Aulenback as well. (Oh, and now by me too. This is the best book I’ve read in ages).
• Between Friends: A Year in Letters by Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine. I picked this up at the Victoria College book sale not just because it was a collection of correspondence but because reading a newspaper feature when the book came out inspired me to embark upon a similar writing project with my friend Bronwyn.
• Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, because I wanted to all the books on the Giller list by women (which was easy as there were only two).
• Flowers for Mrs. Harris by Paul Gallico. Also bought at the book sale, and I was originally attracted by the gorgeous (only slightly damaged) pink dust jacket, and then I remembered that I’d read writer Justine Picardie raving about this novel on her blog.
• What It Feels Like for a Girl by Jennica Harper. Jennica is my favourite poet, and her first book The Octopus kept me up all hours the first time I read it, and so naturally I would read her new book the second I could get my mitts upon it.
• Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. I don’t remember why I read this book at all, perhaps for no real reason, which is probably the reason I was so surprised to love it.
• When Will There by Good News? by Kate Atkinson. Um, because Kate Atkinson wrote it. And everything she touches is gold– except for Emotionally Weird, but I’ve forgiven/forgotten already. Everything else though.
• The Diving Bell and Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. My spectacular Amy Winehouse costume won me this book as a prize at an Oscar Party back in the winter, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. My husband had, however, and was obsessed with it, and insisted that I read it too, and it was as wonderful as he promised. And now we can finally rent the movie.

October 4, 2008

Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden

“We choose New Orleans,” begins the prologue to Amanda Boyden’s second novel Babylon Rolling. “We choose to live Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, though we rarely look at it, churning brown, wide.” The novel’s employment in the prologue of first person plural narration suggesting already that this will be story composed of stories, of voices.

Babylon Rolling tells of a year in the lives of the residents of New Orleans’ Orchid Street, beginning from Hurricane Ivan to just before the devastation of Katrina. Such disparate characters, these neighbours, black and white (and Indian); young and old; long-time residents and newcomers; good people and people who’ve somehow found themselves in more than a spot of trouble.

Though the first-person plural narration ends with the prologue, its spirit continues in the construction of the chapters ensuing. Written in the third person, but very close and in the various singular voices of the characters, within these chapters one voice turns into another in the space of a paragraph break. No other divisions between them, here are the different voices of Orchid Street, one after another as these people go about their separate lives.

The danger of this sort of structure, of such a broad approach to a story (in terms of chronology and character) would be a tendency for glossing over substance. For these characters to be “voices” but little more, and certainly not people, for how do you fit another entire life into a novel that is already so crowded? Which might happen in the hands of a lesser writer, but it struck me soon as I was reading Babylon Rolling that something quite different was at work.

As I read the story of Ariel, the transplanted Minnesotan working overtime managing a New Orleans hotel. She is on the verge of being unfaithful to her husband, and then of course we meet her husband Ed whose own story has nothing to do with that (though of course it will come to, but not entirely). Ed who saves his elderly neighbour Roy after an accident, in which a local drug dealer is to blame and Roy’s wife is seriously injured. The drug dealer’s younger brother Daniel, aged 15, calling himself “Fearius”, and anxiously following in his brother’s footsteps. A hurricane is approaching (but no, not “that” one, not yet). Some will stay, some will go. One of the former being Philomenia whose cooking up something poison in her kitchen and whose grasp on reality is becoming more and more tenuous, though it’s pretty hard to tell.

The point being that none of these characters– like nobody ever in his or her life– is a peripheral character. Every one of them, including those who don’t get to speak so directly, able to claim a part of the prologue’s “we”. And it dawned on me as I read that Babylon Rolling isn’t actually a novel at all, but is a book of short stories all broken into pieces and put back together, a very different kind of puzzle. Which says something about the short story, I suppose, how its surprise appearance here so serves to elevate the novel. That these characters’ stories and lives run so deep, not just into each other but in and of themselves. That their stories stand for their own sakes, complementing as they rub shoulders (and they’re actual shoulders, blood and bone), and that rubbing of these shoulders can create an effect so incredibly rich.

So the structure of this novel is really quite remarkable, but even more so are the voices themselves. That Boyden can bring to life characters so different from herself and from each other as, for example, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (whose presence lends a touch of the Southern Gothic) and Daniel “Fearius” Harris (“But Fearius, he be patient. He learnt it. He waited to make fifteen full years of age inside juvey, waiting four months sitting in there.”) Fearius in particular a leap, a risk, that this author could imagine her way into the mind of a black fifteen year old drug dealer, but it is a leap that Boyden makes deftly. I was uneasy with Fearius’s voice at first, not for political reasons as much as grammatical ones, but I became accustomed to it soon, as much as all the others.

Boyden writes in her Acknowledgments that she started the novel in Toronto after having left New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, which had “reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.” The result being a song certainly, even if not so entirely swannish. Because, as her author bio notes, Boyden lives in New Orleans “still”. And the novel’s epilogue returns to that very same “we”, such collectivity a suggestion of hope amidst such destruction.

September 28, 2008

Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

Rebecca Rosenblum is too close a friend for my opinion of her book Once to be considered impartial, and so however much I loved her book (which is very much), you needn’t be concerned with that. In lieu of my own opinion, however, I give you some from a few less biased sorts:

My husband Stuart says, “I don’t know if I’ve ever read short stories before that so stayed on my mind for days afterwards. “Linh Lai”, and “Pho Mi 99″, they’re stories, but they’re also whole worlds and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”

The Globe & Mail’s Jim Bartley writes, “Plot is the least of this intricate story. What matters, tickling the sense memory, is the prickling pleasure of Isobel’s tired feet freed to the air at bedtime; the sugary baklava stuck to its crumpled carton; the florid, chewing face of the tax teacher as he negotiates a wad of honey and nuts. Rosenblum builds and subtly rounds off a story arc, but the sustaining life humming all through this tale comes straight from the sensory input. In Isobel’s word-picture ramble, Rosenblum’s meanings arrive on the reader’s intuitions. Her art remains veiled. The quotidian is rarely so riveting.”

Daniel Baird writes in The Walrus, “Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality… These young characters’ futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent.”

From Christina Decarie in The Quill and Quire, “Each story stands alone, but Rosenblum sometimes weaves the characters in and out of each other’s lives, and when, say, the restaurant in “Route 99″ is revisited, it feels as good for the reader as it does for one of the characters, a single dad with kids in tow: ‘The buggy’s thin wheels wobble over every lump of snow, salt, ice, and Jake whined unintelligibly through his scarf. But it was worth it … I could smell fish sauve and cilantro, hear Koenberg’s rusty mutter’ … Fantastic and realistic, sad and unnerving, these stories are a delight.” — Christina Decarie

September 24, 2008

When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

“Homer was open on her lap but she was watching Coronation Street” is the definition of Kate Atkinson’s writing, I think. Her literary roots are deeper than deep, but she’s so fully aware of the actual world. So fully aware, as well, of how frequently these roots surface in life, of how relevant literature and literary-ness still truly are, and in the most unexpected ways and places.

Atkinson’s first Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread award, and is one of the finest novels ever written in the English language. I liked her second novel Human Croquet a little bit better. In 2005 she shifted gears a bit with Case Histories, the first of her crime novels about Jackson Brodie, which I enjoyed as well as its follow-up One Good Turn. And now with the publication of the series’ third novel When Will There Be Good News?, I officially retire from asking, “When’s she heading back into real literature?” One bit of good news: Kate Atkinson’s new novel is as brilliant as anything else she’s done before.

There is a solidity to When Will There Be Good News? that was missing from the previous two Jackson Brodie novels. They were about coincidence, connections, the most unexpected links, and were both infinitely readable (devourable) but lacking the containment and control distinct to literary fiction. The shape of this novel is different, tighter, which is not to say standard or unsurprising. Mystery has always been at the heart of whatever Atkinson writes, and she is so deft at bending time and place to create just the right amount of space, to give clues but never answers.

The solidity comes from the novel’s more singular focus, on the disappearance of a doctor and her baby. The twist in this being that the doctor has not even been reported missing, but sixteen year-old Reggie Chase, the mother’s helper, is determined that something is not right. Which is usually the case for Reggie, whose mother is dead, whose scumbag brother has set scary thugs on her tail, who finds herself giving Jackson Brodie CPR after a train wreck. The wrong place at the wrong time, always, though this time the right one. Having saved Jackson’s life, Reggie refuses to absent herself from it, hoping to take advantage of his skills as a private detective to help find Dr. Hunter.

Reggie has ample reason to worry about her employer, though she doesn’t know most of it yet. That as a child Dr. Hunter had been the sole survivor of an attack that killed her family, and the killer has just been released from jail after thirty years. That Dr. Hunter’s husband is involved in shady dealings, burning down his businesses to collect insurance, and there’s every chance he’d pull a similar stunt with his wife. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe knows all this well, however, though she is surprised to find the case reconnecting her with Jackson, the two rather gruff police types having flirted with attraction in the previous book.

Reggie, the hard-luck A-level studying orphan is a marvelous creation, Homer on her lap and Corrie on the telly; she is indomitable, fearless and smart, and so funny we forget how perilous her situation is. That such a character, with that mouth and that attitude, is book-smart too makes for a perfect marriage between two equally brilliant but quite different things. In Kate Atkinson’s work, we can ask for that much, though Atkinson knows also there can be too much, so the world goes. “Just become something happens once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again,” and people like Reggie Chase, Louise Monroe, Joanna Hunter and Jackson Brodie know this. That the world doles it out unfairly willy-nilly, cruelty and brutality altogether ubiquitous, and to think otherwise is just naivete (and luck).

Jackson spends much of the novel unconscious or out of the picture, Louise Monroe serving as the crime solver, day saver. As strong a character as Reggie, she is funny and dry, wary of the world she sees through her work. Of her marriage as well, to a man she’s not particularly in love with, however he is good and safe. And she’s finding herself obsessed with women who’ve been victims of men quite otherwise, women like Joanna Hunter who’ve found themselves as prey.

What Kate Atkinson does with language, with allusion, I’ve yet to see another author do– it’s a kind of mastery. Her turns at genre writing demonstrating her ability to plot a plot, and she does that here better than I’ve ever seen her do before. The first of her crime novels in which “genre” is quite irrelevant, really. If this was the first book by Atkinson you’d ever encountered, you’d forget genre and just fall in love with it. You would fall in love with her.

September 22, 2008

Yellowknife by Steve Zipp

“Atoms or embryos, was there any difference?/ His former self had viewed the world as an orderly place. The unknown was merely the unmapped. His new self had a different view. Scientists might catch the world in a net of invisible lines, but they could never be sure they were harvesting reality and not themselves. A lipogram was as meaningful as a seismogram, the paradox of the ravens as relevant to ornithology as to logic. Math was a human myth, physics a point of view. Justice, truth, and beauty were trees that fell unheard by other ears. Every being was a chimera. At heart the universe was a mystery.” –Steve Zipp, Yellowknife

Who is Steve Zipp? Which is hardly the mystery at the heart of his novel Yellowknife, but still the question is worth posing. How intriguing, this pseudonymical person whose book is as enigmatic as its author. The Yellowknife of the tale is the capital city of the North-West Territories whose law and order is maintained by the North-West Mounted Police– details revealing the reality we’re dealing with here is not straightforward. Though they do have license plates shaped like polar bears in Yellowknife, but that’s not the sort of thing quite plausible enough for fiction, is it?

Very little is straightforward in either Yellowknife-the-city, or Yellowknife-the-book. “Borders exist for a reason,” the novel warns us, and one reason is that when upon crossing this one, all bets are off. Dogs hijack snowmobiles, characters disappear beneath the ice, a Perfesser philosophizes at the dump, and tunnels down in the earth keep turning up in the strangest places. The legendarily mystical North a perfect setting for this kind of magic (which the book turns up and satirizes), juxtaposed in a perfectly readable balance with a (literal) grittiness one would expect from a place where the elements and mining factor so centrally.

The story takes place in 1998, a bureaucratic nightmare of a time as the territorial government is currently in the midst of splitting into two. Though not overly long, Yellowknife has something of a sprawl about it and sprawling indeed is the Cast of Characters, not one of them incidental. The novel’s shape is not particularly taut and some parts reach out into tangents left unresolved, but I still found my reading most satisfactory. The many characters actually populating this strange place, from the drifter whose car is destroyed by a buffalo, the gravid biologist employed by the government and specialized in voles, her fiance who presents her with a ring whose stone is coal. The shady dealer with an understandable fear of dogs and his numerous failed business ventures, one of many rushing for gold but coming up way short.

Yellowknife is one of those novels fat with allusion, giving readers the impression that nothing means nothing, even if it’s not altogether clear what means what. At its most accessible, the novel is a hilarious satire, silly and absurd, but signs are scattered throughout the text indicating something deep down and more profound– sort of like the universe itself.

-More on Yellowknife (with a link to download)
– Steve Zipp’s blog