August 6, 2008
The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper
Though at times maligned in literary realms, thrillers are remarkable for exemplifying just what books are capable of doing to us. For demonstrating the book’s incredible power, and how it is strange that we take for granted a stack of paper with printed symbols that is terrifying. Film is entirely different, I think, or at least bad movies are, which take full advantage of their ability to startle us. Whereas literature has to be more subtle. More subtle than even a good film, because writers have less at their disposal– only words. To create a mood, a grip, the twists and terror, and then to do all this, but write well also? For prose to be surprising and inspired, characters well rounded, scenes to be properly evoked, the story fresh and original, and unbearably real and unbearably awful, and all this has been Andrew Pyper’s marvelous feat in his new novel The Killing Circle.
This was a novel that kept me up very late one night, too terrified to turn off my light, and too impatient to wait until morning to see how it ended. The grip beginning with the novel’s prologue, with Patrick Rush, a single father, at a drive-in movie with his son. The son disappearing on his way back from the snack bar and, frantic with worry, Patrick looks for him admidst the maze of parked cars, in the light of the terrifying movie on the screen before him, snippets of sound audible as he rushes from car-to-car. Venturing further out into the farmer’s fields surrounding, with no sign of his son, and however urgent is all of this, Patrick is also somehow resigned: “I know who has done this,” he says. “Who has taken my son. I know its name.”
In the next chapter we’re taken back four years to when Patrick, an aspiring novelist and dissatisfied television critic, joins a creative writing circle. The circle comprising five other rather eccentric souls, and led by Conrad White– the novelist nobody has heard of–, Patrick quickly realizes there isn’t an abundance of talent among them. And yet the story by a member called Angela captures his attention. Angela, whose face “never sharpens into full focus, like an unfinished sculpture in which you can recognize the subject is human, but beyond this, taken at different points of view, it could be a representation of virtually anyone.”
Her story is a ghost story, the story of a girl haunted by “a terrible man who does terrible things”, and the story starts to get inside Patrick’s head. Or rather he plants himself inside of the story, if there is any difference between such situations. The story’s impact upon him only intensifying when a local serial killer’s crimes start taking on eerie connections to the narrative. Patrick begins suspecting a member of the circle may be responsible, sensing himself in danger, and setting himself up as a suspect as well.
The creative writing circle is an ingenious device here, in “reality” the work from such groups often blurring lines of fact and fiction (i.e. “Write what you know.”) The writers’ stories suggesting (or betraying?) odd biographical details, misconstruing perceptions, providing for inadvertent and inappropriate therapy sessions (as well as terrible fiction), and a strange misplaced intimacy. Friendship or rivalry? And no one is ever quite as they seem, sometimes you’re even hoping this is the case. An atmosphere that absolutely fosters Patrick’s Rush’s paranoia.
This blurring of fact and fiction continues throughout the book, explored by Pyper in a variety of ways, also highlighting how it is that scary stories come by their power. By being just possible enough that you’ve can’t disbelieve it, that there really might be a monster hiding under your bed. So heightened was the mood of this story, the depths of its realism, I considered the monster– I really did– and Patrick Rush’s own experience was analogous. Could there really be a shadow following him home through the alley, somebody at the window, footsteps on the stairs? He knows it sounds crazy, and yet…
This novel is functioning at levels I’ve not got a full sense of yet, meta-meta, and I am sure that a character is called “Conrad White” must be some kind of joke I just don’t have the punchline for. Also notable is the Toronto of the novel, as vivid and electrified as Maggie Helwig’s in Girls Fall Down, and as well featured as that in Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be. Satirizing literary and media culture, whilst on a deeper level exploring the limits and danger of imagination.
So much is also going on beyond the tension, the whodunit, the fear. Pyper’s novel an exploration of story, the nature of story and our lives as stories. Says Conrad White, “We avoid speaking of stories as stories for the same reason we avoid contemplating the inevitability of death. It can be unpleasant. It can hurt.” Patrick unwilling to admit his own story, perhaps still stunned by the death of his wife, and so in place of his story is a void of sorts. A void he fills by appropriating Angela’s story, that of “the terrible man who does terribly things.” The ramifications of this theft are manifold, and awful, becoming the motivation for whatever it was that snatched his son, leading Patrick into the darkest corners of both society and himself.
August 5, 2008
This Weekend for Me
This weekend for me was four days long, and it was filled with ordinary lovely things like reading and writing, a haircut, dinner out and trip to the movies. Plenty of book buying, a lovely brunch with Moms, peach-pie baking and finding out our good friends are having a bebe! A trip to the ROM, bbqs a plenty, and then today to Toronto Island with the Caserights, and we had a splendid picnic under a tree, went paddling, and then Stuart and I rode our bikes from Wards’ to Hanlan’s Point, and home again, and now we’re absolutely knackered.
This weekend, without consciously intending to, I continued my Westness pick with a rereading of The Stone Angel. So glad to reacquaint myself, so appreciative of my recent reading of Lilac Moon for historical context, but I do think that Laurence’s skills as a novelist increased exponentially with the rest of the Manawaka series. Which, I’d think, is the most we could ask of a writer. And then more Westness with Sharon Butala’s collection of short stories Real Life, which is oh-so solid. And then The Killing Circle, which wasn’t West at all, but it kept me from falling asleep last night due to a) terror and b) I couldn’t stop reading. Review to follow… I’m now rereading Late Nights on Air.
July 31, 2008
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
Writes Juliet Ashton in a letter to Dawsy Adams, “I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.” But it might be, homing instinct or no homing instinct. That this delightful book was brought to me, full of all the things I like the best– an epistolary novel, begun on the basis of a used book’s passage from one reader to another, full of wonderful literary references, even a bookish mystery of sorts, plus a reference to the joys of peering in windows, and a teapot that’s used as a weapon.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a novel comprising a selection of correspondence, primarily to and from Juliet Ashton. Ashton, living in 1946 London with its war wounds still so fresh, is a writer seeking the subject of her next book– she’s previously published a commercially unsuccessful biography of Anne Bronte, and a very popular collection of humorous columns she’d written during the war. Her interest is sparked by a letter she receives from Dawsy Adams, a pig farmer from Guernsey in Britain’s Channel Islands, who has somehow acquired a book that was once hers, Juliet’s name and address inscribed on the inside cover.
Dawsy has written seeking other books, which are proving hard to find where he is– Guernsey still a long way from recovering from 5 years of German occupation. Books, Dawsy explains, have become very important to him, and his friends, far more than it was ever figured they would be during that evening they devised their Literary Society as a ruse to hide a pig from the Nazis.
Letters between Juliet and Dawsy, Juliet and her publisher, and also from the other members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, come together to form a marvelously engaging narrative, with characters so real their letters shout off the page. Their stories a testament to the power of literature upon all different kinds of people, as solace during hardship, to bring friends together. Portraying also the horrors of life during occupation, Juliet reflecting that all through the war she hadn’t thought much about the Channel Islands, and I don’t imagine many of us since have thought about it more. A fascinating, if awful, piece of history, and Mary Ann Shaffer’s enthusiasm for this subject is evident in her work. Unnatural exposition the risk of any epistolary novel, and where it happens here (which is rarely) is with these stories, these historical details, but we forgive them because they hold such interest.
The novel’s prose lives up to all the great works it references, which is certainly something. Offering such a fabulous critique: Juliet writes, “P.S. I am reading the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu. Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? ‘My dear little Jane, everybody is born with a vocation and yours is to write charming little notes.’ I hope Jane spit on her.”
One Society member writes of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats who excluded WW1 poems due to his “distaste” for themes of “passive suffering”: “Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! …What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr. Yeats.”
I would urge this novel upon you, with all its wonderfully funny writing, shocking in places, and in other turns sad. Hardly shying away from the brutal realities of this time period, absolutely and bravely unflinching, but also masterful at capturing the nuances of ordinary life. A certain erudition evident, but always underlined by a joy– in books, in reading, in human relationships, and the connections between all three.
(Read DGR’s Review.)
July 30, 2008
Tapestries of Place
I’ve been reading a lot of Sharon Butala lately, ever since I read her latest Girl in Saskatoon in April. I’ve read come to know her voice by heart now, present regardless of whether in fiction or non-fiction, her short fiction and her novels, and opening one of her books is like settling down with a new friend. I’ve just finished Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, an absolutely extraordinary book exploring Canada’s west, its history and its present. Such a compelling read, an essential addition to any Canadian library, so filled with learning, and I would it upon anyone looking to learn more about this part of Canada, or anyone who thinks they’ve learned enough and perhaps could do with some re-examination. And some celebrating too– for Lilac Moon is a celebration, even if a critical one.
“What makes a Westerner?” Butala asks throughout each of her chapters, considering the rodeo as an emblem, relationships to the land, with First Nations peoples, the situation of women. What it means, the pioneering spirit, to be raised in the shadow of this mythology. What this mythology might exaggerate or obfuscate. All this culminating in a beautiful chapter, “Visions of the Prairie West” about how Western Canada has been defined by its artists and writers– “We paint, write, sculpt, dance, film, act, compose and sing and play– however wistful, however tentative– our claims on this place.”
Strange to have read this soon after my rereading of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. I didn’t plan it, and certainly could have forseen the patterns, though I didn’t. Both writers reexamining mythologies of Westness, the tropes of their childhoods, of pioneering spirits and what such stories belie– Butala explaining that when the Canadian West was settled, “it certainly wasn’t to provide homes… for millions of destitute… Europeans” but because “the federal government feared that the Americans, seeing all that tempting ’empty’ territory, would simply move in and take it over.” Didion clarifying that those intrepid men who pushed the American frontier west towards California were in fact pushing themselves towards what then was actually Mexico.
Both writers weaving their personal histories, their family histories, into the wider stories to develop these tapestries of place, the perfect containers to hold and convey such complicated stories. Of places that both writers manage to combine a certain ambivalence for with a lifelong love. Questioning ideals they’ve held since childhood, those instilled by their parents, and grandparents before that, examining their own feelings of nostalgia. Inserting a woman’s perspective (though Didion would shy away from this distinction, I know) into the narrative of “Westness”, which is so often synonymous with “maleness”. Significant also, I think, the way that both Butala and Didion have shifted between fiction and non-fiction throughout their careers, in these particular books bringing the very best of both of these, blending story and the world into something so close to truth.
(Speaking of Westness, we’re going to Alberta in October!! V.v. exciting.)
July 29, 2008
Rereading Emily of New Moon
I reread Emily of New Moon this weekend, still riding the wave of recent L.M. Montgomery mania (which Steph at Crooked House rounds up here). I was surprised (but then not overly) to discover that my paperback copy was actually stolen goods, my then-school library’s ownership stamped on the inside cover, and with no evidence of a “discard”.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first encountered Emily, but she never entranced me the way that Anne did. I do remember enjoying the books, but also how difficult I found them, and I could never quite explain why, and Emily-lovers never really understood what I meant, but I see it now. First being that I read all of Montgomery’s books really young, and any of my understanding of Anne of Green Gables was probably due to having watched the Kevin Sullivan film, which came out when I was six. There was never an Emily movie, and so I was unfamiliar with the story. (This is interesting also to consider how the cinematic Anne influenced my impressions of that novel, considering how different it was to read Emily without such pictures in my mind).
That I had no “template” for understanding Emily might read a bit strangely, considering this story of an incorrigible orphan girl in PEI with romantic dreams and literary leanings, who is sent to live with bachelor/spinster strangers and changes their lives, investing a lonely old house with the heart it had lost, and bewitching every single person in town. That the novel is so remarkably like Anne, however, only shows Montgomery’s progression as a novelist between 1908 and 1923 (nine books later). Emily is a longer book, her character drawn with so much more detail, we get inside her head the way we never really did with Anne, her perspective maintained throughout the text. Her own progression is less a series of scrapes and lessons learned. She has not Anne’s fiery temper– her own outbursts are usually in protest to some injustice instead. She has a certain steadiness uncanny for a child. Emily grows up, but she never changes, she never relents.
This depth of character would have been what tripped me up back when I first read this book. The complicated nature of the others too– I remember being confused by Mr. Carpenter, who tormented the students who had potential in order to draw it further from them, and their ambivalent feelings towards him, and how I couldn’t comprehend it. Though I remember finding Dean Priest’s feelings for Emily a bit creepy, and I still do. Class issues– what it meant that Perry came from a place called “Stovepipe Town” and I remembering picturing a village full of men wearing top hats.
This time around, the book was a pleasure, to discover what I’d been missing. I liked the novel’s engagement with the wider world– stories of immigration, with history. As with Anne, I loved Emily’s bookishness, her passion for writing and how she’d have to do it anyway even if she’d never make a penny. The wise advice that she is given:
“If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten– if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though– and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you– but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice– by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess.”
July 25, 2008
Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky
Fire in the Blood by Irène Némirovsky is a funny little book. Although twisting in its plot, it is rather straightforward in its twists, and I thought I had it all figured out when I finished reading. I had its two main points summed up, but there was just one problem– that these two main points were entirely contradictory, and so I delved further into the text to try to solve this problem, and discovered there is a whole lot going on in this novel than what I’d first assumed.
My experience being quite analogous to the story, a similar theme to Suite Française— that rural tranquility can belie all variety of human drama, and that even in Arcadia, there be– in addition to death– murder in particular, and love, and lust, and secrets and lies.
Fire in the Blood is narrated by Silvio, structured as a notebook, as he observes the passage of time during the autumn of his life. The novel beginning upon his young niece Colette’s engagement, and he reflects upon her happiness, “the fire in her blood” that he remembers from his own youth. That seems so distant from him now, so much so that he supposes if he ever happened to meet his young self, he wouldn’t even recognize him. The past is past, and he is old, and, as his cousin remarks to him, “My god, if only one could know at twenty how simple life is…”
This is a novel quite obvious in its imagery, full of images of burning and fever, of fire and flame. This sort of energy similar to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, I suppose, Silvio’s cousin remarking to him, “Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think about the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew?… Imagine a field being sowed and all the promise that’s contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests…”
When Colette’s husband is murdered, however, and the points of a complicated love triangle become clear, notions of “promise” become dark and ominous. Raising questions of chance or destiny, what happens to our fire, how the past changes as it gets away, and that youth is eternal, always the same, that promise. Silvio asking, “But who would bother to sow his fields if he knew in advance what the harvest would bring?” but still we do, knowing full well what the end is.
This story’s simplicity is deceptive, and perhaps undermined by the fact of this book’s history. Némirovsky’s own story being well known, as well as the story of Suite Française and its remarkable discovery. Fire in the Blood has similar origins, part of it thought missing for years and only found quite recently among the author’s other papers. And it is clear to me that this novel wasn’t finished, wasn’t quite polished, for though the writing is strong (this partly due to translator Sandra Smith, of course), the novel’s structure is clunky and fragmented. Not to the point where the reading is compromised, but the effect is not that of the greatness that was so evident from Suite Française. This being wholly understandable within its context, and so the context becomes necessary, enhancing. This reader being grateful for the author still having sowed her seeds.
July 22, 2008
So much can slip on by
I’m now rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I’ve visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion’s descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion’s consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I’ve also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.
Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing “One Two Three Four” on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson’s post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb’s struggles upon discovering she’d written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.
July 20, 2008
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
That a book has pictures, in my opinion, makes it no less a book, particularly if that book’s language still matters. If the images are enhancement and not just a flashy stand-in for story, and in Skim, a graphic novel with words by Mariko Tamaki and pictures by Jillian Tamaki, images are certainly the former. The images so vivid in their own right that they stand alone effectively when necessary, in individual panels or full page spreads, so perfectly conveying a moment– with expression, posture, that single perfect object standing in for a whole scene. Otherwise the language and images integrated– words stamped out in the snow, chalked on blackboard– in a perfect synchronicity.
But the language still matters– I was part of an audience that heard Mariko Tamaki reading from Skim on Monday evening, and rushed to buy the book between the sets. I almost fought someone for what I thought was the last one, but luckily they had another box. Reading from a comic book— I didn’t even know this was possible. Part of this is that Tamaki is a spectac performer, she did her work true justice. And the structure too– the voice bubble dialogue being terrible funny to listen to, but so much of Skim is written in a diary format, meat and substance as you like.
Skim is the story of Kim, called Skim because she isn’t, and she attends a private girls’ high school and it’s 1993. Always somewhat of a misfit, her isolation from her peers is only exacerbated after a local suicide when classmates establish the Girls Celebrate Life Club (“Teenage Suicide– Don’t Do It”). Skim is disgusted by feigned concern from girls who’ve spent years as her tormentors, and now they’re relishing the drama, discussing her in hushed tones– she wears a lot of black, says she’s a Wiccan, she can’t think of anything that makes her happy. And they don’t even know that she’s in love with her English teacher, Ms. Archer.
Skim is marketed as a children’s book, and will serve this demographic well, I think, assuring other misfits (nearly everyone) that they aren’t alone. Holding great appeal to older readers too, and not only because they’ll have it confirmed how incredibly lucky they are to be grown up, but also for such an engaging story, told with a great deal of insight and dark humour. Further, the acuity of its characterization, of Skim– that a comic book character could be bestowed with such a voice. Even in her most desperate moments, this girl’s company is a delight.
July 18, 2008
Home by Marilynne Robinson
It seems strange now, having just quoted Marilynne Robinson on “show, don’t tell,” and then going on to read her new novel Home (out in September), which doesn’t contain a single bit of “tell” as I understand it, and perhaps contains lack of telling as its very essence. This makes more sense, however, upon focusing on a different part of the quotation: “People are to an incredible degree constituted of what they never say, perhaps never consciously think. Behaviour is conventionalized and circumstantial. In many cases, the behaviour that in fact would express what someone thinks or feels is frustrated, cannot occur.”
Home, Robinson’s third novel, appears to function as in exercise in fiction under these constraints, in which characters are constructed by what they do not, or cannot say. Glory Boughton, thirty-eight years old and the youngest of six has returned home to her ailing father, returned after a long and failed engagement in something of disgrace. She has just settled into life with her father, a retired minister, when her brother Jack comes home also, suddenly, the prodigal son. Jack, that black sheep, the subject of a great deal of family worry and shame, has been gone for twenty years and appears no less troubled than when he left, in fact worse, having not worn his experiences altogether well.
The story of these three characters living together is a quiet one, subtle. Made doubly obscure by their strangeness to one another coupled with the intimacy of family, meaning that even more than usual goes unsaid– the circumstances of Glory’s heartache, just where her brother has been. And just as Robinson doesn’t rely on characters “showing” the answers to these questions, neither does she tell in a cheap way. As readers we don’t get much access into characters’ heads, Jack and his father not at all, and little with Glory because she can’t bring herself to think so much.
And so the story is revealed by what the characters choose to tell one another, and by their silences, and by other words underlying everything they say. Our own lack of insight providing another kind, a certain objectivity illuminating how intentions can be misread, the limits of perspective, and a realistic experience of these characters as actual people without their details written on their sleeves. Their true natures requiring not so much decoding as careful reading, almost listening. This bringing forth an engagement with the novel that renders the quietness and subtlety absolutely no such thing, magnifying every single event.
Marilynne Robinson is a majestic writer. Of all the bits I underlined, my favourite remains, “They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they huing over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nub of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken.” Or when, after a lot of thought about dumplings good or bad, Glory concedes that perhaps the word dumplings is better than dumplings themselves.
Robinson’s new novel is a gorgeous story of homecoming, exploring the nature of home itself, our histories, and the stubborn nature of family love– the bond that just can’t help itself.
July 16, 2008
Chaos Continues
Bibliochaos continues– the house is in shambles, and I’m covered in paint. Luckily so are the bookshelves (paint-covered, that is), and they’ll get a second coat tomorrow, and it’s not so unreasonable to assume things will be back to normal by Thursday. Meaning that I will be able to find time to post a rave review of Marilyn Robinson’s Home, among other things. I’ve just finished rereading Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays— I read it wrong the first time, and am glad I came back to find out just how wonderful it is.
