April 8, 2007

Certainty by Madeleine Thien

I adored Certainty, the beautiful and thoughtful debut novel by Madeleine Thien (new in paperback). There is something masterful about her seamless weaving of ideas and narratives into this remarkable whole. This story is a careful balance between the possibility of certainty and the probability of chaos.

Certainty is constructed upon ideas: page eleven, and already, we’re considering the history of the mind. Further, we find references to genetics and empathy, to fractals, pulmonology. “The snowflake is the perfect example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. These facts and ideas inform the novel, and fill it with the world. Certainty borrows from the post-modern in terms of structure, but then an ultimate sense of wholeness places the novel beyond that tradition.

Thien explores the nature of grief, but more often Certainty is concerned with the nature of love. And the nature of time, of course, as history is what ties the various pieces of this narrative together. Told from at least six points of view, spanning more than half a century and four continents, somehow Thien can invest such vastness with careful meaning and gorgeous language. She writes, “Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.”

Thien’s novel resists convention. Gail, the character most central to her plot, is deceased before the book begins. Her partner Ansel, and her parents Clara and Matthew are dealing with their grief. Chronology is spurned, as the book’s next section (from Matthew’s point of view) takes us to Borneo in 1945. Later we will discover Clara’s story, more from Ansel, the mysterious role of Ani in Matthew’s past, and toward the end of the book Gail is “resurrected” in a sense, to de-cipher her own character and offer some answers.

Though of course none of these parts gives too much away on their own. Each fits together like a puzzle, and ultimately it is the sum of these stories which provides the “certainty” amidst uncertainty: meaning is evident, and beauty abounds.

(I enjoyed this profile of Thien very much.)

March 30, 2007

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

I get the feeling Lionel Shriver gets off on ruffling feathers. She’s the kind of woman who gives herself a man’s name, runs away to Belfast, writes books that aren’t easy to market, and finds fame with a book about a teenage murderer. In her post-Orange Prize world, she writes controversial editorials about politics, abortion, childlessness, and continues to rankle. To be honest, in 2005 when I first became aware of Shriver, I had mixed feelings about her. But then I read We Need to Talk About Kevin, and my resistance went out the window. Lionel Shriver can really tell a story. She is blunt and doesn’t shy from offense, but I’ll read anything she’s writing, and the odds are that I’ll like it.

We Need to Talk About Kevin was Lionel Shriver’s seventh book. None of its predecessors had been successful; Kevin itself– brutal, disturbing and horrifying– had a hard time finding a publisher. The book was sold partly on sensation, I think, but the story was stunningly told. I remember being interrupted during the final twist, and refusing to put the book down. Stuart read the book right after me, and I could hardly speak to him for fear of spoiling the ending, but I was dying to talk about it. We Need to Talk About Kevin was the most underrated overrated book I’ve ever encountered, and any writer would have a hard time following it up. And it was not as though Shriver was in the habit of writing sensation thriller-esque popular fiction. Though most of her earlier books are out of print, I did get my hands on a copy of her first novel The Female of the Species. A wonderful read, but quite unlike Kevin, and like Shriver herself, it seems, more than a bit odd.

So what was she to do next? I’ve read interviews from a year or two ago with Shriver acknowledging that some readers were bound to be disappointed in her next effort. Topping We Need to Talk About Kevin would be next to impossible, and with her new book The Post-Birthday World one gets the sense that she didn’t even try. Instead Lionel Shriver sat down and wrote another book, a completely different one, but once again a good one.

The Post-Birthday World seems like a startling deviation from Kevin but it’s not so much in comparison with Shriver’s early work. Concerned with women’s lives, emotions, relationships, sexuality. Fixated on sport, but snooker in this case in place of tennis (as in The Female of the Species and Double Fault). And the new book is really not so far from Kevin either– so much of that story was concerned with the dynamic between Kevin’s parents, and The Post-Birthday World examines intimacy in a similar way.

The Post-Birthday World is two books in one. Irina McGovern is an American established in London, a children’s book illustrator, safely ensconced in a relationship with the dependable Lawrence. When she finds herself tempted to kiss their friend Ramsay– a dashing geezer (in the British sense), a snooker champion no less– she’s faced with a choice. And at that instant, Shriver’s narrative breaks into two and we find out what happens if Irina does or if she doesn’t.

The two narratives operate in alternating chapaters, each unaware of the other. And it works; I didn’t find myself rooting for one Irina more than the other, or rushing through one alternate universe to get to the better one. Though the two narratives function separately, they do operate together illustrating the vastly different trajectories a life can take. Certain objects exist in both worlds, certain words are echoed. The two stories demonstrate that there is no such thing as parallel lives, and that life is too complicated for such a concept. Each of Irina’s decisions have different consequences, but not for the reasons you might expect. Life isn’t a chain reaction so much as a mammoth muddle, and Irina has to find her way through the mess, no matter where she’s headed. She illustrates a children’s book with a similar premise, which allows Shriver some explanation of her own intentions. Irina explains, “The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny…whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all others are crap… In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

My one criticism was Shriver’s overuse of some words that read conspicuously to me. The number of items which were “sumptuous” grew tiresome, as did the many “junctures” at which Irina found herself. I had never heard of “folderol” before, but Irina encountered an awful lot of it.

Where Shriver’s writing excels is with dialogue in particular. Irina’s exchanges with Lawrence and Ramsay are brilliant, quick, and demonstrate the differences in logic between characters. I also enjoyed the fullness of her characters’ world (which seems a mark of her fiction). The cultures of snooker and children’s book publishing are given full consideration, and as Lawrence is a terrorism expert for a think tank, discussions of world events are substantial (I noticed that many of Lawrence’s opinions echo those Shriver has voiced in editorials such as this one). The lives in The Post-Birthday World are examined from all angles, so richly and wholly. This is fiction thoroughly engaged with the world in which it takes place.

This is good fiction: words, symbols, stories, lives.

March 25, 2007

Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label

I had book trauma this weekend. I don’t mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I’ve nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.

First, I’m now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain’t the tinternet grand?) I’ve not read Macaulay’s novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English “Catchwords and Claptrap” (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It’s simply lovely.

And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).

Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can’t think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it’s a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn’t get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we’ve renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn’t have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.

The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.

March 23, 2007

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly

Like the books noted in the quotation below, Karen Connelly’s first novel The Lizard Cage is truly “full of the world.” Yet the story takes place in isolation from the world, within The Cage– a Burmese Prison where Teza (the Songbird) has been sentenced twenty years in solitary confinement for singing his protest songs. And it is Karen Connelly’s spectacular prose, empathy and descriptive eye which allow this story to contain the world. An award-winning writer of poetry and non-fiction, Connelly’s novel (new in paperback) incorporates her extraordinary use of language and her politics as she brings the plight of the Burmese people to life.

Much of this novel takes place within Teza’s cell, and after seven years in The Cage, he dreams of sky, of colour. He unwraps his cheroots so he can read the words printed on the scraps of the paper used to make the filters. Teza craves conversations, and thinks about his family, his girlfriend, and the life he had before. He meditates. He refuses to be broken. Teza sees the world as a poet sees it, as Karen Connelly must be able to see it in order to write it. Connelly’s descriptions find beauty in the most desolate places, rendering a cell a rich and vivid setting. And that Teza’s spirit cannot be harnessed threatens the authorities– at the prison, and in the wider world– but makes him an inspiration to those around him.

Much of Connelly’s writing has been concerned with her experiences in Asia, and she has plans to publish a non-fiction book about Burmese political prisoners (the most famous of whom is Aung San Suu Kyi). In The Lizard Cage as The Cage itself stands for Burma, Burma can stand for all countries in the world embroiled in civil war– the impossibility of the situation. Connelly displays an incredible empathy for all her characters, even those most atrocious. Which is not to say the bad guys don’t get their due (because she gives them their comeuppances marvelously) but as readers we are given an understanding of the “bad guys” too, which is essential. Multiple points of view are put to excellent use here. Connelly’s story is more complex than good and bad; of Teza and his prison guard it is acknowledged that “They are both caught and struggling”.

Connelly is writing about an intensely complicated situation with no easy solutions. In her acknowledgements she writes, “Someday the government of Burma will change…” and this simple hope can seem futile against reality. In the novel, this hope is symbolized by the character of the boy Nyi Lay (who is the subject of the post below). Connelly is not naive; her plot is often representative of actual injustice, but that Nyi Lay persists and triumphs seems to override all other hopelessness. Much as Teza could find the things of beauty within his solitary cell, so too do we seize the beauty and the hope Connelly so marvelously expresses against the brutality and corruption of capital-R Reality.

This novel is such a stunning achievement of fiction on its very own that we need not dwell on the feat Karen Connelly (a Canadian, and obviously a woman) achieves in inhabiting the character of a Burmese male political prisoner. Remarkable, no doubt, but her achievement is remarkable even without the backstory, and her truest achievement is creating a novel so truly beautiful out of some of the ugliest stuff the world has on offer.

If I had to say it in one word, I’d choose “exquisite”. This novel is one of my first Picks of the Year.

March 20, 2007

Reality is Ralph

From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~

March 17, 2007

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill

Winner of the recent Canada Reads competition, Heather O’Neill’s first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals struck me as a modern Huckleberry Finn. A child, older than its years and younger than it thinks it is, set out into a brutal world where no adult is really trustworthy or even the least bit good. And like Huck Finn, O’Neill’s narrator Baby possesses the most incredibly convincing, earnest and almost hypnotic voice. I would listen to her stories all day. What she notices and how she describes it is a perfect child’s eye view, and yet what she doesn’t say and the spaces in between her words illuminate the reality of her situation and her vulnerability. O’Neill throws out all the right details to give us Baby’s perspective, and to imagine the world she sees.

Her mother’s dead, her father’s a heroin addict; she’s been brought up amongst junkies and hobos, and Baby is not easily fazed. I found the beginning of this book remarkably funny, actually. Bleaker than pink, but I enjoyed getting accustomed to Baby’s voice and her early experiences are a good mix of light and dark. But of course bad gets to worse, and the reader comes to understand that Baby has bad luck and danger on all sides of her. Spanning two years, time in the book goes slow. All this action, and then she tells us it’s just a few months later– which Baby does remark at one point is like a child’s perspective of time. I did find the plot dragging toward the middle of the novel: the beginning reads like a series of vignettes, and soon I wanted something with more drive. However the plot was propelled with the complications Baby faces once she gets mixed up with a pimp called Alphonse and concurrently falls in love with a strange boy from school called Xavier. There were suggestions of a happy ending, though; Baby deserved one. And I don’t think it ruins the book to let you know that.

And so the subject matter is bleak– drug addiction, poverty, prostitution and child neglect tend to be. But then Baby’s voice is so fresh and her perspective so unique that the read is not as hard-going as a plot summary might imply. Oh then by turns this book is heartbreaking, but it has to be. O’Neill’s fiction stands for true stories that aren’t often told let alone so thoroughly examined. I was taken into a whole other world.

March 15, 2007

The Birth House by Ami McKay

All right, so I am the very last one to get on The Birth House train, but even still it wasn’t what I expected it to be. Which isn’t surprising, the novel is not quite what it seems to be. CanLit written by a (transplanted) American. Nova Scotia regionalism with the feel of a book by Fannie Flagg or the Ya Ya Sisterhood series. “A novel” it is proclaimed to be, but then after all it is a “literary scrapbook”. There is something truly original at work in this book, and thus classification is difficult. What Ami McKay has set out to do, she does very well, and this is a remarkable debut from a talented writer.

The plot seems sort of secondary to all the “stuff” within the book, which would matter in most novels, but then the stuff here is so good. McKay uses historical fact, local lore and a dash of magic to render a catalogue of midwifery– not so different from “The Willow Book” which Dora Rare, the midwife in the novel, consults herself. McKay’s novel is constructed from Dora’s journal entries, letters, clippings and advertisements. As a result of this structure, character development can be stunted in places, but then the characters as “types” seem to conform to these as stories a woman might tell over her back fence. A very authentic sense of “this was how it was” without affection.

McKay creates this sense of simplicity, however, whilst employing prose not short of exquisite. Nothing is clumsy and not a line rings untrue. Anyone who composes the line “But I’m so far from home and everything I know that even my prayers feel like sinning” is well on the road to mastery.

And speaking of sinning, McKay doesn’t shy away from the sordid, the brutal, or the brutally honest. Women’s sxual health is provocatively examined throughout, and no punches are pulled, and yet still there manages to be a spirit of lightness. Similarly does the novel treat motherhood and mothering, and womanhood in general. As Dora Rare struggles personally and professionally with restrictions on her freedom and the pressure to conform to societal expectations, the reader becomes her champion and when Dora triumphs– well, her triumphs are so sweet.

March 12, 2007

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy

Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless shifts between a variety of points of view: Rachel, an uncommonly beautiful young girl who has been abducted; her mother Celia, desperate with worry; Ron, the appliance repairman conscious of his unhealthy urges, who is holding Rachel captive in his basement; and Ron’s girlfriend, Nancy, who struggles between her feelings for Ron and her own attachment to Rachel. These various points of view– each one convincing in its own right– enhance the structure of this suspenseful but relatively straightforward narrative, and the result is a multi-dimensional examination of empathy, understanding, and love.

Christie Blatchford is thanked by Gowdy in her acknowledgements, and I imagine her counsel helped to lend this book its verisimilitude– she’s written about so many of these missing children cases in her columns over the years. The near-journalistic quality of Gowdy’s depiction of the police investigation is one of the most compelling parts of this book.

Empathy is essential to the process of tracking down missing children, as investigators must try to get inside an abductor’s heads to know where the crime might go. Such attempts at understanding are also enacted by Celia, who herself suffers with being empathized with by those who really cannot possibly understand what she is going through (the absolute impossibility of true empathy, dealt with also in Afterwards). Gowdy portrays the resistance of empathy as well; speaking to a man who actually does understand her situation, Celia is “instantly on her guard. She doesn’t want her feelings to be feelings he knows. His child died.” Similarly, Nancy also struggles with and against her understanding of Ron’s intentions with Rachel, and links the girl’s plight with trauma from her own past.

These concurrent themes of empathy and the resistance of help the reader to negotiate their understanding of Ron, who, as Gowdy explains in this CBC interview isn’t likeable, but is real– as in complex, interesting and human. His motivation for the abduction is love, which is twisted where it lies, but stems from a long-ago place more understandable. And though this understanding verges on discomforting at times, Gowdy’s is a fascinating portrayal of an often-simplified type of character– also the case with Celia and Nancy, who are fleshed out well beyond the stock figures of “single mom” or “former addict”. Her child’s voice for Rachel is also very convincing.

Wonderfully located in a readable Toronto and secure of its time, Helpless considers the sxualization of young girls, the make-up of the modern family, maternal devotion, and rites of childhood. The tension present from the very start is upheld and deftly orchestrated by Gowdy throughout, and makes for a rich and readable book.

Note: Heather Mallick cites this novel in her latest column .

March 11, 2007

Chang chang chang

It has been a joy to return to shorter novels. I enjoyed Middlemarch, but it wasn’t constructed for a reader like me. Slipping back into the fiction of my time is like putting on something that fits me perfectly, and maybe that means I just don’t want to work so hard for my reading pleasure, but it’s always nice when it comes easy. Particularly with books as great as those I’ve been reading lately. I am now reading Helpless by Barbara Gowdy, which is the first book by her I’ve ever read. And you’d think I would have read The White Bones considering I’ve got a publically-acknowledged thing for elephants, but the premise of the book has always made me keep my distance. Perhaps this new novel will pave my way toward it?

Note: Afterwards and Radiance reviewed favourably in The Globe this week.

March 10, 2007

Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert

Though a startlingly original novel, Rachel Seiffer’s Afterwards brought other works to mind, in the most flattering way. Seiffert’s sparing prose made me think of Jon McGregor’s in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, its consideration of grandparents is similar to Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young and In My Prime, and the beautifully-written portrayal an English working class ethos reminded me of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Which, again, is not to say that Seiffert’s novel is derivative, but rather there is so much going on within it, a review could take a wide variety of approaches.

I’ll keep my approach wide. Here we find prose as lovely as the story it tells. Seibbert’s omission of all unnecessary words and discription is so finely tuned that she matches the way our thoughts proceed, and reading along the page we miss nothing. She shows a particular mastery of providing the best example with which to illuminate an entire character, which is so difficult to do . But the story too– a love story, in which the love is not at the forefront. And each character comes into this story with their own backstory (as people tend to do) and it all ties up together in the end, with such a marvelous cohesion that even the unresolved ending is somehow satisfactory.

Here is the story of Alice, who meets Joseph. Her grandmother has recently died, and she is also taking care to visit regularly with her grandfather, David, a difficult man, and she is curious to know about his time in the British Imperial Army in Kenya in the 1950s. She is bothered by what he keeps from her, and she begins to see a similar reticence in her new boyfriend Joseph, who can identify with Alice’s grandfather’s situation through his experiences in the British army himself, having served in Northern Ireland. Not that the two men connect easily, by any means, and their commonalities eventually surface in an explosive and disturbing climax. And Alice stays outside of all of this. As readers, we are privy to the backstories, but Alice never gets to know, and her coming to terms with the impossibility of knowing is one of the intriguing themes of the story, and a neat twist on love. The flipside of that is how Joseph and David deal with their isolation, and whether or not telling is any release after all. What do you do with the past once it’s over?

No answers, of course, but Seiffert gives us pages and pages on which to ruminate.