May 21, 2014
A Siege of Bitterns by Steve Burrows
From the start, I liked the premise: a birder murder. Though I am not a birder myself, I am fascinated with the species (the hobbyists, I mean), and take a great deal of comfort from the fact that they exist in the world. I also like a murder mystery, particularly those set in the English countryside, so when I stumbled across Steve Burrows’ book launch for A Siege of Bitterns at Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge not long ago, I was more than happy to buy the book. But would the book itself live up to the promise? Well, after a delicious weekend devouring it, I am happy to tell you: yes.
For some reason, television comparisons spring to mind. My beloved Midsomer Murders for one, with its semi-satirical and slightly absurd look at English society, and then also Broadchurch, in which the damaged, alluring, flawed detective genius rolls into town with a whole lot of baggage, and a high profile case is not the introduction to the job that he had in mind. The genius here is Domenic Jejeune, Canadian ex-pat and apparently a media darling, though we’re told very little about either why he’s admired or the past that he is fleeing from. He’s just as much an enigma to his readers as he is to his new colleagues in the Norfolk town of Saltmarsh.
From the television references, however, one is not to think that part of A Siege of Bitterns’ appeal is not its language. It’s a book that will appeal to those of us who covet collective nouns, and apparently it’s meant to be the start of a whole series (A Murder of Crows, A Charm of Goldfinches, etc). One of the book’s greatest charms is Domenic Jejeaune’s girlfriend, Lindy, a journalist, for whom grammar and editorial style is a preoccupation, which proves convenient to Jejeune as these semantical details turn out to be upon which the whole case rests. Birds and words: this is such a book for nerds! And I absolutely loved it.
The case is the murder of celebrity ecologist Cameron Brae, and the suspects begin lining up not long after his body is discovered hanging from a willow bough. Is it his unlikely second wife, a former Spice Girl-esque rockstar with a penchant for Motown music and a yearning to be her husband’s intellectual equal? Or was it Brae’s son whose cravings for his father’s attention lead to involvement with a radical environmental group? Is this about wind turbines, the fragile climate of the salt marshes, landowners with no regard for conservation, or does it all come down to a fierce rivalry among birders to get to 400 species sightings, which Brae was unbelievably close to? What of the note Jejeune finds scrawled in Brae’s study referencing the American Bittern? Could a man be murdered because of a bird?
Burrows’ background includes extensive birdwatching experience around the world, and editorships at the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society Magazine and Asian Geographic, which I assume have led to the deftness with which he writes about ecology and ornithology, applying these ideas to the mystery genre in a way that doesn’t feel like a stretch. I was a bit concerned in the book’s opening when Jejeune’s own background as a birder gives him special insight into a suspect’s false alibi–it was a bit to convenient. But after that, the birding didn’t seem conspicuous in the novel, and it was the mystery itself that had me so absorbed, as well as the complex and interesting characters that Burrows has created–Jejeune and Lindy, and Jejeune’s Sergeant Maik.
It’s obvious we’re being set up for a series here–Burrows has deliberately left so many ends wide open, and I can’t wait to find out where they lead. A Siege of Bitterns signals an original, well-crafted, clever and exciting new series on the scene, and it’s a really terrific read.
May 19, 2014
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
It’s a toss-up, the question of my favourite line from This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. It’s either, “That’s the problem with being adopted. I have no idea how big my boobs are going to be.” or, “You can’t get herpes from a flip-flop.” And it’s remarkable that the lines stand out in a graphic novel, a books whose visuals are so overwhelming. A book whose graphics’ simple blue only emphasizes the detail of the drawings, the clutter in the corners. There are some graphic novels you are breeze through in one sitting, but this isn’t one of them. The illustrations are a marvellous mix of old-school comic style, complete with text to imply sound and movement, and images inspired by scientific drawings of birds, plants and stars. And then full-page spreads with surprising perspectives and you could read this book over and over and discover something new each time.
Summer is fitting for comics, the season allowing plenty of time for pleasure reading, summer cottages perhaps having stacks of old comics on hand. And also for the way that summer is so fleeting–just a few panels in the book of a year. So much of life goes on outside it, and yet these summer memories, these ephemeral experiences of jumping off docks and sitting in sand, are what our minds return to over and over again. Summer brings us to the same old places but we’re a different person each time that we come, as Rose is beginning to discover in the Tamaki cousins’ tale.
And they get the details just right–cottage-country traffic, the winding roads and the posts mounted with family names pointing in their cottages’ directions. When Rose’s family arrives, she goes to find her friend Windy, her cottage friend since age 5. They visit the general store to buy candy, ride their bikes, lounge on the beach, wonder about the local kids and their teenage dramas, contemplate the summer romances they’re still too young for, get bored, get into trouble, wait out the rain.
Outside this chronology of hours, how summer days can stretch so long, there is much more happening, so much that cannot be articulated, which is why this story is such a great fit for a graphic novel. Rose’s parents’ relationship has fractured, her mother seems to be suffering from depression, their family going through their familiar routines but not meaning much of it. The reader also infers that in subsequent summers the differences in Rose and Windy’s ages will start to matter more, that the friends will grow apart, which will be heartbreaking and complicated. But that is a summer still to come.
In the meantime, the girls are on a threshold, having not put away childish things, but beginning to glimpse an adult world before them whose puzzles they just can’t decipher. They still think the puzzles are decipherable, however, so they’re still young yet, looking on in fascination and fear at the possibilities before them, feelings best expressed in an awe-filled silence. And to fill that silence in the meantime, they talk, Mariko Tamaki’s dialogue ringing true. Riding bikes, slouched on porches and bobbing in inner-tubes, doing and talking about everything, and nothing at all.
May 11, 2014
Pat Barker’s Union Street and Just Pretending by Lisa Bird-Wilson
Books are another thing that happen when you’re making other plans. My friend, Maria Meindl, recently recommended I read Union Street, Pat Barker’s first novel. On Maria’s blog, she writes, “When I read The M Word, I thought of the at-times agonizing intimacy of Barker’s book. She portrays the women in a working class neighbourhood in northern England. At first read, I pegged it as taking place just after World War Two, a grittier version of Call the Midwife; then it became disturbingly clear that this was the 1970s. The women’s choices are severely limited, and not surprisingly, the key moments, the defining dramas of their lives are played out on the stage of motherhood.”
So I tracked down a copy, even though it was the worst edition ever, and read it last week while were in Winnipeg. And I’m so grateful to Maria for recommending this book, which is a collection of linked short stories whose different characters (ranging from an 11 year old girl to a Hagar Shipley-ish character not far from death) mark the progression of a woman’s life. The book is gritty, effortlessly daring, disturbing, and ever-surprising. Barker’s women feature levels of complexity not often seen in fiction, and while “the key moments [of] the defining dramas of their lives” are events that we have encountered before, we’ve never encountered them from Barker’s particular angle in which these characters with so little agency are allotted a complicated breadth. These women are not just victims, but they are whole, complicated, flawed and brilliant beings. Their lives are depicted in agonizing detail, what it is to inhabit these bodies which birth, miscarry, are beaten, stand for hours on a factory line (and its a cake factory–the most magnificent detail), which are raped, fucked, rarely loved (but sometimes), tired and weary. But not just bodies–these are people. It’s a truly extraordinary book.
The book I turned to next, presuming no connection, was Just Pretending, a short story by Lisa Bird-Wilson, who is a Metis writer from Saskatchewan whose stories have been widely published in prominent Canadian literary journals. Just Pretending had been on my radar for a while, but I took special notice when it recently took multiple prizes at the Saskatchewan Book Awards, including University of Regina Book of the Year. And it soon became clear to me as I started to read that Barker and Bird-Wilson’s books are similar projects, portraying the wholeness of marginalized women’s experiences, experiences which hinge on maternity, on motherhood and daughterhood, and on what happens when these connections are broken.
Many of these stories centre on characters who have been divorced from their heritage. In the first story, “blood memory”, a woman about to give birth to her first child imagines what her birth mother must have experienced at her own birth, and anticipates the awesome, surreal experience of meeting a blood relation for the first time in her life. In “the nirvana principle”, a young girl whose trauma from abandonment is compounded after a difficult experience attempts to outsmart-aleck her psychiatrist. A father in “deedee” visits a bar in a strip-mall, anticipating a reunion with the daughter he hasn’t seen for years, but she never shows and he gets lost to his old demons. In “Julia and Joe”, a young woman is about to give birth to her first child and and navigating complicated terrain as she lives with the father of the boyfriend who has taken off and left her. A woman’s dream of a happy blended family in “oldest sons” is tainted by the disappearance of her stepson. In “Just Pretending”, a teenage girl who is adopted contemplates her “real family”, which hangs her entire present situation in a state of “pretend”, enabling her to take risks with a charismatic older boy which leads to tragic consequences.
In so many of these stories, pregnancies are miscarried, babies stillborn, symbolizing the perpetuation of the disconnection between the future and the past, and also characters’ lack of agency in their own circumstances. Not to mention reflecting reality. Characters also struggle with addiction–a particularly strong story is “drinking wine spo dee o dee”, in which a down-and-out character drinks in a bus station parking lot in Winnipeg. His girlfriend has taken off to Toronto to find the child she gave up for adoption years ago, and he tells his story as testament to her: “Sadie liked me telling stories. ‘It’s how we know who we are,’ she was always saying,” but he points out that his stories were different from hers, which were “ancestors and shit like that. Mine are just life stories. Jokes and life stories.” Just as powerful though.
This story is followed by “hungry”, about a young girl whose abused and deprived experiences in the care of her mother lead to uprootings and trouble in foster care. Desperate for love, for something to call her own, she puts up with the attention of male classmates who end up raping her, and she becomes pregnant. It’s a harrowing but illuminating story, how one thing leads to another, how there is a light inside Bird-Wilson’s Lucy Wingfeather that no amount of trauma can extinguish. It is a story of perpetuating cycles, and then there is a powerful conclusion of connection finally, in which the mother/daughter connection is finally completed, which parallels a similar conclusion in Pat Barker’s story of a woman whose painful existence as an abused wife leaves her despairing at having brought a daughter (another woman) into the world to continue the struggle, and then finally, she recognizes her daughter and there is some kind of catharsis (we hope).
And we do hope. We cling to the moments of light in these stories, the powerful longing and love to cancel out all that gets lost. There is also humour here, both situational and also in the voices which Bird-Wilson evokes to bring her characters to life. There is a real mix of stories in the collection, and my only criticism of the book is that I’d have preferred more careful creation, perhaps fewer stories with the connections between them made implicit. While Bird-Wilson’s considerable talent is clear here, it would have been better highlighted with more selectivity, a nod to the book itself in addition to its stories.
But the stories are strong. It’s true that our stories are how we know who we are, but they’re also how others can know us, how the experiences of other people can be known. So I am glad that Lisa Bird-Wilson and Just Pretending are receiving such deserved attention. These are life stories, and there is is nothing “just” about it. Pun intended.
May 4, 2014
One Hour in Paris by Karyn L. Freedman
If there is any justice, Karyn L Freedman’s memoir, One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery, will be widely celebrated one of the best Canadian nonfiction titles of 2014. In the book’s first chapter, Freedman, a philosopher and professor at the University of Guelph, tells the story of her own experience with rape at knifepoint in Paris while backpacking through Europe during the summer after her first year in university in 1990. In the rest of the book, she goes on to illustrate her own trauma in the aftermath, her futile attempts to move on from the experiences she suffers from PTSD, how through work with a therapist she learns to finally process what happened to her years after the fact, and eventually applies a philosophical framework to her understanding of her rape and being a rape survivor and to sexual violence against women in a wider and global context.
Freedman is an skilled writer, her prose measured and precise, she is a composer of beautiful sentences, and her mastery of the narrative—which weaves the personal, sociological and philosophical—is impressive. Though I can sense resistance from those readers for whom the book is not directly intended (“I wrote this book for you”, Freedman writes in her prologue to fellow rape-survivors.) So why else might you want to read this book?
To this point, I return to the book that has become my own personal touchstone in terms of memoir, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. As I wrote of that book: “To be stirred then, to have our quiet disturbed. Perhaps this is why we should read this, or any book.” Like Wave, One Hour in Paris is a harrowing memoir, difficult to read but even harder to put down. The violence and rape are actually easier to read about than Freedman’s emotional fragility in the years that follow. She recounts what happened to her in a manner that is direct and factual; her intention is not that we relive her experiences—I don’t think she’d wish this on anybody. But more important to Freedman is that her readers understand what it is to live with these experiences, and also to understand the fascinating workings of our brains, how they process or fail to process traumatic events in our lives.
I started reading the book late in the evening and knew this wouldn’t be a casual reading experience. One can’t stop reading in the middle of the first chapter—there is a need to see the story through to the end, just so we know that it ends. The end of the chapter was devastating, but not entirely, mostly because Freedman’s narrative voice is so authoritative and compelling that I wanted to stick with her. And so I did, glad this dark book about the City of Light was so compact because I carried it in my purse the next day, holding it on one hand while used my other to push my baby in the swing.
And it was there in the playground where I read Freedman’s convincing arguments for speaking out about her rape. Her parents, who emerge along with Freedman herself (and her therapist) as this story’s heroes, wanted to shield her from any more pain or trauma after she came home from Paris. They made up a story about her unexpected homecoming, and were complicit in her attempts to leave the incident in her past, but Freedman comes to see that this decision was not only a misstep in her own recovery, but also how it perpetuates myths about sexual violence. The world, she tells us with two decades of perspective in addition to her own violent rape, is a dangerous place for women, as statistics demonstrate in places as close as our own neighbourhoods and as far away as the war-wracked Congo. But nobody talks about these experiences, suggesting that such incidents are rare, suggesting to those lucky enough to not know better that sexual violence is a crime of circumstance, that it’s something most of us should be able to sidestep. It’s why newspaper columnists suggest that if a young woman refrains from drinking to excess, she might not get raped, and if she is raped, she should have known better. Thereby perpetuating victim’s sense of her own complicity in the crime against her, ensuring her silence, and so the cycle continues.
What was most remarkable about One Hour in Paris was not just the good writing, or how Freedman offers access to her own experience (though this is something), but how much I learned, about sexual violence and the history of trauma and mental disorders, and the nature of these as well. Freedman comes to see her trauma as a chronic illness, the violent experience having changed the physiology of her brain, and so she much learn to manage her symptoms rather than hope to get beyond them. Even so, her own recovery would offer hope to other survivors that there is life beyond the trauma, that they certainly aren’t alone in what happened to them.
While I do think that while there may not be justice, Freedman’s book does have a chance of doing well with Canadian nonfiction prizes because of the way in which she takes her narrative beyond the personal to discuss sexual violence in general, and also internationally in the context of war crimes. And while I dislike this—the idea that a personal narrative is unworthy of note and one can’t write serious nonfiction without war being part of the mix—I appreciate that Freedman has broadened her approach not just to set up her story of one of grave importance, but because she can’t not do it. Her book avoids the inflammatory phrase “rape culture”, but is a document of its very point. She can’t help but tell her story in a broad context because sexual violence is everywhere, insidious and pervasive all around the world, and until the problem is stated plain, stared in the face as Freedman does, things are never going to be any different.
May 1, 2014
Hideout Hotel by Janine Alyson Young
There is a lot to appreciate about Hideout Hotel, the debut short story collection by Janine Alyson Young. The first story, “Bushfire”, is full of violence, drink, and danger, and begins with its main character throwing up out a window. The book’s cover is appropriate–these are domestic tales, but the couch is hideous, threadbare, and sitting on the porch. There’s nothing cozy about these homes, which in the case of “Bushfire” is a trailer in an isolated Australian mining community. It’s where Gina lives with her pregnant sister, their parents finally leaving town, a town with nothing much except the hotel to drink, where Gina drowns her sorrows and is taken to bed by one man after another. She doesn’t imagine she’s happy, but supposes she could be, and looks forward to creating a cozy home with her sister, raising the baby together. But the eponymous fire in the distance suggests that Gina’s dream won’t come true, plus we begin to see that Gina’s handle on her fate is even more tenuous that she knows. This was a strong story, a story that surprised me, whose violence was not gratuitous, and is indicative of Young’s talent.
The story sets a tone which is echoed in the others. These are stories of young women who are trapped on the edge of nowhere, without agency or ambition. In “Greyhound Special”, a lead singer ditches her band and flees to Whitehorse where she pitches a crappy tent and looks to the universe of a sign of what next. In “Once It Breaks”, a young mother considers her loveless marriage. And then “Sung Spit Part One” and “Sung Spit Part Two”, which constitute half the book and together are two fragments of a novella, in which a young woman watches her teenage cousin carouse toward self-destruction, mesmerized by the girl’s charisma, her untouchability, how she refuses to be held. Meanwhile, the girl herself is pregnant, not going anyway, unsure of how to properly rebel against her hippie mother. We meet her a few years later in part two, a little older but still not over her cousin and the events that transpired the summer her cousin went away.
Of her older boyfriend, she explains, “I annoy him, I think, because I’m young and wasting my youth. I’m not excelling in anything, but more than that, I’m not fucking up either. I never get atrociously drunk or high, but I also haven’t applied for law school. It seems there’s no middle ground with youth. You’re supposed to be making the most of it by either getting somewhere or else destroying yourself one hilarious night at a time and I can’t seem to do either with much gusto.”
My problem though is that she doesn’t do much of anything at all, and neither do any of the women at the centre of these stories. The settings are interesting, the situations are interesting, and some really wonderful dynamics transpire–the relationship between the cousins in Sung Spit, or how when the girl visits her mother and sees her mother’s effort in relating to her, the idea of this is terrifying—but I wanted these girls to stop drifting. I was more interested in secondary characters, the mothers and mother-figures who seemed more fully formed by their experiences, but whose perspectives never come into play. Maybe the point is that I am old…
Hideout Hotel is a book with promise, and it holds the seeds of a great book to come.
April 27, 2014
7 Ways to Sunday by Lee Kvern
“Wild verus farmed,” begins Lee Kvern in the acknowledgements which precede her short story collection, 7 Ways to Sunday. “….I am of the latter variety. Wild. Largely unschooled… I learned the liar’s craft by hell and bent wheels, trials and multiple errors in good story judgement.” Her collection too is wild instead of farmed, 20-some years of stories gathered together for the first time instead of a carefully curated collection that was always going to be a book. And the collection works first because of its wildness, of the characters themselves, of the stories which place the reader in all kinds of situations, stories steeped so in their language and atmosphere so that the reader has to find her bearings every time, finds herself somewhere altogether new, the characters’ situations and fortunes shifting in a way that makes the book’s Snakes and Ladders cover so absolutely perfect. The collection works too just (just !) because Lee Kvern is a fantastic writer. When you’re this good, your 20-some years of stories were probably born to be bound.
I loved this book, hooked by the first story, “White,” in which a woman arrives with her husband and two young sons at an ice-fishing party in the middle of nowhere. It’s a dodgy scene: “We pass a running Plymouth, the windows dressed in rime. Inside: two steamy, half-dressed teenagers ravaging one another. My husband raises a brow at me. Avert, avert, I want to say my boys… Avert your eyes, turn away, this knowledge is not for you.” It’s an idea that runs through the book, parents failing to protect their children from the world, children seeing things they shouldn’t have seen, characters failing to avert their own lines of vision from painful revelations as to the realities of their lives.
In “High Ground,” a mother trails her son from party to party, sitting outside abandoned warehouses behind the wheel of her Camry, as he falls into drug abuse after an injury ends his career as a student athlete. “I miss his bare arms poking out of his Varsity jersey… rather than the tainted ticker tape of his blue tattoos telling the world–here is who he is now.” In “This is a Love Crime”, a woman married to a controlling husband whose behaviour borders on abuse drifts farther and farther from his sphere of influence as she grapples with a problem at her supermarket HR job with a checker who insists on violating the dress code with her hijab. “Detachment” is one of a few stories in the collection that take place on rural RCMP detachments; in this one, a complicated mother-daughter relationship plays out against a dangerous backdrop.
Similar is “In Search of Lucinda”, a 1970s set-piece whose garish colours are strikingly evoked as is scent and atmosphere. In this story, the father’s associates bring home two women whose appearance on the domestic scene is quite incongruous, and the situation (and the woman) is delivered redemption through the guilelessness of a little girl. In “Pioneer”, a mother struggles against love and fear for her son whose gender difference is becoming apparent. In “The Night Doors 1987”, a family arrives at the hospital to be with their ailing father as he dies, the story a devastating, haunting and beautiful portrayal of the last moments of a life, of the parts of life that nobody ever talks about, or at least not this vividly. And I loved the title story, in which redemption is once against delivered almost just past just in time, but leading up to that is the most gut-punching (and cringe-making!) spiral of a life heading out of control. It starts off kind of a funny, a guy so reprehensible that all he has for company are the Jehovah’s Witnesses who show up at his door every week, but instead, Kvern makes us care about him, and the oft-mocked door-knockers are offered literary redemption as well, to be people rather than punchlines. By the end of this fantastic story, I wanted to champion every single character.
April 20, 2014
Blood Always Tells by Hilary Davidson
I came to crime fiction via Kate Atkinson, so Hilary Davidson is something of a departure. She’s less blurry about genre, more bare-bones, hardboiled. Though not so much that there isn’t a character here who isn’t always spouting literary allusions, this time Marcus Aurelius. And the spouter is Desmond Edgars, a fascinating character, a helicopter pilot who hauled his own good self out of a troubled youth by way of a good education and military service. Though there is a hollowness to him, something broken in his core, and what makes Blood Always Tells different from the other crime novels I’ve read lately is that Desmond’s emotional truth and complexity stays peripheral to a question that refuses to digress, despite Davidson’s plot with its many twists and turns. And the question, of course, is, Who done it?
But who done what? It’s not straightforward. The book opens with Desmond’s half-sister, Dominique, who’s putting a plan in motion to take revenge on her cheating boyfriend, but then the two of them get kidnapped and holed up in a creepy house in the middle of nowhere. It seems like Dominique’s boyfriend has set them both up to get money out of his heartless wife (yes, he’s married. Yes, it’s complicated) or else the wife is out to get them both, and luckily Dominique has better luck getting a cellphone signal than she does getting her bearings. She manages to get through to her brother Desmond who drops everything to come and find her, to come to rescue just like he always did.
Blood Always Tells is a novel steeped in atmosphere, and it took me a while to find my own bearings, partly because Dominique is not well defined, and the story of her boyfriend and his wife is vaguely preposterous. But once Desmond took over the story, I was hooked, his perspective adding a steadying force, which is essential as the story gets wilder and wilder. Suddenly, we’re dealing with stupid cops and hostile cops, drug dealers, glamour models, three different tragic family legacies, and the extraordinary lengths that one sibling will go to protect another.
The final time I sat down with this book, I had just a few pages left, but absolutely no idea how the story would be resolved. The only thing I was expecting was that I would probably be surprised, and I was, even shocked. Hilary Davidson has nerve, in addition to skill, and in this, her first stand-alone novel, she’s made her mark and it’s truly first-rate.
April 13, 2014
Shorts: New books by Doretta Lau and Gillian Wigmore
I first read Doretta Lau in The Journey Prize Stories with the story from which her first collection takes its title. “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” is the story of a group of Chinese-Canadian young people growing up in Vancouver who repurpose racist language and stereotypes for their own devices. It was so smart, daring and surprising, but most of all funny, and I’ve been looking forward to this collection ever since. Revisiting that story underlined my first impression, and I was once again stirred by its powerful conclusion in which the friends raucously paint over a mural depicting colonial scenes, ending up with an expanse of empty beige wall. And it’s as though in her stories, Lau picks up where the vandals left off, portraying the experiences of Asian-Canadians in her story but not in the ways in which we’re familiar with seeing them depicted in Canadian literature–heroic immigrant tales, family sagas.
For there is nothing familiar about Lau’s approach in her best stories, her reader dazzled by the possibilities of her fictional worlds in which the usual rules don’t apply. The rules of language, for one, as in “How does a single blade of grass…?”, and then the rules of physics in “God Damn, How Real Is This?”, in which people begin receiving text messages from their future selves, which sends the order of the world into chaos, or “Two Part Invention,” whose main character’s determination to start dating dead men leads to a relationship with Glenn Gould.
A few of the other stories, usually about lovelorn characters without purpose who live alone in apartments, blurred together a bit, lacking the focus and definition of the strongest stories in the book. But ultimately, this slim collection is impressive, marking the exciting debut of an original voice.
*****
I wasn’t sure I would love Grayling, a novella by poet Gillian Wigmore. It takes place over the course of a canoe trip through Northwestern BC, has just two characters—none of the people and concrete I like best in my books. And yet, from the first sentence I was hooked, Wigmore’s remarkable prose creating an incredible momentum that parallels her character Jay’s journey on the Dease River. On the run after a health crisis, Jay is paddling to get anywhere, rather than to somewhere specific, but he is interrupted in his personal quest by a girl he meets en-route who sweet talks her way into his boat. The two characters’ personalities are often at odds, their company in so remote a place creating a curious intimacy between them. And we get to know them by what they choose to tell one another, knowing them even better too by their mysteries, by what they choose to withhold. The stories they exchange, their questions without answers, serve to add layers of meaning to the immediate action portrayed in the book and cast a kind of spell.
Wigmore’s writing is incredibly sensual, her prose vivid with bodies and their feelings (and their food!). The connection between the two characters is so rich and complex, resisting cliches and ever fresh, and so too is her story, which would earn a place in my hypothetical “Death By Landscape” anthology, even though no one dies exactly, because that too would be too easy, but instead her ending is mysterious and shocking, unsettling and swift.
Grayling was a runner-up for the 1st Search for the Great BC Novel contest, and one can certainly see how it stuck out in the crowd. For a debut novel, this one is remarkably assured, and here’s hoping that the multi-talented Wigmore has more fiction in store for us.
April 6, 2014
My Real Children by Jo Walton
Jo Walton’s previous novel, Among Others, was one of my favourite books of 2012 and won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, which you can’t say about most books that are my favourite books of any year. I appreciate that because of Jo Walton, for me “the Hugo and the Nebula Awards” are now words that flow from my fingers like “Giller” or “Booker” do. Having made her start with fantasy in 2002, Walton’s writing moved in a science fiction direction with her alternate history “Small Change” series (which I can’t wait to read soon), and then proceeded to be altogether genre-busting with Among Others, which, in its unabashed bookishness, was embraced by passionate readers of all stripes. And now she has produced another such genre-busting book with My Real Children, the story of a woman with memory problems who can swear she’s lived two lives.
At first glance, the story recalls the movie Sliding Doors (Gwyneth and a fictional uncoupling, or not–remember?), or Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World—stories about the possibility of two destinies hinging on a single moment. But it also brings to mind Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the twentieth century told through the experience of a character who gets to live it more than once. But where Walton’s take is particularly compelling and original, as it was with Among Others, is the way her fantastical elements exist in a so-solid reality, leaving it up to the reader to decide where the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur, if it exists at all.
Patricia Cowan is confused, we are told, and some days she’s even “Very Confused”, as the nurses document in their notes on a clipboard at the end of her bed. Is it simply her dementia, or can she remember two lives? Her different children come to visit, there are subtle differences between two care homes where apparently she resides, her different memories. Could this be possible? Is it just senility? Which conclusion is more plausible? And it’s a testament to the spell Walton casts that these questions don’t even matter. To Cowan herself, they certainly don’t.
The “sliding door” moment, that instant in which Patricia Cowan’s life cleaved in two, takes place in 1949 when she agrees to marry Mark. And also when she doesn’t. Up until this point, she’d been swept along in time, losing her brother in WW2, receiving a place at Oxford (because all the men were away, she says, explaining away her success with the tide). She does well at school, finds a teaching job. But Mark’s less-than-romantic proposal is the definitive moment in which she becomes an agent in her fate. When she says, “Yes,” she finds herself “Tricia”, in a loveless marriage, wed to a tyrant who keeps her powerless and miserable. Saying, “No,” results in Pat, some temporary heartbreak, but then fulfilment found in travel, a writing career, a life partnership with a biologist called Bee.
So which are her real children, Patricia Cowan wonders? The four children she had with Mark? With the son who became a rock star and died young of AIDS? Or the three children she had with Bee, two her biological children and all three fathered by the photographer, Michael? And as the reader is taken through the chronology of these family lives, it becomes clear that Patricia Cowan’s lives took place against political backdrops as different as their domestic ones. As we suspect all along and is confirmed in the book’s final chapter, it’s a butterfly-flapping-its-wings scenario. Is it that Tricia, with a life otherwise devoid of purpose and therefore with time to devote to campaigning for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is key to the eventual obliteration of such weapons? Whereas Pat lives in a world where nuclear weapons are used more than once, radiation seeping through the atmosphere to disastrous consequences decades later. The Soviets land on the moon. LBJ is implicated in the death of President Kennedy. IRA bombings, Cuban missiles, nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan, gay marriage made legal in the 1980s, mandatory identity cards, Google in the 1990s, US and Russia aligned against Europe, or American returned to its pre-WW2 isolationist stance. The possibilities are fascinating, how one thing just leads to another. Like a book. Life a life.
As I read this book, I thought less of Kate Atkinson and Sliding Doors and more of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald biography, which I read in December. Not because Walton and Fitzgerald are anything alike in terms of style, but rather that Fitzgerald and Patricia Cowan are near contemporaries with similar experiences–plans and legacies interrupted by wartime, coming of age in an era overseen by a new establishment, Oxbridge educations that culminate in disappointing marriages and women (in the case of Tricia/Trish) who discover their true capabilities later in life. I suppose it says something about Walton’s skill that her novel calls to mind a Hermione Lee biography, that Patricia Cowan’s two lives seem so convincingly lived.
As the bookish Walton undoubtedly knows, one book always leads to another. I mean, she clearly knows this sort of thing because she’s referenced Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes and Margaret Drabble before you even hit page 16. Eventually, as the end of the book drew nearer (and oh, when it finally happened, I was gutted. I might have wished Patricia Cowan had life after life so that I could have gone on forever reading them…), I was thinking about Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, which similarly spans realistic historical periods to end up in a dystopian future. The atmosphere at the end of My Real Children is much the same, showing lives impacted by huge and sweeping histories but the details of these lives being the narratives that matter, the only constants in a history constructed of flux.
April 2, 2014
After I’m Gone by Laura Lippman
It would be so easy to be absolutely enthralled by Laura Lippman’s latest novel, After I’m Gone, that you might forget to notice that it’s so magnificently structured. Written in alternating chapters between the present day from the perspective of a cold case cop, and the back story from the perspective of a whole cast of characters, it tells the story of Felix Brewer, shady wheeler dealer who goes on the lam in 1976 while facing a prison sentence for fraud. He leaves behind his wife and three daughters, as well as his mistress, Julie, who complicates the story further by disappearing herself almost ten years to the day after Felix vanished, the mystery of her whereabouts solved in 2001 when her body is discovered in a Baltimore ravine. But the mystery of her murder remains wide open, picked up in 2012 by retired homicide detective Sandy Sanchez, who’s trying to keep his mind off his own heartache. Who killed her and why? Where was she during all the years before her body was found? And how does all this connect to Felix Brewer?
Sandy’s chapters take place over a few weeks as the pieces of the case begin to come together, the alternating chapters also in chronological order but with a larger scope, moving from 1959 (when Felix’s wife first meets him at a dance) to the present day, each one from the point of view of each of his family members. These separate points of view weave together seamlessly, each one filling in more of the background that Sandy Sanchez is after, but also providing each character her own rich back story–these chapters do not just drive the plot forward, but simultaneously add texture to the plot, each character with her own secrets unbeknownst to the other characters and not expected by the reader either. So that by the end of this book, we have this amazing many-sided shape which is the story, a story with so many pieces that fit together so perfectly that you’d think you’ve got the whole thing figured out, but you don’t. I promise.
It’s so rare to find a mystery whose solution and the journey to get to it are equally delicious.
