Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Novel posits bleak future

Debut novel Swarm

By Lauren Carter
Published by Brindle & Glass

288 pages, $19.95

 

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Capitalism has fallen. The government hardly exists except as whispers in condemned buildings. There are no jobs and everyone is poor. There is violence, rebellion. People have to quickly adapt to an older way of life—when living and surviving meant the same thing.

Lauren Carter’s first novel, Swarm, is narrated by Sandy, who lives in a previously abandoned house on a rural and isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and dying friend, Thomson. Sandy and Marvin fish, hunt, farm and keep bees in order to survive.

         “Things would never be what they were—brightly lit supermarkets with asparagus from Peru and frozen pasta in microwave-safe plastic bowls—”

         “What are our battles? I could have asked, but didn’t. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table.”

When Sandy, never able to have children, finds the footprints of a small girl in her garden, it sparks a search and a yearning for something much larger than the child herself. The neighbour’s baby sleeps, sickly, in a blue recycling box—but Sandy still wants nothing more than a daughter of her own. She is preoccupied with what makes up a life, but is unable to differentiate between her fantasies and her reality.

Sandy addresses her story to the elusive child, whom she has named Melissa, as the book alternates from her past in the city to her present island life. It seems fitting that, in a time of so much isolation, Carter has her protagonist tell the story to someone who may not even exist.

         “No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.”

The ambitious structure is effective in keeping up the pace of the novel, as well as in helping the reader understand how everything fell apart, and how all of those small collapses influence the characters’ present lives. This novel is terrifying because of how realistically Carter has built this dystopian world; it could very easily become our world in the near future. We are already seeing a lack of jobs and resources as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow larger in real life. Carter’s descriptions of this isolated island are easy to imagine—and it’s no doubt that the clear-eyed specificity comes from her upbringing in rural Blind River, Ontario.

I immediately identified with Sandy’s character, and I found myself asking the same questions she’s faced with: What do we risk for our ideals? How do you build a home from things you’ve never imagined or have never cared to? I found myself thinking about how I deal with my own unexpected realities. Though the naivety of Sandy’s character often annoyed me, it’s hard to judge her. When every day is a struggle to survive, it’s difficult to imagine that other stakes exist, but Carter corrects of this notion. Swarm is proof that, regardless of what our current world looks like, humans will always yearn for the same things: love, security, compassion, and companionship.

Carter’s debut reads like an elegy for an entire population, an entire planet. This somber world, paired with a wash of beauty in the prose, makes for a reading experience I can only compare to the blue hour of the day—something half-way between light and darkness.

         “It was too late. Despite whatever I’d once wanted in a life, I had made my reality.”

 

Jenny Boychuk is British Columbia writer and reviewer

 

 

 

 

Family circle resists shaping

Every Happy Family

By Dede Crane

Coteau Books

247 pp., $18.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

Jill, mother, wife and “itinerant” scholar in Dede Crane’s third novel Every Happy Family, thinks “perfection is out there . . . if only she tries a little harder.” For the five years we know her, she devotes herself, lovingly and wearily, to rounding her husband Les and their three teenagers into a perfect circle.  But Crane deftly disrupts her efforts with the cat’s-cradle complications, multiplicities and heart-stopping randomness of real family life.

Language and logic, once grounding for Jill, short-circuit repeatedly throughout the story: a quiet talk with son Quinn doesn’t settle the question of the hidden vodka bottle, and a lecture to enlighten her adopted daughter Pema about misogynist rap lyrics falls short. Her handsome son Beau suffers from a stutter; her kids are more at home with her “faucet mouth” sister-in-law Annie than with her; and her mother, suffering from dementia, can no longer advise her. The lost-language crisis of Langue d’Occ, the subject of her latest paper, is happening in her own home.

Another anxiety for this family circle is its blurring circumference. Already struggling with her mother’s decline, Jill is shaken when Pema’s biological mother asks Pema to meet her in Tibet.  At the same time, Beau longs to set Pema outside his “blood” family, since he has secretly fallen in love with her. Pema questions the status of Quinn’s girlfriend Holly: “He brought a girl. Isn’t this a family event?” Yet Holly and her young son give Quinn the strength to dump a forbidden drink: “Feels like he’s pouring his own blood and thinks he might faint.”

Crane bends the definition of blood relations beyond the biological: her characters long to be truly seen and touched, to feel “the soothing vibration of a living creature.” Jill’s mother imagines a male roommate for herself after surviving a long, unhappy marriage; Les, too ill for love-making, misses Jill’s breasts.  To capture the depth of this longing, Crane includes a tender scene where Satomi, a classmate, explores Beau’s face with her fingers, not her eyes, and then draws it. As her hands linger on his face, he feels known beyond his beauty.

The novel seems to posit that  “outsiders” like Holly and Satomi amplify family, if only temporarily.  When loved ones are overwhelmed, the characters tell their stories to people willing to listen: Annie to a seatmate on a plane, Pema (not trusting her seatmate) to us, Les to an open-hearted teenager in a tree. He observes: “Random encounters with strangers. Is family any different? He’d have to say that Pema, oddly enough, feels more knowable to him, more familiar, than either of his sons, whatever that’s about.”

Crane intimates the interconnectedness of family, in all of its iterations, with the headings she offers in “Parts,” her table of contents. She dedicates the primary chapter titles to family members (for instance, “Les”), and the secondary ones to a category of relative (“Sons”). In “Les,” Les jealously remembers Beau’s coach hugging Beau like a father; in the following section “Sons,” he pushes himself to reach out in a new way to “brainiac” son Quinn. These chapter titles animate the complexities of relationships in the story before and while we read.

Similarly, the time frames dropped in between these titles – Eight Months Later, Three Years Later – generate a lively pace overall. These leaps in time allow the psychic lives of the characters to unfold fluidly, unencumbered by the mechanics of events such as Quinn’s release from assault charges and Pema’s exit from the house.

It is startling, then, to find over one-third of the novel occurs in one long, final chapter, centred on Les’s “Living Wake.”  Although the progress of the characters is enthralling on one level, this section lacks the agility of the previous pages, thus some of its poignancy is lost.  Surprising, too, is the studied effort to “chase the circle closed,” when Jill admits at the wake that it is “impossibly sentimental” to imagine everyone under one roof again, to expect to “come full circle.”  The evening’s ambiguous sun, “oddly like permanence . . . .[a]nd at the same time, as temporary as a breeze,” seems more in keeping with the wise and wistful vision of the novel.

Susan Braley (www.susanbraley.ca) is a writer living in Victoria.

Poet deploys wordplay and humour

Sit You Waiting

By Kim Clark

Caitlin Press

112 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Sit You Waiting is the first collection of Vancouver Island writer Kim Clark, whose poems reverberate between the mental processes we are all captured by and the world we inhabit. Topics include illness, love, desire, travel, and poetry, and Clark infuses several of the pages with bold wordplay and wry humour.

Clark uses square brackets, which can be a bit unnerving until it becomes evident that the recurring technique provides a sub-text. For example, in “A Woman Builds a Body, Post Tsunami,” the brackets help build the poem:

Sleep [stealthy] leaves

the makeshift bed, the woman

[a subduction].

Many poems use this technique, almost as a signature.

Clark handles a variety of length with ease. In “Lavender,” thirty-two words reveal the force of scent-driven memory. In “Three Days on a Train In and Out of Dreaming,” a longish poem of thirteen pages with fabulous use of white space, Clark delves into a train trip across Australia, a place of great space itself. Again the poet employs symbols, this time the number sign (#) and the equals sign (=) to organize the sections. The first is #= and the poem moves to #======= and then back to #= while maintaining more than half a page of space on each page as the traveller observes the landscape and contemplates the journey, both physical and mental. In the poem’s middle section, “A herd of stones gets up and walks away on wooly legs. / The treelines in motion are not stones or sheep but alphabetic arrangements. . . . “ These poems touch magic.

Even a short poem can tell a story, and “Wishing for a Colt” is a clever and funny look at people in a bar hoping for more than a drink. This poem is completely grounded in the concrete. The speaker tries to talk to a “failed cowboy, / dust-diving rodeo rider, / seven broken ribs with a mighty big / hat, and a real small / herd of hay burners / in the interior” while the bar waits for action. It comes.

I am drawn to poems about poetry, and Clark delivers. In “Primate Remuage,” the speaker advises readers to “Be the guerrilla / in the midst.” The corny pun works beautifully as the directions continue and focus on destabilizing the domestic environment until the final command: “Warm to this poem / deep in your pocket. / Leave crumbs / to find your way out.” Overall Clark’s poems appear to be about digging deep within the pockets of our minds,  then pulling the treasures out into the light.   How lovely.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College         

 

 

 

 

Love’s Jazz can be painful

Love, & All That Jazz
By Laurie Lewis
Published by The Porcupine’s Quill

222 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

 How long are we supposed to wait for the ones we love? What happens when the years you’ve been apart equal how long you were together?  And when that number doubles?

 

Laurie Lewis’ memoir reminds us that, while we may use time to measure many things, it is not always an accurate way to measure love—if love can even be measured at all.  Lewis published her first book, Little Comrades (also a memoir), at the age of 81. Love, & All That Jazz acts as a sequel. She talks about discovering her love of writing late in life on her website:

“When you’ve lived a long time, as I have, it’s possible that you’ve had not just one life but several.”

 

            Lewis begins her  new memoir in 1950s New York City. She is in her early twenties and married to Sol, a “smart, honorable, kind” man, with whom she lives a content life; that is, until the day she walks past Gary Lewis, a jazz musician and future photographer for Pepsi-Cola, on the second floor of her apartment building. Neither can ignore the immediate attraction they feel for each other.

 

            It is summer when Lewis begins to see Gary, who is also married, in secret. They meet at bus stops, go for breakfast, and, eventually, Lewis finds herself in his apartment. A few weeks before Christmas, she leaves a note for Sol and sets off to begin her new life with Gary. Living in a tiny, cold studio apartment in Manhattan with hardly any furniture and little money, they are both happier than they could have imagined. Within the next year, they are married and their daughter Amanda is born.

 

            But while the first years are happy, things soon begin to turn and Lewis, who is heartbreakingly innocent and naïve, tries to support her husband through his drug addictions, alcoholism and mental illness. He cheats on her. He lies. He abuses. But still, her love sees him through every recovery, every relapse. Even when he stands before her as a stranger, she manages to see the man she fell in love with on the staircase. 

 

            Her compassion is evident even many years later, as she recounts how those years passed:

 

“Gary’s periods of serious illness run together in my mind. How hard to write about this, to sort out the memories, to make decisions about how much honesty, where, and when. I see things now so differently.”

 

            Lewis aptly describes the ‘50s and ‘60s NYC art scene with vibrancy and detail; she takes her readers into a time when Andy Warhol was “a talented and relatively unknown illustrator,” Ginsburg and Kerouac were reading in local bars, and Ray Charles was playing in California clubs.

 

            “There was Ray with his piano, the musicians grouped at the side rather formally, and the Raelettes in front of the band, the stage only slightly raised. Ray was perspiring and Gary thought he needed something to wipe his brow, so he passed him a silk handkerchief. … The Raelettes swaying, vocal backup, all the love and energy in the room. Gary’s photographs of them were more soulful than the ones for Pepsi-Cola World, certainly. This was his spiritual home.”

 

            Eventually, strong-willed and independent Lewis steps outside of her relationship and builds a life for herself and Amanda in Ontario. She becomes a single working mother in a time when daycare doesn’t exist, and the space she gives her marriage will last far longer than the seven years she and Gary were together. Lewis questions what it means to build a life, and what happens when you are living a kind of life you didn’t intend to. Are there people we are meant to be with no matter what? And why do we keep coming back to them?

 

Lewis’ prose is an easy kind of beauty, and the story reads as if she sat down and typed it out within a single afternoon. She is humble, honest and likeable, which makes it difficult not to care about her story and her life. Even the ending lends itself to the book’s humanness and honesty; it is strangely satisfying:  “But I have to get to the end of this book. Have to finish it now, because I’m sick of writing about the past. I’d like to wake up tomorrow and exist in the day that is, whatever it is.”

 

I think the best books are ones that manage to both end and begin on the last page.

 

Jenny Boychuk lives, reads and writes in Sorrento, B.C. 

 

 

Novel captures culture clashes

Pilgrimage

By Diana Davidson

Brindle and Glass

280 pages, $19.95

 Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Given the climate, people had huge challenges surviving in the late-nineteenth century in small communities on the Candian prairies. But the struggles with cold, heat, and bugs, to name just a few, are almost minor compared to the problems created by human beings: discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, and class. Diana Davidson does a solid job in her debut novel, Pilgrimage, of recreating both the physical landscape of Lac St. Anne, in the Edmonton, Alberta, area,  and the ideologies that affect its inhabitants’ behaviour from December, 1891 to March, 1893.

Lac St. Anne is a mix of European, Cree, and Métis people, languages, and customs. Power is held by the few Europeans who tend to be dismissive of the aboriginal people while feeling quite free to treat them brutally. Virginié Cardinal points out the variety in her family background:  “ . . . everyone here, except Nohkum [grandmother], is a mix of something: Cree, French, Scottish, Blackfoot, Dene, and Lord knows what else!” Her teenage daughter, Mahkesîs, is one of the three main female characters, and like the other two, Mahkesîs is treated vilely by James Barrett, the Hudson’s Bay store manager.  Barrett also preys on Moira Murphy, a young Irish immigrant in his employ. And his third victim is his own wife Georgina, who is not above abusing those she can.

Mahkesîs, Moira, and Georgina all have secrets having to do with sensuality and desire, and in the case of the two young women, love. In this novel, sexuality is a trap for women, just another thing that hampers their lives even if conception was the result of love. Certainly men are adversely affected, but the focus is on the female characters and their lack of power.

Given the novel’s time and place, readers should not expect a happy ending, and as the novel progresses, the sadness and death mount. Moira loves Gabriel, Mahkesîs’s handsome brother, and he loves her, but will that be enough to save her from the clutches of the Barretts? Mahkesîs seeks solace in a convent and in unconventional love. Georgina devises cruel plans while revealing that her own life was severely damaged when her parents married her off to a man older than her father.

The moments of happiness are meagre for all the characters, and Davidson does not shy away from showing the negative effects of enforced religion and language  — or the huge problems of created by alcohol addiction. When cultures come together, the meeting can be mutually beneficial. It can also be a collision in which the powerful abuse their position, leading to suffering and loss. While Davidson occasionally lapses into the stereotypical, the lessons of this novel are valuable ones.

 

Candace Fertile lived for many years in Edmonton and now teaches English at Camosun College

Coteau novels offer fresh prairie perspectives

Dollybird

By Anne Lazurko

256 pages, $19.95

 Clearwater

By Kim McCullough

248 pages, $19.95

Both published by Coteau Books and reviewed by Diana Davidson

Two debut novels from Western Canadian writers challenge us to think differently about the West – both past and present.

Anne Lazurko’s novel Dollybird focuses on the small town of Ibsen, Saskatchewan, in 1906.  Her protagonist Moira is a young unmarried pregnant woman journeying from Newfoundland to find anonymity and escape scandal.  Moira is a headstrong woman determined to make a life for herself and her infant-to-be – even if it means becoming a Dollybird, a phrase that describes both a housekeeper and a whore, for a hapless man trying to make his fortune in wheat.  In the opening chapter, while on the “grain train” from Halifax, Moira notices a young man travelling alone with his toddler son and empathizes with his plight.

Lazurko writes from both Moira and the young widowed father’s points-of-view in alternating chapters.  This structure allows her to explore tension between Moira’s inherited Scottish pragmatism and Dillan’s Irish-inflected Nova Scotian Catholicism.  There is a certain irony that both come from the East coast to landlocked Saskatchewan.  A scene where Dillan labours at digging a well proves to be a turning point in their unconventional relationship.

An early scene of a medicine show in Moosejaw shows us Moira’s inherited interest in her father’s profession as a doctor.  Subsequent scenes in which Moira witnesses and/or practices healing will interest readers of historical medical fiction.  Lazurko’s novel also tells us about prostitution, women’s (lack of) rights, and difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth.  These themes make Dollybird a newer settlement narrative.

            The novel’s strength lies in its glimpses into not only the hardship but also the tight sense of community that marked pioneering men and women.  While Ibsen is a real place name in Saskatchewan, the name also calls to mind Ibsen’s Nora trapped in her dollhouse.  Lazurko’s title speaks to the confining roles women were permitted to have as the West was  “settled” and to the difficulties women faced when they, like Moira, tried to resist them.

Kim McCullough’s Clearwater tells the story of two young people at the end of the 20th century who are struggling to make sense of their fractured worlds.  Claire and Jeff meet when Claire’s family moves into the other side of Jeff’s family’s duplex in Clearwater Lake, Northern Manitoba.  McCullough juxtaposes the teenagers’ relationship against the harsh North, the violence inherent in Jeff’s home life, and the violence that comes to define Claire’s.  Jeff and Clair’s desire for one another is real and complicated and drives the narrative.

Place is important in Clearwater.  In her descriptions of landscape, and how it mirrors the characters’ interior lives, there are moments in McCullough’s book that remind me of Lawrence’s “The Loons.”  Take, for example, the second clause of the opening line: “the sky is in ink-dark canvas held in place at its bottom edge by the pointed tops of even blacker spruce trees.”  Later, when Claire returns to Regina, the urban prairie is a place where “snow gathers on the ground in puffy drifts, then shifts into whirling wraiths across the sidewalk.”

McCullough chooses a tricky structure for the novel: she moves back and forth between third person and first person for both Jeff and Claire’s perspectives.  It works.  The point-of-view volleys to create both intimacy and distance between the reader and the story.

McCullough knows her teenagers: the novel’s narrative voice is never condescending towards them (even when it is omniscient) and her characters’ dialogue and actions consistently read as authentic.  She also deals, adeptly, with the difficult legacy of colonialism and racism against First Nations and Métis peoples in Jeff’s identity and in his mother Rita’s history at residential school.  McCullough’s novel weaves issues of domestic violence, sexual assault, substance abuse/addiction, and suicide into the story of Jeff and Claire’s relationship with honesty and care.  And she transitions them into believable, flawed, and compelling adult characters in the second half of the novel.

Never preachy, Clearwater deals with a complex postcolonial, Northern setting and people making their lives in ways that will appeal to both YA and literary fiction readers.  It is a layered book. And even though McCullough’s story is difficult, and often dark, it ends with a promise of renewal and, maybe even, redemption at the water.

Check Coteau Books (www.coteaubooks.com) and the authors’ websites (www.annelazurko.com and www.kimmccullough.ca) for more events.

 

Diana Davidson’s debut novel Pilgrimage is out this fall with Brindle & Glass.  She has been long- listed for CBC Writes and won a Writers Guild of Alberta award.  Davidson blogs at www.dianadavidson.org. 

Oral history documents Indian women’s struggle

Disinherited Generations:
Our Struggle to Reclaim Treaty Rights for First Nations Women and their Descendants
By Nellie Carlson & Kathleen Steinhauer
As told to Linda Goyette
Published by the University of Alberta Press
174 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

In her foreword, activist Maria Campbell calls this a “small and modest” book about “kitchen work” – revolutionary work by women that, in the end, always gets finished.

Through the recollections of two of the leaders of the Indian Rights for Indian Women movement, this book recounts the quarter-century struggle to regain treaty rights for First Nations women who “married out”— that is, married non-status First Nations or non-aboriginal men, thereby losing status as treaty Indians for themselves and their children.

Nellie Carlson and Kathleen Steinhauer grew up as friends in the prairies, both Cree women eligible for rights under Treaty Six. Signed in 1876 by their ancestors and representatives of the Crown, Treaty Six promised one square mile of land for each family of five in a permanent reserve, hunting and fishing rights, education benefits, health benefits and annual treaty payments. Beginning in 1951, only band members registered under the Indian Act had the legal right to live on-reserve, share in band resources, own or inherit property, vote for band council and chief and be buried on the reserve.

Under Section 12(1)(b), any First Nations woman who married a non-status Indian, a Metis man or a non-aboriginal man would lose her Indian status regardless of her ancestry. This often forced exile from a home community for First Nations women. Nellie Carlson lost her treaty rights when this section came into effect because her husband, Elmer Carlson, was Metis.

Kathleen Steinhauer lost her treaty rights when she married Gilbert Anderson, whose band had lost treaty rights under yet another provision of the Indian Act. When Anderson asked Steinhauer whether she was willing to give up her treaty rights to marry him, she replied: “Never mind. I’ll get them back.” Eventually, she did— and so did some 170,000 others who had lost their rights under Section 12(1)(b).

The struggle of these women to reclaim their rights for themselves and their children, and the network of First Nations women who worked with them in the Indian Rights for Indian Women movement, took decades and met with resistance not only from the government, but from some First Nations men, who referred to them as “squaw libbers,” and even from some women who had married status Indians, thereby retaining their rights, or, in some cases, gaining rights they were not previously entitled to.
Telling the story also took a long time. The conversations of the women with journalist Linda Goyette, then an Alberta resident, began in the fall of 2000 and ended in the summer of 2011. Nellie Carlson was 85 years old by the time the book was completed, and Kathleen Steinhauer was 80 when she died in 2012, shortly before its publication.

This is not an easy book to read for many reasons. Documented history is not as much fun as, say, historical fiction. Furthermore, it can be painful to focus on injustice, even when justice triumphs in the end. In addition, the repetitive nature of spoken history can be tedious as the subjects return to the same event or story again and again. But uncovering hidden history —and isn’t women’s history always hidden? — can also be like unearthing buried treasure. This book is a gem.

Joy Fisher graduated from the UVic writing program in June 2013.

Hostage memoir raises ethical questions

A House in the Sky
By Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett
Published by Scribner
373 pages, $29.99

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

Curiosity: it drives humans to new delights and sometimes to near death.

Freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout grew up in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, but she always imagined a destiny larger than her small-town beginnings. In childhood, her gateway to the world was her collection of second-hand National Geographic magazines.
Early in her co-written memoir she describes the aftermath of a violent altercation between her mother and her mother’s boyfriend:
“My mind swept from beneath the bed sheets, up the stairs, and far away, out over the silky deserts and foaming seawaters . . . through forests full of green-eyed night creatures and temples high on hills. I was picturing orchids, urchins, manatees, chimps. I saw Saudi girls on a swing set and cells bubbling under a microscope, each one its own waiting miracle. I saw pandas, lemurs, loons. I saw Sistine angels and Masai warriors. My world, I was pretty certain, was elsewhere.”

And she makes it so. Lindhout is everything a freelancer should be: resourceful, determined, apparently fearless. She leaves Sylvan Lake at 19 and moves to Calgary, where she immediately begins working in bars and restaurants in order to save up for travel. Men disappoint her, but she achieves her life of travel: she backpacks through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Sudan, Syria and Pakistan. By the time she gets to Afghanistan and Iraq, she’s a fledgling television reporter. And she has a column in the Red Deer Advocate, which pays her a paltry $35 for each story she files. An amazing start for a self-taught writer, anyone would say.

But then in August 2008, Lindhout goes to Somalia, titillated because it is billed as “the most dangerous place on earth” at the time. On her fourth day there she – and her travelling companion, former Aussie boyfriend and photographer Nigel – are kidnapped.
The bulk of the memoir covers how Lindhout survives her 460 days as a hostage, held for ransom by a rag-tag group of Muslim fundamentalist agitators who blunder into kidnapping the Canadian and the Australian when they really meant to kidnap the other two journalists staying at the Hotel Shamo in Mogadishu – an American and a Frenchman working for – incredible irony here – National Geographic.“I’d like to say that I hesitated before heading into Somalia,” Lindhout writes, “but I didn’t. . . . Surely, I thought, I’d find stories worth telling. Surely, there was merit in trying to tell them. I knew that bad stuff happened. I wasn’t totally naïve. I’d seen plenty of guns and misery by then. But for the most part, I’d always been off to one side, enjoying the good, the harm skipping past me as if I weren’t there at all.”

A House in the Sky takes readers right into the series of sordid rooms, the boredom, the brutality and the sexual assaults that Lindhout lives through. Because she is a woman, she is treated far more harshly than Nigel is, and there are many tensions between the pair. The book raises number of moral questions about putting oneself in harm’s way while fuelled by good intentions. It’s a book every freelance writer and every intrepid traveller should read. Lindhout and Nigel are freed eventually after their respective families come up with a $600,000 ransom. As a result of her ordeal, Lindhout founded the non-profit Global Enrichment Foundation (globalenrichmentfoundation.com) to support aid and education in Kenya and Somalia.
Readers of A House in the Sky may be either inspired or infuriated by Lindhout. Is she an opportunistic voyeur or an idealistic voyager? I can’t quite decide, but the memoir is so well written, that it carries you along, even as you are arguing with yourself about Lindhout’s ethics and sense of responsibility.

Lynne Van Luven once wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

Children’s insights poignantly captured

Rupert’s Land
Meredith Quartermain

NeWest Press, 2013

296 pages, $20.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The title of award-winning poet Meredith Quartermain’s first novel immediately summons up Charles II’s land-gift to the nascent Hudson’s Bay Company, but this is no fur trade story. What is important about Rupert’s Land in this context is its immensity, and the hint of limitless possibility in its emptiness. In different ways, this is what both of the novel’s child narrators are desperate to find.

The story is set during the Depression in the small prairie town of Stettler. Cora Wagoner feels constricted by society’s expectations and paternalistic attitudes. She yearns to wear dungarees, study science, go to university and emulate the independence of her aunts in Toronto—“she knows she isn’t just a girl, she can be anything”— but she is trapped by the demands of religion and gender and has little to look forward to but subservient domesticity.  She comforts herself with notions of a different life, an idealized “Indian” existence that owes far more to reading “Hiawatha” than any reality. Hunter George on the other hand is a Cree boy living that reality. He is equally trapped: his family is loving and supportive, but cruelly impoverished; his parents, victimized by the Indian agent; his only prospect, separation from his family and exile far away in residential school. He too takes refuge in his imagination, in the mythical stories of Wîsahkecâhk told by his grandmother. Inevitably, the children’s paths cross when Hunter runs away from the school after his friend dies from neglect, and the pair set off on a borrowed horse to try and get Hunter back home.

Quartermain brilliantly evokes the dustbowl setting and its effect on her characters. Riding across country, Cora observes:

“Whirlwinds of dust skitter towards them across the open, treeless land bringing its blind emptiness of skeletons and abandoned houses—emptiness silting in the whole of Canada—swallowing up tractors and farms and Dad’s job in the store—swallowing up Edmonton and Toronto, and even Aunt Beulah and university.”

This world is not empty, though. It is peopled by the marginalized: hoboes, some good, some crazed and violent; dispossessed families on the move; defensive and hostile farmers. The children kill ducks and a raccoon to survive—“We’re turning into animals, she says”— and are themselves hunted by men with guns, as they traverse a landscape pocked with campsites and garbage dumps, rail lines and highways.

The background of despair is familiar from writers like Sinclair Ross, but the way Quartermain brings an age to life while staring unflinchingly at its attitudes and injustices through the eyes of children is reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird. The same innocent intelligence that characterizes Scout in that novel informs Cora’s and Hunter’s acute observations, conveyed in a blend of pitch perfect dialogue and inner voices. The device allows us to experience the frustration and yearning of the main characters, and at the same time to recognize the deadly ramifications of oppression, especially the toxic influence of the residential schools—a modern understanding that makes the novel’s ending all the more poignant.

 

Margaret Thompson is the author of six books, most recently Adrift on the Ark: Our Connection to the Natural World.  Her new novel,  entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be published in Spring 2014.

 

Novelist elegantly handles assisted suicide

Extraordinary

By David Gilmour

Published by HarperCollins

185 pages, $23.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

 

More Baby Boomers are ageing, sickening and dying than ever before.  And yet more are to come.  So it’s no wonder that “assisted death” is becoming an increasingly newsworthy subject.  And therefore it’s no surprise that writers are turning to the topic with renewed vigour.

Toronto novelist David Gilmour’s newest publication, his eighth book of fiction, tackles the controversy head-on, in compressed prose that is somehow both elegant and colloquial.  I don’t think I am the only one who has fallen upon this succinct work with great interest and equal hunger.  The voice of the narrator is arresting from the very first sentence – “What, You didn’t know I had a sister?” – to the last dying note – “ ‘Goodbye, Sally, I said, goodbye, and then I went down the back stairs and went home.’ “

Ostensibly, the novel takes place over the course of a Saturday evening in June, in Sally’s apartment, which is located in a large urban centre that sounds a lot like Toronto.  But through the siblings’ hours of conversation, the life of an entire family is encapsulated, including such huge events as sex, divorce, parenthood, life and death.

Sally is a strong person, a person who finds the courage to leave a bad marriage, become a single parent, resume her artistic life and pursue an independent and path even after a rogue accident (she trips on a carpet at a cocktail party) lands her in a wheelchair.  She lives her life the way she wants, and she orchestrates her death the same way. The brother is fifteen years his half-sister’s junior and has hitherto been somewhat neglectful of his sibling, whom he regards as  “ a hearty soul.”

But on the night in question, Sally’s spirit has reached its limits because she is able to do fewer and fewer things for herself; her life, she says, has become “less and less manageable.”  So she invites her brother over with the terse instruction to “bring a bottle of Russian vodka.”  Over the next month or so, having “agreed to help her kill herself,’ the brother collects the requisite number of unnamed sleeping pills to do the job.  When the night comes, the siblings talk for hours, their conversation wandering and weaving, sometimes coming back to the reason for the visit, sometimes soaring far away from the ultimate purpose.

“Do the dead forgive us?  I wonder,” Gilmore writes, in the first chapter.  “I hope so.  But I suspect not.  I suspect they do nothing at all, like a spark flying from a burning campfire:  they just go pssst and that’s it.  How they felt about you in that last second is where you remain, at least in your thoughts, for eternity.  Or rather, until you go pssst too.”  This is a powerful book from start to finish.  It will anger many readers, but I suspect it will comfort many more.

 

— Lynne Van Luven’s current book project involves research into end-of-life issues.