Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Journalist captures vitality of Indian lives

Behind the Beautiful Forevers
By Katherine Boo
Random House, 256 pages, $32.00

Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

Behind the Beautiful Forevers opens with sixteen-year-old Abdul Hakim Husain on the run from the police, hiding among the garbage he sorts for a living in an Indian slum called Annawadi. The one-legged woman whose home shares a wall with his family’s tin-roofed shack has been severely burned, and Abdul and his father stand accused of setting her on fire.

Falsely accused, as it turns out, in an ill-considered attempt by the victim to destroy her neighbours, but truth has little currency in the desperate, corrupt world in which the Husains live. Father and son, as well as Abdul’s older sister, will be arrested, imprisoned and tried in a system that is only nominally interested in justice. The waste-picking business that supported the eleven-member Husain family and made them among the most affluent of Annawadi’s three thousand residents will be lost. There will be tears and hunger and despair–and through it all, Katherine Boo will be standing on the sidelines, bearing witness and recording the details of this real-life drama.

Boo, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, is our eyes and ears in this story, but is never present in person. For the first twenty pages or so, the action was so compelling that I hardly noticed her absence. However, by the middle of the second chapter, the writer in me was demanding to know more about Boo and how she pulled off this remarkable feat of narrative nonfiction. I flipped to the back of the book and started reading the Author’s Note, a parallel story that begins: “Ten years ago, I fell in love with an Indian man and gained a country. He urged me not to take it at face value.”

As Boo explains, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an attempt to understand the moral and practical implications of the profound inequalities she discovered when she moved to Mumbai, which differed only in scale from the kind of inequities she had previously reported on in Washington, DC. “To me,” she writes, “becoming attached to a country involves pressing uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.” And so, for nearly four years, she meticulously documented the realities of one “unexceptional slum”–a boggy, congested scrap of land surrounded by opulent hotels–and investigated the forces that shaped its inhabitants.

While Boo’s journalistic skills provide the solid framework for this book, it is her storytelling proficiency and thoughtful analysis that make it such a memorable and moving work. Thinking of places like Annawadi, I have often said I can’t imagine living like that. Without sensationalizing or sanitizing, Boo fills in the gaps in my imagination. She eavesdrops on Abdul and his friends as they talk about “the usual subjects–food, movies, girls, the price of waste.” She observes the ruthless ambition of a woman determined to see her daughter become the slum’s first female college graduate. She lets the Annawadians speak for themselves.

While some readers might take issue with how Boo conveys both the thoughts and words of her subjects, the author’s note convinced me I could trust her methodology and her respect for their “deep, idiosyncratic intelligences.”

This is not a cheerful book, but it is riveting, and I feel wiser about the world for having read it.

Frances Backhouse is the author of several non-fiction books and has her MFA in Writing from the University of Victoria.

Poet explores Garry Oak’s vitality

Gardens Aflame
Garry Oak Meadows of B.C.’s South Coast
By Maleea Acker
New Star Books, 108 pages, $19

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

“A Garry Oak meadow is a garden,” states Maleea Acker. And, according to Acker who cites local ethnobotanist Nancy Turner  “. . . they were constructed landscapes, created and managed through use of fire and species selection, in order to enhance their productivity and maintain their structure.” This understanding has gone mostly unrecognized since the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1718 until fairly recently as the consequences of aggressive development and environmental destruction have resulted in our current ecological crisis.

Acker lives in Saanich on Vancouver Island, where she has transformed her yard into a small Garry Oak meadow. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Victoria, and is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Her first book, The Reflecting Pool (poetry), was published in 2009; Gardens Aflame is her first nonfiction book.

What can the pre-settlement, First Nations’ relationship with Garry Oak ecosystems teach us today? In Gardens Aflame, Acker explores this terrain through a combination of personal narrative, historical research, botanical referencing and regional politics, resulting in an effective overview of the remaining Garry Oak meadows of south Vancouver Island and the challenges faced by those dedicated to their restoration and preservation.

The relationship of First Nations Peoples with their environment on Vancouver Island, and globally, is indisputable. Deep soil charcoal deposits reveal that fire as a traditional ecosystem management technique has been widely utilized for millennia. But to what extent Garry Oak meadows represent “constructed landscapes” is not yet certain and remains a topic of much current research. According to Nancy Turner and Richard J. Hebda, in their 2012 publication Saanich Ethnobotany, Culturally Important Plants of the WSÁNEC People, Garry Oak meadows were “managed” in plots containing camas bulbs. Selective clearing and practices of controlled burning were limited to areas of harvest, not the entire ecological system.

Marguerite Babcock describes camas plot cultivation:

“. . . The plot from which the bulbs were to be gathered would be cleared of stones, weeds, and brush, but not of trees.  The stones would be piled up in a portion of the plot where there were no camas plants growing, and the brush would be piled up on one side, left to rot or to be burned… The brush was actually uprooted, not just cut down… The purpose of the clearing, said Christopher Paul, was to make the camas easy to clear [sic: dig?] when the camas was gathered intensively.”

The history of oak-prairie ecosystems throughout North American is inextricably linked with fire, both human and lightning generated, and some low-intensity fires have been used in Garry Oak locations. Nonetheless, in the 2001 publication, Towards a Recovery Strategy for Garry Oak and Associated Ecosystems in Canada, Marilyn A. Fuchs argues, “The efficacy of fire as a restoration tool is equivocal because some invasive plants are favoured by fire,” and ”invertebrates are vulnerable to direct fire-caused mortality.” Hence, Omar McDadi and Richard J. Hecha in, Change in historic fire disturbance in Garry oak (Quercus garryana) meadow and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) mosaic, University of Victoria, (2008), recommend adopting an approach that involves restoring landscapes to “mosaics of patches having different species compositions.” This requires “restoring patches of alternate stable states on the landscape such as Douglas-fir forests, rather than just one ecosystem variant such as a Garry Oak meadow.” Understanding ecosystems, like our relationship with nature, as Acker attests, “is complicated.”

Garry Oak meadows are one of Canada’s most endangered ecosystems occurring uniquely in the province of British Columbia on southeast Vancouver Island, adjacent Gulf Islands, and in the Fraser Valley. Urban encroachment, changes in landscape management practices and the introduction of exotic species threaten the ecosystem. A Garry Oak meadow is vested with a range of biological and cultural values conferring great significance and urgency to ecosystem conservation. Understanding and implementing Coast Salish ecological management processes along with the hard work of numerous volunteers will help insure their continued survival.

Gardens Aflame is an informative and thoughtfully written book, but it contains a comment that I feel must be addressed. Introduced species of flora and fauna are playing havoc on ecosystems throughout North America and the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is no exception. These birds found a niche in farms and towns and quickly multiplied, competing for food and nest sites, but the practice of catching sparrows, and “crushing them between two logs” is an unethical act of cruelty that should not be condoned.

 

Susan Hawkins is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria and a Landscape Horticulturist.

 

Wong’s ambitious journey in Escape to Gold Mountain

Escape to Gold Mountain
By David H.T. Wong
Arsenal Pulp Press, 239 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Andrea Routley

Many readers are probably familiar with some of the history of Chinese settlers in North America. Maybe they think of racist policies like the Chinese Head Tax, or the Chinese Immigration Act in Canada, which effectively banned all Chinese immigration for a quarter of a century. In Escape to Gold Mountain, David H.T. Wong tells this story through a narrative which spans generations of one family, from an aging father in 19th century Qing Dynasty China, the Opium wars, the construction of the Transcontinental railroad in the USA and the CPR in Canada, violent oppression including a massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming, lynchings in San Francisco, through to the pioneering achievements of Chinese-Canadians and Americans in government, political activism and more. Sound like a big story? It is.

Although a fictional graphic novel, Escape to Gold Mountain is based on historical fact, and on Wong’s own family history. The character readers follow most is Wong Ah Gin, who endures a barrage of predicaments and situational conflicts. We gleam only a little insight into his personality through his relationship with an adopted son, but we must soon leave him behind. Maybe this reflects all histories: the way we touch here softly for a short time, then die, another faint stroke on the past, faint memory for the future. But this may disappoint readers looking to become emotionally invested in the life of one character. Indeed, as the novel progresses and the family tree expands, it is hard to keep up with who is who.

Still, Wong’s drawings do much of the work of individuating characters. The illustrations have a dynamic cinematic quality, with variation in the layout and dimensions of frames, close-ups and aerial views that reflect the scope of the story and the pace of change.

Of course, any story spanning these historical events would be the stuff of an epic novel, but I love this form—the graphic novel—for the way it reconstructs a pictorial history. There is a shortage of images from this time—how many photos have we seen of Chinese workers blasting the side of a mountain, or working at saw mills in places like Port Alberni? And to follow so many generations, each confronted with yet another kind of legislated hate or violent backlash, is exhausting. Even in reading this dynamic graphic narrative I thought, “Not another tax increase!” or “Not another attack!” as if the story were becoming repetitive. But that is exactly the point, of course. Even from my comfy spot on my couch with my coffee and decades (not to mention cultural heritage) between myself and many of these events , I am exhausted by them, a frank reminder of the persistence and endurance necessary for early Chinese Canadians to live in Canada.

I admit I have a soft spot for the historical graphic narratives. In high school, I was a big fan of shoplifting books like Nietzche for Beginners, Fascism for Beginners, or Maus. I can still picture Wagner and Nietzche on the same page, Wagner with his wild hair and “Humph!” expression on his face, having their man-crush fall-out. Okay, so maybe I missed some of the bigger picture. But any book that can make a teenager steal for History is doing something pretty remarkable. If I were 17 again, I might have stolen Escape to Gold Mountain, too.

(Don’t worry, I paid for it.)

 

Andrea Routley is a writer and musician based in Victoria, BC.

Immigrant narrator packs punch

Giant
By Aga Maksimowska
Pedlar Press, 211 pages, $22

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Reading Giant, Aga Maksimowska’s debut novel, I quickly found myself immersed in a world similar to the one inhabited by David Bezmozgis’ boy narrator in Natasha. Both books are infused with an Eastern European allure complete with culinary details, snippets of best-loved phrases in the native tongue, religious iconography and ritual, and a fraught political/ historical backdrop from which emerges the immigrant’s raw and courageous efforts to adapt to a new culture.

While Bezmozgis’s narrator is a Jewish Latvian male, Maksimowksa’s is an eleven-year old Polish girl named Gosia from a family divided by divorce. At age eleven, Gosia lives with her sister, her outspoken cognac-guzzling grandmother and communist grandfather in Gdansk, Poland during the 1980s while the solidarity movement simmers in the background. The sister’s teacher-mother (the only one in the family with a university degree) has emigrated to Canada two years before. Their hard-drinking father works on a container ship and appears sporadically bearing cheap gifts from Asia. The first half of the book chronicles life in Gdansk complete with pubescent angst and the usual firsts: bra, period, sexual encounter, all coloured by Gosia’s relationship with her grandmother and longing for her mother. If it weren’t for tragic-comic scenes like the one where a portrait of the pope and the black Madonna look down on a violent argument between the grandparents or another where a monstrous carp swims in the bathtub awaiting grandmother’s cleaver, I might feel trapped in an early teen book. Sometimes the voice – first person present – rings with an implausible maturity and language, generally plain and unsentimental, is peppered with too many flat, over-used expressions.

These problems are resolved in the second half of the book when I felt finally that I joined Gosia and her sister in their new life in Toronto with their strong-willed mother. Here, the story unfolds as the immigrant story does: the love/hate relationship with the adopted culture and its new language, menial work and the everlasting struggle to make ends meet, prejudice and ignorance. One of Gosia’s classmates carves a swastika into a bench where she sits. “It’s tiny but the grooves of its lines are deep.” Gosia’s loathing of her overlarge body, while emphasized to excess in the early part of the book is now symbolic of her general social awkwardness. Ultimately, it is the women in this story who triumph. Their strength is most evident in a memorable scene where Gosia and sister with mother and her Polish women friends celebrate the election of Walesa, heralding a new era of freedom. It is evident again when Grandmother urges Gosia’s mother to “stop waffling” and choose between Poland and Canada. On a personal level, the women in Giant, like Poland, choose freedom, complete with its confusions and pitfalls. These women have depth, gusto, and deep affection for one another, so much so that their presence lingered with me long after I had finished the book.

 

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer and a recent grad of UVIC’s MFA program.

Author explores Israeli-immigrant experience

Reviewed by Will Johnson

Ayelet Tsabari didn’t want to write about Israel.

Although she grew up there, and visited regularly, she didn’t feel prepared to tackle such a weighty subject. While completing her MFA at the University of Guelph, she toyed with the idea of writing a novel. Then she started a collection of stories that explored the immigrant experience. But nothing was working out as she planned, and she found herself obsessing over her homeland.

“I was scared to go there, because it’s such a loaded place. It’s almost impossible to write about Israel in a way that would not be perceived as political, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility,” Tsabari said.

But after some gentle encouragement from her mentor Camilla Gibb, she decided to tackle Israel head-on. “Once I committed to it, my writing really started to flow,” she said.

That manuscript ultimately became The Best Place on Earth, a collection of short fiction that will be released in March by Harper Collins.

Tsabari knew early on that she wanted to finish the collection with the title story “The Best Place on Earth” because she liked the idea of ending with the image of two Israeli sisters on a Gulf Island in the Pacific.  This theme of travel and displacement flows through the book. Tsabari has spent a large amount of her adult life travelling, in India as well as the Middle East, before settling in Toronto.

“I’ve always been fascinated, and somewhat envious, by how some immigrants are able to move on and embrace their new homes fully. I have friends like that. For some reason, I’ve always been torn between my two homes, and I don’t know how to reconcile this dichotomy. I love Canada; it has been extremely good to me and I’m happy with my life here. But Israel continues to haunt me,” Tsabari said.

“The protagonist of the stories are mainly Israelis of Mizrahi (North African and Middle Eastern) descent and the majority of the stories take place in Israel. Like most writers I write about subjects I’m obsessed with: family relationships, loss, displacement, gender dynamics. I think many of my characters feel exiled in some way and are searching for a home.”

One story that has special significance to Tsabari is “Warplanes.” She said it was the first story in which she consciously tackled an aspect of Israeli life she’d been nervous to write about. “It also has a strong autobiographical element, unlike most of my stories,” she added. “I, too, lost my father to illness during the Lebanon War and I remember feeling like his death was overshadowed by the death of soldiers at the front.”

“It wasn’t a rational thought, but I was ten and obviously couldn’t comprehend or cope with his loss,” she said.

Tsabari said she prefers not to think about her audience too much while writing, because it has the potential to paralyze her process. However, she would have written her book differently if it was intended for an Israeli readership rather than the Canadian audience that might be unfamiliar with some of the customs, place names and events she’s writing about.

“Still, I’d like to believe that literature has the power to transcend the boundaries of land and race and citizenship, and that people can relate to stories from everywhere,” she said.

Tsabari is now working on a novel that tells the story of the Yemeni community and the hardships they face when they immigrated to Israel in the 1950s.

 

Will Johnson has just completed his master’s degree in writing at UBC.

Reid’s essays capture “inside” view

A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden:
Writing from Prison
by Stephen Reid
Thistledown Press, 133 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

This is possibly the saddest book of essays I have ever read. Not sad because the writing is bad; not sad because the author has no insight. But, yes, sad because the essays seem to be written by a man perpetually divided against himself and deeply in pain about the schism.

On the quiet side of the ledger, as illustrated in the collection’s “Epilogue,” hunkers the introspective man, the poetic, sensitive observer: “The years have passed and I have watched the tides come and go, carrying their debris, real and imagined. I have grown old in prison and I am only interested in beginnings these days, but the string becomes harder and harder to find. It seems I am losing the plot of my own life.”

And on the wracked side struts the famously infamous Stephen Reid, the bank robber who revels in his bad-boy exploits, as brought to life in “The Last Score”: “We’re flat out, doing eighty maybe ninety clicks an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I’m wedged out the window, the wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I am no longer bound to this earth.”

But of course, gravity always wins: the car lands, the cop on the motorcycle keeps on coming, and Reid’s cocaine-botched June 1999 robbery garners him 18 more years in prison. As these brief samples show, Reid has grown into a writer of both sophistication and energy. Although still haunted by his past, he’s confronted those first early transgressions when he was introduced to morphine at the age of 10 by a pedophile doctor named Paul; he’s lived through his Stopwatch Gang years, outlived his partner-in-crime Paddy Mitchell, contributed to his community, been Susan Musgrave’s husband and watched his daughters grow–always with the spectre of recidivism at his side.  .

While Reid hasn’t made his living as a full-time writer for the past 40 years, he is a man who ruminates and a man who writes–and when he’s able to subdue his addictions and the catastrophic decisions that usually follow, he demonstrates genuine talent.

This book of essays is a collection of work printed elsewhere, in Maclean’s, in the Globe and Mail, in an anthology and on salon.com, to name just four venues. I’m glad Thistledown has collected these pieces, even if here and there they could have been edited to pare away repetition. This is an important collection of essays, one that should be read by lawyers and police, by corrections officers and psychologists and, yes, most of all, by ordinary citizens and the politicians who purport to represent them. A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden demonstrates what “inside” really means. It gives us a world shaped by both grief and joy, seen through the eyes a man often yearning to be free of himself.

Poems flare with precise intensity

New Theatre
by Susan Steudel
Coach House Books, 95 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

A short, untitled poem in the first section of Vancouver resident Susan Steudel’s New Theatre seems designed to look like a typewritten, anonymous message. Words are cut and pasted across the page, slightly off-kilter, but the images are clear and the phrases crisply articulate: “a study of channels”, “the coal bird”, “Grace in the/ noon water.” This sense of shifting ground under precision-tuned language runs like a fine thread through Steudel’s striking debut collection.

From the opening “sound list” translated into russian using both cyrillic and roman alphabets, Steudel invites the reader to listen hard and manage the grand leaps, not only between language and meaning, but between things themselves, the stuff of them. A meditation on time uncovers surprising (and delightful) aural and imaginative connections:

“Noon. A grumble. A black currant.”

“Tea. The stain in the iris.”

“Evening. River ice clinking into water.”

“The hour. Graphite on paper, a blunt guide.”

“Bath. Giant, silent elk.”

Central to the book is the section called Birch, inspired by Robert Payne’s biography of Vladimir Lenin. Steudel gathers points of illumination and lays them out, side by side, to form a kind of collage. Found poems, lists, quotes from Lenin’s own notes, and word games become the “multiple foci/ through which sunlight tapers to flint sparks.” Mayakovsky, Kandinsky, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova make brief appearances in this series of historico/political poems that bears the chiselled starkness of a siberian plain:

he saw in forests the hardness and purity of
a styled movement,
a lone person in a birch forest

closing his stride;
‘organization of professional revolutionaries,’
this one thought like circling wolves.

Scenes, a more autobiographical long poem, focuses on eleven different domestic settings. Stage directions offered in square brackets create a flickering focus; the reader is urged to step in and out of the poem to reconsider, listen, look again as “loose regattas of dark capsize and drift.” The question of what is real or solid is never resolved. Even clarity is fragile: “But here is the tree, bright as limes/ and the pure call of glass owls.”

In the end, Steudel’s committed vision crosses the spaces she creates. We are left with images that are tightly wound and visible, moving toward us from the outskirts:

I wake beneath dark lamps,
my window fractions into deeper darkness.

A flooded road,
faces of the brown deer and limping buck.
From an antler
grass trails by the roots.

 In Theory and Practice, love is “the magic of intersections: street crossings,/ intersecting lines/ converge momentarily then go streaming off.” This may be the most fitting description of Steudel’s poems that flare with intensity as they negotiate enormous distances.

 

Karen Enns is a Victoria musician and poet.

Young adults attain untidy denouement

Whitetail Shooting Gallery
by Annette Lapointe
Anvil Press, 220 pages, $20.00

Reviewed by Emily McGiffin

Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Giller-prize nominee Annette Lapointe’s second novel, opens with a shotgun blast that reverberates throughout the book. It launches cousins Jason and Jenn, positioned at either end of the blast, into the middle of adolescence and into a sexual turbulence that will follow them into adulthood.

Set in Bear Hills, a small town on the peri-urban fringes of Saskatoon, the novel places a contemporary coming of age story against a rural landscape in transition. Its characters struggle with the tension created by the expectations and stereotypes of rural life while grappling with tumultuous task of finding oneself in the contemporary world.

The story follows the entwined lives of three central characters: Jason, Jenn and Donna, Jenn’s close friend and, eventually, lover to both cousins. Around them, the cast of secondary characters includes Jenn’s parents, Jason’s father Garry, and Sarah, his semi-estranged mother who left the family and moved to Saskatoon following a car accident brought on by a whitetail deer.

As the novel progresses, Jason spends greater amounts of time with Gordon, a mysterious sculptor from the west coast whose activities become increasing sinister as new truths emerge. As their friendship grows, Gordon evolves into a caricature of Jason: both men are marginalized, queer, confused about the shooting incident and, in their own ways and for their own reasons, fascinated by Jenn and Donna.

Far from a bucolic story of prairie romance, the novel tells the story of outsiders excluded from mainstream small-town prairie life by their physical characteristics (throughout their high school years, Jenn, Donna and their friends are “the fat girls”) and their sexual identities. While the family (with the exception of Sarah) lives in neighbouring houses on the family farm and remains united through Jenn’s high school years, the world of the novel unravels as it becomes clear that Jennifer and Jason—both irreparably damaged by the pivotal event in the book—are mired in misunderstanding of the event that prevents resolution and forgiveness. Despite the strong and supportive family that surrounds them, both drift into adult lives marked by an inability to establish real intimacy, which they seek instead in small animals and transient lovers.

An up-front, no-nonsense look at young adults developing their identities in small-town Saskatoon in the 80s, Whitetail Shooting Gallery develops a realistic set of scarred characters, explores their complexities and, finally, arrives at a complex, untidy denouement.

 

Emily McGiffin’s non-fiction and award-winning poetry has been widely published. Her first book of poems, Between Dusk and Night, was published by Brick Books in 2012.

Memoir brilliantly captures real life

Human Happiness
by Brian Fawcett
Thomas Allen publishers, 288 pages (paperback), $24.95

Reviewed by Norbert Ruebsaat

In his 2011 memoir, Human Happiness, Brian Fawcett puts the story of his parents, Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry, at the centre of the action. It takes place in Prince George, in the middle of British Columbia at the edge of the northern resource-rich frontier in a time when local cultures and regional economies had not yet been bulldozed away by transnational corporations. We’re in the post Second World War “Golden Age” of North American progress, prosperity and dreams of perpetual happiness that begins in 1945 and ends in the late 1960s. Rita and Hartley raise a family, create “a Business Empire” (as Hartley, a self-made-man of his time who likes to speak in capital letters puts it) and capture “The Good Life,” a condition no longer available to post-war boomers and Xers who might, says our author, “lead a but never the good life.”

Hartley’s in the soft-drink bottling, meat-packing and milk-delivery businesses. Rita is, as were most women back then, a housewife who devotes tender and intelligent time to her four children. She offsets the loneliness of being at home in a small testosterone-driven resource extraction town, where her husband’s at work all day and on weekends golfs with his buddies, by starting a women’s group with other local mothers. When it becomes apparent that Hartley’s a great salesman but bad accountant, she adds keeping the company books to her duties.

Hartley’s neglectful and self absorbed: when Rita contracts cancer and needs to go to Vancouver for treatment, he doesn’t accompany her; it becomes clear that their marriage is troubled, sometimes dysfunctional, but held together by a shared dedication to everyday common-sense living and no false hopes about the nature of happiness. Son Brian defines this happiness as “something glimpsed in flight,” that requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour,” a state of being he contrasts with the permanent compulsory happiness proffered by consumer culture and advertising.

When, in the mid 1960s, city-based corporations begin to descend on northern B.C., business-suited executives walk into Hartley’s office and announce that if he doesn’t sell his ice cream operation their consortium will dump product into his marketplace below his cost until he is bankrupt. A&W, Dairy Queen and Macdonald’s and their ilk make similar attacks on local stores and eateries. Timber multinationals, backed by the B.C. government, force local logging operations out of business to the extent that, by 1972, 600 locally owned mills and many more portable “gypo outfits” have been replaced by eight supermills and two pulp mills. Hartley, who’s thrown enough city suits out of his office to realize that he “can’t beat progress,” decides, in 1968, to sell his business and moves with Rita to the Okanagan, where he lives happily for his remaining thirty years.

Human Happiness is the best memoir I’ve read about the BC Interior during a crucial period of its history. I know of no other accounts that put personal, family, social, and economic history together so well that I understand how daily lives, family relationships, local politics and economics work together to create a unique culture. And the bonus here is that Fawcett takes the next step, which is to write a memoir not only about life but also about an idea. Happiness stands at the centre of his parents’ story: while giving us intimate news about their lives and dreams and doings, he gives us also a philosophical investigation of a key North American, perhaps universal, real-life value.

 

Norbert Ruebsaat has published in The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, Literary Canada Review, Geist Magazine, Vancouver Review and Dooney’s Café.

Steam-punkish humour sparks Musgrave’s novel

Given
By Susan Musgrave
Thistledown Press, pp. 298.

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Given is the second novel in a trilogy by Susan Musgrave. Musgrave is a poet, a novelist, a writer of children’s books and of non-fiction with over twenty-six books to her name. Cargo of Orchids (2001) was the first in this trilogy. However, while some of Cargo’s characters people the pages of Given, this time around they are not quite alive. Which is a clue. Another clue is the cover. Decidedly ghoulish, it depicts a mechanical model of a human body sans left leg and right forearm. The model hangs from chains, head flopped forward at an awkward angle. Pieces of electrical wire protrude from the openings the limbs once occupied. Coiled springs and empty limbs strew the dark background. A steampunk sort of image. I don’t necessarily judge a book by its cover, but steampunk stayed with me as I read.

The narrator has just escaped from death row in an American prison. Her crime: murdering her own child. Her two death-row friends, Rainy and Frenchy, have already died on death row — for the murders of their children. Death and death images, grief, addiction, ghosts, pain – these fill the book. Humour too. Susan Musgrave is a very funny writer even when her focus is on death. The story follows the narrator as she makes her way to a West Coast island with the help of her slightly estranged husband, Vernal. The names are clever. The penitentiary is called Mountjoy. The pet cat is Aged Orange. Vernal drives an old hearse. And throughout her escape, her arrival on the island, her sojourn to the city, the narrator notes with fitting irony an amazing number of odd and amusing events, signs, sayings in the surrounding world in which she is now a stranger. A radio caller asks Jesus for help losing weight; Rainy (now a ghost) wonders if it hurts flowers when you cut them; the drugstore is called Drugs R Us.

Steampunk is a variety of speculative fiction that appears in a number of literary, theatrical and cinematic forms. Historical steampunk generally situates a narrative in the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era before the advent of electricity when steam power was pervasive. But steampunk also refers to a literary variety of “gas-lit” horror and fantasy that includes supernatural elements. This is how Given affected me: a melancholy narrative of grief and regret with a fantastical, almost horrific understory. Intriguing, compelling, imaginative. And real. It all depends where the spotlight lands. I had no question that the events described fell more within the range of reality than the fantastical. The descriptions of prison life, the punishments, addictions – all believable. That the child ghosts arrive in red mist – also understandable, under the circumstances. That the narrator speaks with ghosts – of course. Nonetheless, as a whole, Given is fantastical. It is funny. It is literary. It is a most unusual read. I look forward to the third in this trilogy.

 

Author Arleen Paré is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator