Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Study of unique map illuminates past

 Mr. Selden’s Map of China

By Timothy Brook

House of Anansi Press

211 pages; $29.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The key word in the subtitle of Timothy Brook’s work of historical detection, Mr Selden’s Map of China, is “decoding.” Even at the most superficial level the map is fascinating; for an expert on the history of China, like the author, it posed many intriguing questions. Bequeathed to the Bodleian library in 1654 by John Selden, an English lawyer and pioneer Oriental scholar, it was largely ignored for three and a half centuries until quite recently, when a curious reader asked to see it, and Brook was called in to inspect the hidden treasure. “The more I examined the map,” he says, “the more it troubled me.”

The map is one of a kind. It was drawn at a time when China had little contact with the world outside its borders, and actively discouraged the export of maps. This practice was maintained well into the twentieth century, as Brook can personally attest. The cartographer is unknown, but the principles by which he worked were original and sophisticated, and seem to reflect acquaintance with European maps of the area. Where most ancient Chinese maps focus on China itself, to the exclusion of surrounding countries and geographical features, and conform to traditional concepts of the country as a square, this map has the giant hole of the South China Sea at its heart, and features the other countries of South East Asia as well as the clusters of tiny islands in the sea. A further mystery is the intricate network of lines crisscrossing the map, as well as the inclusion of a compass and what appears to be a scale of some sort. As a final flourish, the map is full of place names, drawings of trees, mountains and animals, including two butterflies in the Gobi desert.

The expertise Brook uses to decode the map is probably available to very few people. His book, then, must explain a great deal that is not common knowledge in terms that are engaging and accessible. This he achieves. Mr Selden’s Map of China may be a meticulously scholarly argument, but it will also appeal to anybody who enjoys teasing deductions from enigmatic clues, or persuading the long-dead to speak and give up their secrets. In addition, the book contains a wealth of esoteric detail, little informational nuggets at every turn to enlighten and amuse as the reader follows the author along his winding path. Chapter 3, for instance, starts with the King’s Evil, and leads to a breakfast for James II in the Bodleian, a pair of globes, a food fight after the king left, a Jesuit translation of Confuscius, a conversation about the “little blinking fellow”—Michael Shen—his journey from China to Oxford, his translations, his portrait and its iconography, study of Oriental languages, the annotations on the map—and that takes us only halfway through.

This attention to detail, and the step-by-step construction of his thesis, makes Brook’s conclusions about the map, its construction, and its purpose all the more persuasive. He seems to agree with Zhang Huang that the duty of the scholar is “to amass the best knowledge and to make it available to those faced with real-world problems.” No surprise, then, when he concludes that the map reveals that China’s obsession about ownership of the islands off its coast, which is a significant source of tension in the area today, was already a concern in the seventeenth century. Like any good historian, Brook uses the past to illuminate the present.    

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, has just been published by Brindle and Glass.       

 

 

Anthology celebrates queer families

A Family By Any Other Name

Edited by Bruce Gillespie

Touchwood Editions

229 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

A Family By Any Other Name, editor Bruce Gillespie’s latest anthology, invites its authors and readers to consider what queer families might look like now. The anthology is, above all, a snapshot of a fascinating moment in queer history – which is to say, just plain history – the incredible transformation of the position of people who identify as queer and our relationships within Canada and the United States.

Shall we refresh our memories? It has been only nine years since the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada (July 20th, if you want to throw a party). It’s eleven years since Ontario and British Columbia were the first and second provinces to recognize it (June 10th and July 8th, respectively. There’s nothing wrong with having several parties. Or one very long one.) There are still many American states where gay marriage is not legal.

Yet things have changed very quickly. Young people who identify as queer who were children when the laws changed are old enough now to be married themselves, and to have the same expectations as their straight peers about what marriage, fidelity, and family look like. And this is, on the whole, a wonderful thing. I think I’d have to be crazy not to be glad that a generation of people like me won’t be persecuted, isolated, and barred from the public recognition of their relationships.

You should know: this is a good book. The average quality of the essays here is remarkably high. I like to think people who identify as queer take it extra seriously when we set out to tell our stories, but it must also be true that Gillespie is a fine editor who knows how to inspire his contributors. A Family By Any Other Name has a lineage of its own. Gillespie has produced a whole series of anthologies examining the idea of family from all sorts of angles. Full disclosure: I am in one of them. It’s Nobody’s Father: Life Without Kids (2008), co-edited by Lynne Van Luven. A Family By Any Other Name is a substantial addition to the series. It may even be Gillespie’s best.

And yet.

There are some great essays here. Victoria writer Arlene Paré contributes a meditation on the long gestation of her novel and the remaking of her family at the same time, “To Carry My Family in My Imperfect Head.” The well-known trans* author and educator S. Bear Bergman provides an exuberant account of his sprawling chosen family, “Hiddur Mitzvah.” Dale Lee Kwong’s “Created by Choice” describes the merging and multiplication of family through adoption, cultural community, faith, and profound friendship. In “What She Taught Me,” Ellen Russell describes her current partnership as a “blended family” because both partners are widowed: not children but the beloved dead are brought together in this new relationship. I cannot think of a simpler and more profound description of the infinite extension of the bonds of love.

There is also an uncanny similarity among many of these narratives; a similarity that I don’t think would have been present before 2003. Almost all of these stories are primarily about being part of a couple. This couple is usually legally married, and often raising children. If they’re polyamorous, or have unusual rules or configurations in their households, this isn’t usually part of the essay’s focus. A playful exception is “I, Didi,” which describes Dorianne Emmerton’s decision to partner, but not co-parent or cohabitate, with her beloved. Another is Bergman’s essay, describing the shabbos dinners he and his partner host. These dinners are the foundation of an expansive family built on all imaginable configurations of love and commitment: “now we have this kid of our own, a kid whose family tree is practically bent double with relatives of assorted kinds—blood, marriage, wine and glitter.”

Each of the writers in By Any Other Name is funny and thoughtful about  his/her/their own particular struggles, some of which are more likely to be found in queer relationships – the struggle to conceive a child, or the awkward act of donating sperm. It’s just that most of these essays tend to assume the two-person partnership as the family unit. If they extend the discussion further, it’s often to the parents of the spouses. And the chosen family, the queer network of friends and frenemies and supporters and allies? It’s here, but it’s in the background. Several writers make appreciative reference to those communities, but in the end they focus on their spouses and children.

I don’t want any of that delicious talk of spouses and children to stop, but I do want us to remember to spend some time talking about building and celebrating that other love. I think it’s still here, for these writers and for me – it’s just that it was never that easy to describe. We never really had the right language, and now marriage has overshadowed our other loves, at least for the time being. I would have liked, for example, to have seen stories here about the extended communities that came together to face the HIV/AIDS epidemic just a generation ago.

So: the world has changed – right now, in these places, queer lives are better. Being better, they are more ordinary. This is a victory. And yet. I want us to give honour and attention to those who still can’t, or who once couldn’t, or who just won’t, enter into conventional structures of love and connection. I want us to do more than remember. I want us to bring those crazy ideas into the culture at large. I don’t just want queer relationships to be changed by marriage. I want us to change what marriage means. And everything else, too, while we’re at it. As my mom would say: the whole fam damily.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria essayist and poet.  

Grant Lawrence a true Canuck

The Lonely End of the Rink

By Grant Lawrence

Published by Douglas and McIntyre

240 Pages (plus recommended reading, recommended listening, and thank yous), $26.95

Reviewed by Michael Luis

We all know the cliché of jock vs. nerd, but perhaps no more than Grant Lawrence. The 42-year-old CBC Radio personality from Vancouver details this social war in his second book, The Lonely End of the Rink.

The Lonely End of the Rink details Lawrence’s journey to love hockey all the way from his first slippery stumbles on the ice as two-year-old, to his successful run in Vancouver’s premier beer-league in his late 30s. While this makes up the majority of the narrative, Lawrence also weaves in the tale of his hometown team, the Vancouver Canucks, providing an in-depth history of their start as a 1970s expansion team, up to the 2011 Stanley Cup series.

Lawrence focusses on his relationship with grade-school bullying for the early portion of his personal narrative. Lawrence deftly describes these bullies (with names like Buck, “Psycho”, and “Gooch”): “Gooch was a Shrek-shaped hillbilly originally from the small town of Horsefly, BC.”(95).

The stories of how these bullies – almost all hockey players – treated Lawrence are gut-wrenching and portray Lawrence as an underdog we can back. “He threw my bag in the direction I was running as hard as he could…the side of my skull cracked against the thin layer of waxed linoleum covering the hallway’s concrete floor like a snooker ball being struck by a baseball bat” (73)

Lawrence’s language is simple and modest with light metaphors. While many of the metaphors are vivid and concrete, such as the snooker ball and bolas, many of them reference pop-culture, like referring to “Gooch” as “Shrek-shaped”. Considering Lawrence’s position as a media personality, their inclusion makes perfect sense. While the metaphors serve as quick referential humour, the volume of references – some of which being overly specific – can be exhausting. Some were hilarious, such as describing the bizarre opening act for Lawrence’s band The Smugglers as “a Pink Floyd-meets-The Lord of the Rings pagan rock nightmare” (119), but many felt forced and unnecessary, such as the description of “Breaking Bad-esque science-teacher glasses” (17). That being said, I laughed out loud at most.

In terms of the second narrative of the Canuck’s history, Lawrence effectively includes the information that best compliments his personal journey. For example, he focusses on the Canucks’ famous goalie trio of “King” Richard Brodeur, “Captain” Kirk Mclean, and Roberto “Bobby Lu” Luongo. Lawrence was always enamoured by the goalie position, even when disliking hockey as a teen. Since the personal narrative explores many of Lawrence’s failures, it’s no fluke that he examines the Canucks’ three Stanley Cup losses; from the optimism following the 1982 runner-up team, to the brutal riots of 1994 and 2011.

Whereas the Canucks have yet to return to the finals and achieve redemption, by the end of book’s 240 pages, Lawrence achieves his. The book is a tale of falling down on the ice, brushing yourself off, and popping back up. It’s about learning to love what you once hated, and realizing why you love what you already do. The Lonely End of the Rink’s memoir-meets-arts-meets-sports fusion isn’t as game-changing as Orr and Gretsky were, but it’s a unique personal take on our nation’s greatest passion, and definitely worth strapping on some skates for.

Michael Luis is a Victoria student, writer, filmmaker, and musician. Check him out at www.michaelacluis.wordpress.com.

“Canadian roots” captures island history

The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga

By Norma MacMillan

Touchwood Editions

288 pp., $19.95

Reviewed by Bonnie Way

One wouldn’t expect Caspar the Friendly Ghost to have anything in common with Canadian literary fiction, but he does.  Norma Macmillan is the woman who voiced Caspar and who, with her posthumously published novel The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga, makes her mark in Canadian fiction.  Already recognized in Vancouver’s Starwalk for her work in Canadian theatre, Macmillan was an accomplished actress as well as a playwright.  The Maquinna Line is a generational tale that the author worked on for decades before her death; it was discovered in a closet by her husband and revived with the help of a family friend.

The Maquinna Line opens in 1778 with the meeting between Captain James Cook and Moachat chieftain Maquinna on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.  In a few brief pages, Macmillan captures this meeting between equals that would lead to the subjugation of B.C.’s Aboriginal peoples.  Maquinna helps Cook refurbish his boat and looks forward to more becoming wealthy by trade with the white men, but is watched by Raven, who seems to have “some knowledge of the future that was different from his.”

We then skip ahead to Victoria in 1910 and our first meeting with Julia Godolphin at a garden party.  I found these next chapters a bit hard to read, as we skipped between characters—all of whom were interesting, but I wasn’t yet connected with any.  Soon the story settles upon Julia’s brother Stanley, a shy, confused young boy who commits an unforgiveable crime and is banished from Victoria.  Then we meet Sveinn Arnason, the Icelandic immigrant who made his fortune in the Comox Valley and gives Stanley a place to work.

The story meanders forward, touching upon the lives of various families in Victoria until 1947. Macmillan’s theatre background is evident in the way that, with just a few quick sentences, she brings a character alive on the page.  Her familiarity with Vancouver Island and its history was also evident.  As a recent “immigrant” to Victoria myself, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about places I’ve visited or seen, such as the Empress Hotel, Ross Cemetery and St. Ann’s School.

In the foreword, actress and author Alison Arngrim talks about watching her mother go away to write the book and says of reading the manuscript, “My mother’s book … was not simple, and it was not, to put it mildly, a lighthearted satirical romp as I imagined her plays to be.  It was sometimes darkly comic, but often simply dark.  To be honest, I found sections of it downright disturbing.”  Macmillan wasn’t afraid to tackle sexual scandals, mental illness, disability, or death in her novel, yet there is also beauty in each relationship, in the twists and turns of the story, in the way that each family faces their struggles.

Arngrim calls her mother’s novel the “Canadian Roots” and indeed Macmillan does take us on a tour of Vancouver Island through several generations of its early families. She captures the character of the island and its varied inhabitants.  This novel is sure to delight Island-dweller as well as those who’ve never seen it.

Bonnie Way blogs as The Koala Bear Writer.  She has three daughters and is completing her BA in Writing at the University of Victoria while working on a novel.

 

 

 

Book reveals incredible truth on Canada in Afghanistan

The Dogs are Eating Them Now

By Graeme Smith

Alfred A. Knopf Canada

298 pages, $32

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

“The cycle of outrage and convenient forgetting seems likely to continue,” Graeme Smith writes in this extraordinary book about Canada’s war in Afghanistan.  The quotation comes from his chapter on the detainee crisis.  Unfortunately it applies all too aptly to the war as a whole, although now that our troops are home, “convenient forgetting” is more dominant.

Since 2005, Smith has spent much of his life in Afghanistan, far more time than any single Canadian soldier of any rank, which is why this account of what went wrong and why it went wrong is so compelling.  He arrived as a 26-year old Globe and Mail war correspondent:  “…an excited kid, recording what felt in some ways like a climactic battle between the forces of barbarism and civilization.”  Unlike our soldiers, he stayed long enough to see the big picture and to understand how that picture deteriorated over the years, despite occasional local successes.

One example: NATO funds the building of paved roads to improve transportation and strengthen civil society. The local insurgents demand protection money from the contractors (as much as $50,000 U.S. per kilometre) to allow construction to proceed. A success – the road is built and traffic moves swiftly.  Then various government and/or insurgent groups put up roadblocks to collect kickbacks or to steal goods. Success is redefined so that getting through with not too many delays and not too many payments is good. Meanwhile, the drug dealers use the nicely paved road to speed opium to Pakistan or Iran. And the insurgents buy more weapons, and the war worsens.

Another: A schoolteacher who knew Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a child tells Smith about his old friend’s government. “It’s corrupt . . . morally and economically,” he says.

By the end of the book, after seeing all the surges that only made things more dangerous, after cutting through the complexities and disinformation around the detainee-torture crisis, after itemizing the cascading corruption of government theft and bribes and collusion with the Taliban, after watching the Americans and other NATO forces work at cross purposes, after conducting the first-ever survey of insurgent fighters and discovering that the Taliban were more interested in closing cinemas than global jihad, after being targeted by a drug lord for his revelations of government collusion in the drug trade, and after seeing too many small, heartbreaking catastrophes where a farmer loses his livelihood to the war on drugs or loses his family to friendly fire or loses his freedom because he was in the wrong place, after all this, as the Canadian presence comes to an end, Smith sums up the West’s collective failure as, quite simply, “our inability to understand the needs and desires of the local people.” It was always all about us.

Graeme Smith is still in Afghanistan, now as an analyst with the International Crisis Group. We can only hope that he will continue to report on events there with the same unblinkered honesty that is evident throughout The Dogs are Eating Them Now. Lest we forget.

Katrin Horowitz is the author of The Best Soldier’s Wife, a novel about Canada’s war in Afghanistan from the perspective of a military wife.

Eriksson’s characters achingly genuine

 High Clear Bell of Morning

By Ann Eriksson

Douglas and McIntyre

256 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Few books make me cry. So I was genuinely surprised when I found myself crying when I finished reading High Clear Bell of Morning.  To be honest, I cried half way through too — well, I had tears in my eyes.  Of course, this is a terrifyingly sad story about a family’s struggle to come to terms with the mental illness that overtakes their daughter, Ruby, just as she enters university.  Ruby, it turns out, has schizophrenia – a painful twist in any family’s life.

The reader witnesses the undoing of Ruby through the eyes of her sympathetic father, Glen, who tries over and over to save her from her decline into addictions and deprivation.  We are with him through his initial disbelief, through his slow realization that life will never be the same, through his desperation to save Ruby.  From his perspective, there is no reason why he can’t help her overcome her illness and return to being the Ruby she once was.

Part of Eriksson’s brilliance in this, her fourth novel, springs from her choice to tell this story from two points of view: Glen’s, with whom many readers will identify, and Ruby’s as well.  We sympathize with both.  Ruby has her own reasons to feel unsafe, even if those reasons are not reasonable.  She articulates them, describing her impossible situation.  She tries to manage the voices that interfere with her family life, university courses and friends.  Of course, she can’t.   And because Ruby describes the problems, the haunting seriousness of them, the reader begins to understand too.  Eriksson balances these two points of view, Glen’s and Ruby’s, with respect and considerable neutrality, which leaves the reader aching for Ruby and for the knot that has become the family, the conundrum at the heart of serious mental illness.

At the same time, whales are dying.  Glen is a marine biologist who studies killer whales in the Salish Sea.  He collects data that suggests toxic waste in the oceans off the west coast of Canada is endangering whale habitat and whale populations.  Glen has two problems: Ruby and the whales — and he believes they might be related.

Eriksson is a novelist and an ecologist.  Both interests serve to create this very fine book.  She details the lives of killer whales and their habitat, as well as the lives of their researchers, with convincing authority.  Her descriptions of mental illness and its effects are believable.

High Clear Bell of Morning is not overwritten; it is to the point. All the details — emotional, scientific, medical, social — are presented with a credible, eponymous clarity.  But it is Eriksson’s ability to draw character with care and compassion that most successfully sustains this novel.  That is what made me cry.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria writer; her new book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains, is published by Brick Books.

Author and artist collaborate beautifully

Correspondences

By Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein

McClelland & Stewart

Unpaginated, $35

Reviewed by Karen Enns

            Correspondences is a deeply layered collaboration between poet and novelist Anne Michaels, and artist and writer Bernice Eisenstein (author of the graphic memoir “I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors”). It is a beauty of a book, seamlessly blending form and content in a unique design that invites the reader into a communal place of remembrance.

The pages open out accordion-style between two hardcover plates. Read one way, Michaels’ long resonant poem unfolds; read the other way, Eisenstein’s portraits of writers, musicians, and artists, whose lives were brutally altered by the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges, peer out at the reader from muted backgrounds. Opened out completely, the gallery of faces spans the length of a large room. Eisenstein’s subjects include Anna Akhmatova, Bruno Schulz, Albert Camus, Charlotte Salomon, Osip Mandelstam, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, and many others. The haiku-like text that accompanies each portrait is often, though not always, a quotation. Opposite the face of Tereska, a young survivor whose photograph was taken in a refugee camp, and about whom little else is known, are the words, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – Too?”

The end of one side of the book becomes the beginning of the other, pulling the reader into an endless loop of mourning. “Our eyes register the light of dead stars,” a quotation from the work of André Schwarz-Bart, speaks to the relentlessness of that pull; the haunting gazes in Eisenstein’s portraits are as hard to leave behind as they are to see again.

Michaels’s book-length poem begins in the dark, lyrical tone that carries the entire work: “The wet earth. I did not imagine / your death would reconcile me with / language, did not imagine soil / clinging to the page, black type / like birds on a stone sky.” There is deep grief in this elegy to her father and to the historical figures that shared his century. “A life is inextricable from a time, place, language,” she writes in one of the brief biographical notes that introduce the portraits, “If we seek it, if we are fortunate, our sensibilities and our grief find a true companionship — with certain writers, painters, composers, activists. To remember someone is also to remember this ardour, these allegiances, this necessity.”

The poem is a tribute to this ardour then, and to the ways in which language becomes a necessary part of its articulation, a connective tissue between the past and the present, between the mourned and those who mourn, and between the survivors themselves—the ones who have lived to tell the stories. Language, says Michaels, can either complete or dismantle us, “each word the reverse of a word.” Referring to the correspondence between Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, who appear as central figures (indeed, their portraits act as bookends on either side of the gallery), she writes, “For both, language was a leap of faith, staggering and minimal . . . .”

But this book is an artistic collaboration. Two art forms in dialogue can do more than one. If language seems inadequate at times, if it can make the leap only minimally, we have the visual to intensify the palette: “not two to make one, / but two to make / the third, / just as a conversation can become / the third side of the page.”

The accordion-style format means the reader has to physically support the book to keep it together. It is this act that adds a final dimension to the experience of Correspondences. The reader must also bear some of the weight.

Karen Enns’s new book of poetry, Ordinary Hours, will be launched in Victoria April 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Space as part of a group tour sponsored by her publisher, Brick Books. The three other poets featured include Arleen Pare (Lake of Two Mountains), Jane Munro (Blue Sonoma) and Joanna Lilley (The Fleece Era).

What is it to be an asshole?

Assholes: A Theory

By Aaron James

Published by Doubleday

201 Pages (plus Appendix), $25.95

Reviewed by Michael Luis 

We’ve all experienced the wrath of assholes, whether this is every day at work, at home, or—perhaps most commonly—in traffic. In Assholes: A Theory, American philosopher Aaron James contends that “asshole” is more than just an insult for an unpleasant person, but a specific type of human being indelibly ingrained into our society.

James is an associate professor of philosophy at The University of California, Irvine and is known for his book Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy. He holds a PhD form Harvard, and like many of us, has presumably dealt with a lot of assholes.

Right away Assholes establishes its mission statement: “What is it to be an asshole? The answer is not obvious, despite the fact that we are often stuck dealing with people for whom there is no better name. (pg. 2)” This question is examined, and inevitably answered over the book’s seven chapters which feature such titles as “Newer Asshole Styles” and “Asshole Management.”

James applies his experience in both moral and political philosophy to dissect the asshole. I found the former style of philosophy to be the most engaging and interesting. Though I have very limited experience in academic philosophy, I was still able to relate to James’s musings, as I’ve had many run-ins with assholes and found it interesting to look at their make-up from an intellectual perspective. Explorations such as the difference between assholes and psychopaths (pg. 53) and the way we will cuss the word “asshole” even when the asshole can’t hear us (like in traffic) piqued my interest and answered questions I already had going into the book (pg. 127).

The book is also splashed with humour. The part in the second chapter “Naming Names,” where James shows us different types of assholes using relevant pop-culture examples, had me smirking as I flipped the pages. Richard Dawkins is the quintessential “smug asshole” for example; “He writes cocksurely that the views of millions of reasonable and intelligent people have no merit whatsoever… (pg. 40)” Rush Limbaugh and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher are “boorish assholes,” yet Winston Churchill is “boorish, but not quite an asshole. (pg. 47)”

However, this humour almost ends up being the book’s downfall. Assholes is trapped in a strange scenario: the way it examines a brash term with an academic tone could be mistaken for satire; however, the book ultimately ends as a solid moral and political philosophy book with some colourful language. I made this mistake initially, and it took me a little while to realize my misinterpretation and regroup.

I also struggled when the book shifted from moral to political. The political sections felt forced, like James was trying to apply the asshole sheen to the other end of his expertise. The examples within the “Asshole Capitalism” chapter were significantly less concrete than the book’s earlier portions, and were very hard to grasp for a casual plebe like myself with a very limited knowledge of political science (pg. 153). However, I was able to understand his sections on “royal assholes” and “presidential assholes” which combined the political with moral examples such as former American vice-president Dick Cheney (pg. 58).

Though Assholes: A Theory is accessible enough for a philosophy newbie like myself to gain knowledge and entertainment from certain sections, ultimately, this book would be better appreciated in the hands of a philosophy student or enthusiast. I can firmly say this is a much nicer summary than “Fuck this book. I’m better than it.”

As I just learned from James, that’s something an asshole would say.

Michael Luis is a Victoria student, writer, filmmaker, and musician. Check him out at www.michaelacluis.wordpress.com.

Almanac challenges readers to care about wilderness

Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac

By David Pitt-Brooke

Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Greystone Books

287 Pages, $14

Reviewed by Quinn MacDonald

When David Pitt-Brooke published Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac, he hoped it would be part of a larger effort that would secure the Clayoquot Sound as a widely treasured and protected place, beyond the grasping hands of industry and development. But, as he reluctantly admits in his note for this edition, “nothing could be further from the truth” (xii).

Logging continues, diseases from salmon farms have led culls in the millions, and in August 2013 Vancouver-based Selkirk Metals began exploratory mining for gold in Clayoquot’s Tranquil Valley, to the chagrin of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, who have declared the area a Tribal Park. After decades of activism, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve designation, the Clayoquot’s position remains perilous.

A trained biologist and veterinarian, Pitt-Brooke worked for Parks Canada as an environmental officer in Glacier, Mount Revelstoke, and Waterton Lakes before he arrived at the Pacific Rim in 1995. It was love at first sight: “I thought I’d gone to heaven. This is one of those rare places where the storehouse of nature is still full to the brim” (3). But as he watched the tourists come and go too hurriedly, and thought of other nature-lovers who lacked the means to make the trip, he knew more had to be done to share the beauty of “this very special place” (5). With this book, he saw his opportunity to help.

Pitt-Brooke has written for a number of scientific and environmental publications, including Canadian Geographic; in 2002 he received a Canadian Science Writers’ Association Award. Chasing Clayoquot is his first book, and in a 2004 interview with Tofino Time Magazine he revealed that it took seven years to finish the project—making it truly a labour of love. The book brims with scientific and historical information, as you would expect with Pitt-Brooke’s background, and while the meticulous research paints a more complete picture of the landscape, the amount of exposition at times became onerous. It would have been more enjoyable if it were integrated into the engaging personal narrative. Jargon and scientific terms like “desiccation” and “profligate” also could have been better explained or left out (172).

The Almanac structure effectively creates a (compressed) sense of life in the Clayoquot, and the monthly incursions into a surprising variety of microhabitats imbue the book with a deep sense of place. And while a little more editing and guidance might have helped with some instances of cliché and redundancy, his vivid and detailed descriptions, particularly those from the air and sea, capture the wild beauty of the West Coast. At times I found myself transported back to my Granddad’s fishing boat, cruising through the Barkley Sound, with the taste of salt water on my lips and the cry of gulls all around.

Pitt-Brooke feels more whole in the natural environment, but also more responsible: “In wilderness we must take responsibility for ourselves. Or maybe: in wilderness, we’re allowed to take responsibility for ourselves. A rare privilege in these times.” In this time of and murky supply chains, it’s easy to waive responsibility for how our lifestyles degrade the environment on which we ultimately depend. Pitt-Brooke sees these effects first-hand, and wants to share that feeling. This book implicates its readers in the cycle of environmental degradation, but also enlists them as protectors: as you read, you become responsible for the Clayoquot.

Whether you’re familiar with the coast or stuck inland, this book is worth the read. The second edition keeps alive Pitt-Brooke’s dream of bringing the beauty of the Clayoquot to a wider audience, as he reminds us that it will take a constant effort to keep these places timeless and whole.

Quinn MacDonald is an environmental activist and UVic student.

Hodgins gently skewers human condition

Cadillac Cathedral

By Jack Hodgins

Ronsdale Press

213 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

In his latest novel, Cadillac Cathedral, Jack Hodgins takes us back to familiar territory, the Macken world of mid-Vancouver Island. He recreates Portuguese Creek, a tiny community off the beaten track and populates it with what would have to be called characters in every sense of the word—retired loggers, a forceful ex-schoolteacher, eccentric chicken farmers. The focal point is Arvo Saarikoski, “a man in his seventies whose retirement years were filled with the pleasure of restoring cars and trucks that had been wrecked and then abandoned by those who could afford to replace them.”

Arvo hears of a vintage hearse, a Cadillac Cathedral, which is allegedly being used to haul logs out in the bush. It is a serendipitous moment, for Martin Glass, who used to be the local M.P., has died in Victoria. Arvo conceives of the idea of rescuing the hearse, collecting Martin’s body to bring it back home for a suitably dignified send-off, and then returning the hearse to its rightful owner, Myrtle, the daughter of a former local undertaker. Arvo is a lifelong bachelor, despite the determined efforts of the Woman from Thunder Bay and sundry other females, but he has enshrined Myrtle in his heart ever since their schooldays.

It is easy to visualize this novel as a road movie, a version for elders proceeding at the dignified pace of the vintage hearse, a leisurely journey that reflects the lives of the participants and the social mores of their world. Arvo and his retinue set off on their picaresque way to the south Island where Martin and Myrtle both wait, unaware. Naturally there are delays: Arvo reflects that some would consider “his whole life looked like a series of detours,” which they would call avoidance. Certainly, “a detour was also a reminder that there was no end of ways in which life could keep you from even reaching your destination,” and that is exactly the result here, with local businessmen hoping to acquire the hearse for publicity purposes,  most notably with the vehicle being “borrowed” to star at a pre-mortem wake.

The slow pace gives Arvo plenty of time to reflect, and this inner debate is one of the most human elements of the story. Arvo has always been “a man who fixed things—machines anyway.” Decisions are another matter, especially when other people are involved. The advisability of renewing acquaintance with the unattainable Myrtle involves a mental roller coaster of indecision which life resolves in typically unsuspected ways.

And that, of course, is the real subject here. The final events at Martin’s seaside funeral seem to offer Arvo a different kind of future with Cynthia’s dreams of reviving her old drive-in movie business. As Arvo discovered with Myrtle, however, “something that belonged entirely in your past might as well disappear altogether once you were no longer part of it.” There is already evidence at the funeral that the demands of the future will override the nostalgic pull of the past: Martin’s absentee sons are already negotiating real estate deals at their father’s old home.

Hodgins calls his novel A Tale. A hint, perhaps, that we should enjoy this story for its narrative elements, for its light-hearted humour and gentle skewering of the human condition—for its sheer entertainment value—and also be prepared to recognize it as being more than the sum of its parts, almost allegorical. Cynthia, willing to embrace uncertainty, sums up the intent best: “Haven’t you noticed?” she says. “We start life over again every day. All of us. Even a man who hides in his workshop with grease up to his elbows.”

Margaret Thompson launches her new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, at Russell Books, Tuesday, April 15, 2014,  at 7 p.m.