Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Glover’s stories engrossing, polished

Savage Love

By Douglas Glover

Goose Lane

264 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Susan Sanford Blades

Turn to any page of Douglas Glover’s Savage Love and you’ll find yourself engrossed in a world without convention, where an emaciated woman in otter-skin coat and hunting boots becomes a universal sex symbol or a man falls in love with a legless mute and proceeds to kill anyone who comes “like lambs through the front door.”

This is Glover’s tenth book of fiction, his sixth book of short stories. He won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2003 for his novel, Elle, but as of yet has been overlooked by awards juries for his latest effort.  That’s a shock, as this is a tight, accomplished book of stories, published in the year of the story by a man who, literally, wrote the book on writing fiction (Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012).

Savage Love begins with a two-page Prelude, “Dancers at the Dawn,” in which stated language is “much better for describing things that don’t exist than for pinning down reality.” Glover dances with this writer’s paradox throughout the book. He pins down what is real—realer than real—in language that is graceful, muscular, challenging (no one has me reaching for the dictionary like Douglas Glover), all the while decrying it for its ineptitude. In the tongue-in-cheek “The Lost Language of Ng,” for instance, “the more achieved Ng intellectuals . . . eschewed speaking altogether and communicated by ‘signs and thoughts.’ ”

The remainder of the book is separated into Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies. Each piece is a theme-heavy meditation told in eloquent language, with characters described in details that are contradictory, astonishing, and beautiful (much like humans themselves), with quick, original plot lines—sometimes so fast-moving as to make the story itself seem implausible thus allowing his reader to hone in on its elements, which, I believe, is Glover’s intent.

Throughout the book, Glover rips open the skin, digs deep, and exposes the beating heart of life (“I am already nostalgic for the yeasty richness of life, its sudden turns and dramas, its deep sadness, its mysterious and gorgeous purposelessness”), the “inhuman endlessness of desire,” and, of course, love (“whatever happened between us, it would end badly, that all love ended badly, that we would one day part out of boredom or disgust, or that we would grow old and not be the people we were this minute”).

His characters are never dull (even the cardigan-sweater-wearing librarians among them); his endings often sheer quirky brilliance (“except for the catering assistant found with a pitchfork in her throat behind the barn after the reception, everyone lives happily ever after. For a while.”)

At times I found myself wanting for the mundane, for a peek at the mechanics of humanity via an exposed slip, Munro-style, rather than a Glover-style gawk at the meaning of life via the gruesome edge of death. But an author cannot satisfy all of his reader’s desires and Savage Love is a celebration of what Douglas Glover—and the short story—can achieve.

Susan Sanford Blades is a Victoria writer.

Authors reanimate Canlit for teachers

Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools

By Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler

Oxford University Press

275 pp. $69.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

In Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools, Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler rightfully name teachers as curators of Canada’s narrative culture. Teachers collect, preserve and interpret the literary artifacts of Canada and help students to recognize and understand these national treasures. Legendary books like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind are among these artifacts.

But Donawa and Fowler also name a crisis: innumerable national treasures are missing from the “permanent collection” of contemporary Canadian fiction. Reading Canada, a dynamic guide, re-imagines this collection for Canadian teachers, pre-service teachers, and readers at large.

Reading Canada is spacious and inviting:  in each chapter, key thematic and conceptual principles, such as social realism or visual literacy, come alive in the discussion of new Canadian literature; following the discussion, a pedagogical essay explores how to “call students to responses, reflection and research” using this literature. The case studies at the end of each chapter – for instance,  “What Fear Makes Us Do: Beyond Fear and Bullying” and “Classroom Canada Reads” – are highly engaging.

Fowler and Donawa promote literary-quality, contemporary Canadian fiction for secondary-school students. They point out that teachers, under pressure to manage heterogeneous classes and achieve more standardized outcomes, often choose readings already enshrined in the curriculum. The readings they select are likely to be classics like To Kill a Mocking Bird or Lord of the Flies. Although venerable in their own right, these books do not depict “the sociopolitical, geophysical and imaginative landscape” in which today’s Canadian students live.

To represent this landscape, Donawa and Fowler launch an astonishing exhibition of current Canadian authors, all of them worthy of sharing space with the Atwoods and Mitchells in the existing collection. Many of these books enlarge the definition of “Canadian” and introduce crucial issues like belonging and otherness. For example, Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel The Book of Negroes offers a powerful story of a black woman, who, after years of enslavement, struggles as a “free” Black Loyalist in Canada. This book and others situate the history and politics of race, too frequently seen as only American concerns, in Canada.

Young adult readers themselves often inhabit complex worlds where they deal with problems like poverty and isolation.  Reading Canada provides a trove of recent Canadian books wherein these readers may find their lives mirrored. Carrie Mac’s The Beckoners depicts the cycle of the abused becoming abusers; Sylvia Olsen’s White Girl follows Josie to a reserve, where she is the only white girl.

Such books also include models for problem-solving; for instance, bi-cultural Ashley in Jamie Bastedo’s On Thin Ice builds strength by connecting with Nanurluk, the Great Spirit Bear of her father’s culture.  Such stories provide students with literary examples of building empathy and hope, “one narrative experience at a time.”

Fowler and Donawa observe that the genre of speculative fiction addresses problem-solving on a large scale, its narratives “challenging the boundaries of the possible.”  The chapter on this genre exemplifies how judiciously Donawa and Fowler contextualize, in every chapter, the newest members of the literary “permanent collection” they envisage. In this case, they outline how myth has nourished speculative fiction, and how hybridity and intertextuality teach students to see the elaborate  “matrices” of thought in literature.

Reading Canada’s expansive matrices give the book energy and dimension: readers can compare new books with books already deemed canonical; contemplate digital forms of learning (for example, creating a book report in the form of a Youtube video); explore the “synchronous space between image and word” in graphic novels; and promote crossover texts and “cross-curricular resonance” in the classroom.

With its deep appreciation of narrative text, Reading Canada transcends the confines of “textbook.” Even so, Donawa and Fowler describe their guide as provisional, a work in progress to be amplified by future teacher-curators in Canada.  Their book offers a vision of the permanent collection, not as unitary and official, but as open-ended and personal, to be shaped and reshaped by the “multiple discourses” and readers of English.

Susan Braley is a Victoria writer and former college professor.

 

 

 

 

Author sees maps as repositories of history

The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island

By Michael Layland

Touchwood Editions

232 pages,  $39.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

            In this meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book, Michael Layland traces the development of the accurate, detailed maps of Vancouver Island we take for granted today. His own qualifications as a cartographer and historian, with a special interest in exploration and map-making, ensure that this account will more than satisfy the most exacting academic and scientific scrutiny, but rest assured, that does not mean it would appeal only to scholars. What this book does, in terms that even those with the most limited acquaintance with maps can follow, is to conjure Vancouver Island almost literally out of thin air.

            Near the end of the book, Layland refers to the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas, and shows a long list of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw place names Boas collected which demonstrate the First Nation’s intimate knowledge of the coast where they had lived for centuries. By contrast, the earliest European visitors to the North-West in the sixteenth century were venturing into completely uncharted territory, armed only with rumour and speculation and their own courage. The earliest maps of the region reflect this tenuous grip on reality: fragmentary pieces of unattached coastline, possible straits, rocks and mountains covered with tiny hand-drawn trees, straggling lines that peter out when circumstances forced the explorers to turn back. At the time, those early mariners did not even realize they were travelling beside an island, and thought they were mapping the mainland.

            Readers of this book are in much the same position as the very earliest visitors. The island is hidden at first, but as the author leads us through the centuries, its outline becomes more defined, its intricacies more exactly delineated, its salient features given lasting names, each successive map and chart visibly more accurate and reliable, until the familiar outline emerges. Nor is that the end of the process, for the interior of the island remained an unknown quantity for many years, and the surveyors’ maps of areas of development are just as fascinating as those of the ocean-going explorers.

            What is immediately obvious from the author’s entertaining narrative is how much history, how much human experience, is concentrated in these two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world. The maps are the products of a variety of motivations: curiosity, the search for a Pacific entrance to the fabled north-west passage, politics and jockeying for power, diplomatic missions, trade, gold, farming, colonization. The maps also immortalize the people involved in their making, for it was as commonplace for explorers and surveyors to name the straits and bays and islands and hills they discovered after themselves, their colleagues, and their vessels, as it is for a botanist to add his name to a new species. So Layland shows that in the very names familiar to all Island dwellers, and easily located on any modern map—Haro, Juan de Fuca (who was actually Greek), Vancouver, Broughton, Meares, Mayne, Baker, Pandora, Cormorant, Quadra, Gabriola, Pemberton, to name just a few—lies the whole history of European involvement in “the land of heart’s delight” at the edge of the world. 

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, is being published this spring.

Winning novel’s captures war’s high cost

Lucky: A novel
By Kathryn Para
Published by Mother Tongue Publishing
213 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Kathryn Para’s debut novel and winner of The Great BC Novel Contest, Lucky: a novel, explores how we distance ourselves physically and mentally as a way to try to adapt to unthinkable tragedy and suffering.

Anika Lund is a photojournalist working on assignment in the war-torn Middle East when she meets Viva from Syria, a woman in search of her husband’s kidnapper, whom she believes to be in Fallujah, Iraq. Ani’s job is to take photos—of dying children, of broken buildings and dust—that will explain the state of the Middle East to westerners in a way words cannot.

Given the machine gun and the destruction of Murad’s house, Murad, perhaps, is the man she seeks, the one with ties to Zayid’s terrorist franchise that ripples through the Middle East. But on the ground, cradling his head, he looks less like a terrorist than an ordinary man. She takes another photograph of him, and the acid in her stomach lifts, swirls and threatens. Trembling comes next, followed by cold sweat. She lowers the camera and stows it in her bag. Maybe this trip will have been worth the effort. Maybe this time she has taken the photograph that will stop the war.

Ani joins Viva in hopes of finding the photographs that will change everything. Eventually, they are joined by a cocky journalist named Alex, with whom Ani has fallen in love. Together, and well-aware of the dangers that await, they devise an intricate plan to reach their destination. But when Viva’s search for her husband’s kidnapper grows fiercer, something terrible happens in Fallujah.

The novel alternates between the past in the Middle East, and the present in Vancouver, B.C.  Each thread is written in the present tense, which allows the reader to witness the urgency of Ani’s time abroad as she relives it. Para has done something structurally fascinating: like a camera lens, the story fluctuates between zooming the reader uncomfortably far into Ani’s mind post-trauma in Vancouver, and zooming back out to create distance as Ani, Viva and Alex fight for their lives in Fallujah. The pieces of the story that take place in Vancouver are written in first-person point-of-view, from Ani’s perspective, while the parts set in the Middle East are written in a limited third-person point of view, also from Ani’s perspective.

Back in Vancouver, Ani struggles to live with what has happened. Her therapist prescribes a concoction of different anti-depressants and tranquilizers, which Ani mixes with alcohol in an  attempt to escape reality. Then, at a party, Ani’s publisher introduces her to another journalist, Levi, who she thinks might be able to help Ani with her book, to persuade her to open the box of photos she can’t bring herself to look at. Levi is mystified by Ani’s brokenness and, though it isn’t long before the two become locked together physically, she won’t let him into her mind to see what she saw.  By the time a reader reaches the end of the novel, it is not difficult to see why.

Levi finds me later under a tree in the park. I explain that the willow roped me, twisted me around and hog-tied me like a calf, hid me under the dead leaves. My sweet Levi. My swagger man in his tight jeans, my cool-word man with his Mac computer, my investigator man with his laid-back methods. He waits for people to open themselves up. He’s a tricky man.

While the ambitious structure is successful, Ani’s internal first-person voice is much more engaging and interesting. The contrast between voices is obvious but not jarring, and mirrors the premise so well that Para can easily get away with it.

Lucky explores notions of reality and memory and how we skew them in order to try to move forward—or even just exist. The novel succeeds portraying both the deterioration of a civilization and the singular self—and shows how we continue to do the enemy’s work long after we’ve escaped them.

Jenny Boychuk is a BFA graduate about to launch post-grad studies in writing.

Youth fiction worthwhile despite predictability

Three Little Words

By Sarah N. Harvey

Orca Book Publishers

218 pages, $12.95

Reviewed by Marcie Gray

Sarah N. Harvey tries to say a lot in Three little words. Her novel for young adults ranges over the various facets of family life as she tells the story of 16-year-old Sid. He was a toddler when his mother abandoned him and his foster parents took him in, raising him on one of the Northern Gulf Islands. He leads what seems to be a contented life – the only hint that he is unsettled is the comic strip he draws of a boy who is a lonely outcast. Then a friend of his birth mother arrives on the scene, and Sid learns he has a step-brother and a grandmother in Victoria. Sid, pale and wiry and sporting lots of red curls, discovers his brother has curly hair too – but it’s black, along with his skin. From here, Harvey leads us on a journey into what makes a family, as she explores foster families, birth parents, and siblings who are different races.

These are intriguing issues for the intended audience – teenagers who are figuring out their own place in the world. But this kind of audience also demands action right from the start, and Harvey doesn’t deliver. Instead she tries to hook readers by presenting a mystery: an eight-year-old girl arrives at Sid’s house seeking foster care. Her past is unclear, but whatever has happened, she is now afraid of males and speaks only to say please and thank you. Harvey moves from this mystery to a quick but thorough introduction of the main characters, and along the way, even manages to throw in some satirical sexual humour that will appeal to this audience. But it may not be enough to keep them reading past the first couple of chapters.

If these teen readers stick with the story, they’ll be rewarded. Harvey, an author from Victoria, has written nine books for children and young adults, and her prose is polished, her narrative engaging. She introduces more mystery and a manhunt, along with the ever-present question: what does the title of the book mean? What are the three little words? There are lots of chances to guess along the way, and Harvey has fun with the chapter titles, giving each chapter three words, from “Have a Heart” to “Make My Day.”  It’s entertaining just trying to interpret how she names each chapter.

The plot moves smoothly, if a bit predictably. In a young adult novel, the pacing has to stay on track, and on occasion that’s accomplished rather conveniently, when one character or another seems to read Sid’s mind. But these are minor matters. Three little words takes major themes such as family and tolerance and respect, and wraps them in a tasty novel.  I hope teen readers will dig in.

Marcie Gray used to report and produce for CBC Radio. Today she’s writing her own youth fiction.

Rakoff’s last work darkly funny

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
By David Rakoff
Doubleday
113 pp, $32
Reviewed by John Barton

Anyone who follows This American Life or Wiretap will know of David Rakoff, the Canadian-born humourist, who died of cancer in 2012 at 47. Journalist, broadcaster, screenwriter, actor, and artist, he published three books of essays that won two Lambda Literary Awards and a James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Hardbound with a die-cut cover, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish was published in the summer of 2013, a year after the author’s death. A novel in verse, it is illustrated by Toronto cartoonist Seth; his portraits of Rakoff’s characters sit on the heavy creamy stock disingenuously and resistant to bleed-through.

Rakoff’s narrative strategy is a memorable example of six degrees of separation. The characters—or clusters of characters, all mostly strangers to one another—are scattered in time and place from New York to Chicago, Burbank, and San Francisco, each sometimes making only one star turn or cameo as the twentieth century unfolds from just before the First World World War to the late-century AIDS crisis, before spilling in rhyming couplets into the third millennium. As one storyline is cast off for another, readers may wonder if the spun-out narratives will ever twine into one coherent thread. Hints of how they might are dropped here and there. For example, the first story closes with Margaret, a 13-year-old, Chicago meatpacker escaping an abusive stepfather, being saved from the deathly cold in a westward-hurtling boxcar by a Yiddish-whispering hobo, who holds her inside his coat. In the next story, we learn he is Hiram, the dying father of Clifford, an artistic boy growing up queer in Los Angeles during the 1920s.

Because any real ties between the book’s characters are few, we turn Rakoff’s hundred-and-first page (with only twelve to go) speculating that he may have died before he could shore up his shaky narrative arc. However, he pulls everything together in the last twenty lines. That we close the book appreciating how tenuously his characters are interconnected, even if his characters never do themselves, permits Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish to make an impassioned claim for poignancy.

This novel in verse is no Changing Light at Sandover; nor is it another Autobiography in Red, but it does belong to a tradition of light verse that Americans have excelled at since the Gilded Age (Rakoff became a U.S. citizen in 2003). It’s as entertaining as anything Don Marquis or Dorothy Parker wrote. Anyone familiar with “The Night Before Christmas” should easily recognize the verve of Rakoff’s versifying ambitions.

Though I found his reliance on near-exact rhymes exhausting, his wit amused me throughout. A good example is a passage from the point of view of Sloan, a control-freak realtor who lives an Upper East Side dream that her incontinent mother-in-law renders nightmarish:

The family was blessed and seemed wholly awash
In the kind of good fortune one doesn’t dare dream,
Near-parodically copious, bursting the seams
Of the sky; heaven-sent, like the biblical gift of the manna,
Until her thoughts happened to land upon Hannah.
One Hannah hint seems to be all that it takes
For Sloan’s inner Lexus to slam on the brakes.

I may not own a car, but my solar plexus spasmed with mirth.

Rakoff also succeeds at moving his readers. We last see Clifford, one of his few recurring characters, as he laboriously succumbs to HIV:

What a difference a day makes. Now times that by twenty.
Clifford was hollow, a Horn of Un-Plenty.
Tipping the scales at one-fifteen at most
He was more bone than flesh now, and less man than ghost.
The CMV daily lay waste to his sight
Now, it was all Renoir smearings of light,
I loathe Renoir, Clifford thought, chocolate-box hack.
Chuckling, his hacking cough wrenching his back.

For light verse, this passage is very dark, affirming that such poetry can be serious honestly. A gay man, Rakoff lived in New York through the AIDS crisis and must have witnessed countless friends and acquaintances die. One cannot help imagining their deaths returned to him while writing the very darkest moments of this posthumous book.

I also wonder if the chocolate-box reference is not a wry putdown of Forrest Gump, that loathsomely saccharine movie that for far too long allows its eponymous central character to recount his bathetic life. Despite the light-footedness of this verse, there’s nothing too sweet about Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. Though their stories are often pathetic, pathos lightens how Rakoff chose to let his characters live out what we see of their lives.

John Barton is the editor of The Malahat Review.

Collection chronicles difficult lives

Red Girl Rat Boy

By Cynthia Flood

Biblioasis

169 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Cynthia Flood, winner of the Journey Prize and the Western Canada Gold Award, amongst others, has published one novel and four collections of short stories. Her latest, “Red Girl Rat Boy” chronicles lives not easily led by those not easy to love; are any of us?  Marcia, in the title story, is sickly obsessive;  Ellen, in “One Two Three One,” rejects her own child.  A host of battle-weary activists spar with one another in “Blue Clouds” and “Dirty Work.” In “Eggs and Bones,” a resentful young mother lies in bed listening to her husband cook breakfast. “ Foods catch, stick on that scaliness, scorch.” Syntax is frequently truncated and I’m disarmed, on edge, as if asked not to get too comfortable.

With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character’s most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again. In “To Be Queen,” the best piece in the collection, Kenny, whose relationship with his lover has just ended, recalls growing up with siblings in a family where a sister died before he was born. With his remaining siblings, in the way that we do, he seeks to piece together the particular grief that shaped him. “Each sibling privately recalls their first sight of Mom crying.”  In a psychic distance that could not be much closer, we are with Kenny in a playful childhood attack from his older sister’s friends; “They’re on me. First I laugh, then there are too many eyes and fingers, open mouths, teeth.” And a few sentences later, with a skillful widening of the aperture; “Thus I learned that if you don’t give a shit, or credibly pretend not to, even in defeat you have power.” At the end of this story, I am left yearning that my own children may never live with the absence of one another. Such is the emotional impact of this raw and honest writing.

Flood’s cast of characters cavort, love, grieve and rebel between the complicated layers of their lives. A montage of ailing elders subvert the meaning of the story’s title, “Care,” in a macabre nursing home setting. Several stories look back to Vancouver in the 70’s and 80’s. “Addresses” is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of those who rented in the West End at the time. It is, paradoxically, their quirkiness that makes Flood’s characters both recognizable and tender. In “Such Language,” Lauren’s mother, out of love, leaves a foul message on the machine: a wake-up call in code, the only language mother and daughter are capable of speaking.

These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow.

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay. She’s one of the founders of the fledgling Fat Oyster Reading Series. http://judyleblanc.com/

 

Luck smooths refugee’s transition

Life Class

By Ann Charney

Cormorant Books

232 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Nerina, the protagonist of Ann Charney’s fourth novel, Life Class, is an unusually optimistic and determined refugee. She carries freight from her past in the former Yugoslavia, including a terror of dogs born of her experiences in war-torn Sarajevo, but she refuses to allow it to define her. As she remarks, “Just because you’re born in some unlucky place doesn’t mean you have to carry it with you for the rest of your life.” Even though she is scratching out a living as an illegal alien in Venice, she is determined to reinvent herself and find a place in the sun. The novel traces her path across two continents as she successfully pursues this aim, taking leaps of faith and constantly starting over from scratch.

She has help, from a succession of colourful characters. Helena, an elderly woman who makes a living as a go-between, linking artists and wealthy patrons in the art milieu of Venice, rescues her from sweeping the floor in a hairdressing salon and recommends her for a job with a rich American couple. Walter, aging and gay, ensures her access to the United States. Helena’s cousin, Leo Samuels, gives her a job and training when she arrives in New York, and even supplies a room for her to live in at the back of his framing shop. Even her romance with an up-and-coming artist, Christophe, is instrumental in taking her to Montreal and the possibility of some day starting her own gallery.

There is a lot to be said for a novel that is determinedly happy, in which characters uniformly beat the odds and find success, and do it against a background of great cities and beautiful countryside. But those odds exist in life; nobody’s path is entirely free of pitfall and calamity. Despite Nerina’s origins, there is a Teflon quality to her experience. In narrative terms, her story lacks any real conflict and that makes her journey flat and predictable where it should be inspiring. She encounters difficulties—a theft, no documentation, little knowledge of English, having to cope with a large dog, dependence on the goodwill of others—but the people she meets smooth each one away and on she goes. How significant it seems that her favourite character in the fiction she reads to learn English should be Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair!

At one point in the novel,  Walter quotes Robert Louis Stevenson: “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” This novel certainly shows Nerina doing that. We are entertained by her progress through the rarefied world of fine art and its patrons, but the lesson Nerina draws from her life class—she is “suddenly struck by the vast uncertainty of it all…yet, through all of it, life goes on, ordinary and mysterious, revealing the future in random slivers”—seems a disappointingly hollow outcome in a novel meant to be uplifting and life-affirming. One cannot help feeling that her friend Helena may have been closer to the mark and could have been speaking for all the characters in the book when she observes, “your change of fortune has more to do with dumb luck than skill.” And where’s the excitement in that?

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, will be published in 2014

Coal-mine disaster dusted off to good effect

The Devil’s Breath

The story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster of 1914

By Steve Hanon

NeWest Press

327 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

The early years of the 20th century seems distant, faded from today’s viewpoint, almost a full century later. European powers and their “new world” spinoffs still saw western Canada as a sparsely populated hinterland. Tucked into the remote Crowsnest Pass in the south-west corner of the new province of Alberta, however, were a number of coal mines producing the energy that would fuel the first burst of western development.

In June of 1914, the worst mining disaster in Canadian history took the lives of 189 men at Hillcrest Mine in the pass. The story of that disaster has been largely overlooked in our cultural record — and not only because it happened so long ago.

The disaster was covered by western media, but little of the news was picked up in the east. Western coal itself rarely travelled as far east as Manitoba, so the story simply did not reverberate very far afield.

Yet, for a region that had suffered the Frank Slide just 11 years earlier, the Hillcrest explosion was another devastating blow. Filmmaker-author Steve Hanon sifts through conflicting and confusing sources – newspapers, inquiry reports, company reports and memoirs – to patch together a picture of what happened at Hillcrest before, during, and after the explosion and fires.

The Devil’s Breath takes over 100 pages to lead us to the day of the disaster. The context, Hanon says, is everything. He takes readers inside the industrial age thinking of the time, the heated world of coal mining labour struggles, and the work ethic that drove small frontier communities.

The mine exploded between 9:15 and 9:30 am on June 19, 1914, killing many miners instantly. In the book’s most gripping chapter, “Without Air to Breathe,” we follow the frantic escape attempts and rescue efforts that filled the minutes and hours immediately after the explosion. Miners scramble to find escape routes and air to breathe. Rescuers head down shafts, retreat for air and equipment, return at considerable risk and often stumble into caverns filled with the bodies of their friends and co-workers.

What went wrong? Why do Canadians know so little about Hillcrest? The story moves from life and death heroics to the frustrating opacity of our economic, governmental and social systems. One is left believing that there were far too many vested interests in Hillcrest for real accountability to stick. To his credit, Hanon avoids the temptation to pick out a single, arbitrary villain. “The truth likely lay tangled somewhere in the Gordian Knot of human behavior that involved politics, the struggle for control, human failings, fear, shrugged shoulders, equivocation, evasions and fatalism,” he concludes.

The Devil’s Breath is presented in a handsome trade paperback edition with 20 pages of photographs, a useful glossary, an event timeline, a full listing of the disaster’s victims, bibliography and other notes. It is a thorough package.

The effect is more archival than imaginative, which is appropriate. Hanon did not set out to write a new story set in the context of Hillcrest, but to clear away the coal dust and give us a good look at the original story. That he does admirably.

Lorne Daniel lives in Victoria, B.C.. His blog Writing:Place is at http://lornedaniel.ca

Shy in person, bold on the page

Shy: An Anthology

Edited by Naomi K. Lewis & Rona Altrows

The University of Alberta Press

171 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

Shy, An Anthology battles the stigmas and assumptions that surround what it means to be shy with a collection of poems and personal essays. As someone who has always self-identified as shy, regardless of my peers’ boisterous disagreements, I approached this anthology with a combination of weariness and curiosity. I found the foreword, which described, with great spirit, the crippling effects of shyness and social anxiety, nerve-wracking. It did not seem true to my experience, and I became worried that this anthology, though full to the brim with good intention, would dramatize shyness, making it feel less real, less important. I was afraid that shyness would become a caricature.

Luckily, by the end of the book, this fear was assuaged. I found the personal essays particularly interesting and engaging. Some of the contributors recounted childhood experiences much like mine.  For instance, Naomi K. Lewis describes French Immersion in her contribution, “Say Water.” Primarily, the essays recounted childhood experiences, though some did discuss shyness in adulthood. For this reason, I couldn’t help but think that these stories would make powerful guest lectures at elementary or high schools. As someone who has already worked through the shyness of childhood, these stories did not carry as much weight for me as they might for someone in the midst of these feelings.

I appreciated  those essays that focused on shyness in early adulthood, and even late adulthood. I particularly enjoyed Jeff Miller’s “Common Loon,” which recounts his experiences with shyness in a foreign country after a disastrous break up. Debbie Bateman’s “Amongst the Unseen and Unheard” reminded me that the “most damaging part of shyness isn’t the embarrassment,” but rather “the missed moments” and all the meaningful connections that we fail to make due to our own fears.

As for the poetry, I really enjoyed Lorna Crozier’s contribution, “Watching My Lover,” which is indescribably beautiful, and Kerry Ryan’s “How to be shy,” which has a refreshingly comedic take on shyness. The first segment of Ryan’s poem, entitled “How to be shy: the hug,” is especially funny, but also reflects how I and other shy individuals feel when confronted with random acts of physical closeness.

Even though Shy had its ups and downs, as with any anthology, I found it to be a  worthwhile read that I would recommend to anyone who has felt some sort of philosophical compulsion to understand her or his own shyness. In many ways, Shy is a compilation of coming of age stories centred on bashful, artistic individuals. And I am thankful to them for sharing their experiences.

Senica Maltese is a BA student focusing on Honours English and Writing.