Category Archives: Frances Backhouse

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.

Author walked the trail, tells the tale

 

Wild
By Cheryl Strayed
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages, $29.00

Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

Two years ago, shortly before my fifty-first birthday, I went backpacking alone for the first time. Although the trip was short in both time and distance – three days, 26 kilometres – I felt immensely proud of my accomplishment. After years of backpacking with companions, I had braved the wilderness on my own and carried with me everything I needed to survive. By the time I picked up Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, my blisters and bug bites had long healed and the blackened nail on my left big toe had finally returned to its normal hue, but I felt an instant affinity for this young woman who had dared to embark on her first solo backpacking trip at half my age and with no previous long-distance hiking experience of any kind. After reading her account of her three-month, 1,770-kilometre journey, I am in awe of her fortitude and spunk.

Strayed was 26 when she first heard about the Pacific Coast Trail, a high-elevation wilderness route that follows the western spine of North America from the California-Mexico border to southern British Columbia. Still deeply mourning her mother’s death four years earlier, estranged from her siblings and stepfather, and in the throws of divorcing a man she loved but could no longer live with, she decided a long, solitary walk in the mountains was what she needed to clear her head. She set off carrying a pack that weighed more than half her body weight (she soon nicknamed it Monster) and a compass she didn’t know how to use. Amazingly, despite searing heat in the Mojave Desert, trail-obliterating snow in the Sierra Nevada, ill-fitting boots to which she lost six toenails, exhaustion, loneliness and scary encounters with menacing men, rattlesnakes and a Texas longhorn bull, Strayed kept going, mile after mile, day after day. And like any good pilgrimage, the journey transformed and healed her.

In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might have become mired in pathos or wandered off into tedium. Strayed keeps it on track with her honest self-analysis, wry humour and strong storytelling instincts. With her deceptively simple, conversational prose, she held my full attention through all the highs and lows of her soul-searching, and the endless, gruelling ascents and descents.

Near the end of her epic trek, Strayed writes of how deeply her feet hurt: “Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at the day’s end I was still pretty much shattered.” Her words might not make you want to tackle the Pacific Coast Trail yourself, but they’re bound to inspire. Whether you’re looking for an outdoor adventure story or a rumination on coming to terms with personal adversity, Wild is sure to satisfy.

Frances Backhouse is a Victoria-based author and magazine journalist. Her travel memoir, Hiking With Ghosts, relates her adventures backpacking the 53-kilometre-long Chilkoot Trail.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

By John Vaillant (Knopf Canada, 2010, 329 pages, $34.95
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

A tiger, wounded by a hunter, returns to stalk and kill the man and terrorize his village before it finally meets its own death in a dramatic showdown. It sounds like myth or legend, but as the subtitle of John Vaillant’s latest award-winning book states, this is a true story, all the more powerful because of its veracity.

Vaillant’s first book, The Golden Spruce, examined the ecological, political and economic reverberations of one exceptional tree’s destruction and won the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Now The Tiger has picked up the 2011 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, this country’s most lucrative non-fiction prize. Both books reflect Vaillant’s acute concerns about environmental issues. “The Golden Spruce and The Tiger are really the same story,” he told the audience at the B.C. award ceremony. “I just told it a different way.”

Despite the similarity in theme, the research requirements of the two projects were literally worlds apart. Not only did Vaillant travel to the remote Primorye Territory in Russia’s Far East, he also conducted most of his interviews through an interpreter. The depth of the information he gathered is a tribute to his journalistic skills and to the talents of Josh Stenberg, whom he acknowledges for his role as “fixer, minder, cultural advisor, counsellor, and historian,” as well as translator.

Vaillant begins the book with an exquisitely rendered scene of high suspense, as the protagonist and his dog move unwittingly through the dark toward their fatal encounter with the Amur tiger that lies in wait for them:

“Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling. They are hunting partners and the man understands someone is there by the cabin. The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together.

“Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.”

Primed by this brief prologue, I was surprised to turn the page and plunge into dense, fact-filled exposition. If you’ve heard about Brad Pitt’s production company optioning The Tiger and are looking for a fast-paced, Hollywood-style adventure, you’d better wait for the movie. If, however, you don’t mind a narrative thread that is spun out gradually, while simultaneously being woven into a meticulously researched and intelligently considered rumination on the relationship between people and tigers, read the book. Vaillant is a master of this writing style, though I would have preferred far fewer footnotes.

Given the current domination of memoir within the literary nonfiction genre, Vaillant’s decision to stand outside this story is surprising and admirable. In a Q&A interview posted on his web site (at www.thetigerbook.com/faq/), he explains that his initial impulse was to write a first-person travelogue. He stifled it out of respect for the story’s “mythic” dimensions and the people involved. “[The] events are so intense and poignant that I felt as if I hadn’t really earned the right to insert myself into them.”

Instead, he takes us into the events through the participants, focusing on Vladimir Markov and Andrei Pochepnya, the tiger’s victims, and Yuri Trush, the game warden charged with tracking and killing the tiger. Although he never met two of these men, Vaillant creates detailed portraits of all of them. He probes far back into their personal histories and maps their lives in an attempt to understand their motivations and fears during the winter of the tiger attacks.

There is little doubt that Markov, a known poacher, tried to kill the tiger so he could sell its body parts on the black market. But rather than make a villain of him, Vaillant takes the same kind of big-picture approach he took with The Golden Spruce. In this case, he traces a line from perestroika and the dismantling of the Communist system to the widespread unemployment in Primorye that pushed men like Markov into poaching as a survival strategy.

Vaillant is donating part of the book’s proceeds to organizations working to protect Primorye’s Amur tigers, which now number fewer than 400. More important, he has raised awareness of the precarious status of all tigers – not by proselytizing, but by speaking to both our primal fear of these beautiful, deadly cats and our fascination.

As Vaillant notes, “Tigers … get our full attention. They strike a deep and resonant chord within us, and one reason is because, as disturbing as it may be, man-eating occurs within the acceptable parameters of the tiger’s nature, which has informed our nature.”

Subconsciously, we all still remember what it’s like to be prey. The Tiger makes us face that ancient terror.

 

Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers & The Spirits of the Forest

Directed by Michael Ostroff
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

 

Like many contemporary British Columbians, I can’t hike on the West Coast without Emily Carr ghosting along beside me. I don’t even realize she’s there until suddenly a shaft of light strikes a cedar in just the right way and the scene before me transforms into an oil painting on canvas. Ottawa-based director Michael Ostroff seems to be subject to the same kind of double vision and has turned it to magnificent advantage in his latest cinematic offering, Winds of Heaven, which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) in October 2010.

After struggling for recognition as an artist for most of her life, Carr is now widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s pre-eminent 20th-century painters. Ostroff could have simply chronicled her rise to fame, providing a comfortable diversion for her many admirers. Instead, he chose to explore Carr’s relationship to the First Nations culture that so strongly influenced her creative journey. The resulting 90-minute documentary is a nuanced and original take on her work and life, which ViFF executive director Alan Franey calls “[o]ne of the most important films ever made about our province.”

British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, the year Carr was born; by the time she died in 1945, the province had assumed its modern identity. As Carr was growing up, B.C.’s original inhabitants were being increasingly marginalized. Yet, unlike most of her contemporaries, Carr was fascinated by indigenous culture, particularly the work of First Nations carvers. Her paintings of totem poles are among her most famous.  Klee Wyck, a memoir about her visits to First Nations villages, won the 1941 Governor General’s award for nonfiction and continues to sell well. According to First Nations art critic Marcia Crosby, however, Carr’s ongoing popularity does no favours to the people who furnished her inspiration.

“The way [Carr’s] history has been collapsed with aboriginal history has the power to teach very old ideas,” observes Crosby, who, along with ’Ksan museum curator Laurel Smith Wilson and art historians Gerta Moray and Susan Crean, provides commentary through the film. One of Ostroff’s main goals, an admirable one, appears to be refuting those out-dated ideas about the obsolescence and inferiority of First Nations culture. At times this narrative thread threatens to eclipse Carr’s story, but ultimately the integration is successful. My only objection to the film  is that Ostroff comes close to holding Carr responsible for an entire generation’s racist attitudes and hurtful behaviour, not just her own.

Fittingly for a film about art, Winds of Heaven is a treat to watch. John Walker’s fluid camerawork gives us sumptuous footage of wild coastal landscapes and luminous rainforest close-ups that perfectly complement shots of Carr’s paintings, while archival footage and photographs and period recreations fill in historical background.

The dramatizations never show Carr in full—usually only her hands are visible: sketching, painting, typing—but we hear her through the voice of veteran Stratford actress Diane D’Aquila, who reads selections from Carr’s letters, diaries and published writings. What we do see are vivid, believable reconstructions of Carr’s world, including her childhood home, the pension where she lived while studying art in Paris and the Victoria boarding house that she ran for years and memorialized in The House of All Sorts. Scenes of her 1930s painting expeditions into the semi-wilderness around Victoria, with a caravan she dubbed “The Elephant,” are especially striking.

For anyone who is unacquainted with Carr, Winds of Heaven offers an excellent introduction. More important, it challenges those of us who think we already know her to take another look at the artist and her art — and to fully appreciate where both came from.

For more insights into Emily Carr, check out The Other Emily: Redefining Emily Carr, March 2 to October 10, 2011, at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.