Category Archives: Margaret Thompson

Book captures history of fabled Tofino

Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History

Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy

Harbour Publishing

640 pages;  $36.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

The cover image of this handsome book captures the kind of seascape the names Tofino and Clayoquot Sound immediately evoke: the huge pale sky, a broad stretch of golden sand punctuated by tide pools, waves curling in past offshore islands, a rocky promontory covered in trees, shafts of sunlight lancing through the green and making ghosts of the upper branches. The title, though, tells us that this is not another travelogue designed to celebrate the extraordinary beauty and wildness of the western edge of Vancouver Island; it is a history of a fabled place.

As a history, it has a great deal in common with biography, especially the kind which studies celebrated people who are still living. In just the same way as a biographer explores every detail of the subject’s background, antecedents, formative influences, and life choices in order to explain his or her fame, so Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy have approached this relatively small area of Canadian geography to explain how it has arrived at its present state. As a result, the place becomes a character with a starring role in its ongoing dramatic narrative, far more complex and entertaining than its reputation as a modern tourist mecca would suggest.

The authors begin at the very beginning, with the first volcanic upheavals of 400 million years ago, and the vast collisions of land masses and buckling tectonic plates, the advance and retreat of ice, and the erosion of wind and water that led to the present geography. The detailed description of these giant forces at work emphasizes the grandeur and endurance of the place; the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples who first settled there, drawn by its rich resources, blended harmoniously with their surroundings, if not always with each other, for thousands of years, undisturbed. By contrast, later pioneers had no hereditary feel for the land; they were there to impose their own ways, for their own ends.

Inevitably, biographers will concentrate on the people important to their subjects. No surprise that the early settlers provide the authors with a wonderful cast of supporting characters, whose personalities and actions supply a fund of good stories. There is the missionary who insisted on carrying his pet canary in a cage as he was transported in a canoe; the eccentric Frederick Tibbs and his fondness for dynamite; the former cowboy, Edward Fitzpatrick, who was marooned on a rocky islet and sheltered in the roots of a tree for 19 days; and Bill Spittal and his dog, Joe Beef.

The authors blend these anecdotes seamlessly into a coherent and exhaustive analysis of the forces and events that affected the development of the area. They trace the ebb and flow of enterprises like the sea otter trade, fishing and logging, and the impact of social changes like the missions and residential schools, the building of roads, and the delivery of goods and mail by sea. They describe the change that came to the area with the Second World War, when Tofino suddenly became the first line of defence against a distant enemy across the Pacific, never seeing any action to speak of, but establishing the beginnings of an airport. More modern times have seen just as much change; the hippies of the ’60s and the War in the Woods in the ’80s added their share of strife, at the same time changing the attitude to the environment for ever.

Horsfield and Kennedy acknowledge that there will always be changes and surprises lying ahead, but they stress that the people of the area, after years of division, appear to be relating to each other in new ways. The place survives, ready to adapt to whatever happens next. As the authors conclude, “Here on the west coast, another wave is always about to break.”

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

Historian revives the story of the enigmatic Peter Pond

Dr. Barry Gough is a noted historian and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society recognized for his scrupulous research and engaging narratives. He is the author of many books, including Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterways of Forgotten Dreams and Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America (Harbour, 2007) which won the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Most recently, Dr. Gough explored the life of a fur trader who has long fascinated him in The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, Fur Trader and Explorer who Opened the Northwest (Douglas & McIntyre, 2014). He spoke to Margaret Thompson about this enigmatic figure.

The title of your book—The Elusive Mr. Pond—immediately suggests that Peter Pond is a shadowy figure, historically. What first drew your attention to him as a subject for a book?

The authoritative Dictionary of Canadian Biography, one of the great national literary institutions of [our] country…asked me to write for their pages a large biography of this unusual character. The staff of the Dictionary also knew of my fascination with the intersection of the fur traders, the First Nations, and the opening up of the Canadian northwest. Since then and even today I have been drawn to a personality who does not fit the norms of Canadian history—and who challenges us to think in new ways about our past, particularly that of the distant eighteenth century. Put differently, I could not put Peter Pond aside, could not consign him to the scrap heap of history. He deserved better, and therein lay the fascination of his incredible story—and my desire to tell it.

From your account, Pond’s life is not well documented by himself or others, and there are large gaps in the record. This must have presented a challenge even to an experienced researcher like yourself. Will you tell us something about the process of disinterring verifiable fact about Pond, and what caused you the most difficulty?

The art of the historian is to recount the past and explain this to the interested reader, the latter constituting an increasingly difficult task given the fact that fewer Canadians read of their history, more particularly that before the end of the Second World War. (It is a fact that Canadian history is disappearing as a subject of public interest, a reason for considerable worrry to those of us who have spent lifetimes trying to educate our fellow Canadians in the rich depth of our history.) The historian, however, often has to read between the lines—and go beyond the documents. I do not have a photo of Peter Pond but that did not stop me from writing a speculative pen portrait of the fellow. Peter Pond left a wonderful memoir, short though it is. But from other sources in the North West Company files, from other fur trade biographies, and from Hudson’s Bay Company papers, and above all Colonial Office papers in Kew, Surrey, we can complete a very wide and deep literary portrait. And by his maps shall he also be known. Of specific interest and importance are Pond’s various maps; and these are important historical records besides being quizzical and fabulous cartographic creations of the age.

If you have an inquisitive instinct and love the pursuit of the documentary chase, there is no shortage of material about Peter Pond. But the working historian has to know how to get at it and have the abilities to mine that particular vein of gold.

As you point out, Pond enjoyed good relations with the First Nations he encountered, and was even employed on occasion as a sort of diplomatic envoy. How much of his success would you ascribe to this quality?

He was not born in the wilderness or the frontier, but he took to it naturally, even intuitively. He welcomed the freedom of the frontier. That meant living with the First Nations, sleeping with the native women and encouraging the diplomacy with the various tribes—all part of “the custom of the country,” so called. The Peter Pond “gene pool” is probably well spread throughout the vast geography stretching north and west from Detroit running up to Lake Athabasca and beyond. But it was more than his ease of living with the First Nations, the American Indians. He had become a fearless fellow from his warrior years in the Connecticut and New York militias. He was hard-nosed and capable of the hardest physical demands placed upon him: he was a marathon runner of the fur trade. Among all fur traders, save Mackenzie, he was first among equals in capabilities.

In fur trade history most historians treat the fur traders as a class of equals; in fact, some were stronger than others. Pond and Mackenzie were among the toughest, and from them devolved the great expansive strength of the Nor’Westers that led them against all odds to the Arctic (or Icy) Sea and to the Pacific. It is shocking to my sensitivities, however, that Mackenzie gave Pond so little credit for his zeal, leadership and geopolitical vision—the essence of this biography. Why was Mackenzie so selfish? Was it his Scots disposition? Or was it the fact that Pond was a Colonial American? The book probes this question, and it speaks to the essence of who is a Canadian. Do we lose our Canadian status when we leave our country? And do we have to stay in this country to be famous in it? The Peter Pond story speaks, in a way, to the shallowness of the Canadian nationality and to the fragility of our collective belonging. But he was a significant figure in the creation of the Empire of the St. Lawrence, the political and economic system that was the progenitor of the modern Canadian state.

Looking at Pond’s maps, I was struck by the enormity of his undertaking—not so much the sheer size of the country, which he could not know, but the courage it would take to strike out into a limitless unknown. That he managed a successful trading career, as well as demystifying vast river systems and almost working out a route to the Pacific, suggests that he was a remarkable man. Why, then, is he not as much of a household name as Mackenzie and Fraser?

He was not Scottish. That’s the first answer, the primary one. The next answer is that he did not remain in Canada. He left the fur trade and Canada and retired or returned home, as some of us do, to his home town, in his case Milford, Connecticut, in my case, teasingly, Victoria, British Columbia. The Scots had a profound influence in our history; I proved that in my biography of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, First Across the Continent, a book which did so much to explain to Americans (as well as Canadians) and those beyond our borders, how important the fur trade was to our national alchemy. Yes, he spanned the greater northwestern scope of Canada, from Montreal out to Windsor and Detroit then up through the Great Lakes to all the river courses (often against the flow of current) right up to the English River and then the Methye Portage that took him into the new fur trade eldorado, Athabasca, and to the Canadian north leading to the Arctic and the rivers of British Columbia.

In your preface you make this comment: “It may be fashionable nowadays to engage in creative non-fiction, but I can assure the reader that I have declined this seduction, save where I have speculated on Pond’s appearance.” The phrasing makes it clear that you disapprove of creative non-fiction in a historical study, yet your own example of succumbing to the “seduction” illustrates the colour that fictional techniques can give a narrative without tainting its authenticity. Can you elaborate a bit on your take on creative non-fiction?

I am not opposed to creative non-fiction… [but] we who are biographers or historians are bound by the rigorous craft rules set down in our callings. We cannot create facts; we cannot create circumstances; we cannot change chronology; we must respect those who have written about the subject already. Someone writing creative non-fiction, by contrast, can exercise greater liberties. For myself as a working historian I am particularly bound by the main materials of my subject—a personal narrative or memoir, related trade narratives, business and political records of the age, maps and charts, and the views of others about the personality and circumstances that form the main subject. My search as a biographer has always been to provide an authentic representation of the individual under examination. That is my credo.

But the biographer’s calling also requires imagination and the perspective of the years and of the age in question. It is a wonderful challenge and I hope to find another figure as compelling as Peter Pond though, alas, I am not sure I will ever find it. He stands in the same category as Lawrence of Arabia and Sir Ernest Shackleton, and the world cries out for figures whose stories have yet to be told and retold.

Orca launches new series, The Seven Sequels

Orca’s The Seven Sequels

Sleeper by Eric Walters; Broken Arrow by John Wilson; Coda by Ted Staunton;

The Wolf and Me by Richard Scrimger; From the Dead by Norah McClintock;

Tin Soldier by Sigmund Brouwer; Double You by Shane Peacock

Orca Book Publishers

By Margaret Thompson

When Orca published the original Seven series in 2012, few could have anticipated just how successful it would be.

The concept, “spawned in my hot tub” according to author Eric Walters, was unusual: seven loosely connected books by seven different authors about seven grandsons fulfilling tasks dictated by their grandfather’s will, the reading of which provides the starting point for seven simultaneous adventures.

Publisher Andrew Wooldridge admits it was a risky venture, but the gamble paid off. To Orca’s somewhat panicked surprise, the first run sold out in two weeks, 100,000 copies have sold in North America since then, and foreign rights have been sold in Brazil, India and South Korea, as well as world French rights.

That is the stage set for the The Seven Sequels, which officially launched Oct. 1.

The publication of any book is a collaborative effort. Obviously, producing seven books at one go calls for a remarkable degree of cooperation from three entities with very different concerns and priorities: the publisher, the editor, and the group of writers.

Wooldridge sees the series filling a need for books aimed specifically at boys, notoriously reluctant readers. Not surprisingly, the story idea came from a writer who has long concentrated on exactly that particular audience, and Walters enlisted a team of similar authors well-known for their skill both in storytelling and in presenting their material in schools. Orca added two of the final seven writers.

Armed with Walters’ anchor scene, the authors were free to write their own stories. Richard Scrimger, author of The Wolf and Me, saw the strength of the plan.

“Writing is a solitary business,” he says. “You, the keyboard and the cup of coffee.”

Yet he found it easy to sit down with friend and fellow writer Ted Staunton over “a drink or six and figure out plots that would work for each of our characters.” Scrimger sums up the essence of this kind of approach: “Because our stories are still very separate, we have that sense of control that writers like – and yet we can borrow from each other as needed.”

Shane Peacock’s experience was somewhat different. His character is an odd man out in the series – an American, infrequently in touch with his cousins. Apart from  avoiding contradictions, Shane had little contact with the other authors or need to compromise. He found this changed with the sequels, starting with the plans for the second anchor scene.

“We talked at some length about how the opening scene would work and made sure it made sense for all of us. We even asked for certain things and objects to appear in the opening sequence.”

In Shane’s case, that was a Walther PPK pistol. Knowing more about the characters made him search for more ways to connect the second time round, but he was cautious: “I had to make sure I didn’t overthink the connection to the others.”

Given the complexity of the project, it’s hardly surprising everyone concerned pays tribute to the editor, Sarah Harvey. Asked what it was like to be single-handedly responsible for editing seven linked stories for simultaneous publication, she was pithy and to the point:

“Short version: logistically challenging, time-consuming, terrifying (at times), satisfying (when the books finally arrived in the warehouse!)”

“Terrifying” stands out, of course, and Wooldridge echoed the sentiment: “A nightmare, at times,” he allowed. Dealing with seven different authors at the same time sounds akin to wrangling a herd of cats; Sarah Harvey wrote an entertaining piece for Publishers’ Weekly (2012.08.27) about the experience which outlines her fear of not being able to “keep all the balls in the air,” and illustrates better than anything else what collaboration can involve, including “way too many text messages.”

Practice makes perfect, though.

The sequels were less terrifying all round. Still risky, because a series like this swallows the resources for a season. But the lessons learned with Seven have resulted in advances and innovations for Orca: investment in a shrink wrap machine to do their own bundling; production of audio tapes for all the books; digital versions; teacher guides (with the help of real teachers!); an access of confidence in large projects.

There were similar spin-off benefits for everyone involved. Sarah Harvey does her work much as she has always done, but apart from the “street cred” she claims, tongue in cheek (though it’s real enough), she welcomes “the knowledge that I’m capable of undertaking a large project and doing a good job.”

The writers enjoyed the collaboration, and valued the novel experience of joint presentations. John Wilson said, “We still present individually in schools, but we often do evening presentations for entire school districts, which involve all seven of us on stage at the one time, a very exciting and energizing experience for us and the audience.”

At the end of her article, Sarah Harvey asks a question: “Would I do another series like Seven?” And answers it: “Probably. If Andrew asked nicely. And gave me danger pay. And a week in Maui afterwards.”

Andrew must have asked nicely. Here we are, two years later, with the launch of The Seven Sequels.

This time the anchor scene involves five of the boys discovering a cache of money, a gun, forged passports in different names all with the photo of their grandfather, a coded notebook and a menacing accusation. Free of adults for a week, they scatter to discover whether their grandfather was a spy or not.

The stories are fast-paced and action-packed. Accordingly, the boys’ progress is as punctuated by gunshots, murder, kidnapping, betrayal, codebreaking, pursuit and pretty girls who may or may not be trustworthy, as any Bond movie. The settings range far and wide—the boys have all that hidden money, after all—from Uruguay to Spain, from Bermuda to England, from Toronto to the Southern States, from Jamaica to New York, with a divertingly original crossing of the US-Canada border complete with magic realism for good measure.

The stories benefit from the varying expertise and interests of their authors. Sigmund Brouwer’s Tin Soldier explores the Vietnam War and the American military; John Wilson uses the downing of an American plane carrying nuclear bombs over Palomares, Spain, in 1966 as the catalyst for his plot in Broken Arrow; Norah McClintock’s From the Dead investigates the secret world of Nazi war criminals in a wonderfully realized decaying Detroit; Eric Walters’ Sleeper involves the treachery of the Cambridge Five.

Subversively informative the novels are, but they are fun, too. Shane Peacock’s Adam in Double You is obsessed by all things Bond, and the search for Bunny in Ted Staunton’s Coda is enlivened by the frequent allusions to movies, not to mention an unexpected alligator guarding a grow-op. Richard Scrimger’s Bunny is perhaps the most endearing character; sweet, naif, literal, appalling speller, he gives the reader a glimpse, as the author says, “into an ‘other’ kind of mind,” one that will find it perfectly reasonable to play a game of shinny with his kidnappers.

The real genius of this series lies in the simultaneous action of the individual books. It is a series without sequence. You can read them in any order, and they make sense. You can choose to read only the ones that interest you without losing the thread or missing something vital. It is, in fact, the big family saga as smorgasbord, the separate dishes all served at once, take whatever you want, and make a satisfying meal.

And will Seven spawn sequels like Rocky? Will there be granddaughters? No and no. But Sarah is at work on a new series called The Secrets with female protagonists, to be published Fall 2015.

“Different challenges,” she says, “but a nice change from all that testosterone!”

Sharp and quizzical look at human experience

The Pull of the Moon

by Julie Paul

Brindle & Glass, 2014

$19.95; 184 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

If fiction serves to map what makes us human, the short story may represent those small regions, shown in contrasting colour to demonstrate their position vis à vis the larger country or continent, and magnified to reveal their complexities in more detail. In her second collection of short stories, Julie Paul surveys the minutiae of human relationships with a sharp and quizzical eye.

Her characters are what would be called ordinary people: married couples and single parents, friends and colleagues, family members and complete strangers. We observe them in their separate landscapes, coping with separation and parenting duties, going on holiday, irritated by their neighbours and apartment living, resentful of family demands—all very much the stuff of daily life until we hear the details. Then we see the old secret behind the cottage holiday that has frozen a family in denial and guilt in “The King is Dead,” the psychic distortion caused by the accidental killing of a baby rescued from a car wreck in “Damage,” the grief and loneliness of a brother and sister, “each with a country to themselves,” in “Crossing Over.”

Many of the characters yearn for love and connection, but there is not a single straightforward path for any of them. In “Flip,” the main character seems at first to be a caricature of a librarian: Claudia is timid, socially awkward and has a talent for self-deprecation. She has also had very few sexual experiences apart from an early collision with fellatio and a short-lived relationship with Clark which ended with a text to say he’d gone to Alberta.

Rodger’s courtship transforms Claudia, who “feels like another person has entered her body,” and she finds herself whisked off to Cuba, where she sees, “Women with gigantic cigars in their mouths, looking like they’re enjoying themselves immensely.” This is sex as fun, but Andrew’s experience in “Weeping Camperdown” is alarmingly different. He is a single parent dipping his toe in the dating pool once again. He seems to find a soulmate in Joni. Lying under the Weeping Camperdown in the Ross Bay cemetery is idyllic, but subsequent events quickly bring far more than he bargains for, Joni’s ideas of love being as freakish a mutation as the tree.

Guilt and responsibility for others run like underground rivers in many of the stories. The narrator in “Adios” struggles with her part in Fred Poole’s death, having ignored her neighbour, the victim of a stroke, when she saw him wandering down the street. Even this guilt has its complications, for the Pooles resist medical intervention for religious reasons, and there is a delicious irony in the end to the narrator going to Mrs Poole’s rescue when she has a fall, and becoming “the answer to a prayer.” Angela in “Her Full Name was Beatrice” frets over her role in the tragedy of her friend Erica murdering her child, Beany, tormenting herself with “what ifs,” dreaming of alternative scenarios, addressing herself as “You.”

This is not to say that the tone is unrelievedly serious. There is a delightful sense of humour at work here, and even the most serious stories are leavened by wit, by captivating throwaway lines, by hilarious, incongruous detail. It is a reminder that we are dealing with humans and human behaviour seen up close: funny, sad, inadequate, tragic, venal, conflicted, desperate, sometimes even noble. This particular cartography is often entertaining, frequently disturbing, and always illuminating.

Julie Paul will launch The Pull of the Moon on Sept. 28 at 7.30 p.m. at Munro’s Books in Victoria.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

Deaf memoir speaks passionately

The Deaf House 

By Joanne Weber

Thistledown Press

274 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

There is a prefatory Note to The Deaf House by Joanne Weber that explains the difference between deaf/Deaf and hearing/Hearing as they are used in the narrative. For many readers this may well be their introduction to points of view radically at odds with their perception of profound hearing loss as a disability. That the Note needs to be there at all, on the very first page, is a clue to the frustration and conflict the deaf/Deaf face in their attempts to survive and thrive in the hearing/Hearing world.

Weber relates her own experience to illustrate that struggle. We meet her first as a small child, baffled and disturbed by the sounds in her head. Her hearing parents, especially her mother, throw themselves into the task of acquiring every scrap of knowledge and skill that would help them help her. The result is a child who is amazingly successful at school, despite profound deafness. She loves books, and thanks to her mother’s constant insistence on correction and practice, on learning sign language and lipreading, speaks clearly and grammatically. To all intents and purposes, she functions perfectly, although she guesses much of what is said; she is even paraded as an exemplar of what a profoundly deaf child can achieve.

Weber gives an impassioned account of the inadequacies of this way of life. There is a frantic quality to the events echoed in the tone of her writing. We follow the compulsive student, the affair with a married man, the single mother of two small girls who keeps moving house, the frustrated teacher, torn by the professional requirements that tie her to teaching practices she is convinced are useless. The simmering anger effectively conveys the turmoil of those years, but it is the quieter moments that provide insight for the hearing reader: the younger daughter, weeping, placing her hand on her mother’s throat, for instance, or the image of Weber’s ideal house—open, doorless, so that she can always see people talking.

The tensions inherent in a lifetime of trying to function in a world whose rules are predicated on being able to hear are most clearly exposed in Weber’s accounts of her interactions with her students and the education system. Her attempts to make her students more proactive and independent are frustrated at every turn. The students have cochlear implants and think they need nothing else; they rely too much on interpreters; the interpreters sign sloppily and inaccurately, using a code invented by hearing people rather than American Sign; the students think of themselves as disabled, belonging only to the hearing world rather than to the Deaf community.

Weber uses many fictional devices to convey the chaotic nature of her life. She plays with time, cutting frequently forward and back, to her childhood, to the early days of her relationship with her daughters’ father, often repetitiously, and sometimes, distractingly. She has conversations with herself, and introduces different facets of her own personality in dramatized playlets—Ms. Hearing Weber, for example, Little Red Deaf Coat, Joanne Maybe Hearing, It Depends. Such restlessness “on this weary walk in the desert” needs an antidote, and it does come finally with the appearance of Johanna, who can tolerate compromise and failure, and say, “I must stop looking for ways to escape my Deaf body.” Her voice is the last we hear, calming the turbulence:

“There is no solution, no cure, no rehabilitation, there is my body that just is. Fired into the world, my Deaf body has become the house.”

There is satisfaction for the reader in Weber’s acceptance, but also, perhaps, a sense of an opportunity missed. For those who can hear, deafness is an unfathomable state; how illuminating it would have been to devote more space to a discussion of the role of language, for example, or to explore the choice by the Deaf to not pursue technological or surgical remediation. Dwelling so exclusively on the personal engenders sympathy for an individual, but information and analysis may lead to understanding and action for a community.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

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.       

 

 

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.

Absorbing novel recreates Aleutians campaign

The Wind is not a River

By Brian Payton

Harper Collins

$29.99;  308 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

War has provided storytellers with material for thousands of years. Whatever one’s viewpoint, there is a terrible fascination in extremes;  for fiction writers, examining the best and worst of individual behaviour against the collective excesses of armed conflict is irresistible.

Brian Payton’s absorbing second novel, The Wind is not a River, is part of this long tradition. In essence, the novel is a love story played out against the background of a Second World War campaign. That may sound familiar, but there is nothing predictable, from first to last, about Payton’s foray down a well-worn path.

For a start, the campaign is in the northern Pacific, and involves the only battle fought on American soil. Then, Payton’s protagonists are a young, happily married couple living in Seattle. John Easley is a journalist usually occupied with National Geographic projects; his wife, Helen, works in a store. After his sudden puzzling ejection from the Aleutian islands, and his brother’s death, John feels compelled to return to Alaska, despite a quarrel with Helen which both regret.

“Someone wants this battle fought beyond the view of prying eyes. What were they hiding in the Aleutians?…Easley was one of a handful of journalists with any knowledge of this corner of the world. What kind of writer shrinks from such a duty?”

Wearing his brother’s RCAF uniform, John talks his way into the role of an observer in the Aleutian theatre and a flight on a routine sortie. His plane crashes over the island of Attu; he survives, along with 19-year-old Karl Bitburg. Three thousand miles away, Helen struggles with her father’s poor health, and her own growing conviction of her husband’s peril. Despite her complete lack of qualifications, she is hired as part of a USO troupe and sets off on an epic search into the unknown.

Unknown, because Payton’s other protagonist and constant presence in the novel is the terrifying isolation of the Aleutian islands. Flung in an arc from the Alaskan mainland across the North Pacific towards Japan, they are sparsely inhabited. The climate is relentlessly hostile—cold, wind, and fog, rain or snow.

“…it becomes clear that the island does not offer up shelter gladly. Beaches curl round coves and end on rocky headlands. Up from the high tide line are rolling fields of rye slicked tight against the land. Then, after some two hundred feet of elevation gain, snow. Neither tree nor shrub worthy of the term. No bushes laden with summer berries. No grazing cattle or sheep, or even deer, rabbits, or squirrels. The only possible sources of protein are also visitors here—birds of the sky and fish of the sea.”

John’s life is pared to an increasingly desperate struggle to survive.

Payton alternates between John’s and Helen’s narratives, a device which provides momentum and grapples attention. There is a visceral excitement in the race against time as Helen fumbles her way through song and dance routines, moving ever closer to the husband she believes is still alive, while John endures the lonely road to physical and spiritual exhaustion until another quirk in the fortunes of war snatches him south again.

The fact that neither is aware of how close they come is heartrendingly realistic. Like the fog ebbing and flowing over the island, concealing and revealing, the censorship and secrecy about the Aleutian campaign, which ignite John’s journalistic instincts in the first place, and hamper Helen’s dogged search, isolate the couple in an opaque and bewildering world in which the only familiarity or strength lies in memory and belief in love.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cukoo’s Child will be released shortly. 

 

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.

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