Category Archives: Reviewers

Container object for the CS Reviewer categories

Gaslight illuminates psychological abuse

Gaslight

By Patrick Hamilton

 

Directed by Brian Richmond

Blue Bridge at the Roxy

October 21 to November 2

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Thankfully, I have never been involved in a psychologically abusive relationship, but, as United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” I saw it – and heard it – last week at the Roxy Theatre.

If you think Gaslight, set in the London of the 1880s, has no relevance in today’s world, I urge you to catch this Blue Bridge production directed by Brian Richmond. Five minutes into the play, you will be disabused of that silly notion as Mr. Manningham, the abusive husband, played by Vancouver actor Adrian Hough, sets out to undermine his wife’s sanity. Hough’s demeaning tone rings with authenticity and pierces like an ice pick through the heart.

Hough wasn’t solely responsible for this chilling effect. He was given his lines by playwright Patrick Hamilton, who wrote Gaslight in 1938. Hamilton, whose father was a financially inept drunk, was raised in relative poverty (and, one suspects, abuse). His formal education ended in 1919 when he was just 15, but he published his first poem that year and kept on writing. Gaslight made him rich. After six months at the Apollo Theatre in London, the play went on to a four-year run on Broadway. In 1940, it was made into a film in England, and in 1944, MGM released the Hollywood version starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton. Bergman won her first Oscar for her nuanced performance as the abused wife.

Thea Gill, who plays Mrs. Manningham in the Blue Bridge production, does not, unfortunately, follow Bergman’s fine example. Gill’s interpretation seemed stuck in the high hysterical range. Still, when she got her revenge at the end of the play, it was a satisfying denouement.

Wes Borg, who plays Rough, the retired detective who solves the case of the husband’s long-ago murder of another woman in the same house, provided welcome comic relief as he bustled loquaciously through the mystery with a Scottish accent. (Iris Macgregor Bannerman, who played Elizabeth the maid, doubled as dialect coach.) When he handed Mrs. Manningham a flask of Scotch whiskey and said “It’ll give you faith in your reason like nothing else,” I couldn’t help but laugh.

The technical aspects of the production were mixed. The hiss of the gaslights when first lit provided an ominous touch, and the rise and fall of their light as the mystery progressed was timed to perfection. The blurred black-and-white film of a pianist projected onto the piano at the beginning of both acts puzzled me until I watched the 1944 film and discovered that the husband was a pianist. The film projection coupled with recorded music set a sinister mood and eliminated the need to have a live actor playing. Attention to these technical aspects enhanced the play’s theatricality. The sound design, however, was flawed, or else the microphones were faulty. Volume fluctuated distractingly as the actors crossed from one side of the stage to the other.

When the actors took their final bows on the night I saw the play, Hough seemed momentarily shocked as he was roundly booed. He needn’t have been. The boos were not directed at him but at his character. Booing the villain in early melodrama has a long tradition. Although the practice was less common in later, psychological melodramas like this one, Hough’s superb depiction of the quintessential abusive husband earned him this tribute.

If you need to be reminded that psychological abuse is still a problem; if you want to see an abused wife get revenge; if you want to let off some steam by booing a villain, go see this production of Gaslight at the Roxy through Nov. 2.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover. 

A new WorkPLACE at Open Space

WorkPLACE

Curated by: Lynda Gammon

Until Oct. 25

Open Space, second floor, 510 Fort Street

Reviewed by Adam Hayman

Lynda Gammon has turned Victoria’s Open Space into a WorkPLACE. Not her own work place, but a curated exhibition examining how we have worked and continue to work in the modern world. Gammon, a Victoria artist and associate professor at the University of Victoria, is known for questioning both space and place. At Open Space, she showcases eight works from four artists.

The idea of WorkPLACE was not to accumulate a large selection of work, nor was it to question how an artist works. Instead, a small collection of quality pieces examines the word work.

I found it easy to absorb the entirety of each piece in 90 minutes, including the time it took to watch Christine Welsh’s hour-long documentary. This is why Open Space’s admission by donation policy is perfect for exhibitions such as this. The gallery on lower Fort Street is a simple stop to make if you have the extra time during a visit downtown.

The theme of  “work” is  clear throughout the majority of the pieces with the exception of the beautiful Eyeless Dragon by Dong-Kyoon Nam. Nam is a Korean-born artist who works with found or everyday objects. He received his MFA from UVic and now teaches at the University of Manitoba. In Eyeless Dragon, a halogen light stares down at the exposed innards of copper wire and electric cord, but the piece doesn’t register as easily with the theme of work as the others. It is, however, still powerful and can absorb a large amount of the viewer’s time.

Tommy Ting is a London-based artist who works in many mediums, and his pieces, ‘Machine’ and Workers Posing as Workers, brought political weight to the show by looking at workers in the past. Swiss born photographer/filmmaker Thomas Kneubühler provided a collection of photos titled Absence, which were a series of shots of people staring at what we assume must be a computer screen. This depiction of modern society provoked self-conscious thoughts—how do I look when I’m sitting in front of a screen? The photographs were also perfectly situated next to Ting’s Workers Posing as Workers, a reproduction of a photo showing faceless Asian and Native Cannery workers from the turn of the century. The proximity of these pieces poked at my social conscience, which was a great choice by Gammon.

Gammon’s decision to present two videos, and where she placed them, however, needs re-examining. Christine Welsh, Metis filmmaker and women’s studies associate professor at UVic, had her documentary about the Coast Salish women who make Cowichan sweaters displayed prominently in the exhibition. It proved a fitting choice for this collection and the film runs just under an hour. This isn’t hard to sit through, unless, of course, you’ve just watched the shorter documentary, Currents (six and a half minutes) by Thomas Kneubühler, which is situated just to the left of the stairs when you enter. Sitting through seven minutes of a film, and then more than 50 minutes of a separate film is not easy on a millennial’s attention span. So if you are like myself I would recommend starting with Welsh’s film, and then moving around the gallery to end on Kneubühler’s.

WorkPLACE runs until Oct. 25.

Adam Hayman is an amateur woodworker and fourth year writing student at UVic with a passion for visual arts. 

Alumni production packed with energy

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Adapted by Ron Reed from C.S Lewis’ Novel

Starring Mark Gordon and Kaitlin Williams

The Phoenix Theatre

Two added shows: Oct. 24 and 25 

Reviewed by Madeline McParland

Phoenix Theatre alumni Mark Gordon and Kaitlin Williams have been touring The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe for the past two years and now have brought it to the theatre that shaped their careers. The first book of the Narnia adventures is compressed into a famous two-hander play, but for me, C.S. Lewis’s hearty narrative is not well served by the play’s format.

The story is told in retrospect on behalf of brother and sister characters Peter and Lucy, who are revisiting the Wardrobe eight years after leaving home. The two actors recreate 10 different characters between them, including Mr Tumnus, Mr and Mrs. Beaver, the Queen and Aslan the lion. They did an impressive job navigating the play’s entire dialogue  — not an easy feat.

A simple set keeps the characters reminiscing in one room furnished by a chair, a lamp and a wardrobe, with a few fur coats for costume. Minimal props and lighting are used to indicate shifts in character or scenes. However, I found the constant switching back and forth between characters to be underwhelming. Peter and Lucy would talk — and with only a small accent adjustment and a white fur coat they’d become brother Edmund and the Queen.

The first half of the play had a steady pace — Narnia was nicely introduced and all the familiar references were there. Gordon’s portrayal of the Beavers was my favorite, as he hunched and waddled with vigour. I found Williams’s portrayal of the Queen to be her best character: she had the perfect cackle and looked just as irritated with Edmund as the rest of us felt.

Unfortunately, the second half of the play seemed rushed: all the best action was funneled into a whirlwind of shifting characters. Some of the best moments, the battle or the stone table, were undercut with overwhelming narration mixed with hurried dialogue. I was most looking forward to seeing the great lion, Aslan, but alas, he was only portrayed with a small throw blanket the actors passed back and forth.

The book has many beloved magical elements that create its fantastical narrative, and although I admire the play for taking on such an endeavor, the story calls for a performance that is a little more larger than life.

Madeline McParland is a UVic student and freelancer.

Hush Little Daisy

Baby with the Bathwater

By Christopher Durang

Directed by Clayton Jevne

at Theatre Inconnu

Until October 18

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Welcome into the cozy crib of the Dingleberries, the most dysfunctional couple on the block. In this dark parody on parenting, Helen and John start out terrified of raising their child the wrong way. But not to worry. Very quickly, the Nyquil and Quaaludes take over as they relax and ruin him in innovative ways. Though family tension is nothing new in storytelling, Baby with the Bathwater certainly serenades the audience with an unexpected lullaby as we follow Daisy’s life, from his first moments to his 30th birthday. Baby Daisy somehow grows into both the centre of their world and a painful afterthought as his parents switch moods faster than the settings on a blender.

Things complicate further when Nanny marches uninvited into their home– a scary Mary Poppins who is part “Auntie Mame” and part “antichrist.” Lorene Cammiade delivers the character’s warped lines with such a cheerful English accent that I couldn’t help cracking up. The surprise Nanny and her startling antics subvert the saccharin stereotype, and she seems to chastise parents for hiring strangers to raise their children.

This hyperfamily is hilarious. To pull off a hundred-minute play whose entire plot spotlights a baby doll is quite a theatrical victory for both playwright and production. And the audience laughs all the way through. It’s fitting that the baby is a physical prop since the child in the story is treated as more silent prop than person. Durang’s witty dialogue is anything but clichéd as one character reads Mommie Dearest to the poor thing as a bedtime story. And speaking of props, a great one was the red rattle that comes with a warning label: made with lead, asbestos, and red dye no.2. It sums up the toxic love in this story and the universal risks of naïve parenting.

As Daisy ages and sprawls unresponsively on the playground in existential malaise and his neurotic mother goes into passive-aggressive catatonia on the floor at the feet of her drugged-up husband, one can’t help wondering who drove whom crazy – the baby or the parents? The psychology of child development around early trauma and learned behaviours gets fully exploited here. This is a love/ hate relationship as illustrated when Helen yells “I love you. I hate you!” at Nanny before they all go to bed. In the same bed. Ahem. Since Helen always yearned for either “a baby girl or a bestseller” and her writing career never surpasses Spark Notes, Daisy is raised as a girl until 15 years old when his masculinity can no longer be denied.

The ’80s flavour this play, yet it still rings true for today. Sometimes the tragic bolts that strike border on being too random. Strangers run in and out of their lives with disturbing intimacy at first sight. People just happen to be run over by buses. And characters can seem a tad one dimensional at times. But, this is a satirical tribute to all the magical nannies and fairy godmothers of childhood fiction. Instead of a big bad wolf, you get the baby-eating German Shepherd. So it makes strange sense.

Tea Siskin was fabulously funny to watch as a designer mother at the playground. She was Marisa Tomei meets Snow White on valium, as sweet and flaky as homemade apple pie. As Helen and John, Rebecca Waitt and Jack Hayes unravel comically before our eyes, from uptight and spring-loaded to loaded with amphetamines and ambivalence. Still, somehow these extreme characters represent the fumbling of every family with every child.

The giant baby blocks that make up the set spell out small, subtextual words during the play like die and def, and add an increasingly menacing tension between innocence and pain. One can’t help feeling these grown adults raising this child have all the common sense of a baby themselves.

This play arcs beautifully from the absurd to sane. Matthew McLaren plays adult Daisy and brings a needed counterpoint to all the outrageous chaos. When he appears, it’s a wonderful turning point in the play where reality bleeds through and we feel the darkness of the irony – comedy melts into tragedy.

But just when it could sink too deep, the end is a relief, the proverbial diamond ring that should come since the mockingbird refused to sing throughout Daisy’s unfortunate childhood. Despite the traditional lullaby being perverted in every possible way, it somehow ends on a final note of hope and that is so rewarding after the emotional mess that poor Daisy endures. This ending is earned. Normal has never been so refreshing. If there is one positive message you can take home with you from Baby with the Bathwater, it is this: you can survive your childhood and rewrite its song.

Leah Callen is completing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Victoria.

Debut collection embraces female experience

Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, Julia Leggett’s debut collection of short stories (Mother Tongue Publishing, 188 pages, $19.95) is both polished and compelling. She was born in Calgary, but grew up in Zimbabwe, which she left at age 18. Leggett makes her home in Victoria now and is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Her poetry has also appeared in Force Field:  77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue 2013), edited by Susan Musgrave. Leggett recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions for Coastal Spectator. Gone South will be launched in Victoria on Saturday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m., at the Martin Batchelor Gallery.

Julia, this is such a strong first collection of stories, and you have an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Is Gone South an aspect of your master’s thesis?

The collection is essentially my thesis. Though a few of the stories are in quite different places than they were when I submitted. The entire collection is longer too. I went into the MFA program really only writing poetry and so my fiction tended to be tightly wound. I had to learn to elaborate. The opposite I think of what a lot of writers struggle with. I know when I started my MFA, there was more talk about how “writers aren’t taught, they’re born,” but without doing my MFA, I do not think I’d have ever written this book. The MFA not only gave me permission to focus on writing, it demanded I do.

The title story of your collection is incredibly powerful, a relentless epistolary record of a young woman’s diagnosis of melanoma. In your Acknowledgements, you thank your “fellow melanoma warriors,” so I’m deducing this work is based upon personal experience. Can you talk a little about that?

It is a deeply personal story. I was diagnosed and underwent treatment for melanoma when I was 28. Luckily, I am currently [showing] no evidence of disease because melanoma has a pretty appalling survival rate, and not very exciting or effective treatment options. I thought I understood what it meant to be mortal before my diagnosis but I don’t think I really had any idea.

“Gone South” was a very challenging story for me emotionally. I wrote the first draft in two intense weeks about a year after my treatment ended, and in hindsight, too soon. In visualizing Ruth’s progressing illness in such detail, I felt as if was staring into my own future. I had to rewrite the story in short bursts or else I became consumed with anxiety, convinced I would experience a reoccurrence. Not all writing, it turns out, is therapeutic. I did write letters about my own illness when I was sick, as Ruth does in “Gone South,” and that was helpful. The act of telling people the story of my cancer enabled me to make meaning out of my illness.

Women’s lives – their struggles minor and major – are the focus of these stories, and that’s wonderful to see. Do you have a list of women whose writing has given you the courage to create your own characters with such humour and insight?

My literary influences are a little odd for my age I think.  I am up to date on the one-hit-wonders and the best sellers of the 1930s. Zimbabwe was under sanctions before 1980, and after independence, Mugabe kept the country insular and self-dependent until the mid-1990s, and so the library had very few books from after about 1960. I read Elizabeth Goudge, Daphne De Maurier, Stella Gibson, Miles Franklin and the modernists; Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. I read my mother’s books from the ’60s and ’70s too, like Lynne Reid Banks, Doris Lessing, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter and Marilyn French.

Readers who know you grew up in Zimbabwe might expect African images in your fiction, but there is not a one in this book that I can find. Is that part of your life going to be a whole other story?

I imagine I will come around to writing about Zimbabwe. I know Canadians are often surprised and, perhaps, disappointed my work does not directly address Zimbabwe. Particularly Canadian writers, who I suspect view a childhood in Africa as the equivalent of a literary pot of gold! But the truth is I find Zimbabwe very hard to fictionalize. For me, it’s not really a place where imaginary things happen. The story of Zimbabwe itself (colonialism, independence, dictatorship, violence, economic collapse) is so big and still unresolved — Mugabe remains in power and the country remains in a state of uncertainty and suffering — that, at this point, Zimbabwe could never simply be a setting for me.  It would always be the protagonist.  The human experiences I was interested in exploring in this collection would have been dwarfed by Zimbabwe.

I do feel some guilt about not setting my fiction there as I think it is vital for a country to tell stories about itself. Our literature connects us to each other, it shows us what it is possible and points out alternative ways of living. And if the fiction you are reading is all about America or somewhere else, your own country, in an odd way, can lose it’s sense of “realness,“  become ersatz to you.

I left in 2000 during a time of extreme political and economic turmoil. I was 18 and leaving home for the first time, and felt exiled, orphaned by my country. My parents have stayed on in Zimbabwe, which isn’t in fact reassuring, as the situation is often dire. For years, I was homesick. As a child I had never thought I would live anywhere else. I was Zimbabwean, where else could I go? I lived in England in my early twenties, as though I was in a waiting room, just killing time, hoping eventually I would go home. Losing your country was a trauma I talked to death and at some point, without really noticing, I simply let go of that story and moved into the present. And presently my life is here in Victoria.

I understand you are now working on a master’s degree in counseling psychology.  How does that inform your pursuits as a writer, especially your poetry?

Poorly. I am beginning to believe the more therapy you go to, the less poetry comes out of you.  I don’t actually buy into the “insanity makes good art” myth but there is pragmatism to the therapeutic outlook that I think is better suited to short fiction or the novel.

Pride and Prejudice play up for scrutiny

Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin

Adapted for the stage by Janet Munsil

Directed by Judy Treloar

Langham Court Theatre

October 1-18, 2014

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

“The movie wasn’t as good as the book” is a standard refrain. Whether that judgment should be applied equally to adaptations of great novels for the stage is currently up for scrutiny at Langham Court Theatre as it presents its production of Pride and Prejudice.

The audio book of Jane Austin’s 200-year-old novel runs about 11-1/2 hours. When well-regarded Victoria playwright Janet Munsil accepted a commission two years ago to adapt the book for a joint production by Theatre Calgary and the National Arts Centre, she had to condense the popular story to as close to two hours as possible.

There are perils attached to such drastic reductions. One is the danger of transforming a richly nuanced classic into a theatrical Readers Digest Condensed version of itself. That didn’t happen here, but the play does gallop from one plot point to the next, and the dramatization robbed the work of some of the delicate understatement of Austin’s prose.

For example, the necessity of repositioning the opening line of the novel had unintended consequences. The novel begins: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This line, assigned to an omniscient narrator, sets the novel up as an intentional, if subtle, critique of social mores. In the play, this line is spoken part way into the first act by Mrs. Bennet, the protagonist’s mother, a foolish woman. Thus located, it is reduced to a laugh line, and the overarching purpose of social satire goes unmarked.

All 19 of the major characters are retained in the dramatization, and drawn with such distinctness that there is never an occasion to confuse one with another. The credit for this success is attributable in equal parts to the novelist, the playwright and the capable actors who played the roles. Significant emotional depth, however, is lost in the adaptation. As I left the theatre on opening night, I overheard one audience member remark that one of the characters seemed more like a caricature than a character. “Oh well,” he added, sounding unhappy, “I suppose it had to be that way.”

Costumes, designed by Merry Hallsor, cloak this production in class. Credit is also due for the set designer (Caroline Mitic), carpenter (John Taylor) and production crew in charge of set decor (Maureen Colgan) for designing a flexible set that can quickly accommodate scene changes. As a result, the story plays straight through each of the two acts.

The confines of the Langham Court stage, combined with the large cast, did lead to some awkward moments. The repeated use of dance scenes in the first act became a bit tiresome. And, at least once, a group of characters was left onstage with nothing to do while two characters engaged in private conversation.

Why turn novels into drama? Michael Billington, theatre critic for The Guardian, tried to answer that question in a commentary he wrote a few years ago. Some novels, he conceded, might acquire more “texture,” but, he concluded, the “really great novels invariably lose more than they gain.”

Pride and Prejudice is a great novel. Pride and Prejudice, the play, was a sell-out hit in Calgary in 2012 and has since won acceptance in community theatres in Saint John, N.B., and in England. It awaits your judgment here through October 18.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover. 

Rez issues still powerful

The Rez Sisters

By Tomson Highway

Directed by Peter Hinton

Performed at the Belfry Theatre

Sept. 16 – Oct. 19

Reviewed by Madeline McParland

In The Rez Sisters, the dark realities of Indigenous women’s lives are staged with a blend of humor and truth.  Peter Hinton has headed theatre centers and organizations from Vancouver to Montreal and now he brings The Rez Sisters to life again after 28 years. Originally launched in 1986, The Rez Sisters is written by celebrated First Nations writer, Tomson Highway. As someone born after the play was first produced, I have grown up learning about the complex issues stemming from Canada’s colonization of Indigenous peoples; this play shows the “rez” issues are just as relevant as when I first learned of them.

The play follows a cast of female Indigenous characters living on Wasaychigan Hill Reserve in Northern Ontario. The women are all obsessed with their dream of winning the BIG BINGO. Pelajita Patchnose (Tantoo Cardinal) wants to stop roofing houses and move closer to her sons in Toronto; Annie Cook (Lisa C. Ravensbergen) wants to become a singer; and Marie Adele Starblanket (Tasha Faye Evans) looks to lighten the financial load of having 14 children. My favorite was Pelajita Patchnose’s (Tantoo Cardinal) comedic timing: nonchalantly threatening to hit her friends over the head with her roofing hammer and telling Annie Cook she has a “mouth like a helicopter.” Her quick lines always brought fast laughs that relieved any tension in the scene.

This intimate play is set entirely on a raked stage, on top of a shingled roof. Kudos to Tracey Nepinak, whose character, Philomena Moosetail, spent the entire play in heels. Other than minimal assistance by simple sound effects and lighting, the actors bring the play to life through animated dialogue. Although effective, I found the dialogue to be quite aggressive as it is riddled with swearing, characters screaming threats at each other and Emily Dictionary (Reneltta Arluk) telling Veronique St. Pierre (Cheri Maracle) to shove a great big piece of –ahem- something, into her mouth.

I felt a peculiar balance in tone throughout the play: emotional monologues about abuse are contrasted by frank jokes about Indigenous men and sociopolitical hardship. The audience eventually discovers each woman’s reality and the struggles she experiences — whether it be abuse, alcoholism, segregation, sickness or death.

To me, the play’s pivotal scene occurs when Pelajita Patchnose (Tantoo Cardinal) gives a moving speech after Marie Adele Starblanket (Tasha Faye Evans) passes away. Pelajita stands in the center of the stage with the women surrounding her as she addresses the injustices experienced by women living on the reserve: from lack of access to proper medicine, abuse and poverty. Tantoo’s character also consistently refers to the reserve’s dirt roads and how their chief always claims he will pave them. She declares if she were chief, if any woman were chief, things like this would get done.

The play’s opening night was particularly moving because it was introduced with a cultural song and drumming by two younger Indigenous performers, one male and one female. This made the reality of the issues raised in the play all the more apparent to me.  Twenty-eight years later, young women of my generation are aware and listening with acute attention.

Madeline McParland is a UVic student and freelancer.

Thomas brings colonial mystery to life

Audrey Thomas’s latest novel is in the running for the City of Victoria Butler Prize. Thomas, who lives in Victoria and on Galiano Island, recently talked with Lynne Van Luven about Local Customs (published by Dundurn), which is based on four historical figures: Letitia Landon, George Maclean, Brodie Cruikshank and Thomas Birch Freeman.

The author describes the research that went into this new novel as  “exciting, but also dangerous, unless you exercise some self control.  It’s a bit like sitting next to a big bowl of peanuts; can you limit yourself to one or two?” Although Thomas first learned about Landon in the 1960s, she says, “it took me almost 40 years to get back to her.” Proof that no fact or experience is ever wasted on a writer.

It’s fair to say that no aspect of colonialism in Ghana goes unremarked in Local Customs, so I am guessing your family’s residence there in the mid-1960s left an indelible mark on your memory.  Was there a particular catalyst that impelled you to take up this terrain again, so many years later?

I do think those two years in Ghana had a profound effect on all of us, and once I saw Letty’s grave, in the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle, I knew that someday I would write about her.  In the end, she became part of what I like to think of as a trilogy: Isobel Gunn, Tattycoram and now Local Customs.  I would like to get the rights back to all three and present them as a set: Three Women.

It’s interesting, to me, that Virago Press turned this novel down; I think it would have done well in Britain.  All that Colonial stuff, plus Scotland, women writers etc.

Another interesting thing: I was on what I hoped would be my final draft, when there was an article in The London Review of Books about a young scholar who had discovered Letitia did have a child by her publisher; there had been rumours about this, but nothing had ever been proven.  This woman found the birth certificate.  This was too good to pass up, so back I went to the drawing board.

I have read Local Customs twice and I have a confession to make:  I did not entirely like Letitia Landon Maclean as a character. I admired her feisty nature, and her ability to support herself and her family, but I also reacted to something closed and smug in her nature. (I am actually rather disappointed in myself; after all, she is a feminist of her era.) Can you talk a little about the challenge of recreating characters from history?

First of all, you are not meant to like Letitia Landon. I think you can admire her, without liking her. Like many of her class, she is a snob, and her attitude to Mr. Freeman isn’t at all nice. I don’t think of Letitia as a feminist, rather as an eccentric, with a modicum of talent. She knew what her public, mostly women, wanted and she gave it to them. Her letters, on the other hand, are brilliant.

I love the ending of your novel, the way the “mystery” of  Letitia’s demise is left cloudy. Did you have to fight an urge to “solve” the story or was the uncertainty more interesting to you as a writer?

I think I left Letty’s death as a mystery, so that the reader could ponder it. I have my own theory, but I’ve never tried to articulate it to anyone else. She DID take drops, but George insisted she was always very careful to measure them out exactly into a glass of water. It’s interesting that in one of her novels, Ethel Churchill, the heroine poisons herself. And I think it was with Prussic acid. (My notes on that book are over on Galiano, so I can’t say for sure). I can say that I am interested in fear, in what makes people afraid. One reviewer of the novel suggested that Letty might have had yellow fever, which she said can cause hallucinations. I don’t think she had yellow fever; there is no mention anywhere of her looking as though she had it. It is curious that both her own physician and the chemist who made up her medicine chest insisted they had never prescribed Prussic acid or made up a suspension of Prussic acid, yet that was the official verdict, that she accidentally took an overdose of her drops, which were Prussic acid. There was no autopsy, just a hastily assembled inquest.  Her death will always remain a mystery.

The Methodist preacher, Mr. Freeman, seems a particular thorn in Letty’s side once she arrives at Cape Coast Castle. In theory, he sounds like an admirable character: a free black man whose father was a slave, made something of himself and set his son on an educated path.  Why does Letty so heartily dislike him?

I’m surprised you like Freeman. As a character in this novel, he sets himself above the people he has come to “save,” and sees no real connection between himself and the natives of Cape Coast. Letitia is quite right to call him on his Noah and Mrs. Noah figures; in a way, they represent how he feels about himself, a metaphor? The real Thomas Birch Freeman was no doubt all the things you say, but not the Freeman in my book. The real one did get George in a lot of trouble when he sent his monthly newsletter after Letty’s death, saying she had seemed perfectly well the night before at the dinner party. His papers are in the archives at the University of London, and the correspondence between him and George Maclean is there. (Freeman’s remarks led to the rumours in London that George had poisoned Letty.)

Overall, you set yourself a task, I think:  to write Local Customs within the strictures of 1836-38, and that means avoiding anachronisms, maintaining the diction and attitudes of the era. Was that particularly difficult?

I did not think it was difficult to maintain the diction of the times. I had a book called Maclean of the Gold Coast, plus Brodie Cruickshank’s Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast, plus the Freeman archives. Plus Letitia’s letters. And I have lived in both England and Scotland. I had lots of stuff to look at.

I had lots of fun with Mrs. Bailey and wondered exactly who was the original for her, not the real woman who accompanied Letitia  — there wasn’t enough to go on  — and then it came to me. In my early twenties I taught school in Birmingham, England, in what would now be called an “inner city” school. There were a couple of women teachers there, and one in particular was a lot like Mrs. Bailey, except for the knitting! She was very forthright and could handle the children a lot better than I could. I think that’s who Mrs. B. is modelled on, along with other intrepid Englishwomen I have met. (Women who could “cope.”)

The Butler awards will be presented Oct. 15 at the Union Club. Other books nominated are Michael Layland’  book of non-fiction, The Land of Heart’s Delight, Catherine Greenwood’s book of poetry,  The Lost Letters, and fiction by Dede Crane (Every Happy Family) and M.A.C. Farrant (The World Afloat). Nominees for the Children’s Book Prize are Day of the Cyclone by Penny Draper, Petrosaur Trouble by Daniel Loxton and W.W. Smith and Whatever by Ann Walsh.

Haida Manga is evocative and deeply human

Red: A Haida Manga

Story and art by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Douglas & Mcintyre

108 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

Hand-painted by artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga is the stunning retelling of a tragic Haida legend, in which an orphan boy named Red grows up vengeful after raiders capture his sister from their coastal village. The evocative artwork, reminiscent not only of tribal Haida art, but also of Japanese watercolours, gives Red’s harrowing and fantastical story a deeply human quality. Yahgulanaas illuminates the story’s complicated commentary on the cycle of greed, fear, destruction and rebirth.

As a graphic novel novice, I didn’t know what to expect from this mysterious “Haida manga” form. At first, I found the jumps in setting unnecessarily jarring; however, on a second reading, they proved an artful way to enact how violence, nurtured by a rising sense of capitalism among the coastal villages, ruptures Red’s spiritual awakening and leads him down a path of self-destruction. The surrealist distortion of the illustrations, particularly during the raid scene, makes Red’s terror and trauma palatable on a bodily level, thereby proving the graphic novel form is an excellent complement to traditional oral narrative.

Without a doubt, Red is the kind of story that is enriched by multiple readings. I understood and appreciated this story in Yahgulanaas’s graphic novel form much more when I read it a second time. The story’s commentary on the relationship between greed, fear, destruction and rebirth remains complicated and resists a simple reduction, even given multiple readings. However, it becomes ever more purposeful in its execution.

On my first reading, the narrative’s point of gravity felt muddled. I wasn’t sure what point the story, or the author, was trying to make. I had a vague sense of anti-capitalist sentiment, but I couldn’t reconcile it with the rest of the story. My second reading, although it did not give me a hard answer to the “point” of the story, felt successful in its complexity rather than ill-conceived.

Even the artwork grew on me with re-reading. I could immediately see the skill and expertise in Yahgulanaas’s paintings, but they just weren’t to my personal taste. Looking at these paintings now, I appreciate them wholeheartedly and wish that the paperback format had made use of the fact that this entire story forms a single piece of art when the pages are placed side by side. I think it would be extremely successful as an accordion book that could be unfolded into the original poster sized piece of art (but that would cost a small fortune, I suspect).

If you want to expand your reading into literary graphic literature, but don’t know what to pluck from the shelves of superhero comics at your bookstore, pick up Red. It’s a rough gem with a shining centre if you take the time to look for it.

Senica Maltese is a writing and English literature undergrad at the University of Victoria. 

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!”