Rakoff’s last work darkly funny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Barton is the editor of The Malahat Review.

Hearing Voices at The Belfry

By Hanna Leavitt

Earlier this fall, Belfry Theatre patrons may have wondered at the contingent of blind and visually impaired patrons and guide dogs in attendance at a particular performance of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).   Like the other blind people, I was there to experience the Belfry’s first-ever described theatre-arts event, a service provided by VocalEye Descriptive Arts Society. This Vancouver-based non-profit organization delivers live-audio description services for the blind, the first of its kind in Canada to do so.

I asked my friend Kristi to check out the show with Calvin and me. Calvin’s my guide dog. He’s pretty keen on the theatre, although sometimes he does forget it’s acting. We showed up 45 minutes before the start of the play to register with Larry, the VocalEye representative. We were each issued a single earpiece headphone along with a receiver with its own on/off and volume control. Larry escorted us to our front-row seats where we settled in for the performance.

“Turn on your receiver,” said Kristi, “Someone’s already started describing.” I flipped my receiver on and adjusted the volume. Sure enough, a clear, soft-spoken voice came through my earpiece.

“Good afternoon and welcome to VocalEye’s described performance of Goodnight Desdemona . . . by Ann-Marie MacDonald, directed by Ron Jenkins and produced by the Belfry Theatre. I’m Steph Kirkland, and I’ll be your describer for today. I’m describing from the old follow spot booth behind the balcony, left of centre.”

Kirkland, a 20-year veteran of the Vancouver theatre scene, also reads textbooks for the blind at Vancouver’s Langara College. “When I saw the call for audio theatre describers for blind people, it was a natural fit,” she says.  She has since formed a non-profit society called VocalEye that trains and promotes the services of audio describers to the theatre community. “It’s my goal that this service be sustainable,” says Kirkland. “I would love for it to be available at theatres across Canada.”

Fifteen minutes before curtain, Kirkland provided brief descriptions of the set, characters and costumes via our wireless earphones.

“There are five performers in this production, three women and two men. The main character is Constance Ledbelly, assistant professor at Queen’s University, played by Daniela Vlaskalic. All the other characters are played by the remaining four cast members. The central location is Constance’s office in the basement of Queen’s University. The back wall of her office is completely filled with nine built-in bookcases, each about 3 feet wide and 16 feet tall. The shelves are filled with leather-bound books, their spines embossed with gold and tagged with library labels. Dog-eared sheets of foolscap, a table fan, portable radio, stapler, lamp, clock, mug, and other odds and ends are also crammed in among the books.”

She continued her thorough set description, right down to the blue recycle box alongside Constance’s work space. I now had a picture in my head of the set, the same set that sighted audience members took in with a simple glance.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes when the play starts,” said the voice. The earpiece went silent.

“This should be good,” said Kristi. I agreed. I attend plays from time to time, but it’s frustrating to miss body language and other actions that aren’t always evident from the dialogue alone.

Moments later, the Belfry’s manager took the stage, welcomed everyone and invited us to enjoy the performance.

The voice was back.

“Darkness. Flash of light: Man smothers woman with pillow. Flash of light: Young woman plunges dagger into her belly. Flash of light: Constance Ledbelly in red toque slowly lowers phone receiver to desk – picks up leather manuscript, drops it in recycling bin – plucks white feather from her toque, drops it in.”

Okay, so I knew what the set looked like and what was happening. I wondered about the character of Constance. I didn’t wonder for long though. The voice must have read my mind.

“Constance Ledbelly is in her 30’s, large boned, slim and gangly. Her square face is pale, without makeup, and flanked by two scrawny, brown pigtails. Her large, wire-frame glasses are taped in the middle. She wears a full set of blue-grey long johns under a purple, t-shirt, hand-knit sweater vest, a drab, plaid pleated skirt and knee-high, black rubber gumboots. To top it off, she wears a bright red toque with a big pom-pom on top, a white feather pen tucked in the brim. She writes with this feather pen in green ink.”

Okay, now I had it – the set and the eccentric main character.

All freeze.

“Janitor mops floor, smokes cigarette. One hand on mop. Lets go of mop – the handle stays upright.”

Kristi and I laughed along with the sighted audience members, sharing a comedic moment in real time. What a treat not to have to tap a friend on the shoulder and whisper, “What just happened there? Why is everyone laughing?” I was hooked. The descriptions were concise, informative and blended effortlessly with the action. Kirkland elaborated on the process a theatre describer goes through prior to a performance.

“I typically attain a copy of the script, attend the play at least three times and take notes. Then I spend several hours working on the actual descriptions I’ll use during the play.” Preparing for the play and describing it can take as much as 20 hours per production, according to Kirkland. Her training and skill were evident as she quietly provided just enough detail to inform but not so much that it interrupted the dialogue and action.

VocalEye is committed to offering a comprehensive, theatre-going experience for blind patrons with its three-fold package. Through its Theatre Buddies service, volunteers meet blind patrons at a designated, accessible location. Buddies then guide patrons to the theatre. The audio describer takes over during the performance. But wait, there’s more. After the performance, we were invited to stay for a touch tour.

Kristi, Calvin and I ascended the stairs to the stage along with six other blind patrons. The touch tour was fabulous, adding an entirely new layer of enjoyment to the play. Belfry staff, actors and VocalEye representatives assisted us in our exploration of the set and props. We met the actors. We touched Desdemona’s gown with its elaborately beaded bodice, Romeo’s and Othello’s swords and daggers, the masks worn at the ball and some of the 1,500 hollowed-out books that lined the set’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Touching the costumes and props fleshed out the theatre experience for me, the finishing touch to an enjoyable afternoon. The Belfry contracted with VocalEye to describe one matinee performance per run this season. Will Calvin and I be back for another described show? You bet we will.

Hanna Leavitt is in the second year of her MFA in Writing.

 

 

Collection chronicles difficult lives

Red Girl Rat Boy

By Cynthia Flood

Biblioasis

169 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

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

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

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

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

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

 

Luck smooths refugee’s transition

Life Class

By Ann Charney

Cormorant Books

232 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

True West a true hit

True West by Sam Shepard

Directed by Britt Small

November 19 – December 1, 2013

The Roxy Theatre

Nadia Grutter

“Did they do a good job of it?” someone asked me after I saw Blue Bridge Theatre’s November 19, 2013 rendition of Sam Shephard’s True West. Absolutely, was my reply. The play was one of the best productions I’ve seen in Victoria. And that is why this is going to be a spoiler review. If it isn’t enough to read that this play is fantastic and buy yourself tickets, read on, but know that I’m revealing some of the juiciest bits.

The play shows estranged brothers and Lee and Austin, who find themselves housesitting their mother’s suburban home…together. Austin is trying to negotiate with a Hollywood producer despite Lees constant interjections and eventual undermining of the project. Directed by Britt Small, this comedy explores the differences and similarities between the two within the tense confines of reconciliation.

The show has incredible attention to detail, from sound and set to costume. The set is a kitsch yellow kitchen, with a fully stocked fridge and pan-stacked cupboards. On the table are dog-eared books beside a functional typewriter (which is later de-ribboned and later still, destroyed with a golf club). In the back corner are potted plants, which are effectively killed as well. In one scene Austin steals a series of toasters, which are plugged into the stage and nearly pop toast into the front row. Lee wears a leopard print belt, Denis’ hair comes loose as he drinks, cricket sounds taunt Lee half into madness and their mother’s bright blue eye shadow makes her character twice as hilarious. To all involved designers: well done.

While the acting was generally impressive, Paul Fauteux’s stage presence was a force to be reckoned with. His portrayal of the bat-out-of-hell Lee took the fiction out of Lee’s character and made me believe in the the wide-stanced, expressive delinquent in front of me. I was nervous that he might jump down and teach me a lesson if I looked at him the wrong way. What made Fauteux’s performance so believable was the humanity with which he played Lee. He understood the character so well that when a chair unexpectedly fell over in the middle of a scene, he kicked it.

Jacob Richmond’s character, Austin, was supposed to be more static, but his comedic timing seemed off—but only when his character was sober. Drunk Austin was hilarious. At one point Fauteux knocks a plate of toast out of his hands. Richmond proceeds to crawl around the stage and earnestly reassemble the tower of toast. His bewilderedness made me also believe that reassembling that stack of toast was of the utmost importance, and I quietly egged him on from the front row. My only complaint was that, despite their tumultuous relationship, the two characters yelled too much. Both actors demonstrated the ability to dynamically handle emotional material, and I would have liked to see them deliver those highly emotional lines with less volume and more feeling.

True West is not to be missed—seriously. Do yourself a favour and visit Blue Bridge at The Roxy for an evening of laughs, tears and toast.

Nadia Grutter is a freelance writer and editor living in Victoria.

Frontier still with us, author says

By Liz Snell

Bruce Kirkby looks like a typical surfer dude: tall and tan, with a ready smile and grown-out blond hair. The Kimberley, B.C. writer, explorer, and photographer is certainly familiar with the ocean; he recently paddle- boarded from Vancouver to Victoria over four days, enlisting a high school student to film the trip.

But Kirkby’s adventures stretch far beyond the sea. Speaking at a recent event for Nature Conservancy Canada, he rattled off fantastic tales of his world travels, from hikes in Canada’s far north to traveling the Republic of Georgia by horseback with his wife and young children. Spectacular photographs accompanied his stories. He barely stopped for a breath as he spouted comments and jokes about his adventures in Myanmar: “We ultimately ended up trying to escape from [the military] and getting tossed in the clanger. But that’s a different story.”

Kirkby frequently dropped names, but rarely people’s titles; rather, “vetch,” “locoweed,” “reticulated python,” and “plain-pouched hornbill” freckled his stories as naturally as the rest of us might talk about TV show characters. His language made it clear he feels at ease in nature, though he appeared equally at ease speaking in front of a crowd.

During his stories, he frequently seemed overcome by enthusiasm: “You can hardly believe what you’re seeing.” Describing Burma, he said, “I can’t believe it. It feels like Eden; it’s like the books you read as a child.”

Kirkby communicates a deep passion not just for foreign travels but also for preserving Canada’s natural beauty. He frequently discussed the “archetype of the frontier,” which people first applied to the west coast, then to the far north. “It feels primal and enduring,” he says of the north. People  assume, “There’s always one more valley to go over.” But, Kirby says, “There is no more next valley. The frontier’s given and given and given, and now we’re at the point where we need to protect the frontier.”

In 2011,  Canadian Geographic published Kirkby’s article on the Darkwoods wilderness conservation area in BC’s Selkirk mountains. At 55,000 hectares, Darkwoods is the largest area in Canada ever purchased for conservation, and its caretakers face unique challenges. Kirkby visited Darkwoods 10 times over one year.  He exuberantly described the incredible vastness of the landscape and his encounters with both animals and the humans involved with the property. “I was just beside myself,” he says of swimming with bull trout in Darkwoods.

Kirkby noted his frustration over the politics surrounding conservation, saying that the ‘60s and ‘70s produced a view that “you either cared for the environment or cared for the economy, but not for both.” The two are not mutually exclusive, he said. “I don’t think a love for the environment makes you leftwing or rightwing; it makes you human.”

He encouraged people to develop an appreciation for nature and wilderness in themselves and those around them, as a first step toward conservation. He described the incredible opportunities we have for exploring in Canada, paradoxically stating, “We still have the frontier with us.” (http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jf11/conserving_darkwoods.asp)

Liz Snell is the editor of Campus Confidential:  A UVic Modern Love Anthology.

Coal-mine disaster dusted off to good effect

The Devil’s Breath

The story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster of 1914

By Steve Hanon

NeWest Press

327 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Lorne Daniel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Shakespeare worth the hiccups

A Tender Thing by Ben Power

Directed by Peter Hinton

November 5- December 8, 2013

The Belfry Theatre

Review by Nadia Grutter

“Give me the light.”

Lights up on Romeo as an aged man. He stands with his hands open by his sides, eyes fixed on his gaunt beloved. Juliet lies in a queen-sized, covers pulled up around her bare shoulders. Her white hair is pushed back from her wizened face. She is dying.

The November 7, 2013 North American premiere of Ben Powers’ A Tender Thing captured the audience…for the most part.  Powers’ contemporary twist on Shakespeare’s tragedy shows Romeo and Juliet as an old couple attempting to save their love against time and illness in classical Shakespearean dialogue. But while the lighting, sound, set and acting impressed individually, the lacklustre couple detracted from the play.

But before I get to that, I’d like to congratulate lighting designer Robert Thomson and sound designer Brooke Maxwell for an unforgettable dream-like ambiance mixed with ethereal and realistic light and sound. The play opened and closed with deep cello instrumentals, which enhanced the inherent darkness in the play.

But in dark there was light: Maxwell incorporated classic love songs, like “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos while Thompson illuminated the stage with water-like projections.  I thought the water lighting was particularly effective, as it reflected the fluid, eternal nature of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Most importantly, the lighting/sound indicated changes in time, which fast-forwarded and rewound throughout the play. This is what I took issue with: without the strong lighting and sound, I think the audience may have become confused as to where they were within the story.

The set was impressive as well. The walls of stage left and right were two giant mirrors, expanding the stage into a reflective landscape. Juliet’s bed was portable, and made for some fun moments with Romeo scooting the bed around the stage in an infatuated stupor. Other props included two chairs (which went largely unused and made me question their significance) and a massive wooden door set back in centre stage. The free standing wooden door symbolized death, release, enlightenment or all of the above, and loomed ominously in the background as a latent reminder of the couple’s impending fate.

And Peter Anderson! The actor as Romeo kept the audience laughing, and sometimes crying, with his charisma and earnestness. Claire Coulter was less demanding as Juliet and didn’t project well. She did, however, skillfully alter her voice according to her age. Together the actors didn’t seem to click. Maybe it was nerves; maybe it was an off night. But as two of the most famous lovers in literary history, their display of passion was disappointing.

The end of Powers’ play was both surprising and inevitable, which is a difficult balance to strike. A little shocking, too. I won’t give it away. I’d see the play again, if not just for the ending, to see experience atmosphere heightened with the love I have faith Coulter and Anderson can more strongly portray.

 

 

Novel probes Afghanistan aftermath

Katrin Horowitz is a Victoria writer whose second novel, The Best Soldier’s Wife (Quadra Books, 184 pages, $21.95,) was a finalist in Mother Tongue Publishing’s second Great B.C. Novel Contest.   Horowitz’s protagonist Amy Malcolm, whose husband volunteered to serve in Afghanistan, writes a series of letters to the wife of the Chief of Defence Staff, as she struggles to understand what happened to her husband in the conflict.  Horowitz’s first novel, Power Failures, was a murder mystery published in 2007 after she had been a volunteer in Sri Lanka.  Horowitz will be launching her new book in conjunction with Remembrance Day events at Vancouver Island libraries:  in Duncan and Ladysmith on Nov. 14; Nanaimo on Nov. 15 and on Gabriola Island on Nov. 16.  Horowitz recently answered Lynne Van Luven’s e-mail questions about her new novel.

 Katrin, I really enjoyed the conversation – or is it a monologue? – that you created via Amy Malcolm’s “letters” to Mrs. Harker, the wife of Ian Malcolm’s chief commander in the Canadian Forces.   Can you explain how you came up with this technique for your novel, and what you hoped to achieve?

I knew as soon as Amy arrived in my imagination that she was obsessed with how Mrs. Harker had managed to become the ideal military wife.  If the story is a conversation, then Mrs. Harker is the antagonist to Amy’s protagonist.  And if it’s a monologue, Mrs. Harker is Amy’s alter ego.  But it took me a while to find the most compelling way to tell their story.  Then I happened to read White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, and recognized that I what I needed was a twist on the epistolary novel.  The letters allow Amy to say what she needs to say to one particular person, a person with whom she invents a relationship – but also someone who is on one level “you,” the reader, thereby strengthening the connection between writer and reader.

I find it interesting that Ian Malcolm is a reservist helicopter pilot who volunteers to serve in Afghanistan without first consulting his wife or teenage son.  Why this detail, why not just a novel about a regular enlisted man’s family?

Amy and Ian have a long history together.  And like many middle-aged couples, they know how the other is going to respond to certain issues.  Ian doesn’t tell Amy about his decision ahead of time because he knows that she will try to talk him out of it, and he doesn’t want to be talked out of it.  His strategy works, because he effectively shuts Amy up, and the rest of the story happens because he shuts Amy up. Ian retired from the full-time military because Amy insisted, she’s good with words and can talk him into anything, and although he’s still flying, which he loves, it’s not the kind of flying he did in the military.  Commercial flying is all about keeping it safe, about staying firmly in the centre of the envelope.  As their son Ethan points out to Amy with devastating accuracy later in the story, Ian was bored with his life and was looking for a new adventure.

Ian volunteers in 2009, and serves for nine months, but three years pass before Amy actually writes her letters to Mrs. Harker.  Why the lapse in time?

Amy first thinks of writing to Mrs. Harker the same day that Ian tells her he has volunteered.  But she is held back by her own reticence, so she limits herself to what she calls ‘head letters,’ letters she imagines writing but never commits to paper, because a good soldier’s wife doesn’t complain.  Even three years later she is worried that her letters are presumptuous, although by this point her obsession with Mrs. Harker has grown until it is impossible for her not to write. She feels she must tell her story to the wife of the general who she holds responsible for what happened to Ian.  How we communicate – the who, what, when, where and why of sharing our thoughts – is a thread running through the book.  Is the best soldier’s wife the one who keeps her thoughts to herself?  Or as Amy asks near the end of the book, “If I tell the truth and nobody hears, is it still the truth?”

As I read the novel, I kept thinking that you must have family in the military, because the details felt so accurate.  But in your Acknowledgements you thank Mary and Steve Lawson because they “made this book possible.”  Can you talk a little about your position on or your connection to Canadian Forces?

Thank you!  My father fought in the Second World War before I was born, but my only real connection to the military is through my very good friend, Mary.  She not only shared stories of life as military wife with me and introduced me to other military wives, but also enlisted her husband’s help with the details of his life at KAF.  The scene in the book where Ian puts together a slide show of all his pictures of ramp ceremonies for dead soldiers was inspired by some of Steve’s photos.

The daily newspapers provided incidents from the real war in Afghanistan, from horrific IED attacks to the ridiculous ‘Love in a LAV’ scandal.  Reading military memoirs, including former Chief of Defense Staff Rick Hillier’s A Soldier First, provided additional background.  The names of the dead soldiers that end each of Amy’s letters came from the Department of National Defense website. And finally, as I was writing about Ian’s PTSD, I realized I was also writing about how my father had been damaged by his war experiences.

Quadra Books may not be a known publisher to many readers.  Can you tell me why you chose the house to showcase your second novel?

Quadra is a Victoria literary publisher committed to publishing “good books for thoughtful readers,” which for me is an excellent starting point.  That it was willing and able to include The Best Soldier’s Wife in their Fall list and bring it out in time for Remembrance Day was a big plus.