Confessions in a church of desire

Speaking in Tongues
By Andrew Bovell
Directed by Philip Riccio
January 22 – February 24
The Belfry Theatre

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Meet Pete, Jane, Sonja, and Leon. Pete and Jane are married; Sonja and Leon are married. But Pete wants Sonja, and Jane wants Leon. Thus, two one-night stands overlap in time and space in one hotel room. These characters have a lot in common: lovers, lines, and gestures. Their synchronized dancing suggests that everyone dances the same in the dark. But, the strange unison splits eventually, and each coupling ends on a different note.

Speaking in Tongues felt like a seedy service dedicated to desire in the renovated nave of the Belfry, where characters share unholy confessions. Everyone wants someone, to feel something, to light a burnt-out candle to lust or devotion. Driven by desire, they intersect emotionally like a car crash.

As the play unfolds, the irony is that characters confess their feelings freely to drunken strangers, to a note-taking therapist or a cop. A particularly amusing bar scene brews between Peter and Leon as they unbottle their feelings over beer. But, people struggle to face anything head on with their intimate partners. They speak subtext to their spouses by putting themselves in someone else’s brown brogues using metaphorical monologues. These lengthy scenes tried the congregation’s patience somewhat, but were less disorienting than the echoing hotel scene. Scene transitions were sometimes seamless, but each one spoke such a different language that the play overall lacked coherence.

The adrenaline-charged second act shows Valerie trying desperately to reach her husband on a pay phone in the middle of nowhere before she vanishes. New characters piece together her story. Nick was the last to see her alive, and the last to handle her stiletto. Yanna McIntosh’s deer-in-the-headlights panic as Valerie panting in the darkness made my hair stand on end.

The actors fill the shoes of several characters whose lives spill into each other. Richard Clarkin plays the jilted lover, Neil, with gut-wrenching pathos. Hélène Joy gave me chills as the psychopathic Sarah who eats men alive, rubbing one leg over the other slowly like a predatory cricket. Jonathon Goad seduced us with natural ease as the smooth-talking and smooth-haired cop, Leon.

While these characters worship and excommunicate one another casually, the plot undresses the truth: sex has long-term side effects. Our lives continue to overlap long after we leave the hotel room.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

Novelist undismayed by publishing changes

Ann Ireland’s new book, The Blue Guitar, has just been released by Dundurn, an Ontario literary press. The author spoke to Lynne Van Luven via e-mail from her winter pied-a-terre in Mexico.

I’ve been following your career as a fiction writer since A Certain Mr. Takahashi (1985), and I notice that you seem intrigued by the dynamics and power differentials in learning situations where we have a student/instructor relationship. Could you comment on that?

When I was young, [I had] various teachers who exerted a strong influence on my greedy mind. In a way, I wanted to become the person I admired. This must have been creepy for those concerned. I saw getting close to the teacher as being a short cut to a certain degree of sophistication and knowingness. Now, as a long -time writing instructor (Ryerson University’s continuing education division) I have a strong radar for students who want to get too close, and I find myself backing off. I know too well . . .
In my new novel, The Blue Guitar, I wanted to investigate how caring for someone who has had a severe breakdown creates an uneasy power imbalance in a relationship. It can be tantalizing to save someone, to feel his dependence.
When the younger, cared-for Toby decides he wants to make big steps on his own, it is an affront to his lover, Jasper, who is afraid that Toby will be hurt again. And yes, perhaps [even] more afraid that Toby will manage on his own. So easy to confuse Control with Loving.

Ann, The Blue Guitar — in this era of endless television reality shows as well as oppressive celebrity culture — addresses the tensions and fears behind competition, in this case among a group of classical guitarists. Can you talk a little about your view of the pressure to excel in culture today?

I wouldn’t confuse celebrity with achievement, but perhaps these two concepts are getting mucked about these days. It’s dead easy to achieve celebrity via the Internet. Heck, I have been flailing about on Facebook and various social media sites, getting out the word on The Blue Guitar, and I feel the narcissism in this sort of activity. More me! Here I am again! Another ‘like’ on my author’s page!
I recall, when I was a little girl and drawing my name on the dusty surfaces of mirrors, my mother would recite: ‘Fools’ names and fools’ faces/always appear in public places.’
I hear that voice whispering into my ear, constantly. However, real achievement– playing the recital of your life after putting in ten thousand hours of practicing – that is another matter entirely. That is climbing the mountain; that is sticking your flag at the summit. It’s the result of immense personal effort and even, dare I say, ‘talent.’ Talent exists. Maybe even a talent for celebrity.

Toby, your main protagonist in The Blue Guitar, has had a breakdown due to competition stress a decade ago, but is driven to try again. Do you see him as more “heroic” than Lucy, who’s a talented amateur who just wants to push herself beyond playing at weddings.

I’m not sure that I see Toby as more ‘heroic’ at jumping back into the fray, after such a god-awful mishap ten years ago when he played in Paris. He is a huge talent and knows it. Lucy is not a huge talent and knows it. Each of them imagines a life that would change drastically if s/he were to win this competition. Yet they are at such different points in their lives, Lucy being middle-aged mother of two teenaged sons, Toby not quite 30, feeling the last ten years have passed him by. I’m not sure for whom I’m cheering. Lucy was the ‘me’ character, except she’s way more accomplished as a musician. She operates at the competition in my stead –if only I had more courage, more musical talent . . .

You understand “competition nerves” very well. Do you play an instrument yourself?

I have played most instruments known to man in my life – and none of them well. Classical guitar, piano, oboe, cello, banjo, recorders. I don’t play in front of people, or hardly ever. Nerves tend to play havoc with my performance. In high school, I liked playing in orchestras, band, trios, quartets. It’s one of those ‘if I had another life to live’ deals.

Ann, you’ve been publishing fiction for over 20 years now. What’s your opinion of the current bouleversement in Canadian publishing?

Thanks; I had to look up that word. Maybe that’s because I’m writing this from Oaxaca City, Mexico, and Spanish is in my ears. You are speaking, no doubt, of the upheaval due to e-books and the end of the old ways: warehousing books, packing them into cartons and sending them across the country to book stores, then the unsold ones getting packed up again and sent back to the warehouses . . . It wasn’t viable to continue that way, books being a commodity that were sold on consignment.
Technology has slammed all of this and I think it may be a good thing. Writers MUST make sure they get a fair shake on e-books. E-books don’t have to be printed, shipped or warehoused. They are much much cheaper to produce. Yes, the publishers still have to acquire/edit/market books and print ‘tree books,’ and those costs remain. But there is no getting around the fact that the e-books circumvent many of the traditional costs. In the future we may see more writers’ co-operatives, selling e-books and print on demand books with no middleman.
I also note that the smaller, independent publishers are quicker on their feet and more flexible – and they don’t have to answer to the mother ship in Germany or New York or wherever.

Rushdie memoir casts a spell

Joseph Anton
By Salman Rushdie
Random House
636 pages, $30

Reviewed by Arnold Kopecky

“Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.” If you could boil Salman Rushdie’s quarter-million-word memoir down to a single phrase, that would probably be it – though it wasn’t him who said so, nor was it Joseph [Conrad] Anton [Chekhov], the name Rushdie assumed for the last decade of the 20th century. No, it was the German writer Heinrich Heine, writing a century earlier, his words borne out first by the Nazis and later recalled by Rushdie in light of his own experience.
In 1989, soon after the Ayatollah issued the fatwa and the government of Iran started sending assassin squads to England, Rushdie/Anton watches a mob burning The Satanic Verses on television and shouting for the author’s death. This is happening not in Iran, but in Bradford, England; twelve years later, the same mob’s mentality is now incinerating 3,000 thousand people in the twin towers. Rushdie’s private hell has become the world’s war on terror.
Perhaps it helped that I had two weeks in the Mexican sun with nothing better to do than absorb over 600 pages of prose, but Joseph Anton cast a spell on me. I suffered just the slightest bit of detail-burnout near the end. Rushdie kept an immaculate record of every conversation, thought, emotion and social transgression (both his own and those of his friends and acquaintances) throughout the fatwa years, knowing that one day, if he lived, it would be him who wrote them down. The writing is less drunken, more crisp – more accessible, as he would probably hate to hear – than in his fiction; in both substance and style, I’m reminded of G.G. Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping, the riveting account of ten prominent Colombians held hostage for a year by Pablo Escobar.
For a while, Rushdie says, he thought he would turn his fugitive years into a novel, as he’s done with every other aspect of his life. Saleem Sinai’s Methwold Estates in Midnight’s Children, we learn, is a precise replica of Rushdie’s childhood home; the opening scene of The Satanic Verses was inspired by the Air India flight that Qaddafi blew up, with one of Rushdie’s relatives aboard. But when it came to writing about the fatwa years, he eventually concluded that “the only reason his story was interesting was that it had actually happened.”
Interesting, too, that a writer whose best fiction was written in the first person should choose to cast his memoir in the third. Perhaps it has something to do with the surreality of those fatwa years. These were years consumed equally by trying to gain entry into “the halls of power” in order to convince the world’s governments to help him, and by trying to remain a writer of fiction. Throughout it all, Rushdie endured astonishing displays of antipathy from the British public, compounded by the petty squalor of shuffling from one house to another at the behest of an oft-grumbling Scotland Yard. One moment he’s having tea with the Prime Minister of England, the next he’s hiding behind a kitchen sink so that the plumber won’t recognize him.
The memoir reads like a bookish Jason Bourne movie, with a cameo from every writer you ever heard of – good guys and gals include Eco, Fuentes, Sontag, Mailer, Grass, Marquez; John le Carre and Roald Dahl come off as surprisingly bad. The cast expands beyond the world of letters to embrace the likes of Bono, Gorbachev, and Bill Clinton, who – predictably but hilariously – is ever the slut.
Some readers may feel Rushdie’s record of these remarkable years veers into A-list gossip, occasionally even revenge (think twice, reader, before divorcing a famous writer); but a hundred years from now, when everyone in the narrative is dead, what will remain is an intimate portrait of the absurd ends to which religious fanaticism can take not just a life, but humanity.

Arno Kopecky is a travel writer and journalist whose stories have appeared in The Walrus, Foreign Policy, Reader’s Digest and the Globe and Mail. His first book, The Devil’s Curve, is a literary travelogue about his journeys through South America.

 

Novel’s politics undermine its art

Imperfections
By Bradley Somer
Nightwood Editions,
256 pages, $21.95

Review by Sushil Saini

“The idea of political art is a monstrous thing,” [sic] argued Bertolt Brecht referring to works of art that are lauded for their political message rather than the integrity of the art itself. Great art can be political, but political art cannot be great. So it goes with Bradley Somer’s novel Imperfections, a meditation on our society’s fascination with youth and beauty. To be clear, I am a fan of Somer’s point of view and welcome any book that asks us to critically reflect on how ludicrous and tragic our collective obsession with beauty has become. However, Somer is more in love with making his point than making his story. The result is a sometimes-clever read with a strong point of view like the line of perspective on a flat horizon.

Meet Richard Trench – a lonely skinny man-child who remembers his parents’ rejection of his imperfections from the moment of birth. His childhood, and subsequent rise to modeling superstardom during the 80s and 90s, is rife with pop culture references. To his credit, Somer cunningly incorporates seminal moments in our society’s recent beauty revolution into the tale. Characters discuss events like Vanessa Williams as the first black Miss America and the rise of the undernourished waif as a beauty ideal. For anyone over the age of 35, these references add resonance and much-needed depth to the story.

Trench’s career peaks around the millennial turn over and his descent into idleness and insecurity would be more compelling if his character were more sympathetic. His choices are more befuddling than amusing. And when he finally finds love, his low self-esteem provides the plot twist that leads to his grotesque downfall.

The tone of the book oscillates between Can Lit sad childhood tropes and a French farce. Characters make the author’s points through ponderous commentary on beauty and perfection, but they are rendered one-dimensional by their role as mouthpieces rather than people. From the alcoholic mother looking for the perfect life to the creepy plastic surgeon offering the perfect look, there is no fresh air to breathe life into these characters.

After my first read, I thought that maybe I just didn’t get it. Maybe Somer was actually attempting a higher concept book, one that reflected his points in form as well as content. Could the one-dimensional characters represent the superficiality of physical beauty? Perhaps the farcical plot twists were supposed to mirror the preposterous paths this obsession can take. Possibly the tragic results of this obsession are supposed to be exemplified in Trench’s horrifying end.

If this was Somer’s intention then he succeeded, but the results are unsatisfying. Politically, Imperfections is a valid and sometimes insightful social commentary. As a novel it is far from perfect.

Sushil Saini is a bibliophile based in Victoria, B.C.

 

A novel to break your heart

The Round House
By Louise Erdrich
Published by Harper Collins, 317 pages $27.99

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Louise Erdrich is a fine American writer. With over twenty-five books to her name, she is also prolific. Nor is she limited to one genre, besides her fourteen novels, three works of non-fiction, one collection of stories, six books of children’s literature, Erdrich has published three collections of poetry. Her writing is diverse and literary.

She is among my favourite novelists, which is not to say that everything she writes is perfect, though many of her novels come close. Erdrich is an expert craftswoman. She can shift novelistic techniques from book to book to meet the demands of the story. Her primary fictional territory is Ojibwa country, North Dakota (Erdrich is part Ojibwa). Her characters are mainly Ojibwa, often related contemporaneously or from generation to generation. Her literary opus spans centuries.

In her latest novel, The Round House, Erdrich tells a difficult and complex story about a violent rape that shakes up a small upstanding family living on the reserve. The fact that the exact whereabouts of the incident is clouded, and that the perpetrator is non-native, complicates the legalities of crime, prolonging the crime’s unfortunate aftermath. Because the story pivots on this bitter legal detail, an inheritance from the colonial history of American Indians, Erdrich’s novel must also be understood as an admirably political text.

The Round House is told from the point of view of Joe Coutts, the thirteen-year-old son of the woman who has been raped. He is also the son of the reservation’s court judge. Still a boy, Joe is both innocent and troubled, trying to come to terms with the world and the violence that rocks his mother and father. This adolescent POV shapes the novel, at least partly, into a coming-of-age story. Joe is a typical adolescent boy; his friends are too. They sneak cigarettes, beer, marijuana; they are interested in sex and they ride their busted-up bicycles everywhere. But they become embroiled in the crime’s mystery, the whodunit, the revenge. In this way The Round House takes on the flavour of a crime novel. Erdrich is covering a lot of ground in The Round House and tackles a number of important issues. Each issue is covered sensitively, accurately (her research is impeccable), and convincingly. The story’s action unfolds with appropriate drama, the voice is consistent, and best of all, her writing is poignant, eloquent, lucid.

In the bedtime scene that follows the rape, Joe’s mother isolates herself in the bedroom. Joe observes the sadness: “My father was looking so intently at the head of the stairs as he climbed, step by deliberate step, that I crept around the couch to see what he was peering at – a light from beneath the bedroom door, perhaps. From the foot of the stairs, I watched him shuffle to the bedroom door, which was outlined in black. He paused there and went past . . . . He opened the door to the cold little room my mother used for sewing. There was a daybed in that room, but it was only for guests. . . . The sewing room door shut. I heard my father rustling about in there and hoped that he’d emerge again. Hoped he had been looking for something. But then the bed creaked. There was silence.”

These are the details that can break readers’ hearts. Be prepared to have your heart broken.

Arleen Pare is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator.

B.C. poet explores her construction days

Vancouver poet and creative writing teacher Kate Braid talked via email recently with Lynne Van Luven about her new memoir, Journeywoman: Swinging A Hammer in a Man’s World, published in 2012 by Caitlin Press. She was frank about how little progress women have actually made in the trades over the past 30 years. Braid is working on a new book, which she suspects will be a book of essays.

Kate, you were a pioneer among women labourers in B.C. Does that designation feel foreign to you?

In spite of warnings in high school about “long-term goals,” my life has been basically one step after the other, mostly guided by gut instinct. In hindsight, that’s served me well – no way, as a girl growing up in the ‘50s, I could have ever planned to be a carpenter. So when people started using the word “pioneer,” I had to look over my own shoulder. Who? Now, I’m not sure if the word is a compliment or a curse. It tends to put people on pedestals, which makes me uncomfortable mostly because it says, “You (Person On Pedestal) can do that but I never could,” and my work since I started in the trades in 1977 has been to encourage more women (and men) to join me.

Do you think the status of women in trades has improved since the 1970s when you first began as a carpenter?

Alas, I know it hasn’t. The number of women in trades in BC in the ‘70s was 3%. The number of women in trades now (if you exclude chefs and hairdressers) is 3%. Same in the U.S. That, in spite of Affirmative Action laws (in the US), Human Rights and Charter laws (in Canada), role models, special groups and courses for women, etc. The number of women in traditionally male white-collar jobs like medicine and law and even engineering, is far higher, so clearly there’s something harder about breaking into blue collar work – and, I dare say, more resistance on the part of the men.

Often in your book, despite all the struggles you recount, you talk about how “empowering” it felt to be a woman who earned her living by the strength of her muscles and the sweat of her brow. Can you comment on that feeling?

It’s amazing, the confidence that being able to put up your own shelf gives you, let alone the confidence that comes from building your own house. As a woman, I knew I could enjoy my body for sex (though even this was not said overtly – mostly we were supposed to feel ashamed). And I could use my body below the wrists and above the neck for clerical work or teaching. But I was never told I could be physically strong, competent. I also learned – by going through the wonderful training called apprenticeship – that anyone can learn this. It isn’t a secret code men are born with; it’s a skill – like cooking – that even I could learn. Totally exciting!

You have taught carpentry and you have taught English and creative writing. What similarities have you found between the disciplines? What differences?

After 15 years of building, the hardest thing for me when I started teaching (initially, construction to BCIT carpenter apprentices) was not having a physical measure of what they’d learned at the end of a day. I used to literally want to take their heads between my hands and shake them, ask, “What’s in there? Did you get it? Anything?”

However, I’d always written. I kept copious journals throughout the construction years, loved poetry, and when instinct sent me back to school to take Creative Writing at UBC, I was more familiar with the implied, the almost, the unspoken – though the hardest thing for me there, was the ambiguous. Very funny for a poet, who dwells in the ambiguous! And in fact, that’s what I came to love most about teaching creative writing. As a carpenter, you build in a traditional, time-honoured, tested way, the same every time, though in fact the changes in conditions are endless so it’s always challenging. But there’s something about the physical groundedness of the work that’s deeply satisfying. Creative writing is different. Every word can take you in a different direction. It’s all ambiguity and suggestion, which is another form of truth. And both – carpentry and creative writing – are highly creative.

If you could wave your magical carpenter’s hammer, what change would you like to see for labourers in the province of British Columbia?

By “labourers,” do you mean construction workers? I’d want every student in the province to get their hands on blue-collar tools before they leave high school so they could seriously ask themselves before they graduate, “Is this something I’d love to do?” I’d like young women in particular to ask themselves this question.

Someone at BCIT once told me their biggest recruiting ground is a student in first-year university courses – young people who never thought of trades as a career, or who thought it was beneath them. If you want physical work, it’s fabulously rewarding, challenging and well paid. Tradespeople – good ones – have to be smart, and there’s a kind of quiet pride among them because at the end of the day, they can see exactly what they’ve done, how important it is, how long it will last. I loved that.

 

P.K. Page biographer reveals her method

By Lynne Van Luven

“People generally don’t really think about mortality until they get into their 80s,” P.K. Page biographer Sandra Djwa was quoted as saying in a recent interview.

I find this statement intriguing because I think about death almost every day – decay in life, the future ever-impinging on the present, skull beneath the skin, that sort of thing. (Too much black-romantic poetry at an impressionable age, I suspect, augmented by too many news reports from trouble spots on the globe.)

It’s been almost three years since Page’s death on January 14, 2010, so I decided to attend Djwa’s public talk January 10, 2013, at a University of Victoria visit sponsored by The Malahat Review. Djwa, a gracious woman of 73, had visited poet Tim Lilburn’s class the day before, and now she was standing before us, her auburn hair glinting under the classroom lights, as she explained why her “private and sometimes reticent” subject, P.K. Page finally agreed to an interview.

Describing herself as “friends of a sort,” with Page, Djwa said that biography is a big commitment for anyone because it’s like “letting an interloper into your life . . . an intrusive, unwanted guest.” Djwa first met Page through her poetry in 1962; the two did not connect in person until 1970, when Page visited Djwa’s poetry class at Simon Fraser University, where Djwa is now professor emerita.

In February 1997, in a letter to Djwa, Page “wondered, can we do it?” Djwa quoted her own letter to the poet, in which she too questioned if she was up to the task. Obviously, she was, since Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page is one of five books short-listed for the $25,00 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Djwa cited the extensive arsenal she used to forage for facts about her subject: interviews with the author and with people who knew her; letters and diaries; news reports and archival documents; the subject’s journals, and, of course, her poetry itself. “Memory,” noted Djwa, “is a very tricky reconstructive mechanism.”

Throughout her talk, Djwa charmed the audience with her wry, self-effacing wit. She suggested a biography was a reflection of one life obsessed by another, and she noted that she sometimes tested Page’s memories of a situation with others’ stories about the same event. She sub-titled her book “a life” not “the life,” she said, because every biography is the “life of a subject as seen by a specific biographer at a particular point” in that person’s life. Nobody ever knows everything about another human being.

She cited one scene in her biography in which she had substantiated Page’s memories of her early days by an interview with Mavis Gallant. From that, she forged a description. “Is it true?” she asked the audience after she read a passage. “Well, mostly.”

Shoe image dances life into novel

The Apple House
By Gillian Campbell
Brindle & Glass, 240 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

I loved the shoes! They are everywhere in this charming story about life on the West Island near Montreal, Quebec, and they will make you pay attention to footwear everywhere you go. In the novel, shoes spark new love, beckon the unknown, weather the years like old friends and represent a time when handmade objects held real value. The shoes are perfect for a story that centres on Imogen Jackson’s life and love affair with the town cobbler, Thomas Laviolette. When Thomas’ death is foretold in the first few pages, Imogen must sort out the family shoe store and come to grips with her future and her past.

B.C. author Gillian Campbell fills The Apple House with life-affirming details that ground this 1970s story in reality. The Apple House itself is a clapboard building that sits down the street from Imogen’s childhood home. This house was the site of early childhood romps and raids for the protagonist and her friends. It resurfaces as the fixer-upper she and Thomas planned to live in before his death by car accident. It takes on further meaning when Thomas’s trouble making friend moves in after Thomas’s death.

The house helps to connect the narrative, which unfolds in three interwoven time periods. Although the reader may find the multiple narratives and shifting points of view (Campbell uses first, second and third person) confusing at the outset, Campbell soon trains you to shift from place to place. For me, the childhood narrative sometimes lagged behind the others, but the different threads allowed compelling and diverse scenes to emerge. The funeral of an old man, for example, is replete with sharp details that would only be remembered by a child. The shoe store, on the other hand, evokes anxieties that we only encounter in adulthood.

The Apple House draws out the contrasts of life in small-town Canada, and that is one of its greatest strengths. While life-long relationships build a strong community, they also make it hard for characters to change. Misunderstandings can last for years. Also, small objects and a shared landscape create a culture that is unique to each town — whether it is a French and English village from 40 years ago or the communities we live in now.

Campbell has embedded worth in her first novel by using a tiny geography to sketch the drama of a close-knit community, thereby reminding us of the power of everyday objects.

Jennifer Kingsley is a writer and broadcaster based in the small town of Almonte, Ontario.