Alice sounds a haunting refrain

Alice

Co-created by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Paul Schmidt

Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass 

Directed by Clayton Jevne, Theatre Inconnu

Through Dec. 20

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Even before the Canadian premiere of Alice at Theatre Inconnu begins, artist Robert Randall’s illustrations of a dissolute man, a bright-eyed girl and a rabbit, projected onto a screen, undulate gently as if deep underwater.

It is an early clue about the psychological depth of this surreal musical exploration of the relationship between a Victorian-era author and the real-life child who was his muse.

In 1856, Charles Dodgson, a mathematician and Anglican deacon, befriended the family of Henry Liddell and became a particular friend of Liddell’s middle daughter, Alice. Dodgson, an amateur photographer, posed Alice in various make-believe postures, including that of a beggar-maid in torn clothing. At one point, Dodgson wrote in his diary: “I wish I could free her of all her clothes.”

In 1863, when Alice was 11 and Dodgson had just completed a draft of what he would later publish as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Mrs. Liddell ended the relationship between her daughter and Dodgson and ordered Alice to destroy his letters. Dodgson continued to write, if not to Alice, than at least about his Alice, and later published Through the Looking Glass.

When Americans Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and Paul Schmidt began to conjure Alice in 1990, they hit on the idea of melding the Alice stories with the real-life relationship between Dodgson and Alice. Wilson, a director known for visual conception, was struck by the image of a photographer with a black cloth over his head. The image also resonated with Schmidt, who wrote the libretto. What must it have been like, he wondered, for a child to be photographed in an era when the process entailed long periods of holding perfectly still, stared at by the camera’s eye? It became his opening scene.

It fell to singer-songwriter Waits to write music and lyrics for the play. In collaboration with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, he created a haunting atmosphere as a counterpoint to the text in which sorrow and reverie, touched by obsession and insanity, rise like a mist around the characters. Theatre Inconnu musical director Donna Williams and the group, The Party on High Street, used an exotic variety of musical instruments, including a horned instrument known as a Stroh violin and the eerie theremin, to achieve an emotionally fragile mood.

Psycho-sexual allusions are never far from the surface. In the Dodgson character’s anguished opening number, “There’s Only Alice,” Graham Roebuck, in the guise of the White Rabbit, sings: “And so a secret kiss brings madness with the bliss.” Alice, played by Melissa Blank, morphs in age, but maintains a strong determination throughout to grow into her own identity. She is not untouched by Dodgson’s obsessive attention, however. In Alice’s last song, as an adult reflecting on her childhood relationship, she signals her continuing attachment when she sings: “You haven’t looked at me that way in years, but I’m still here.”

Hints of pedophilia run through the Alice stories as well. Both acts end with trial scenes in which the Black Queen demands the beheading of, first Alice, then Dodgson, because of inappropriate letters sent and received. This is a crowded tale, populated by seven supporting actors, several of whom play as many as five roles apiece. Imaginative costuming by Shayna Ward, as well as talented acting, effectively disguise this redundancy of roles. Together, the cast and production team bring to life characters from the Alice stories with an edge you’ve never seen in them before.

Despite the condemnation in the scenes derived from the mad worlds created in Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, this play as a whole is not censorious of pedophilia, but rather treats both characters involved in the relationship with sympathy and respect. In a 1993 BBC documentary, the argument was made that the intent is, rather, to see the relationship as “something complex and moving and beautiful, if troubled.” In Theatre Inconnu’s program, director Clayton Jevne advances his hope that the current production will both entertain and haunt the audience “in a way that reminds us that we are all ‘haunted’ by those who have touched our psyches.”

Jevne’s hope is realized. Alice is a play that risks much and touches deeply.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover.

Tofino artist, writer create fine chapbook

In the fall, a lovely package arrived in the Coastal Spectator mailbox. It was a chapbook, This Dark, haiku by Tofino poet Joanna Streetly, illustrated by Tofino artist Marion Syme. Syme and writer Adrienne Mason are the owners of Postelsia Press, which published This Dark. Mason, who trained as a marine biologist, explains that the Postelsia is the Latin name for the sea palm, a tiny, tenacious seaweed that lives in West Coast habitat. Both Streetly and Mason talked to Lynne Van Luven recently about their creative (ad)ventures.

Adrienne and Joanna, when I hold This Dark, there is no doubt in my mind that this chapbook of illustrated haiku grew directly out of the West Coast environment.  Can you each talk a bit about how you came together in this project?  

Joanna:  Adrienne contacted me one day after I’d put out a haiku about gardening and the rain. It was a rainy April day, and we were all in the thick of the weather change. It was a shared experience, and the poem extended the scope of that shared experience. It linked us to each other and to our environment. A two-point connection became a three-point connection…

I can’t remember the haiku that pushed Adrienne over the edge, but one day she instantly responded to one, saying that the poems just had to be published. Several wine and dinner gatherings later, a first draft was in the makings. In publishing these poems, complete with the gorgeous linocuts, Postelsia Press has helped make them feel tangibly representative of the coast – a hold-in-your-hand collection, but also an expression of collaboration itself.

Adrienne:  I enjoyed reading Jo’s haiku on Twitter – her choice of words always seemed so perfect – and I could tell she was having fun with it… Her daily haiku were a reminder about the importance of daily practice.

Haiku also spoke to the physicality of books that I love. There is something that appeals to me about a small book with some heft that can fit in your hand. And [my partner] Marion and I wanted to design beautiful books, so Jo’s words and our vision of the physical manifestation of the book — small, thick, beautifully illustrated, with a quality wrap cover — came together.

Adrienne, you and artist Marion Syme founded Postelsia in 2009 — hardly a good time to launch a small press. You are an author yourself, published by more established presses such as Greystone and Kids Can Press.  What was your impetus?

I don’t even consider Postelsia a small press, more of a micro press. In some ways it was a backlash to “traditional” publishing. I’ve published over 30 books in that way, and, frankly, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. More importantly, we have one thing that a lot of publishers don’t have — direct access to a steady stream of visitors from around the world who come to this international destination. We also have two independent bookstores — one in Tofino and one in Ucluelet — as well as two other outlets that sell a nice selection of quality books. We were very clear from the beginning that our marketing and distribution “strategy” (such as it was) would stop where Highway 4 meets the Pacific Rim Highway. I knew how difficult it was to get books into stores outside of the region, because essentially we’re looked at like a self-publisher, so we’ve always been very clear that our market is the Tofino-Ucluelet region.  (Having said all that though, we do have one of our books distributed through Sandhill.)

It is really more a labour of love . . . than anything. Everything gets invested back into the press. I know this business has the smallest of margins, so I went into this with my eyes wide open. I want to produce local books (we use printers in Port Alberni or Victoria), with local writers and artists, on local topics.  You can find the four books we’ve published (and that are still in print) at Postelsia Press.

Joanna, your bio says you “have lived afloat in Clayoquot Sound for over 20 years.” I imagine that somehow the compressed quarters of a boat might have made you a woman of few words when it comes to your writing. Do you think there is any connection between the sparse beauty of haiku and your floating home?

I don’t consider myself a person who is naturally given to sparseness. But my lifestyle has saved me from being a compulsive packrat. I live on a floathouse that I mostly built myself. The interior is 16 feet by 24, with a nice airy loft . . . floathouses have to be able to float. And that means you can’t fill them with possessions, or they’ll list to one side – or even sink… Twice a year as my penance, I reluctantly box and bag the detritus of useless stuff that seems to creep around me like ivy. I sort it into piles – to give away, to sell, to recycle. It’s never enough.

With haiku, the process is similar. I chose to work with the syllables as a way of honing my writing skills. Skilled editing is a challenge and benefit to any writer. And so, for me, haiku became a way to distil essential moments into a single drop of imagery. I always begin with too many syllables, too many words I’m attached to. I always have to sort out my thoughts and choose which ones are worth holding onto. Rarely, a haiku will be born whole, no refining needed. More commonly, I chew them over while I walk through the forest, or they rearrange themselves in my brain as I paddle a kayak.

Artist Marion Syme’s linocuts are a response to Joanna’s haiku, and to her own walks in the forest and along the beaches. Adrienne, you say you had a great launch of the chapbook in August that drew together the Tofino community. I am wondering how you think “community” contributes to artists’ and writers’ process and products.

In Tofino, and in our region in general, “community” is huge. If you are a local writer or artist, you will almost be guaranteed a great launch of your work. The community as a whole is very creative so people understand that when artists put themselves out there – to release their writing, art, theatrical production, music, whatever — it’s part of the “deal” for the rest of us to support them. I know people who will buy every book put out by a local person and purchase new works of art, even though they have no room on their bookshelves or walls…

I think the creative events are also one of the few times in a very busy tourist town where “locals” gather. We did Jo’s launch for This Dark in mid-August, possibly the busiest time of the year in Tofino, but community members filled the venue. It was a little pause in the summer where we could come together, celebrate Joanna and Marion’s creativity, before going back out into the busy world. I am always rejuvenated after these events, and they are wonderful reminders of why Tofino is such a great place to live.

What new books can we expect from Postelsia Press?  

This Dark is our most recent title. Then there is a chapbook, The Golden Fish, which is an original fable by our local (just retired) librarian. And a small anthology (which we envision as one of a series), The Chesterman Beach Anthology — poetry, history, memoir, interviews by locals (some writers, most not) all about Chesterman Beach, our community’s place to celebrate, mourn, exercise, work out our troubles, get married, scatter ashes, learn to ride bikes, party…

Collection maps career of seminal poet

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Works of Don McKay

By Don McKay

Goose Lane Editions

584 pages; $45.00

Reviewed by Cole Mash

The importance of being gifted with the publication of Don McKay’s collected works can be found nested in the title McKay chose for the volume. In the dust jacket, McKay provides us with a definition: “An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other.” The name is perfect because that is exactly what we have: two Don McKays lying at an angle to each other; one a timestamp of a McKay’s earlier work, and the other the seminal poetry that has made McKay one of Canada’s most celebrated bards.

Raised in Cornwall, Ontario, Don McKay is the author of 12 books of poetry, twice winning the Governor General’s award. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2008. McKay is considered a pioneer of Canadian eco-poetry, once describing his own work as “nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis.”  His love of birds and birdwatching is a trademark fulcrum of his poetry.

Angular Unconformity: The Collected Poems 1970-2014 brings together a number of McKay’s books of poetry in their entirety, including, among others, his widely celebrated Birding, or Desire (1983), his Governor General’s Award winning books Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000), as well as some new poems and an insightful afterward by the author.

At the beginning McKay gives us a section called “A Note on the Title” in which he tells us that an angular unconformity has gaps in between the geologic structures; gaps of millions of years. He tells us to “imagine a biography with gaps of decades in it” and that is what we get with this offering: a poetic biography filled with blank space. Some books such as Air Occupies Space (1973) and Lightning Ball Bait (1980) are left out altogether, but in this erasure we get representative relic, a facsimile of an old flight plan.

The volume begins with poems from Long Sault, McKay’s second book of poetry. These poems foreshadow a later eco-centred McKay. “See” starts out by comparing roadways to islands followed by a poem employing the eco-imagery of a river sleeping “behind the dam.” The rest of the poems from Long Sault continue with this eco-imagery, and we even get an early bird sighting with mention of a great blue heron, a bird which McKay would later devote a whole poem to.

Next we have the poems of Lependu. The poems in Lependu centre on historical Ontario and the story of the hanged man (le pendu being French for “the hanged”).  In the poem “When Lependu Loves You”, McKay writes, “Nevertheless//when Dundas Street expects Lependu//to be in the air on Friday night she grins//like an extra long unplayed piano”. In this passage there is an absence of the eco-centrism characteristic of McKay’s work before and after this book. Instead, the poems of Lependu establish a sense of place and country, which McKay also carries forward in his poetry, and drives us onward with the ferocity of language that perpetuates McKay’s work.

Then we arrive at McKay’s seminal book, Birding, or Desire. This book brings together the Canadiana and eco-poetics that McKay cultivates in his first two selected offerings. He does this almost metapoetically in the poem “A Morning Song” in which his copy of “Birds of Canada roosts on the shelf,” a Canadian book on a shelf in a Canadian book to be bought and placed on your shelves. It is here in the book that a thematic and linguistic continuity is found in the wooded space McKay has chosen to inhabit with his words. This harmony is sustained right up to the last poem in the collection, which asserts, “we are here, we love it, we// belong”.

In the beautiful and haunting parable-esque afterword, McKay envisions running into a much younger version of himself. When looking back on his life he tells himself that “half a century, does not pass in vain,” and this book is proof of that; evidence of water collecting in the ground for years–a frost heave crack in the spring pavement.

McKay’s poems are filled with exciting, kinetically charged language in a geography I can inhabit and relate to. The text invites the reader to come and learn about one of our country’s great poets while also sheparding them through the experience; it is a field guide to McKay, and one that would be an asset to the shelf of any lover of Canadian poetry.

Cole Mash is an English and creative writing student at UBC Okanagan. His poetry has been published in The Eunoia Review and The UBC Okanagan Papershell Anthology.


Abraham’s debut EP reveals life after love 

This Old Heart

By Abraham

Produced by Sam Weber

Reviewed by Chris Ho

The soft strum of a ukulele is a fitting introduction to the delicate and powerful sound of Abraham’s debut EP, This Old Heart. Victoria songstress Sydney Batters describes her solo project, Abraham, as “a rebirth,” and this could be part of the reason why the EP identifies with, and yet transcends, the singer-songwriter tradition. Her songs eloquently express the bittersweet nature of heart-on-your-sleeve love. It may be a timeless theme, but the delivery is far from generic on Abraham’s debut.

This is not an EP that tries to get your attention with bubbly melodies and energetic drum beats. It’s up to the listener to share that moment of stillness when the fog beings to clear and you’re overcome with thoughts about past heartbreak. This feeling comes to mind in the opening tracks “Naked Daughter” and “Send My Love.” The emotional weight gradually lifts – not just toward the end of some songs such as “To Be Free,” but also at the end of the album when you hear the powerful line: “Take my body down when I die / Burn it bright baby, baby burn it bright / Throw me in the ocean, let the breeze carry me on.”

Each song feels carefully placed to enhance the album’s emotional journey; yet it’s done in a way that feels natural and free. And therein lies the brilliance of This Old Heart. Abraham is described as a “project [that] is centered around the evolution of life, love and death. It is a journey through human connection and relationships.” And the EP delivers this in a genuine and refreshing way.

What is most striking to me, however, is that Abraham’s voice is not at all fixed in any one kind of singing style. It moves freely, ascending into the sweet and airy and back down again into sultry and soulful song. This is especially apparent in her final track (and my favourite so far), “Burn Bright”, which was featured on CBC Radio 1 last week.

Though the emotional depth of Abraham’s songs often shine through in a raw and stripped-down way (such as in “My Head My Heart”), the production of the EP enhances its overall themes and moods. It sounds as if producer Sam Weber recognized that Abraham’s sweet but powerful voice can stand on its own, and decided to take a “less-is-more” approach. I loved how some of the instruments and sounds felt subtle and, at times, even ambiguous. It was sometimes difficult to discern which particular instrument played a certain part.

Abraham will release This Old Heart tonight (Nov. 28) at the Victoria Event Centre at 7 p.m. Copies of the album will be available at the show, and soon digitally available online.

Chris Ho is a freelance writer and Victoria-based musician.

Forbidden City’s diplomatic nature casts shadow over art

The Forbidden City:

Inside the Court of China’s Emperors

Vancouver Art Gallery

Until Jan. 11

 

Reviewed by Annabel Howard

The Forbidden City was – states the Vancouver Art Gallery’s eponymous exhibition – the largest palace ever built. It covered 178 hectares, and to walk from the southern to the northern gates took one and a half hours. Not that its principal inhabitant – the Emperor – would ever have done that: he was, after all, never seen to walk in public. Instead, a bevy of eunuchs (the only other men allowed inside those hallowed walls), carried him aloft in a sedan chair. To ensure the delineation of status was clear, the chair passed over an untouched path paved with dragon-carved marble. No-one ever walked on these pavings – the dragon was the symbol of the Emperor, exclusively. The eunuchs walked to the side, on plain stone. This is but one insight into the life at the palace offered by the VAG’s Forbidden City. It serves to illustrate the fact that every movement and gesture, every material object, everything the Emperor ever touched, looked at, wore or displayed, was carefully orchestrated to demonstrate one thing: his power.

It is an extraordinary and brilliant act of diplomacy for Canada to gain access to the material of the Forbidden City, which represents one of the great strands of China’s cultural heritage, and which is carefully monitored by the Chinese government. Eighty works on display in this exhibition have never left the Forbidden City, let alone China, and many of the paper works in Vancouver were not shown in Toronto (where the exhibition was hosted at the ROM) because they were deemed too fragile.

It is, however, the highly diplomatic nature of this show that casts a strange shadow. The extent to which The Forbidden City has been subjected to political and economic ends is disarming, if not outright disturbing. In preparation for the launch, much was made of the unique cultural ties between China and Canada. At the Vancouver preview Kathleen Bartels, VAG director, took the opportunity to announce the opening of a new Institute of Asian Arts. It was perhaps no surprise that media attention focused on the presence of Christy Clarke, Mayor Gregor Robertson, various Chinese businessmen and Chinook Energy, trumpeting the “strong economic links” between the two countries, rather than focusing on the art itself.

Despite providing a tantalizing glimpse into the wealth and majesty of the Forbidden City, the quality of the exhibits was uneven, and at times felt sparse, and an attempt to organize the objects into a progression from pubic to private left many of the more interesting pieces grouped together in the final rooms.

Pure curiosity was satisfied by the opportunity to see an Imperial dog coat stitched in lilac silk, an Imperial latticed picnic basket, the Emperor’s bath, jade chop-sticks, a tea-cup made of gold and pearls and used only once a year, and a creatively styled air-conditioner that functioned with ice hewn from the mountains outside Beijing.

An insight into the life of the Emperor’s consorts is equally fascinating: hairpins made with Kingfisher feathers, platform sandals, 15 centimetre long nail guards decorated with precious stones and pearls, a robe so intricate it required the hands of 450 workers and, representing the root of it all – a mirror decorated with 100 boys at play, so the women wouldn’t ever forget why they was there.

It requires a bit more work to find the objects with intrinsic art historical value. Some of the Emperor Qianlong’s (r. 1735-1796) antique bronze collection is on display: a Song dynasty bell, commissioned by Emperor Huizong in 336 C.E. is one of only 30 that survive globally. A miniature porcelain cup, made between 1465 and 1487 is extremely rare and of exquisite quality. A fan painting of an Autumn Forest by Shen Zhou belongs to the literati movement – a highly refined, educated and expressionistic aesthetic well represented in this piece.

But throughout the exhibition notable gaps emerged, and these curatorial silences were not restricted to the material selection. There was no mention of the more than half a million original objects that are now displayed in the National Palace Museum, Taipei – the result of the Chinese Civil War. There was no mention of Tiananmen Square which lies just steps from the Forbidden City itself. There was no mention of Ai Wei Wei or the suppression of contemporary Chinese art. This seems a particularly glaring omission for a gallery that has hosted 28 shows of Asian art in 30 years, and is currently hosting Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Art.

It seems that this exhibition ultimately sacrificed cultural elevation for the chance to publicly promote economic links between China and Canada. Although the curators have created an appealing and approachable insight into 500 years of Imperial power, authority and excess, it is hard to view this as an exhibition of indubitable depth and quality.

Annabel Howard is a writer and art historian from the UK. Her art criticism has appeared in Glass Magazine, The World of Interiors, and National Geographic Travel.

Governor General winner melds intensity and restraint

Lake of Two Mountains

By Arleen Pare

Brick Books

83 pages, $20

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Arleen Paré opens her Governor General’s Award-winning collection, Lake of Two Mountains, with “Distance Closing In,” a spare, moody poem with echoes of the Imagist poet H.D.: “sky collapsing from its bowl / shoreline waiting    taut / stones dark as plums.”

Paré, now known to all of Canada as a Victoria-area poet and novelist, is masterful in this mode of simultaneous intensity and restraint. Lake of Two Mountains is an elegy of sorts—in the tradition of the love-elegy as well as the elegy of loss. The beloved here is the lake, known passionately in childhood and now re-imagined from multiple perspectives. The collection is like an Elizabethan poet’s blazon, with the beloved’s parts mapped out as a geography—but here the metaphor and the beloved are one thing, a landscape at once infinitely interpretable and yet also always exceeding human attempts to grasp, to own, to define.

Poet Patrick Lane compares the poems in this collection to “monastic prayers for forgiveness,” and there is indeed something both contemplative and austere about them. There is no narcissism here, no confessional “I.” Instead, Paré, offers grammatical and figurative intercessors. Where we might expect that “I,” there is often a “you,” as in “How Fast a Life.” “You stood at the end / of the wharf, you and you sister. / Cautious. In handfuls, your mother’s ashes / catching the wind,” Pare writes, and this “you” thrusts the memory into the arms, so to speak, of the reader. Or a simple word like “let” creates poems that are both pleas and directives: “let him sit on the beach… // let him unreel / the past on the waves,” “How Mend a Life” incants.

The poetic voice comes closest to asserting ownership in the poems about family members. In “Dad Before Lake” there is the possessive “my mother”; in “How Mend the Years” there is “my uncle.” Most raw and intimate, perhaps, is “Dad in the Lake”: “His face as it clears each popping wave – / his eyes – / how unsure where he is.” “Figments” recounts the death of a mother, the eeriness of the body in death, its alien otherness as a kind of fossil evidence of the living person. It speaks of a retreat from language: “If you could, you’d live below theory.”

Indeed, language, in its precision, its power and its failure, is the collection’s ambiguous consolation. The poems often take formal shapes that elegantly echo their subjects. “Alnoitic Rock” (the name of a rare volcanic rock found in the region) presents “topographies herded flat, wide as the weft of caribou hooves,” and is written in long, widely-spaced lines. “More” is a poem about reflection that itself reflects, in shimmering, gently distorted echoes.

Lake of Two Mountains stands as a remarkably coherent, yet never over-formalized, whole. It is keen-eyed, full of detail and careful construction; there are many pleasures in its language. If I were to look for some further development on these strengths—say, in Pare’s next collection—it would be only this: that some of her carefully governed intensity be allowed to break through, both formally and emotionally, like the bolt of lightning that threatens but never strikes in “Distance Closing In.”

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet, essayist and reviewer.

Bold debut novel challenges views of sexual abuse

Pedal

By Chelsea Rooney

Published by Caitlin Press

240 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Jen Neale

Chelsea Rooney’s Pedal, her debut novel, is a bold and challenging look at issues that most veteran writers fear addressing. The novel examines sexual abuse, and also pedophiles, one of the last groups that, according to Rooney, “we’re allowed to openly hate”. Rooney, a Vancouver-based writer, completed the novel while attending UBC’s MFA program. On her website, she says, “I just wanted to write a book that was funny and also had pedophiles in it, like life does.” The humour and style with which Rooney writes renders this a necessary read for anyone seeking a fresh take on a mired subject.

Pedal tells the story of Julia, a counselling psychology master’s student researching sexual abuse, specifically, non-traumatic sexual abuse in childhood. Julia seeks to find people like herself, who experienced sexual abuse as a child, but refuse to buy in to the victim/survivor models available. She nicknames her participants her “Molestas.” In a meeting with Julia, one of the Molestas describes a therapist who tried to convince her that her depression was caused by her years of childhood molestation rather than her sister’s recent death. The Molesta responds to the therapist by telling her to go fuck herself. Julia questions whether trauma and shame come from society—and particularly doctors—rather than from the experience itself.

The idea that childhood sexual abuse could be harmless, or even desired, will no doubt cause many readers to squirm; however, Rooney discusses this idea so unflinchingly and with such reason that I gave it full credence. The underlying message is inarguable—the right of women to define their own experiences of abuse.

Julia’s field of interest naturally extends to the perpetrators of sexual abuse, including her father, whom she calls Dirtbag. However, Julia’s obsessive fascination with pedophiles eventually leads to both her graduate advisor and boyfriend leaving her life on a single day. After being spurned by these two stabilizing forces, Julia sets off on a cross-Canada bike trip with a man named Smirks, whose sexual proclivities she takes advantage of for research and self-analysis. The result is a tense narrative, with questions of sexual disposition woven seamlessly into the text. Pedal begs to be read in a single sitting.

It’s worth pointing out that Rooney distinguishes in her novel between pedophiles, those who are attracted to children, and molesters, those who act on their desire. The reader is pulled into the secretive world of non-offending pedophiles at an MAA (“minor-attracted adult”) meeting. The attendees are those that cannot publicly reveal their attraction, or seek support, if they wish to maintain their social and professional lives.

Though it has the forward momentum and arc of a novel, Pedal seems to follow the format of a personal essay in its systematic exploration of ideas. Sexual abuse and pedophilia are examined from every possible angle, but no conclusions are ever forced upon the reader, who is instead left to follow Rooney’s ideas to their natural, often paradoxical, conclusions.

Mid-way through the novel, for example, Smirks asks Julia how she would solve the pedophile problem. Julia conjures up an alternate reality where pedophiles could act on their desires—an island filled with children who felt no shame or trauma in sexuality. Smirks asks what happens to a sixteen-year-old girl who is no longer attractive to inhabitants. Knowing that her line of reasoning falls apart here, Julia says, “You’d kill her.” Julia knows that in reality there is no easy answer to the pedophile question, and also the question of what happens to the minors involved. Pedal is filled with such moments, where the arguments highlight an aspect of Julia’s past or inward search.

Julia is a finely balanced character. At times she seems hopelessly lost, and in these moments I couldn’t help but feel parental worry. At other moments, though, her clarity and wisdom forced me to reconsider my longstanding beliefs on childhood and sexuality. In perhaps the most distressing moment of the book, Julia encourages Smirks to spend some alone time on a canoe with a young girl. When the canoe and passengers are no longer in sight, Julia is forced to confront her conviction: will she intervene or remain inactive? These are scenes to be read through barely-parted fingers.

Pedal carries the reader through moments that, if they were not buoyed on either end by humour and lively prose, would sink to the depths of discomfort. Rooney handles her topic with sympathy and openness, two qualities pedophiles are not afforded in society. With public dialogue on sexual abuse expanding, this novel comes at a key moment.

Jen Neale is a Vancouver writer.

Joan of Arc character study seen in its cultural context

Saint Joan

By George Bernard Shaw

Directed by Kim Collier

Arts Club Theatre Company, Vancouver

Playing through Nov. 23

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Before the audience ever sees Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, we learn some things about her. The best hens in Champagne have stopped laying while she is kept waiting in the courtyard below and she won’t go away. Why hasn’t she been thrown out, the squire wants to know; are the servants afraid of her? “She is so positive, sir,” replies his steward, enigmatically.

When we finally see her, the steward’s meaning becomes clear. Joan, a mere slip of a girl, a farmer’s daughter who by her own admission “doesn’t know A from B,” converses with her elders and her social and gender betters as an equal. Oh, she’s polite and genuinely warm, but not shy about ordering them around:  “Captain,” she tells the squire, “you are to give me a horse and armour and some soldiers and send me to the Dauphin. Those are your orders from my Lord.” Her Lord, it turns out, is God.

The squire thinks she’s mad, but in the end he does her bidding. Thus begins Joan’s campaign to oust the English “goddams” from France and crown the Dauphin King in Rheims cathedral. She succeeds, at least in part, but by 1431, victory has turned to tragedy: Joan is burned at the stake as a heretic and not one of her former comrades will intervene to save her. How can this be? Well, for one thing, her temerity has become insufferable.

Catching the right tone (sincere friendliness combined with unconscious presumptuousness) was complicated, but Vancouver actor Meg Roe proved herself equal to the task. A slip of a woman like Joan herself, Roe had early on been convinced by her father that Joan was the part to play if she wanted to be a “real” actress. She enlisted the assistance of director Kim Collier and the two of them eventually persuaded the Arts Club Theatre Company to take on the project. “It was fun to play a strong woman,” Roe said in a promotional video, and challenging to inhabit Shaw’s “big ideas.”

Unlike Shakespeare, Shaw places his characters in their cultural contexts. It wasn’t just Joan’s character flaws that doomed her, but also her insistence on a direct relationship with God – a heretical idea in the eyes of the Church hierarchy; her budding nationalism, which challenged the unity of the Holy Roman Empire; and her notions about the divine right of kings, which threatened the feudal lords. Then, of course, there was her rejection of woman’s traditional role and her insistence on wearing men’s clothing. Some dislike Shaw’s “big ideas” and think they make his plays wordy, but, for others – and I am one – the context adds texture and depth.

To make time to explicate his “big ideas,” Shaw eschews pomp and circumstance. Battles are fought off-stage; the king is crowned off-stage; Joan is burned off-stage. Nevertheless, there was no absence of “theatricality” in this production. Soldiers mingled with the audience (at one point, Joan climbed into the balcony to urge her men onward into battle); singers provided her saints’ voices in ecclesiastical music composed by Alessandro Juliani; and an elegantly simple set with a revolving stage designed by Pam Johnson accommodated scenes as diverse as the countryside above the Loire river and the interior of Rheims cathedral.

This is a big show in every sense of the word. Eleven actors took to the boards, most of them double-cast, some even triple-cast, and the production lasted in excess of three hours, including two intermissions. The director cut most of Shaw’s epilogue, but fortunately retained his final line, which resonates today as strongly as ever: “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”

Shaw completed this play in 1924, four years after Joan was canonized. In 1925, Shaw received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For Victoria residents who want to check into this play more deeply before spending  hard-earned dollars on an overnight trip to Vancouver, there’s a link to Shaw’s preface and the script through Project Gutenberg.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright who wishes she could write like George Bernard Shaw.

Wilderness memoir takes honest look at paddle journey

Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience
and Renewal in the Arctic Wild

By Jennifer Kingsley

Greystone Books / David Suzuki Foundation

Pages 240; $29.95

Reviewed by Terry Jones   

In her debut book, Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild, Jennifer Kingsley carries us with her on a daring trip that begins in the Northwest Territories and follows the Back River through Nunavut to the Arctic Ocean. Deposited by float plane on the permafrost, Kingsley and five companions test their physical and emotional resources in an intense drive to reach their goal 1,000 kilometres to the north.

With an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, a Bachelor of Science in biology, and extensive experience as a naturalist and wilderness guide, Kingsley has found her writing niche with her first book. She provides accurate, vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Arctic Tundra. Through her eyes, we share sightings of migratory birds, white wolves, muskox, and the magnificence of massing herds of caribou.

The struggle for survival serves as a leitmotiv for Paddlenorth. Kingsley provides compelling examples of everyday life-and-death situations in the Arctic wilderness. We learn of the endurance of the caribou as they ford icy water and we witness nature’s raw power as prey and predator face off at the water’s edge.  “The bear . . . snapped that goose left and right until it hung like a skein of wool,” Kingsley writes.

The paddlers’ survival mirrors that of the resident wildlife. Despite the team’s thorough preparation that includes rationed food, carefully chosen equipment and emergency gear, the reader is always aware of the possibility of imminent disaster. This awareness and the author’s first-person narrative serve to heighten and maintain the story’s tension and suspense. An overturned canoe can mean hypothermia, emergency evacuation or worse. An inoperable emergency phone might make rescue impossible. An inattentive moment could mean a face-to-face encounter with a grizzly. In addition to the these dangers, the team faces rapids, waterfalls and huge blocks of ice, and struggles with the discomfort of unrelenting mosquitoes, black flies, wind, sand, blisters and frigid temperatures.

Kingsley never shies away from talking about the mental toughness the trip required or her emotional struggles to fit in with the team. “I was tired of reading about the wilderness as a backdrop for so-and-so’s personal struggle; yet there I was, dragging my anxieties across the North,” she writes. Kingsley observes the “tundra’s oppressive moods” can make one feel claustrophobic despite the region’s immensity. The Arctic tundra, known also as the Barrenlands, is the place to go if you want to “measure yourself against the Earth” and “test your perspective on life and distance.” Kingsley’s honesty is admirable as she examines the challenges of group dynamics, where personalities and preferences can cause disagreements and insecurity. She’s candid about times when she doesn’t feel good about her behavior and when she’s taken to task by a fellow paddler. “I had been impossibly stubborn at times,” she admits.

We begin to feel we know her paddling group, not only through a series of black and white photographs but also by sharing in their grief, frustration and misgivings. Kingsley is frank and thorough in her description of the tightrope the group must walk between the enjoyment of stopping to view the natural world and the necessity of completing paddling distances over the 54-day trip.

Kingsley artfully weaves the history of the Arctic into her narrative. We learn that the Back River is named for Lieutenant George Back who served as midshipman on Franklin’s first and second overland expeditions through the Canadian North between 1819 and 1822. Snippets of the Arctic’s history underscore the necessity for Kingsley’s group to be prepared for any circumstance. The land has a long history of people dying while waiting to be rescued.

With Paddlenorth, Kingsley has succeeded in writing a travel memoir that is both exciting and educational and also serves as an excellent resource for anyone planning a similar adventure.

Terry Jones is a Victoria writer. 

Imagination sets Arctic adventure book apart

Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream
in a New Northwest Passage

By Kathleen Winter

House of Anansi

280 pages; $29.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley

I was suspicious of this book at first. I thought it was audacious to write an entire volume about the Northwest Passage after being there (and it’s a big place) for only two weeks.

Then I met Kathleen Winter, this fall, at Calgary’s Wordfest. She got up on stage and said, “How could I be so audacious as to write a whole book about the Northwest Passage after spending just two weeks there?” Her awareness of this simple fact won me over. She laughed, and we laughed with her. Also, I had already read the book, and it reinforced that a story is more than the substance of an experience; it’s what you make of it. The duration of a voyage can be secondary to its impact.

Boundless is a personal account of Winter’s time as a writer-in-residence aboard the Clipper Adventurer, a steel-hulled ship chartered by Adventure Canada to take 100 tourists at a time to the Arctic. On her voyage, in 2010, the objective was to travel one of several routes through the Northwest Passage–from Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland, to Kugluktuk, in the western Canadian Arctic. She was a last minute addition. It was her first time so far north.

Winter sets the scene by emphasizing the spontaneity of the voyage and introducing us, right away, to some of the characters she will share the ship with, including Inuit guides to whom she feels drawn. After two brief chapters, Winter takes a sharp turn to recall the home-made “Viking funeral” she held after her first husband’s death. She and a friend towed all of his belongings into the middle of a lake, while others looked on, and torched the whole barge worth. The scene surprised and enthralled me. It revealed so much of Winter’s character and past that I was ready to go anywhere with her. This chapter demonstrates one of the books greatest strengths: Winter moves easily between ideas, experiences and eras of her life. She’s nimble. She can cover the foxtrot and aging in a single page. She leaps between disposable knickers, colonial history, mustard and poverty. She introduces us to Emily Carr’s milkman while icebergs float by.

Life on a ship is familiar to me. I am one of the T-shirted naturalists that Winter chides in this book, though I work with a different company. I mention this because I know how different life can be on ships; they have their own transformative landscape, and Winter recognizes it immediately. She details her own tendency toward independence that borders on isolation (she stands alone on deck, hides in her bunk, works on her crocheting) and then introduces musician Nathan Rogers, son of the beloved Stan Rogers. Nathan is an ambassador of ship life; he won’t stand for this Leave Me Alone stuff. She describes him, and his singing, this way:

“Somehow everything I’d learned about life pointed to an idea that to receive something you had to earn it. I’d never thought of myself as a tree, a graceful being visited by songbird, starlight, and rain, and which people love for itself, not for what it does or how smart it is, or how indispensable. I was used to making myself indispensable in one arena or another, but Nathan’s song turned me into that tree.”

At moments, Boundless, borders on the existential and Winter peppers the narrative with so many questions I longed for a few more answers. I questioned, at times, the connection the author describes between herself and the land. I wondered how that could really happen on a two-week cruise with more than a hundred shipmates. But then every adventure story is personal and unique. Transformative moments are not universal; it is not my place to doubt them, and many of us–myself included–have experienced similar realizations as a visitor to a new place.

What sets Boundless apart is Winter’s craft and imagination. I would love to sail with someone like her–either on a ship or through the pages of a book.

Jennifer Kingsley’s book Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild was published by Greystone Books and David Suzuki Foundation in 2014.