Tag Archives: Reviews of the written word

Hodgins gently skewers human condition

Cadillac Cathedral

By Jack Hodgins

Ronsdale Press

213 pages; $18.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

In his latest novel, Cadillac Cathedral, Jack Hodgins takes us back to familiar territory, the Macken world of mid-Vancouver Island. He recreates Portuguese Creek, a tiny community off the beaten track and populates it with what would have to be called characters in every sense of the word—retired loggers, a forceful ex-schoolteacher, eccentric chicken farmers. The focal point is Arvo Saarikoski, “a man in his seventies whose retirement years were filled with the pleasure of restoring cars and trucks that had been wrecked and then abandoned by those who could afford to replace them.”

Arvo hears of a vintage hearse, a Cadillac Cathedral, which is allegedly being used to haul logs out in the bush. It is a serendipitous moment, for Martin Glass, who used to be the local M.P., has died in Victoria. Arvo conceives of the idea of rescuing the hearse, collecting Martin’s body to bring it back home for a suitably dignified send-off, and then returning the hearse to its rightful owner, Myrtle, the daughter of a former local undertaker. Arvo is a lifelong bachelor, despite the determined efforts of the Woman from Thunder Bay and sundry other females, but he has enshrined Myrtle in his heart ever since their schooldays.

It is easy to visualize this novel as a road movie, a version for elders proceeding at the dignified pace of the vintage hearse, a leisurely journey that reflects the lives of the participants and the social mores of their world. Arvo and his retinue set off on their picaresque way to the south Island where Martin and Myrtle both wait, unaware. Naturally there are delays: Arvo reflects that some would consider “his whole life looked like a series of detours,” which they would call avoidance. Certainly, “a detour was also a reminder that there was no end of ways in which life could keep you from even reaching your destination,” and that is exactly the result here, with local businessmen hoping to acquire the hearse for publicity purposes,  most notably with the vehicle being “borrowed” to star at a pre-mortem wake.

The slow pace gives Arvo plenty of time to reflect, and this inner debate is one of the most human elements of the story. Arvo has always been “a man who fixed things—machines anyway.” Decisions are another matter, especially when other people are involved. The advisability of renewing acquaintance with the unattainable Myrtle involves a mental roller coaster of indecision which life resolves in typically unsuspected ways.

And that, of course, is the real subject here. The final events at Martin’s seaside funeral seem to offer Arvo a different kind of future with Cynthia’s dreams of reviving her old drive-in movie business. As Arvo discovered with Myrtle, however, “something that belonged entirely in your past might as well disappear altogether once you were no longer part of it.” There is already evidence at the funeral that the demands of the future will override the nostalgic pull of the past: Martin’s absentee sons are already negotiating real estate deals at their father’s old home.

Hodgins calls his novel A Tale. A hint, perhaps, that we should enjoy this story for its narrative elements, for its light-hearted humour and gentle skewering of the human condition—for its sheer entertainment value—and also be prepared to recognize it as being more than the sum of its parts, almost allegorical. Cynthia, willing to embrace uncertainty, sums up the intent best: “Haven’t you noticed?” she says. “We start life over again every day. All of us. Even a man who hides in his workshop with grease up to his elbows.”

Margaret Thompson launches her new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, at Russell Books, Tuesday, April 15, 2014,  at 7 p.m.

Daughter recalls father’s past with heart, humour

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter; Growing up with a gay dad

By Alison Wearing

292 pages; $24.00

Reviewed by Cecania Alexander

When I pick up a book, my dearest hopes are, admittedly, a bit unfair. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter – a nonfiction family memoir about Wearing’s growing up as her father discovers his gay identity in a time of political turmoil – met all of them, and threw in a few delicious surprises.

Wearing’s voice is delightful, not surprising as she is a musician, a dancer, a theatre performer, an award-winning one-woman-show star (including an adaptation of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter). Her first book was an international bestseller (Honeymoon in Purday: An Iranian Journey). Wearing conveys humour, emotion and soul through art – she could make a fun, heart-warming journey out of peeling a baked potato.

In Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, anecdotes, research, and lively stories are combined with her voice to form a fantastic ride. The memoir  begins in peachy childhood with an artistic, caring mother and a goofy father who “enjoyed skipping down sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the ides and snapping his fingers like castanets,” and all things “festive.” But Wearing grows up amidst choppy waters as her father explores his gay identity, keeping his double life from the family, eventually coming out amidst great obstacles. At times I was dumbfounded with shock; at others I felt a surprising familiarity and connection to the family’s struggles; mostly, I was laughing.

The disruption of Wearing’s family was hard on her, as was accepting her father’s homosexuality but the strife is washed with wildly hilarious stories in which Wearing pokes fun at her family (recounting one brother’s obsession with poo, a family Christmas in which everyone accidentally ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms, and of course her father’s many quirks), and at herself   At one point she describes her hair as “thick knuckly masses, something a (brief) boyfriend was once generous enough to inform me was the stuff that makes up a rhinoceros’s horn.”

About two-thirds into the book, the point of view shifts to her father via diary entries, newspaper clippings, letters and notes during his coming out. These scraps of overwhelming struggle blew me away, revealed a violent world that I could not have otherwise fathomed. The story culminates in a sentimental, occasionally overly sentimental, acceptance, love and appreciation for family in all its fairy dust and demons. However, I forgave the story its sentimental weight because I just plain enjoyed it so much, and felt its resounding relevance.

This is an important memoir. Fortunately, it is also a story that anyone with a heart will enjoy.

Cecania Alexander is a fourth-year Creative Writing student at the University of Victoria.

Absorbing novel recreates Aleutians campaign

The Wind is not a River

By Brian Payton

Harper Collins

$29.99;  308 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Comic-strip memoir on prostitution shockingly authentic

Paying For It

By Chester Brown

Published by Drawn & Quarterly

290 pages, $19.95

By Lachlan Ross

Taking the prostitution debate into “comic-strip memoir” form, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown documents his relations with sex workers. The Toronto-based writer’s eighth book depicts a 14-year period (from 1996-2010) during which 36-year-old Brown gives up on the “romantic love ideal” after his girlfriend dumps him. Rather than mourning the failed relationship and searching for a new partner, Brown continues living with his ex, but searches sex sources online.

Paying For It illustrates Brown’s interactions with prostitutes, both sexually and personally, while also including his friendships with ex-girlfriends and close friends. His friends’ reactions to his new lifestyle choice make for numerous debates, sparking the topic of ethics in prostitution. Brown’s clear advocacy of decriminalizing prostitution is backed by endless encounters with professional sex. While Brown notes in a foreword that he didn’t include all conversations to uphold women’s anonymity, the behaviours and reactions of Brown and the escorts create an understanding of why women work and why Johns pay.

Brown’s blatant honesty comes across on the page in thought bubbles during scenes. On page 137, during paid sex, he thinks, “She’s deliberately placing her hair over her face. She’s ashamed. She doesn’t want me to be able to see her face while I’m screwing her… I feel bad for her, but not so bad that I’m giving her a tip.”

While this account may upset some readers, the inclusion of thoughts like this made me believe in Brown as a reliable narrator. His character’s thoughts often don’t match his speech during both sexual interactions and conversations; I think that is a credible human trait. While Brown is a soft-spoken gentleman in speech, he has thoughts like, “That she seems to be in pain is kind of a turn-on for me, but I also feel bad for her.  I’m gonna cut this short and come quickly.” (188) I think this conflict between his outer persona as an introvert cartoonist and his up-front thoughts make for an authentic protagonist, to whom I felt connected.

Brown accepts that not every interaction is successful, but the reader grows with Brown in his journey, discovering what he likes and doesn’t like about each woman. Brown guides with strong narrative voice, forcing me to wrestle alongside him with the ethics of prostitution.

The blatant cynicism expressed by one friend, matched with the logical voice of another, provide both emotional and reasonable concern for Brown’s involvement in the sex trade. The scenes with ex-girlfriend, Sook-Yin, with whom he is still living after their break up for the majority of the book, adds odd twists and comic relief as Brown is also forced to live with her new boyfriends.

Paying For It is an entertaining read.  Brown’s skillful cartoons and sometimes brutally straightforward dialogue make for a frank account of life as a John. His story drew me in; I felt engulfed by a life I had previously not considered. The book shows a regular, honest, man paying for a service, and presents his argument that most Johns aren’t bad people. While some readers may be off put by the content of this memoir, this is a great read for those who can withstand the surprisingly graphic comic strips. For those who pick up the book expecting something different, jaws may hit the floor; this book isn’t for churchgoers.

            Lachlan Ross is a fourth-year student and athlete.

Ozeki’s meta-fiction challenges reader

A Tale for the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Penguin

422 pages, $30

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

For those of you who walk West Coast beaches with eyes trawling for washed-up treasure, the Man Booker Prize-nominated A Tale for the Time Being may be a vicarious pleasure. But if you’re hoping for a narrative sustained over 422 pages, you may be a bit disappointed. But just a bit because Ruth Ozeki’s story —  that veers from Tokyo’s seedy Electric Town to a moss-embraced monastery —  is readable, timely, and for the most part, fun.

It’s post Fukushima, and a barnacle-encrusted garbage bag washes up on a British Columbia Gulf island – likely Cortez but it’s never named – and inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a 10-year-old diary, a circa-Second World War wristwatch, and a bundle of letters from the same wartime era. It’s picked up by Ruth – the character shares the same name as the author – who begins to read the diary in her rural wooded home.

Teenager Nao has recently moved to Japan from California with her parents. Her father is listless to the point of suicide after losing his Silicon Valley job; her mother spends her days watching jellyfish at the aquarium. Tormented by her bullying classmates and teacher, Nao skips school to write in a manga cafe. She intends to chronicle the story of her activist-turned-Zen Buddhist nun great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko, who, at 104, lives Yoda-like in a tiny, mountainside monastery. Nao had been sent to spend the summer at the monastery, where Jiko serenely unravels the secrets behind Nao’s burns, scars, and anger. By the end of summer, Nao is wiser, having learned some of Jiko’s secrets.

But did Nao survive the tsunami, Ruth wonders as she reads the journal in allotments, not wanting to get to the end too quickly. In alternating chapters, Ruth’s narrative of her small island life filled with clichéd rural folks is an annoyance, but perhaps meant to be. Ruth the Character is a frustrated writer that Ruth the Author takes on a meta-fiction dalliance, ruminating on reader/writer relationships that push the true reader  — you and me — away from who we really want to hear about: Nao.

Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist and filmmaker, does have a gift: her ability to create believably the delicate, healing monastery life as well as the frenetic pop-culture-infused Tokyo that alternately shelters and abuses Nao. Also remarkable is Nao’s fresh voice, the teenager moving between those worlds:

“And because we’re friends, here’s something else I will share with you. It’s kind of personal, but it’s really helped me out a lot. It’s Jiko’s instructions on how to develop your superpower. I thought she was kidding when she said it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a really, really old person is kidding or not, especially if she’s a nun.”

Ozeki has worked as a bar hostess in Japan and also sets Nao in that eerie workplace for a short time. But Nao figures out she has more important things to do, like write in her journal, the time transporter that connects Nao, Ruth the reader/writer, Ozeki the author, and you and me, the readers. The meta-fiction- Zen-Buddhist-traverse works in some places, with footnotes that could be fiction or not. “Can’t find reference to medical cafes or Bedtown. Is she making this up?” character Ruth asks, tripping up the reader. Is this the same Ruth who explains in footnotes that Ijime is Japanese for bullying and omuraisu is a rice pilaf-filled omelette seasoned with ketchup and butter?

Meta-fiction when taken too far is like a plot spoiler. It can deflate verisimilitude, that diaphanous place to which fiction readers either float or strain. As with the waves Juki uses as life metaphor to explain to Nao the futility of flailing against the inevitable, sometimes it’s best to not try too hard. Nao’s conclusion is akin to the reader’s experience in absorbing A Tale for the Time Being: “I never completely understand what she’s saying, but I like that she tries to explain it to me anyway. It’s nice of her.”

Vivian Moreau is a Victoria freelance writer and editor.

Glover’s stories engrossing, polished

Savage Love

By Douglas Glover

Goose Lane

264 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Susan Sanford Blades

Turn to any page of Douglas Glover’s Savage Love and you’ll find yourself engrossed in a world without convention, where an emaciated woman in otter-skin coat and hunting boots becomes a universal sex symbol or a man falls in love with a legless mute and proceeds to kill anyone who comes “like lambs through the front door.”

This is Glover’s tenth book of fiction, his sixth book of short stories. He won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2003 for his novel, Elle, but as of yet has been overlooked by awards juries for his latest effort.  That’s a shock, as this is a tight, accomplished book of stories, published in the year of the story by a man who, literally, wrote the book on writing fiction (Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012).

Savage Love begins with a two-page Prelude, “Dancers at the Dawn,” in which stated language is “much better for describing things that don’t exist than for pinning down reality.” Glover dances with this writer’s paradox throughout the book. He pins down what is real—realer than real—in language that is graceful, muscular, challenging (no one has me reaching for the dictionary like Douglas Glover), all the while decrying it for its ineptitude. In the tongue-in-cheek “The Lost Language of Ng,” for instance, “the more achieved Ng intellectuals . . . eschewed speaking altogether and communicated by ‘signs and thoughts.’ ”

The remainder of the book is separated into Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies. Each piece is a theme-heavy meditation told in eloquent language, with characters described in details that are contradictory, astonishing, and beautiful (much like humans themselves), with quick, original plot lines—sometimes so fast-moving as to make the story itself seem implausible thus allowing his reader to hone in on its elements, which, I believe, is Glover’s intent.

Throughout the book, Glover rips open the skin, digs deep, and exposes the beating heart of life (“I am already nostalgic for the yeasty richness of life, its sudden turns and dramas, its deep sadness, its mysterious and gorgeous purposelessness”), the “inhuman endlessness of desire,” and, of course, love (“whatever happened between us, it would end badly, that all love ended badly, that we would one day part out of boredom or disgust, or that we would grow old and not be the people we were this minute”).

His characters are never dull (even the cardigan-sweater-wearing librarians among them); his endings often sheer quirky brilliance (“except for the catering assistant found with a pitchfork in her throat behind the barn after the reception, everyone lives happily ever after. For a while.”)

At times I found myself wanting for the mundane, for a peek at the mechanics of humanity via an exposed slip, Munro-style, rather than a Glover-style gawk at the meaning of life via the gruesome edge of death. But an author cannot satisfy all of his reader’s desires and Savage Love is a celebration of what Douglas Glover—and the short story—can achieve.

Susan Sanford Blades is a Victoria writer.

Authors reanimate Canlit for teachers

Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools

By Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler

Oxford University Press

275 pp. $69.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

In Reading Canada: Teaching Canadian Fiction in Secondary Schools, Wendy Donawa and Leah C. Fowler rightfully name teachers as curators of Canada’s narrative culture. Teachers collect, preserve and interpret the literary artifacts of Canada and help students to recognize and understand these national treasures. Legendary books like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind are among these artifacts.

But Donawa and Fowler also name a crisis: innumerable national treasures are missing from the “permanent collection” of contemporary Canadian fiction. Reading Canada, a dynamic guide, re-imagines this collection for Canadian teachers, pre-service teachers, and readers at large.

Reading Canada is spacious and inviting:  in each chapter, key thematic and conceptual principles, such as social realism or visual literacy, come alive in the discussion of new Canadian literature; following the discussion, a pedagogical essay explores how to “call students to responses, reflection and research” using this literature. The case studies at the end of each chapter – for instance,  “What Fear Makes Us Do: Beyond Fear and Bullying” and “Classroom Canada Reads” – are highly engaging.

Fowler and Donawa promote literary-quality, contemporary Canadian fiction for secondary-school students. They point out that teachers, under pressure to manage heterogeneous classes and achieve more standardized outcomes, often choose readings already enshrined in the curriculum. The readings they select are likely to be classics like To Kill a Mocking Bird or Lord of the Flies. Although venerable in their own right, these books do not depict “the sociopolitical, geophysical and imaginative landscape” in which today’s Canadian students live.

To represent this landscape, Donawa and Fowler launch an astonishing exhibition of current Canadian authors, all of them worthy of sharing space with the Atwoods and Mitchells in the existing collection. Many of these books enlarge the definition of “Canadian” and introduce crucial issues like belonging and otherness. For example, Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel The Book of Negroes offers a powerful story of a black woman, who, after years of enslavement, struggles as a “free” Black Loyalist in Canada. This book and others situate the history and politics of race, too frequently seen as only American concerns, in Canada.

Young adult readers themselves often inhabit complex worlds where they deal with problems like poverty and isolation.  Reading Canada provides a trove of recent Canadian books wherein these readers may find their lives mirrored. Carrie Mac’s The Beckoners depicts the cycle of the abused becoming abusers; Sylvia Olsen’s White Girl follows Josie to a reserve, where she is the only white girl.

Such books also include models for problem-solving; for instance, bi-cultural Ashley in Jamie Bastedo’s On Thin Ice builds strength by connecting with Nanurluk, the Great Spirit Bear of her father’s culture.  Such stories provide students with literary examples of building empathy and hope, “one narrative experience at a time.”

Fowler and Donawa observe that the genre of speculative fiction addresses problem-solving on a large scale, its narratives “challenging the boundaries of the possible.”  The chapter on this genre exemplifies how judiciously Donawa and Fowler contextualize, in every chapter, the newest members of the literary “permanent collection” they envisage. In this case, they outline how myth has nourished speculative fiction, and how hybridity and intertextuality teach students to see the elaborate  “matrices” of thought in literature.

Reading Canada’s expansive matrices give the book energy and dimension: readers can compare new books with books already deemed canonical; contemplate digital forms of learning (for example, creating a book report in the form of a Youtube video); explore the “synchronous space between image and word” in graphic novels; and promote crossover texts and “cross-curricular resonance” in the classroom.

With its deep appreciation of narrative text, Reading Canada transcends the confines of “textbook.” Even so, Donawa and Fowler describe their guide as provisional, a work in progress to be amplified by future teacher-curators in Canada.  Their book offers a vision of the permanent collection, not as unitary and official, but as open-ended and personal, to be shaped and reshaped by the “multiple discourses” and readers of English.

Susan Braley is a Victoria writer and former college professor.

 

 

 

 

Author sees maps as repositories of history

The Land of Heart’s Delight: Early Maps and Charts of Vancouver Island

By Michael Layland

Touchwood Editions

232 pages,  $39.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

            In this meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book, Michael Layland traces the development of the accurate, detailed maps of Vancouver Island we take for granted today. His own qualifications as a cartographer and historian, with a special interest in exploration and map-making, ensure that this account will more than satisfy the most exacting academic and scientific scrutiny, but rest assured, that does not mean it would appeal only to scholars. What this book does, in terms that even those with the most limited acquaintance with maps can follow, is to conjure Vancouver Island almost literally out of thin air.

            Near the end of the book, Layland refers to the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas, and shows a long list of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw place names Boas collected which demonstrate the First Nation’s intimate knowledge of the coast where they had lived for centuries. By contrast, the earliest European visitors to the North-West in the sixteenth century were venturing into completely uncharted territory, armed only with rumour and speculation and their own courage. The earliest maps of the region reflect this tenuous grip on reality: fragmentary pieces of unattached coastline, possible straits, rocks and mountains covered with tiny hand-drawn trees, straggling lines that peter out when circumstances forced the explorers to turn back. At the time, those early mariners did not even realize they were travelling beside an island, and thought they were mapping the mainland.

            Readers of this book are in much the same position as the very earliest visitors. The island is hidden at first, but as the author leads us through the centuries, its outline becomes more defined, its intricacies more exactly delineated, its salient features given lasting names, each successive map and chart visibly more accurate and reliable, until the familiar outline emerges. Nor is that the end of the process, for the interior of the island remained an unknown quantity for many years, and the surveyors’ maps of areas of development are just as fascinating as those of the ocean-going explorers.

            What is immediately obvious from the author’s entertaining narrative is how much history, how much human experience, is concentrated in these two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world. The maps are the products of a variety of motivations: curiosity, the search for a Pacific entrance to the fabled north-west passage, politics and jockeying for power, diplomatic missions, trade, gold, farming, colonization. The maps also immortalize the people involved in their making, for it was as commonplace for explorers and surveyors to name the straits and bays and islands and hills they discovered after themselves, their colleagues, and their vessels, as it is for a botanist to add his name to a new species. So Layland shows that in the very names familiar to all Island dwellers, and easily located on any modern map—Haro, Juan de Fuca (who was actually Greek), Vancouver, Broughton, Meares, Mayne, Baker, Pandora, Cormorant, Quadra, Gabriola, Pemberton, to name just a few—lies the whole history of European involvement in “the land of heart’s delight” at the edge of the world. 

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cuckoo’s Child, is being published this spring.

Nisga’a poet challenges anthropology

The Place of Scraps

By Jordan Abel,

Talon

272 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

The Place of Scraps by Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel is a collection of poetry with an intriguing premise: Abel has started with Totem Poles, a foundation text by noted anthropologist Marius Barbeau, extricated passages, and created word pictures and images to explore the tangled relationship between cultures and the exploration of them.

Abel employs the technique of erasure, and in some cases gets a poem down to punctuation, forming a cloud of tiny marks, reminiscent of fireflies or mosquitoes. The use of blank space on most pages is remarkable, opening up the possibility of a wide array of thought and feeling regarding what has happened to First Nations culture. And on pages filled with images and letters, the same opportunity is paradoxically presented.

A fragmented thread of narrative conveys the story of Abel’s life, in particular his contact with a totem pole from his ancestral village, which his mother has identified in a book and says he saw as a child. “But the recurrence of the totem pole in the poet’s life combined with an apparent failure of memory carries with it a multiplicity of emotions.” The carved pole connects Abel to his people, as does a spoon carved by his absent father and given to him by friends of his father. The concept of carving connects objects—the wood of the poles and the spoon—and words or images carved out of Barbeau’s work by Abel’s imagination. And one carves out a life of surrounding matter. Or possibly one is carved out of life.

This book is meant to be absorbed more than read. Abel does develop forward motion, but a reader gains much pleasure from going back and looking at random pages as visual art as much as poetry. Many of the pages present pictures of words or letters or images with words and letters in the background. Sometimes the letters are piled up as if a typewriter stuttered or a printer jammed, resulting in a heavy black cloud of repetition. The black and white pictures of totem poles, sometimes presented sideways or upside down, are arresting.

The Nisga’a and other carvers of poles did not try to preserve them. The poles eventually fell and rotted, returning to the earth in a natural cycle. When Abel finally goes to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to see the pole his mother talked about, his experience captures an aspect of cultural difference: “The poet confronts the admissions staff member at the ROM, explains that he refuses to pay to see a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village. . . . The staff member shrugs, verbalizes his apathy, and allows the poet in to the museum. The pole towers through the staircase; the poet circles up to the top. The pole is here; the poet is here.”

I love the symmetry of that line—“The pole is here; the poet is here”—just as much as I love the fact that the paper of this book is made from wood pulp, and this particular object will also form a step in a natural cycle of change, both concrete and abstract.

 

Candace Fertile is a Victoria reviewer who teaches English at Camosun College

BC author captures reality in fiction

People Who Disappear
By Alex Leslie
Freehand Books, 256 pages, $21.95.

Reviewed by Miles Steyn

The title of Vancouver author Alex Leslie’s debut collection of stories, People Who Disappear, sounds like a Dateline: Investigation Marathon. Yes, people do disappear, but don’t expect thrilling, high-stake plots; it’s the everyday, unassuming way of life which causes the Canadian characters who star in this book—some already gone, some living—to change and leave, be it figuratively, literally, mentally, or historically.

Although the plot of some of the stories tends to run away at times, Leslie has an ability to abduct readers with her dark, poetic language, which stands upright, screaming for attention.

Like a camera out of focus, it could take some time to adjust to the metaphors stacked high on each page. Some jar the reader: “The snowy road balanced against the side of a dark mountain, the ultrasound image of a bone inside an arm,” but others strike an image with perfection: “air thrown up by the ocean rushes down the deck and makes my stomach its windsock.” Once you find a rhythm to Leslie’s prose—paying closer attention to the human drama of the stories rather than plot—her tonally and textually rich writing will clasp your attention like a vice grip.

In the opening story, “The Coast Is a Road,” two female lovers—the narrator and a journalist—roam the Pacific coast together, the journalist searching for environmental news stories, the narrator for intimacy. The story zigzags between land and sea, developing the relationship of the characters until a twist in the plot sinks the ferry upon which our two lovers are passengers. It’s hard to miss the connection between this ferry and the BC Ferry, MV Queen of the North, which sank in 2006. In fact, most of the short stories in this collection seem grounded in fact. “People Who are Michael” follows a series of YouTube videos of a small-town Canadian boy who becomes an international recording artist and millionaire before the age of seventeen. Sound familiar? Justin Bieber was evidently the inspiration for the character Michael, who, in an unexpected twist, is kidnapped by a crazed fan. From the colour of his wardrobe, his hairstyle, to the comment his mom makes below a video upload: “Michael before he was famous . . . sorry about the video quality . . .  you can hear his voice pretty great though . . . ” it’s glaringly obvious that this is a carbon copy of Bieber’s life, but with a strong, dark turn.

This collection of a dozen stories features every subject from gay women to the environment, each wrapped in social and political themes such as homophobia, mental illness, or environmental issues, and always backlit by Canadian culture.

People Who Disappear manages to paint portraits of people, not characters; humans who are unified in their flaws, emotions, and desires, all footed in the Western Canadian landscape Alex Leslie so organically depicts. Promising work from a young, talented British Columbia author.

 

Miles Steyn grew up in South Africa and has studied creative writing at UVic and UBC.