Fiction

388 LEITERS IN CANADA: 1963 you talked about sound, not footstep sound, shiphorn, nightcry, but strings collecting, silver and catgut, violas riding the waves of May like soft ships, and the anchoring senses, the range, the register, the index in the ear; the long yes measure from the drums of our skulls to the heart (and its particular tempo); the music anchored there, gathered in. you will hear me now, I think, while my skin still gathers tones of the sun in, while we ride the bars, the slow passages of these first minutes; while the taut drums of our skulls open and all sounds enter and the pores of our skin like slow valves open. we will hear each other now, I think, while nothing is known, while sound and statement in the ear leave all alternatives; our skulls like drums, like tonal caves echo, enclose while the ribs of our bodies are great hulls and the separate ships of our senses for a minute anchor. for a minute in the same harbour anchor. FICTION F. W. WAIT Anyone seriously interested in Canadian nction will have noticed and perhaps welcomed in the past few years a waning of its traditional tendency to earnestness, and a growing sense of what apt subjects for FICTION 389 comedy and satire lie everywhere at hand. The poets have had this awareness since the 1920's-indeed it is a prominent feature of Canadian poetry, and one which is shown in common by poets otherwise as diverse as Klein and Birney, Layton and Reaney. The novelists have continued On the whole to approach their tasks with a more determined sobriety, but the exceptions have become increasingly notable. In different ways and with varying success the modes of comedy, satire, and irony have been taken up in novels by Robertson Davies, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, and William Weintraub, to name merely the first to come to mind from recent years. But 1963 is the first year that these modes have threatened to supplant those of realism and historical romance. A third of this year's books assume the existence of akind of reality which can neither be escaped (into certain forms of romance) nor merely recorded conscientiously and realistically, but which demands mockery, ridicule, stripping and scourging, or at least the gentler catharsis possible through hyperbole and farce. Since to understand all is to forgive all, satire depends for its vigour, its ability to strike home or amuse, On a deliberate limitation or focussing of attention, as with the caricaturist who chooses to isolate the toothy grin or the big nose where others might see an ordinary face. But if the limitation is too severe, our ordinary human sympathies reassert themselves , and the satire seems irrelevant, unfair, perversely inhuman, or superficial. Mordecai Richler's fifth novel, The Incomparable Atuk (McClelland and Stewart, pp. 198, $3.95), shows both the possibilities and the dangers of the satirist's specialized attention. It is, to begin with, a very funny book-more so than The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.. But whereas that earlier novel has a burning COre of experience within its risible extravagances which makes it live on in the memory, Atuk seems no more likely to survive its laughter than last year's Spring Thaw. The latest book has in fact more in common with the stage review than with tbe conventional novel form. There is the central comic thread on which to string consecutive skits; the story of Atuk, the Eskimo poet who comes to Toronto and learns (rather quickly) how life is lived in the white man's civilization. There is the usual buck-shot approach to political , social, and sexual customs. There is the familiar caricaturing of local TV, newspaper, and sport celebrities. The plot gets more farcical as it goes along, the characterization is two-dimensional, the dialogue is smart, the jokes broad. As in any good stage review the secret is in the pace: fast, energetic, irresistible. However, The Incomparable Atuk is not a satirical stage review, it is 390 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1963 a novel by a writer who, as one of the best younger novelists in this decade, expects...