Fiction

~CTION 11 with detonators is wilfully anti-intellectual. But Renee's vast anger and Steven's icy manipulativeness remain unfinished, deprived of context. The 'interpenetration' of idea and sensibility is a serious omission in the novel, yet may go unnoticed through the concluding sequences, where each scene is more striking than the last in the originality of its horror. Renee's demise is especially ingenious, the bomb (disguised as a baby) exploding during 'her dream of ballet.' In contrast, the bluebird, the squirrel, and the sudden discovery of 'you' as the humane element of the self that accompany Billy at the end are silly, if morally desirable, and make one almost regret his survival. 2/ MICHAEL F. DIXON 'The first sentence of every novel should be: "Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.'" In The Skin of a Lion (McClelland and Stewart, 244, $22.50) does nbt begin so; this assurance of order occurs more than half-way into (not 'through' - I doubt there is a way entirely through) Michael Ondaatje's threnodic monologue on the mystery rooted in an elusive, hidden symbiosis of history, individual experience, and myth. To detect and mimic the faint human order we impose on existential chaos, he implies, is the business of art, and Ondaatje's hypothetical first sentence might well serve as a sort of epigraph to all half-dozen of this year's most interesting and accomplished works of fiction from established Canadian writers. Their wide variation of theme and technique, considered in concert, invites attention to the exquisite struggle of the narrative artist. Can the conventions of storytelling, themselves an imposed human order, be made to reveal rather than merely reinforce the ritual strategies againstchaos bred by our rage for order? Can the artist make us see, not merely look? In the Skin ofaLion presents the immigrant as artist. To see through the eyes of a stranger is to correct myopia induced by habit, the invisibility bred offamiliarity. 'Patrick Lewis arrived in the city ofToronto as ifitwere land after years at sea ... an immigrant to the city.' A brief prologue in italics establishes Lewis as the narrator, speaking of himself in the third person, piecing together the pattern of his life over the first forty years of this century in a monologue delivered to his step-daughter Hana as they drive through the night from Toronto to Marmora six hours away. 'Do you see?' he asks Hana periodically. Like the readers who join her functionally as listeners, Hana 'sees' Toronto, surely Canada's post-war emblem of the urban-mundane, transformed into exotic dreamscape, strange, menacing, inchoate, in a narrative night-sequence appropriately as elliptical and imagistically associative as mind-drift along the wavering edge of sleep. 12 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 The Bloor Street Viaduct I goes up in a dream' experienced by Lewis indirectly after the fact through'4000 photographs' in a cinematic procession of 'time-lapse evolution, from piles sinking into bedrock through the fronding skeleton of steel rising to the topping of tar; muscle and fire reshaping matter and space to fulfill, on 18 October 1918, the monumental vision of Rowland Harris, Commissioner of Public Works.' For Ondaatje, however, this powerful cinematic sequence is merely an establishing shot, prelude to a shift of focus from monumental work to elemental workers, the immigrant supernumeraries who appear only as compositional details, inert and invisible on the transparent-deceptive surface of the photographs. Vitalized through Lewis's memory tract, they become charged with mythic resonance. On the dizzy skeleton of the viaduct, under Lake Ontario in the stifling, dark, mile-long tunnel feeding Harris's othermonument ('a temple'), the waterworks in Victoria Park Forest, and in the noxious, deadly slaughterhouse and tannery, Ondaatje's prose rhythm ritualizes their agonizing labour into the controlled grace of tribal dance, tuned to the mythic procession of light and dark, while a larger rhythmic structure interlaces imagery spun from the primal elements of. earth, air, fire, and water into a texture of extraordinary intricacy and evocative power. The workers, as a blended or collective character, seem to merge with and emerge from this primal texture. Like...