Fiction 2

320 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 different matter and has raised some reasonable protests. As a work of fiction, which is what must count here, the book is unquestionably a success, and the novel of the year. 2 / HELEN HOY Pull up a comfortable armchair and get out your reading glasses: this year's fiction by established writers is enjoyable to read. CRnadian literature, even fifty books at a gulp, can be fun. A claim like this, modest though it is, has not always been possible. While some regulars like Kroetsch and Wiebe disappoint in differing degrees, both old hands like Margaret Atwood, Leon Rooke, and Brian Moore and apprentices like Veronica Ross, Paul Quarrington, and Janette Turner Hospital delight. Even Callaghan is less ponderous than usual. Voices long silent or heard faintly from periodical publications or busy in other genres - Stephen Vi2inczey, Paul St Pierre, EIi2abeth Brewster - are engagingly raised again in this year's collection of fiction. In part, the simple readability of this fiction reflects the prominence of old-fashioned storytelling (and these comments thus become a sad revelation of the critical limitations of the reviewer). The best of these works, though, tell their stories with a comic or lyric flair, with a dramatic vigour or psychological discernment, and with a freshness of language which remind us that storytelling itself is an art. Of the two piles of short-story collections in front of me at the moment, those ofslight and ofsubstantial accomplishment, the former can be dealt with more expeditiously. In The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories (Penguin, '96, $5.95 paper), W.P. Kinsella perfunctorily continues Silas Ermineskin's comic narrative of Alberta reservation life, winning sympathy a little too neatly, exploiting his wiseacre characters too overtly, displaying the sentimentality hinted at in Shoeless Joe but lacking that novel's enthusiastic fascination with its subject. Less facilely, Fred Bonnie gives us unassuming, sympathetic stories of Displaced Persons (Oberon, 1982, '33, $19·95, $9·95 paper), working-class boys and men with nagging private feelings of puzzlement or distress. Virgil Burnett's Towers at the Edge of a World (Porcupine's Quill, 211, $7.95 paper, illus. V. Burnett) traces the long history of Montarnis, an imaginary walled French town, through a series of gothic tales, beginning with legendary monsters, ending with modern black magic, and marked by lush diction, a sense of the weird, and an emphasis on passion and the preternatural. Of interest particularly to A.M. Klein scholars is M.W. Steinberg's helpfully annotated edition of Klein's Short Stories (University of Toronto Press, 338, $35.00, $14.50 paper), which collects all his completed short fiction and usefully extends the canon of his works. Demonstrating FICTION 321 Klein's range (fairy tales, dystopias, animal fables, fictionalized homilies, extended jokes, parables, reportage, and parodies), his distinctively erudite diction and elaborate syntax, his clever humour, play with language, and addiction to egregious puns, and his breadth of knowledge , the stories, with the exception of the last two more substantial pieces, tend to fizzle out, to lack the necessary development. Occasional pieces, inspired by quirks of fancy, they have a certain inconsequence. To raise funds, the Writers' Union of Canada has issued a limited edition of handbound, handprinted works by Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, and Robert Kroetsch, at the arresting price of $400 for the three volumes. Atwood's Unearthing Suite (Grand Union Press, [27]), the final, affectionate story in her Bluebeard's Egg (discussed below), is the most satisfying. Hodgins provides us in Beginnings (Grand Union Press, 29) with the openings of five unpublished novels, all but the first exhibiting his storytelling facility and distinctive voice and, as fragments from fuIllength manuscripts, testifying to a diligent apprenticeship, but failing, inevitably, to have substance as a published work. Kroetsch's Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, [28]) is a miniature AlibiJournal, two months' love letters composed during the writing of Alibi, evidence of Kroetsch's sometimes wearisome willingness to turn his life, including private references and intimate details, into art, into metaphor, into metaphor for art. Other minor contributions are similarly contemporary in approach. Toby MacLennan's Singing the Stars (Coach House, [641, $6.50...