Fiction

'/I r '2 I?' I (.( t_5. .,[. Letters in Canada 1989 I ~~ j . We welcome Michael Thorpe (English, Mount Allison) to the Fiction section (for new authors), Andre Marquis (French, Saskatoon) to the Poesie section and Sherry Simon (Concordia) to the Translation section of 'Letters in Canada.' Pierre Hebert (French, Sherbrooke) is returning to share the Romans section with Janet Paterson (French, Toronto). We regret that illness has prevented Gabrielle MacDonald from reviewing this year's work in established fiction in English. The section will appear again next year. This issue is the last to appear under the editorship of Tom Adamowski, who has filled this role since 1985. He is succeeded by Alan Bewell (English, Toronto). During the past five years, Tom has worked tirelessly to preserve the distinct character of UTQ while at the same time recognizing the profound changes that have rocked the study of literature and the humanities. We also mark the end of Margaret Procter's collaboration as Editorial Assistant. Her efficiency and unerring good sense did much to facilitate the editorial work of Tom and myself. Marie! O'Neill-Karch (French, Toronto) has now joined UTQ as Assistant Editor. (oc) Fiction MICHAEL THORPE The first six novels I shall discuss were finalists for the 1989 W.H. Smith Books in Canada First Novel Award. It is curious that none of these novels, considering their comparative quality (and only one is literally a first book), was also short-listed for the Governor-General's Fiction Prize, which this year, as often before, involved inexplicable choices. Marilyn Bowering's To All Appearances a Lady (Random House, 336, $22.95) is an extremely ambitious and substantial first novel. Bowering sustains a complex dual narrative to unravel the story, or (to employ an apter figure) bring the reader to its innermost Chinese box. The enveloping narrative is told by Robert Lam, a West Coast pilot of mixed English and Chinese parentage. Hehas neverknown his parents, butwas reared by Lam Fan, his stepmother, and her husband. The story opens UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 1, FALL 1990 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 with Lam Fan's death in her hundredth year and Robert's intrigued inspection of the few papers she left behind. Her death has also, it seems, freed him to sail up the coast on a personal exploration of the old whaling stations, but in the event he finds himself accompanied by Lam Fan, now· 'my spiritual pilot,' on a voyage to discover his origins and the tragic, struggling lives of his unknown parents. This in itself turns one stream of the narrative into a convincingly realized re-creation of his parents' nineteenth-century world, beginning for his mother in Hong Kong, but soon shifting with her and his Chinese stepmother to the precarious world of Vancouver. There his mother, India Thackery, not quite 'a lady' in that she sets herself as secular missionary to combat the Old World evils flourishing in the New, develops into a moving, vital figure. The father, who is not actually Robert's father, as the narrative will ingeniously show, Robert Louis Haack (as a boy he has metR.L. Stevenson), is like the contemporary Robert 'a man with potential, however unrealized.' Both fathers must be outgrown and yet also known more deeply- Robert must learn to conquer the shame of 'his Chinese father's heathen origins' ·and to face a personal guilt, largely involving, as do other strands of the plot, the reckless violation of women. Two journeys within journeys, complementary characterization and circumstance and incident- all reduplicate and answer each other under an inscrutable hand. Lam Fan, too, needs the voyage beyond death to answer in the suffering spirit a longconcealed guilt of her own. She knows too well, as she has told her stepson, that everyone is against suffering 'especially for themselves.' It is said of an outcast leper's poems of self-admonishment that their sadness brought 'relief. They were a victory over time itself, since words repeated- forever- the patterns of existence. They were an answer.' The novel itself repeats such 'patterns,' with compassion and deep understanding for a neglected past and for a people as...