Fiction 2

FICTION 11 exists as the struggling 'man of little faith.' Perhaps in Salutin's next work the writer will have more faith in the autonomy of his characters, will say less and reveal more. 2/ DENNIS DUFFY Any year that includes new works by Atwood, Davies, Findley, Callaghan, and W.O. Mitchell ought to be a Platonic Great Year. But this is not so for 1988. Of these canonical authors, only Findley upholds and strengthens his reputation. Other writers, however, indicate that the project of a national literature continues. Janette Turner Hospital's Charades (McClelland and Stewart, 291, $24.95) brings a truism to life. Its form becomes its content, conveying a far more potent message than any thematic mumblings ever could. The title character (pronounce her name to rhyme with Scheherazade) pulsates within the universe ofmodern quantum physics; a point oflight, she dots fitfully the tidy life ofKoenig, an upcoming, near-Nobel Laureate at MIT. Post-modernist narrative anti-conventions meld with the Russiandoll techniques of The Arabian Nights to offer a reading experience parallel to the process the novel portrays. In an effort to convey the content of modern science, our era has inflated science fiction from a pulpy offshoot of serious writing to a genre canonized in university courses. The briefest immersion in that genre convinces a reader that talking heads and rhyming plots rule over stylistic verve. Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home stands as the confirming exception to the rule, while Doris Lessing's interminable Shikasta series indicates the degree to which Olaf Stapledon's logorrhoeic ghost continues to hex the project. Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and Don De Lillo's White Noise offer two of many instances of s-f's entry into mainstream fiction. What the thoughtier among us view as post-modernism - the whimsical, random play with convention and reader expectation - may in fact be explained by something as simple as writers' desires to decorate their work with the marks of a genre rich in popular appeal. The popularity of such explanatory accounts of the material universe as Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics, Gary Zukav's Dancing Wu Li Masters, and Stephen Hawking's A BriefHistory ofTime indicates how eagerly the reading public latches on to an explanation of the universe that science assures us that we live in. In addition, the endurance and influence of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its emphasis on the cultural forces that shape the thrust of 'pure' science, illustrates how intent we remain on finding science another linguistic pursuit no less arbitrary and conventionalized than our other cultural games. 12 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 It is one thing to encounter fictional characters who talk about this 'new' universe that has in fact been with us for nearly a century. It is quite another to find them and their occupations embodying the habits of that universe. Charades avoids mere trendiness as it places over its events an imaginative template corresponding to the construct which some of them formulate. Perhaps an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth. It is splendid to find the both of them together. Opening and closing in the mind of Professor Koenig, a sexual glutton on the scale of Scheherazade's sultan, the novel tracks Charade's endless search for her father. Beguiling Koenig both erotically and narratively (a very literal reading of Barthes), the heroine has by the book's end advanced her search a step further. In accompanying her, the reader's imagination has roamed from the Australian Outback to Harvard Square to Toronto at the time of the Zundel trial. Lest the novel, with its frequent couplings, sound like some potboiler that claims significance for what is only shapelessness, let me try to trace the beads along one of its strings. Banish probability and other conventions ofrealism, and free-associate instead. Charade's (earth-) mother Bea has always named Nicholas Truman as the child's father. He in turn ran off from Australia in the company of Verity Ashkenazy, a Holocaust survivor who changed her last name to the emblematic one that it is now. Adopted by a French family who later move...