Fiction 1

Letters in Canada 1988 It is a pleasure to welcome Gabrielle A. MacDonald (New College, University ofToronto) and Dennis Duffy (English, Toronto) to the Fiction section and Janet M. Paterson (French, Toronto) to the Romans section of 'Letters in Canada.' This issue also marks Len Doucette's final appearance as Associate Editor of UTQ, a position he has held since 1984. Beginning with the Winter issue, David Clandfield (French, Toronto) will assume the responsibilities of Associate Editor. Although Len Doucette has had editorial responsibility for 'literature other than English,' it is appropriate that his editorial advice, tact, and sound common sense be acknowledged in an issue of 'Letters in Canada.' He has had the major responsibility for looking after LIC, and that it continues to serve an important function across the country is in great part owing to his efforts. (THA) Fiction 1/ GABRIELLE A. MAC DONALD Janice Kulyk Keefer's Constellations (Random House, 270, $21.95) is a first novel from an author whose command of language and insight into Canadian Maritime culture have earlier been impressively demonstrated in her collections of poetry, short stories, and a critical study of Maritime fiction. Constellations is a novel structured with fine and consistent economy, the patterning of characters tightly interconnected from the outset and becoming increasingly taut as the plot moves towards its explosive conclusion. One of Keefer's outstanding accomplishments is to present the familiar themes of rural east-coast literature - poverty, isolation, the alienation of the artist - reconstructing them in an unmistakable time present, in settings which bring ostensibly 'regional' dilemmas into direct parallel with their urban counterparts in Halifax, Montreal, London, Paris, and Warsaw. Coastal Nova Scotia, Keefer implies, has its own unlovely inheritance of social and economic ills, but at the same time has no historical monopoly on poverty, forced emigration, failed dreams, and fractured communities. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 1, FALL 1989 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 The narrative begins with the voice of Claire Saulnier, professional pianist manquee and music instructor at the tiny College Sacre Coeur in Spruce Harbour, Nova Scotia. The constellation of characters moving in and out of Claire's control includes Bertrand France, a resentful temporary lecturer, uprooted from Paris; Hector Wagner, a once and disowned student protege of Claire's, now presiding as janitor ('Dean of Drains') at the college; Halyna Radowska, the young, talented, and calculating oboe virtuoso; and finally Mariette, the adolescent child marked by poverty and human cruelty, both victim and catalyst. But even as these figures are drawn together, Keefer wishes us to understand that the linking of constellations is arbitrary: 'random stars strung together ... making up a picture like a child's dot-to-dot drawing - but of what?' The protagonists endeavour to reach or avoid one another out of urgent needs, needs which nevertheless shift and change like the patterns in the heavens, in some seasons visible, in others dark and inaccessible. For the ironically named Claire, the impairment of vision is a continuing wound, a part of her inner devastation. In her world, attachments between human beings are unreliable and therefore fraudulent. Pain and pride, fused and intense, construe her (to use her own analogue of language) into a creature uttered by her parents, alternately coerced and abandoned by them, a woman now intent on reducing her interior world to a closed and perfect circle of nullity: 'degree zero of independence.' The central characters in the novel are all in some sense displaced persons - exiles. (Even the priests of the college belong t~ 'an obscure teaching order expelled from post-Dreyfus France.') All but Claire seek the desired home place, while in the background lingers the history of the expulsion from Nova Scotia of the Acadian French and the memory of their painful return. The rhythm of outward-bound/homeward-bound persists in the narrative, disrupting and altering the lives of Bertrand, Hector, Halyna, and Mariette, as it has earlier eroded Claire's. For these reluctant exiles, the compulsive return home is a return to the kingdom and condition of the disempowered. But the need for power, for control in the events of a l~fe, also persists. The novel...