Fiction 1

Letters in Canada 1983 Fiction 1 I DOUGLAS HILL To read through the 1983 fiction from new writers is to be teased with anticipation and disappointed by reality. There are a couple of rewards, to be sure, and a few mild surprises, but on the whole not much to cheer about. Quantity has declined with quality: there are barely a dozen novels all told, no more than a handful of story collections. One hopes the scarcity of new fiction is connected only to some sort of periodic slump and not to the start of a wholesale turning away from, or giving up on, modes of prose narrative. Publishers ritually lament that serious fiction doesn't pay the bills; perhaps writers are beginning to mind the music. Short stories, to begin. Much of the year's meagre display is like fast food. The books are bland and digestible - in an emergency they will satisfy a hunger- but they're pretty thin fare; they leave behind neither a lasting impression of nourishment nor an urge to repeat the experience. The work in Coming Attractions, edited by David Helwig and Sandra Martin (Oberon, 138, $21.95, $11.95 paper) is typical. Each of the three authors presented here (Sharon Butala, Bonnie Burnard, Sharon Sparling ) writes clearly and compactly; only Sparling, however, gets beyond competence, beyond contrived staging and forced effects, to approach a distinct personal voice. Similarly Night Games, by Robert Currie (Coteau, 120, $15.00, $7.00 paper), and A First Class Funeral, by Sonia Birch-Jones (Oolichan, 158, $16.95, $8·95 paper), fail to extend the boundaries of the genre. Currie's book has two parts: fust, clean naturalistic stories of 1950S adolescence in Moose Jaw, full of pranks, dirty jokes, drinking, and sex; then more analytical but less personable stories that look at a few of the same characters in maturity nearly three decades later. Currie can handle his textures well, and doesn't do badly with the subtleties of youthful friendship, but the book as a whole is too predictable to carry much interest. Birch-Jones runs into this difficulty, too: her tales of Jewish childhood in South Wales, circa 1930, have the appeal of an unfamiliar milieu and a somewhat exotic family, but their subjects are conventional and the treatment undistinguished as well as uneven. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4, AUGUST 1984 316 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 Philip Kreiner's People Like Us in a Place Like This (Oberon, 133, $21.95, $11.95 paper) is better. The four stories in the collection are set along the Hudson Bay coast and describe various states (Inuit, Indian, white) of sub-Arctic consciousness. Kreiner looks on his village of Little Whale River as 'not so much a geographical location as ... a location of the spirit'; his lengthy title-piece, a 'story of extremes: examines the interplay of environment, race, and character in the unreal isolation of the North. Though the dual narrative of another long story, 'Messiah: seems artificially imposed and rather overblown, elsewhere Kreiner achieves a consistently flattened, matter-of-fact style, with touches of attractively morose humour. Chameleon & Other Stories, by Bill Schermbrucker (Talonbooks, 154, $7.95), is the year's most ambitious work in short fiction and at the same time the most substantial. The eight stories, setin Kenya during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s (through the period of Mau Mau terrorism and the country's struggle for independence), balance the narrator's sharp memories of the past against his compulsion in the present moment (he has emigrated to Canada and Jives in Vancouver) to explore the meaning of those memories. Like Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family in 1982 (and the comparison is not unfair to either writer), Chameleon is a search for the truth of heritage and beginnings. Schermbrucker has a gift for illuminating image: the central metaphor of the chameleon ('whose eyes can look in different directions and move at different speeds from one another') reflects his narrator's predicament, the pull of the disparate cultures that he must try to integrate. Chameleon's prose is tight, with a controlled profusion of sensory description. There is much that can...