Established Fiction

A year’s worth of Canadian fiction is an arbitrary sample, but it can offer us some sense of how the national canon is changing and has changed. If Frygean garrisons and Atwoodian victim positions long ago dropped out of the cultural conversation, are there terms that should replace them? Built into such generalizations about a nation’s literature are anxieties as to whether it has “typical” characteristics that can be discovered, and whether these are in any way unique. The best answers don’t focus on single traits, shared among many cultures, but on the reasons those traits are selected and clustered and on the changing values assigned them over time. It is from the associations and (re)formations of these building blocks that we construct a body of literature.

The continuing internationalization of Canadian fiction is what is immediately evident from the books in this year’s sample. About half these works were written by authors who weren’t born in Canada or by authors who no longer live here. A quarter of this fiction is not set in Canada. Only two of the ten books on the 2012 Governor General’s and Giller short lists have entirely Canadian settings (Russell Wangersky’s short story collection Whirl Away and Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride, and the latter is about immigration and émigrés). All three of the novels nominated for the Governor General’s Award – Robert Hough’s Dr. Brinkley’s Tower, Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager, and Linda Spalding’s The Purchase (which won) – are set elsewhere, as are about half of the stories in the two nominated short story collections, Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13 and Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories. The Giller Prize winner, Will Ferguson’s 419 (about 50% of the plot takes place outside Canada) was joined on the short list by Alix Ohlin’s Inside (the publisher’s blurb promises us that we will “follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda”) and Kim Thúy’s Ru (a French-Canadian novel in translation that tells of “a life-changing voyage from a childhood in strife-filled postwar Vietnam to a new beginning in 1970s Quebec”). Indeed, even the novel that won this year’s Amazon.ca First Novel Award, Anakana Schofield’s Malarky, is Irish in every way but the current residence of its author. Obviously this geographical range of settings and the audience’s acceptance of writers who come from or go abroad is not just evidence of the global mobility of our time but of the increasing inclusivity of Canada and Canadians. The cultural nationalists who, a generation ago, would have been troubled by these numbers are no longer heard from. There is a new confidence on the part of Canadian writers to take their readers where they please, and a new willingness among Canadian readers to go there.

There are commercial concerns at play as well. What the narrator remarked forty years ago in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing – that what Canadian publishers “like best is something they hope will interest the English and American publishers too” – is more relevant than ever in an increasingly global marketplace.

All this border crossing affects not only who is writing or where the stories are set but also the subjects chosen. The settler, who once had a special place in Canadian writing, has given way to the voyager. While the journey is a very old narrative device, our contemporary tales are about individuals who could neither stay where they began nor find rest where they arrive. These are not happy wanderers but displaced persons who move through worlds in which space and time are also adrift – and they risk being reduced from immigrants or refugees to passersby. Their antecedents are not the adventurer or the picaro; instead they most often recall Candide and the way he experienced the “inquietude and alarm which every little thing inspires in a new country.”

1

Rawi Hage’s Carnival speaks deeply to the “perpetual transitions,” the “fluctuations between liberty...