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FICTION 353 complex image of Riel, but the treatment of the historical issues remains inadequate. In Pilgrims of Peace (Coach House Press, 39, $2.00 pa.), Bonnie Day is sincere yet artistically unconvincing as a poet of social protest. Michael Harris and Michael Freedman share one chapbook, the former contributing Poems from Ritual, the latter, Through the Telemeter . Both are exploratory, catching the occasional hard, clear image, but failing to write anything that comes olI as a whole. David McFadden's The Salad Maker (Imago 9, Montreal, 36, $0.60 pa.) mixes anecdote and aphorism and is somewhat too slap-dash, while in Sparrows (Weed/ Flower Press, 30) Nelson Ball continues to create poetry which explores patterns of stress and release, physical and m~ntal. The New Brunswick Chapbook Series ( University of New Brunswick), edited by Nancy Bauer, has provided collections of four maritime poets: Robert Gibbs, in The Road from Here, writes of east coast scenes and characters with sharp but alIectionate observation; Robert Cockburn, in Friday Night, Fredericton, shows an understanding of ballad material in his treatment of soldiers, fishermen, and legendary figures of New Brunswick; William Bauer's exploration of the past and present in Cornet Music for Plupy Shute is marred by a vein of fantasy which lacks direction; and Kent Thompson, in Hard Explmurtions, casts an amused eye on the commonplaces of experience and writes of them with vigour but a too perfunctory sense of form. (HUCH MACCALLUM) FICTION A 1968 Governor-Genera!'s Award went to Mordecai Richler for his two books, Cocksure, a "novel," and Hunting Tigers under Glass, a collection of essays and reports first published in London or New York periodicals. A lean year for Canadian fiction in English? No, for the judges might well have chosen anyone of six other books: Brian Moore's I Am Mary Dunne; John Reid's Horses with Blindfolds; Ernest Buckler's Ox Bells and Fireflies; Jack Ludwig's Above Ground; Malcolm Lowry's unfinished Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend is Laid; or Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown. Of these seven fictions, Cocksure (McClelland & Stewart, 250, $5.95) is the most Mod. It is the story of Mortimer, a WASP from Caribou, Ontario (although partly educated at Upper Canada College), who in his early thirties has established himself as an editor in an old, humanitarian publishing house in London. Richler has created his central character to mortify him, slowly page by page, and totally at the end. 354 LEITERS IN CANADA Mortimer is corroded from within by his sense of WASPishness in general, and in particular by his growing sense of sexual insufficiency and the accusation that he is a Jew. From without he is closed in on by wife, friends, employers, and by the God who is unmaking this world, the sinister Star-Maker. Cocksure is a blow-up from the first paragraph. It is meant to rough up the reader by horror comic-book atmosphere, laconic prose, and sadistic destructiveness. Often it is wildly funny; much of the bumour is black, or just dirty. Wbat is blackest, however, is not the graffiti, but the Mad-Superman force of Star-Maker. Cocksure began as a short piece, and seems to have been extruded to 250 pages by enclOSing Mortimer in this StarĀ·Maker action; unfortunately its effectiveness Hags towards the end. Many admirers of Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) believe him when he says that he tbinks of bimself as a novelist. After these last ten years of journalism, film and T.V. writing, The Incomparable Atuk, and now Cocksure, some of his admirers hope he will get on with being a novelist. In Cocksure, Richler assaults his reader; in I Am Mary Dunne (McClelland & Stewart, 217, $4.95 US) Brian Moore works much more subtly. (Perhaps Moore should no longer be regarded as a Canadian writer, but most of ti,e characters in this new book are Canadians.) All the fictional elements in this 1968 Portrait of a Lady are fused to involve us in the painfully expanding consciousnes of a woman as she moves through one day of inner crisis in her early thirties. Her past is very...

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