Fiction 2

318 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 in the fields at Flintcombe-Ash. Kogawa's scene does not have the symbolic resonance of Hardy's, butit has a similar kind of immediacy and power. Finally, Kogawa's prose style deserves comment and high praise.Sheis a marvellous writer and the book is full of truly lyrical passages. The long proem to the book provides a good example of her poetic prose: Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound Ihearis only sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pock marks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground stream. JfI could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would Icome at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply. The richness of Kogawa's language, the evocative quality of her imagery, are equally apparent in, say, the narrator's description of the break up of her family: 'If we were knit into a blanket once, it's become badly moth-eaten with time. We are now no more than a few tangled skeins the remains of what might once have been a fisherman's net. The memories that are left seem barely real. Grey shapes in the water. Fish swimming through gaps in the net. Passing shadows: It is very rare to find prose of this quality in a first novel - indeed, in any novel. 2 I HELEN HOY After the vigorous crop offiction by established writers in 1981, Canadian publishers might justifiably be excused, as they prepare their 1982 lists, for pondering anxiously the biblical prophecy of the seven years of famine which follow the seven years of plenty. From whom, after all, have we not heard in the last year or two? Over one-third of Canada's significant fiction-writers broke the surface of the literary pond in 1981, including such familiar novelists as Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Timothy Findley, Mavis Gallant, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Brian Moore, and Audrey Thomas. The list of major Canadian novelists who published in IgBl, long though it is, is only one indication of an ongoing process of competent fiction-writing in Canada. Rather than producing a single masterpiece (or single dud) and retreating to discouraged silence as formerly, major and minor writers alike, confident of an audience, continue to write. We have now in fact a new tradition of trilOgies, tetralogies, even twelve-volume romans fleuves: witness the linlced novels of BeresfordHowe , Matt Cohen, Davies, Hood, Kroetsch, Laurence, MacLennan, and FICTION 319 Thomas, for instance. Even newcomers in fiction now boldly announce: 'first in a two-volume sequence.' E.M. Forster's strictures on the arbitrariness of endings and the post-modem emphasis on process not product have found an especially congenial home in this country of multiple perspectives, gradualism, and accretion, this country where a constitution, still to be revised and replete with opting-out clauses, is arrived at by a series of final offers and absolute deadlines. From the outpouring of work in 1981 the short-story collections of Hodgins, Thomas, and Gallant and the novels of Davies and Finclley in particular merit serious consideration, while, among the less well-known writers, very promising work comes from Keith Maillard, David Williams, and David Adams Richards. Canadians, of course, continue to ignore the requirements of the market-place and to produce volumes of short stories in abundance. Winnipeg-born Margaret Creal, now a resident of the United States, has followed her first novel with an engaging collection of short stories, The Man Who Sold Prayers (Lester and Orpen Dennys, 198, $13.95). These pieces are clearly in the tradition of the well-made story, but their cleverness, with the ironic twists of plot, is sometimes a little too simple and evident: the ironic nemesis which befalls a selfish husband, the discovery of old secrets in a modem town 'without a past,' the mutual pretence at uninvolvement on the part of two lovers. The clever plots, though, are merely the medium for a compassionate and perceptive portrayal...