Fiction 2

26 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 2 IT. L. CRAIG The twenty-five new works this year by established writers show by and large solid extensions of established reputations. While there are no real surprises or outstanding innovations, still there are clear developments and up-to-date revisions, reflective of the eclectic concerns and styles previously laid down. This eclecticism makes groupings of this material difficult this year, except for five books premised on murders; the twentyfive are arranged instead in order of decreasing interest, not quality alone. And there is a great deal of interest here. The Walled Garden (Black Moss, 110, $14.95) is not undergraduate reading material. Although fairly short, Michael Dean's new novel is a teasingly challenging read, unabashedly postmodern and consciously dense with artistic allusion. Very soberly and with insistent dignity, the art criticI narrator describes a crisis in his marriage to an artist. The crisis turns out to be two entangled crises of individuation, with love being sacrificed in between. The simple plot, however, bears the enormous weight of the artistic symbolism these two characters employ ubiquitously as the basis of their language, and indeed of their thoughts. This heavily laden train of metaphor is constantly being explicated, as its atavistic elements are recovered and renewed to form the garden of humanity's desires now and forever. Intimately investigative of signs, the text is a slow-moving story of their interpretations, and of their controlling power over the potential of thought (and thereby action). The text and the narrator move self-reflexively over difficult terrain surfaced with powerful tropes that require exact explication if desire (the perfect garden) is to be realized. With a mock scholarship whose irony often negates itself by mocking its own mockery, the novel progresses through the dense undergrowth of an aesthetic of symbolism, focused on medieval and Renaissance painting. (Is this novel an ironic Canadian version of Eco's The Name of the Rose?) With this novel I have undertaken the task of replacing the central metaphor in a piece of continuous prose, and of finding a new image that will bind the elements together in a centripetal configuration around it. The end of my marriage is the event I am using to illustrate this process. Is there a story beneath the process, or is symbolism really the meaning and narrative merely the carrier wave? In this the most artistically selfconscious novel of 1993, Dean raises the issues of postmodern art in a most postmodem manner, and lets his art itself suggest what answers it can. A unique work in Canadian fiction, The Walled Garden represents the avant-garde more than most of the works considered here, despite its inevitable elitism. Ostentatiously postmodern in its writerly introspections, Graeme FICTION 27 Gentleman the various tIcltlOltlal ....n~l,..::\,....rD'I"C> these characters v ..... "".....'....... achieved in the With such an eCllectllc modernism has nowhere to understand and at least on an - that some C';OY'on"it'U 1112:atlOn' - is an absolute re14~ct]lon and is articulated on the one hand by the eerie and on the other idiotic the American television but articulated on hold as the cry claims attention. The one constant in the turmoil of the life is the whose with pn)mpt€~ct the narrator's Ollto14Dglcal Oe"pel110Ien<:e on wit apl10nsms h ....."' ... "'I. as he reads the of his life and rewrites .... "'i~• .n'..""'" that can the final resolution. In that sense the HnJLUV,rLJ the narrator's of his I-h,..,....... ""I-" to him. It is a line of 28 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 Gentleman Death is a successful novel by its own standards, although more for the genuine and careful detail of the stories than for the conclusion, where the text solves its own questions comfortably, leaving the narrator born again out of the detritus of a world caving in upon its own frivolities and tragedies. Gibson's incorporation of English diction and even symbolism estranges the text to some degree. One character eats apples 'which she'd vigorously polish high on the inside of her thigh, as the bowler does with a cricket ball.' Gibson makes a clear attack on Free Trade as a sell-out of Canada, administered by greedy capitalists and accepted by mindless consumers: this is the peculiar Canadian face of modernity, the yard sale after one thought everything (and everyone) had been sold. One would like to see such statements made in the Canadian idiom: one would like to think Canada is more than the cry of the wolf in darkness. At 546 pages, The Robber Bride (McClelland and Stewart, $28.99) would be an interminable read were it not for the interest Margaret Atwood packs into almost every page, making each one a delight to read, as well as a further lure into the depths of her topic. This topic is personified by the title character, Zenia. Everybody knows a male or female Zenia to some extent - a predatory opportunist who lies and steals his or her way through life at the expense of victims who have yet to learn this lesson. Zenia is an extreme: evil without theology, beauty without morality, drama without heart, exploitation without responsibility. Alwood presents her as simultaneously attractive and repulsive - as every woman's dream and every woman's nightmare. Her three victims cluster together as a conglomerate contemporary woman: the insular academic, the even more insular (she lives on Toronto Island) leftover hippie, and the aggressive businesswoman. Each of these three decent individuals is developed with care and respect by the author, whereas Zenia, with many of her lies exposed, remains a sinister mystery at the end. The academic character is a military historian, whose study of men's battles parallels the conflicts between these three women and the archetypally duplicitous Zenia. The world of female wars - with some sort of love as the ideal conquest - is explored with the same intensity that history's wars have been, demonstrating a pan-gender levelling of the playing fields that are supposed to serve as the training grounds for wars. At one point the businesswoman asks, 'Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of woman? A mother knows.' However, this is not just a debunking of the peaceful woman myth: this is a levelling, not a one-sided, sexist inquisition, and as such it continues the levelling, and indeed widens the scope of it, that Atwood has demonstrated throughout her canon, in illustrating women's issues with a stark and often fierce realism. Readers familiar with Atwood's style will find it as sharp and lively as ever in its vital characterization of these four women. Many of the devices FICITON 29 that 11ave worked for her so well before are worked hard here again, such as the symbolism-laden food and associated eating habits, and the equally symbolic dream narratives. Yet this characterization has a sincerity and even a moral foundation that is new in its forward stance. Abstract certainties implicitly support the conglomerate attitude shared by the trio of victims in the end, giving the conclusion more than a sense of shared subjective optimism, and pressing upon it a conscious objective didacticism . A failing bipolar perspective, also associated with the history professor, is a holdover from Atwood's earlier work, and here is recognized as present but dwindling in importance before the moral outrage of the victims. This is a fun novel to read, with Atwood's gift for comic sketches boldly expressed; but it is also a novel about adultery and greed and lying and child abuse, and about the tragic emotional consequences of all of these. It is a novel about the wages of sin" It is about life as a woman when the glue that has held society together is melting, and when behaviour like Zenia's seems to be becoming the norm. Equally, the novel is innovative in its depiction of conflict between women, often over men. It is a new book with new ideas, and it is certain to be recognized for their provocative nature. David Adams Richards's For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (McClelland and Stewart, 229, $18.99) will strengthen his reputation as a writer of powerful fiction within contexts devoid of any exaggerations of plot or character. Jerry Bines, the violent grave-robber who haunted Road to the Stilt House, is the central character in this novel, which, like Richards's six others, is set on the Miramichi River. However, this is a reformed Bines, one more like Joe Walsh in Nights below Station Street. This is a character determined to do right by everyone, and he pursues his own moral path stubbornly and quietly into tangles of human tragedy that finally sweep him away. The novel derives its strength not from the sporadic, perky vitality that has brigh~ened much of Richards's earlier characterization, but from the quieter yet steady perseverance of the semiarticulate Bines. No fool-saint, Bines yet demonstrates the destruction of innocence and naIvete in his well-meant efforts to help those who have meant something to him. Richards's background is bleaker than ever in its wintry complement to a plot which inexorably grinds away at its characters. The conclusion leaves the meaning expiring in violence on a kitchen floor, with the biblical symbolism reversed to leave Christian sacrifice as a devalued offering in a shallow world of opportunism and ideologies divorced from reality. Richards has honed his already sharp criticism of university-educated people who have lost human feelings, in comparison with a Bines who feels and acts without ideological excuses. This is best seen when Bines kisses a woman who is writing his biography to validate her own theories of male pathologies: '''It was the most 30 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 brutal thing I've ever experienced," Vera later said. liThe least appreciative of the true nature of affection between a caring man and woman./I But she felt she had to say this, and it was what others would expect her to say.' Bines has kissed her because he cares for her, while she, who wishes to articulate the failure of caring in her book, can only verbalize what she cannot feel. In her success as a writer lies Richards's criticism of a sodety where indifference and endless theorizing have displaced true, selfless caring and the possibility of meaningful action driven by such care. Richards has denied with vigour that this novel has anything to do with Alan Legere: to think that would be to miss the entire interplay of values beneath Bines's ex-criminal character, as well as the quality of Bines's determination to act with meaning and integrity. The ironic reversal of failure and success which winds up this novel is a profound dismissal of the hypocrisies of modern life, of life in which doing good leaves one vulnerable to the predations of others unencumbered by honest feelings or morals. Those who have in the past seen Richards's fiction as harshly pessimistic may have trouble respecting the highly qualified brightness of Bines's reformed character, and recognizing the essential positivism in Richards's own respect for such a life. Bines's story is framed by its retelling to a boy who, in his own innocence, is attracted to Bines. The intrusion of the narrator's adult voice, full of cynicism and aware of the instability of any telling, is lyrically violent, falling across the book heavily in its insistence on devaluations. TIlis narrative thrust pulls readers away from Bines's feelings and actions, and emphasizes the need for them to make a choice of empathetic direction . In its willingness to admit alternatives, the voice also accepts the complexities of life and the difficulties of articulating it with any confidence . -The voice shares Bines's own confusions, and in its telling imitates Bines's actions. This device aside, the style of the novel will be familiar to Richards's readers, with somewhat less reliance on multi-level cliches and on character portraits, but with the expected vigorous focusing on the vital, the incongruous, and the valuable. 'There is something in the attic.' This is the oft-repeated kernel around which Carol Malyon's novel If I Knew I'd Tell You (Mercury, 144, $14.50) is built. Malyon uses this symbol of urban wildlife denning in the extremities of houses to correlate with the theme she dramatizes so well. Her protagonist (a would-be writer) is working at surviving 'her husband 's death and the alienation of her daughter, but seems unaware of the extent and detail of the psychological damage caused by both events, and because of this unawareness she is unable to attend consciously and decisively to the much-needed work of self-repair. Alienation is so complete between all the characters that self-repair and no repair at all are her only options. Her putative writing is an exercise in exorcism, and while it offers her the chance to manipulate vicariously her own demons FICTION 31 into more meaningful patterns, it offers the reader the subtextual reading of her anxieties and 'blocks.' Limited venues and characters give a minimalist appearance to the two settings she inhabits, thereby forcing the focus upon her grief and her inarticulate passivity in the face of it. As she rewrites the lives of four other characters towards some kind of possibly happy future, she slowly moves herself towards an open ending that has at least brought some of the characters together, like squirrels huddling against the COIning winter. Malyon provides no clear resolutions , but the psychological bleakness of alienation is explored with admirable care and sensitivity. Malyon divides her narrative into sixty-seven mini-chapters over the 144 pages, each one tied to one or more of the main characters, and each soberly controlled in the third person limited. The overwhelming effect of alienation between characters is accentuated by this consciously fragmented organization. The novel is presented piecemeal, as a puzzle for the reader, the pieces each carrying their own cues for their own tentative connections. This process works well and stays very focused: the edges of the focus, what might be expected in the peripheral vision when such minimalist, concentrated characters predominate, constitute my only criticism. These characters are so dominated by obsessions, which are in these cases camouflaged avoidance mechanisms, that there is nothing in their lives except avoidance. The main character is supposed to be carrying on a successful work-life, and going to parties and visiting friends: the contrast with the dumb grief that otherwise defines her life is noticeable . Her character suffers from this discrepancy, as do the others less significantly. Outweighing this is the measured prose that dolefully rings the changes of their lives. A poetic parallelism of phrasing is common in this prose, contributing to the steady craftsmanship that makes this a very worthwhile novel. In Je eaime Cowboy (Goose Lane, 200, $14.95), T.G. Rigelhof maintains a high level of energy to match what must be a genuine interest in people. He builds characters up in lush layers of detail that then support them in the vicissitudes of plot. He includes the reader in this layering process, sharing and renovating expectations gleefully in what are truly enjoyable narratives. The fact that most are tragic stories, involving violence and betrayals of loved ones, is almost taken for granted as a subtext, almost obscured by the density of characterization. But these themes of deception and violence are merged with Rigelhof's spirited style in a persuasively inevitable manner that is the mark of a careful and talented writer. These stories bulge at the seams, in directions that constantly surprise, as the plots edge away from conventional expectations and, in fact, frequently play mischievously with readers' expectations. However, these deliberate detours are made into the depths of character, and do not affect the mutually supportive union of form and content: rather they emphasize 32 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 the union by building up interest in the variety of personalities Rigelhof presents. These are very contemporary stories, belonging to very real places, such as Montreal and Edmunston, and the realism of the backgrounds so convincingly resurrected on the page forces the struggling characters into focus, both for themselves and for the reader. The characters dress in background clothing and listen to background music, and it is a struggle to foreground one's own identity. Rigelhof decorates each protagonist with a flurry of contemporary cues that they wear like uniforms: this makes them bright, streetwise, and 'with it,' but is never the central attraction. Their almost subconscious resistance to the current moulds is what the author brings out with a cynically informed but essentially compassionate tenderness. This resistance of the individual is played out against the acts of violence that constitute life and social behaviour in Rigelhof's fiction. Such acts, physical and emotional, Rigelhof presents as grounded in the human psyche overloaded with Iniscellaneous jealousies and other vices, but it is the counterbalance, a vague, altruistic sense of ethics, that underlies the positive resistance he celebrates. His stories stretch with a taut, humming equilibrium between these poles. Reading these nine short stories is like watching a tightrope act: one's respect for the achievement is tempered by the potential for horror. A sequel to Black Blood and Under the Bridge, F.G. Pad's Sex and Character (Oberon, 196, $15.95) plugs on with the story of Mark Trecroci, son of Italian 'Dee Pee' parents settled in Sault Ste Marie, now a university student in Toronto in the last three years of the 19608. The novel follows Mark's struggles between the poJes of sexuality and intellectuality, as he moves towards becoming a writer. The background is turbulent - the Rochdale experiment, drugs, sexual liberation, and draft dodgers, set against the timeless pursuit of wisdom at the University of Toronto and the achievements of scholars such as McLuhan and Frye. Characterization is basically a contrast between the studious and naive Mark and a hedonist dropout who crashes spectacularly in a symbol-ridden conclusion that seems to leave Mark the winner of their tug-of-war. Margaret Laurence has a walk-on part, encouraging Mark to persevere as a writer, and he labours desperately to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. His summer jobs in the Algoma steel plant provide the reader with some relief from his putative attempts at self-realization and writing. Sex and Character is a very simple book, unremarkable as much for its ideas as its style. It is a pedestrian translation of Stephen Hero, with the poetry left behind, and with no attempts at saying anything new. Some extraordinarily simple dialogue dulls the novel's edges even more. For .example, a supposedly bright Marxist-Leninist student is given these FICTION 33 can be retried in new ways. VU-I,.f.,,-(;;:) Vittorio is an ......A'-..............O';'.I.1 .. It apIJeareCl then before we'd be back more or less bound some twisted that that made sure there could be no new arg;ulllents among us, no new solutions. Ricci demonstrates his direction his n1"~~""u,::,o 34 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 vague abstracts and difficultrelationships, and with a firm determination remaining reductive, 'nothing taken for granted but the brute random fact of existence.' With such an achievement, it is tempting to forgive Ricci the breach of unity that skews most of the last forty-seven pages as they move from a Southern Ontario Italian farming community to Nigeria. Why Ricci would shove this thirty-four page intrusion into the novel, so successful and unified until then, is hard to understand. It is, of course, a strong autobiographical element transplanted from Ricci's own life into Vittorio 's, but it is also the weakest writing in the novel. To condemn it as causing disunity would be to condemn life itself for lacking unity: yet aesthetically this element drags the novel down and away from its established unities, and thus away from the success of Lives of the Saints. Not just an immigrant novel, In a Glass House nevertheless explores with careful insights the Italian immigrant experience, concentrating on the psychological aftershocks of trans-cultural upheaval, following their effects into the second generation. It may be a novel with a flawed conclusion , but it is still extraordinarily good writing, and a work that cannot be read without engaging the reader in thought about those aspects of relationships that we most avoid facing. Eleven more of Mavis Gallant's short stories are presented in Across the Bridge (McClelland and Stewart, 198, $23.99), some set in Montreal and the rest in Paris. Most are highly focused stories, dioramas of depleted lives within decayed societies. They operate as self-contained, waste-free' mechanisms which, like clockwork, contain wheels within wheels that reveal themselves as one reads deeper into each. The common theme is marriage: its blunt necessities and its heavy institutional responsibilities are shown pressing down upon innocence and freedom. Concentrating on the critical junction where two people court, become engaged, and settle into a marital and parental routine, these stories witness the draining of vitality and spontaneity. Passion and anything but a formal rhetorical love are suppressed into drab tangles of quiet desperation. Gallant pursues every squeak of vitality into every corner of her characters' lives, especially elaborating the betrayal of innocent children into marriages by parents who know of nothing else to do. The converse of her theme, that young adults would be happier without any relationships at all, living out their lives in fantasies instead, seems forced upon characters by the brutal realities of life in general, brought to the surface by marriage in particular. The doleful celibacy that permeates Gallant's characters' lives ,seems preferable to the righteous yet petty miseries that attach to married life. In the title story, Old World romance, delineated in affectionate detail, contrasts with the material demands of the present, the romance element hanging over the characters like a not-quite-lethal weight. These FICTION 35 characters unconsciously cluster around the protection of a delicate ftnde -siecle smugness and fend off all aspects of the modern world, for they lack the strength to face it, and, Gallant implies, it is not worth facing anyway. Her style shows an almost fierce determination to hollow out characters, leaving them shells made of unachievable dreams. A disturbing collection, Across the Bridge is nevertheless as dated as its characters are. The thirteen stories in Bill Schermbrucker's Motortherapy and Other Stories (Talonbooks, 167, $15.95) are attractively wrapped in a colourful old Austin A40 advertisement, with an engine cross-section and four drawings of parts, that helps give it an air of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But these stories are not that easy to pin down. There is that air of mechanical competence transferred to life in general, and a vehicular symbolism is littered about the book like an auto graveyard. There is also that peculiar estrangement of white Africans resettled in perpetual exile in colder climes. There is a bildungsroman framework as well, starting from a young man's first trip on his own, from Kenya to Johannesburg, to a multi-divorced, middle-aged man trying to fix his windshield wipers in British Columbia: the continuity of all of these motifs provides the stories with a solid unity that few such collections display. The attractions of this book run much deeper than its covers. A congenial, breezy tone just seems to let narrative unfold on its own, and the stories resist conventional analysis in their easy-going, stumblingforward manner. Even the clunky symbols that parallel themes seem such obvious ones, almost apologetically included, that it is difficult to see the craftsmanship that certainly has determined their presentation. With its considerable power camouflaged in the body of an old Austin, Schermbrucker 's style is casually effective. He avoids detailing anything except the mechanical parts of cars and human relationships: when these expire or rupture, he fixes them with what he has on hand, manufacturing his own tools if that is what it takes. Watching Schermbrucker do this thirteen times is well worth while. With its air of not really trying, Motortherapy is one of the best works of fiction of 1993. The density and complexity of Bill Gaston's North of Jesus' Beans (Cormorant , 192, $13.95) is a contrast with Schermbrucker's simplicity of style. Gaston's dozen short stories are vaguely West Coast in setting and aggressively postmodern in design. While each stands independently, together they cover most of the bases of contemporary writing. Each builds upon what is already an unusual situation, pushing it into areas where forced and difficult considerations of options lead to a wall of very hard realism. Gaston heats up characters in these fictional crucibles, stresstesting them, distilling epiphanies of appalled awareness when the heat becomes unbearable and when options condense into single irrepressible 36 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 truths. The basic plots arise out of characters' strenuous efforts to understand themselves and their relationships with others, and by their struggles to creatively articulate their predicaments. Gaston's lighthanded narrator lets the characters shed their own layers of seIfdeception , as he takes them up against the facts of their own existence, the facts that constitute how others define their personalities. How people deal with fear of being placed lower in the pecking order than where they think they belong is one frequent motif; the nature of art, and the point of writing in particular, is another. The stories isolate painful areas of psychic weakness, and rub deeper into the wounds until some truth is told. These fictions are lively and intriguing: their intricacies of form lead one beguilingly into deeper thought as each progresses, pushing the reader beyond the envelopes that the ideas are supposed to be inside. Gaston expertly cuts away this self-containment with challenging stories that seduce the reader out of any comfort-zone and into circumstances that multiply layers of complexity upon situations and characters that at first appeared fairly simple. In their eclecticism these stories demonstrate Gaston's complete competence with this genre, and with the tenets and forms of postmodernism. The ten stories in Dianne Warren's Bad Luck Dog (Coteau, 177, $14.95) are not at all complex, each winding twinned strands of plot and symbol together lightly but effectively. With a deft colloquial touch, Warren sketches out characters in what one would be tempted to call hopeless situations, if Warren herself had not pre-empted and highlighted the word. A vaguely western setting does not disturb the essential placelessness of the characters or the stories. While there is more to the book than disturbed youth, caught in a world of tired and indifferent older people, that is the theme that is most memorable, in a book one is not likely to forget. Fire by night is her main metaphor, impressed into the stories with clever staging. The world is burning under her characters' feet as they try to catch their balance. These stories work extremely well. They are simple modern, without the bells and whistles but with unsettling strength and directness. There is no more room in them for humour than there is room for the characters to move around. The pain of animals in traps permeates a tone of frantic desperation, vividly reinforced by Richard Gorenko's painting Big Dipper, Garbage Truck and Dog, reprodueed on the jacket, and in gems of understated symbolism: She was frantic, but when he finally came they went to a movie and then they went back to her place and made love. Mrs. Derkson pounded on the floor above them and Joel frightened Stevie, first with his anger and then with his intensity. He bit her on the shoulder and left a small bruise that lasted for days. FICTION 37 She looked at the bruise often in the mirror, what it meant and where it had come from. She the bruise inside of in a small dark its way out. .;,.~n:,l.1iint'l' tension characters and exhibited in what is a fine is "tAEn·t~:li"t:\ and the Protestant-Catholic historical detail novel with a "'••I.....:::i-'.:lft·h""l tOtInCLat1 the value of a (]1('nfl,tolmr;IUS vision. assassination in a Lake Ontario across the lake. Class to now and then the media statistics to show Inurders and acts of VlCHel1ce 38 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 a superfluous murder, in this case plugged into a Toronto-set novel that is essentially a character portrait of one hedonistic yuppie who crashes his life. Harrow Winncup, a golden boy at Upper Canada College, fritters away his life with drugs as the sycophantic narrator dissipates his in alcohol. The failure of promise, the potential bleeding away into the_ gutter yet subsidized by old money, is the tragedy Harrow enacts and his friend reflects. It is a sad story, with lonely, alienated individuals struggling with artificial aids to achieve brief pretences of life and meaning, and losing touch with what few real comforts and values do lie beneath their barren lives. The bright, frantic party scenes are contrasted with scenes of rank despair and self-pity, giving the novel an up-anddown movement that presents the two characters' lives with apt parallelism . There is a vague blaming of the previous generation for the two men's malaise, but while some importance is attached to this it is not developed in sufficient depth. An Affair with the Moon is an awkward novel of contemporary male angst, a slow-moving depiction of a despoiled yuppie fantasy against a background of corrupt privilege. It is the great Gatsby's arcadian adventurer with Upper Canada's diluted plutocracy. It is not a novel that explores anything new, nor does it seem aware that that is what great novels do. Lesley Choyce's new novel, The Ecstasy Conspiracy (NuAge, 182, $13.95), has a bizarre murder-mystery plot which seems to be continually extended to provide a playground for the puerile attempts at angst by a character, Richard De Mille, whose career as a Halifax professor of English literature (at 'Chebucto U,') depends on his production of a novel with the same title - the novel that is his life. However, the preposterous complications of storyline really serve to carry a dialogue (within De Mille's mind) between his new Canadian identity and his New Jersey youth. His love affair with a personified American Dream that collapsed into right-wing rigor mortis pushed him north to Nova Scotia: much of the novel is powered by his before-and-after reflections about the impact of this move upon his identity. While in the end he plumps for Nova Scotia's idyllic peace (Chebucto V.'s eccentricities notwithstanding), the psychodrama that passes for thought here hardly explains a process or a character. Unable to extract meaning from his life experiences, for which everyone else is to blame, the shallow De Mille (who is related to every other De Mille) spends a great deal of time wallowing in a confusion generously shared with the reader. Choyce has bestowed upon De Mille layers of pseudo-intellectual activity, but they add up to very little in a character whose knee-jerk reactions to history supplant the possibilities of ongoing ideological response and fruitful introspection, and leave him reduced to a contented lump sharing a warm bed. To say that Choyce's prose lacks discipline and sense would be missing PIcrrON 39 the point that his main character and the circumstances that produced hhn do as well. So is the De Mille who crawls into bed in the end just a friendly version of a Beckett character, updated in contemporary idiom? De Mille tries hard, and seems to feel he has succeeded in escaping the ghosts of his American past and in finding a bucolic happiness in Atlantic Canada. It is a lacklustre conclusion, however, one that avoids the problems the novel has raised. In fact, the novel is an exercise in avoiding the complications of an initial act of avoidance. The genuine stylistic gifts that have marked much of Choyce's earlier prose are spread too thin over this ridiculous plot. The book gives the impression of being a hybrid - of demonstrating the manners of 19905 literature but flaunting massmarket appeal as well, in the simple patterns of suspense and erotica. When a novel doesn't have something significant to say, style and vitality alone are not enough. A murder mystery wrapped up in a travelogue, Jacqueline Dumas's The Last Sigh (Fifth House, 248, $14.95) rarely succeeds in raising itself above that level, although it makes a number of efforts. Many of the main characters are Canadians who come together in Granada. Beneath the shadows of Moorish architecture, the Moorish legends of history decorate the Spanish present in 'scenes of carnivalesque vitality. The protagonist is enchanted by both past and present as she investigates her husband's .death and renews her own interest in life. This would be a standard murder mystery were it not for the author's insistence on providing a thick texture of Spanish history and mythology, which she contrasts in pithy phrases with Canada's limited body of legend. The novel hangs together well, although the conclusion contains some clumsy transitions as it rushes the characters into their final places. There are a few very smart passages in The Last Sigh commenting on literature and criticism in Canada. Some of the best lines come from the woman who is unfortunately murdered (a murder which seems superfluous and is never satisfactorily explained), The protagonist herself is a dud, handicapped by an uninteresting mind, and with no style at all: she weighs the novel down. Most of the prose is plain' and weak, and the novel has to depend on the borrowed vitality of the Spaniards for what vitality it shows. There are unconsummated hints of something better throughout what remains a mildly interesting book, but a weak Gothic novel. Out of Love (Cormorant, 211, $14.95) by Roy MacSkimming is a political thriller with a psychodrama inner filling that is neither political nor thrilling. Set largely in Greece in 1974, in a bewildering stew of Greek politics that ranges from militaristic fascism to Machiavellian pseudoMarxism , this novel, with suspense-laden and ponderously oblique movements , follows a Canadian whose search for his missing son takes him back two decades into the love affair, also in Greece, that had produced 40 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 the son. He learns to 'faU' out of love and to develop mature relationships beyond possessive passions, as he recognizes his faults in past, destroyed loves. This post-amour theme is intelligently rendered, but is itself hardly profound. The Greek pro-democracy agitation, following the junta's collapse , is itself a reinforcing lesson to the father that he overlooks, in his concentration on recovering his son and reimposing his fatherhood. And in the background is the Cretan labyrinth as an underground metaphor for his quest. Out of Love is a neatly organized, efficiently presented novel, characterized by MacSldrnming's forthright, lean prose that is curiously basic yet seems to carry comfortably a lot of infonnation. The Plaka-Constitution Square area of Athens is a setting well-depicted in its basics, but not fleshed out; the same can be said of the characters. Devoid of truly dramatic scenes and insights, and following the trail, if not exactly caught in the ruts, of conventional modern treatments of family and love, Out of Love is a lighter novel than it pretends to be, perhaps because it has not taken the time to develop some of its more important points. In his search for his son the protagonist is also searching for himself, and his failure to recognize this is inadequately presented in the confused gropings that conclude the story. Plot overbalances theme, and leaves the novel sadly lop-sided as it ends. Gail Scott's Main Brides against Ochre Pediment and Aztec Sky (Coach House, 230, $16.95) is set in a Montreal Main bar and is closely attached to a writerly woman named Lydia, who has retreated into the bar for the day, away from a corpse glimpsed in the street. And in this bar, populated by a changing cast of eccentrics, Lydia waits for closing time, spiIming fictional lives for the women who corne and go in front of her. She opens and closes these fantasies like a series of short stories, but she herself provides the continuity of a novel, as she imposes upon the unknown characters fragments of her own hard-earned knowledge of life. The novel reads like a trip to the zoo, as the caged/framed colourful characters exhibit their essence - or the essence that Lydia perceives in them; or in herself. However, this book has more than the attractions of human eccentricity. Scott uses these characters to explore her vision of women cultivating freedom, courage, and love, which she sees as three mutually supporting elements. Lydia sketches stories of women tiptoeing through minefields of potential pain, remembering past explosions but finding the strength to soldier on, to pursue the vitality of love in a world littered with the metaphorical corpses of jilted lovers. Scott's style is carefully and wittily crafted to reflect Lydia's tentative constructive efforts, incorporating self-editing as well as self-deception. Often deliberately slow and turgid, with cascades of sentence fragments nudging descriptions gently and exactly into place, the style is ponderous in its gradual movements. Even so, Lydia is a careful builder, showing FICTION 41 painstaking attention to the small, giveaway details of her characters, and to the giveaway process of her controlled characterization. This is an interesting novel which demands a lot from a reader, but in its convincingly tragic vision of contemporary women's lives can be quite rewarding. Although Mark Frutkin has delnonstrated a very considerable talent in earlier work, both in poetry and fiction, In the Time of the Angry Queen (Random House of Canada, 232, $27.00) is a disappointment. It has intriguing ideas as a foundation and a strong allegory for a platform, but the structure is unsound. Chess provides the novel's allegory, but its connection with the protagonist, who is consciously striving to think out that connection, is unclear. Having a living chess game at the Toronto Stock Exchange is a very bright device for Frutkin to bring out his theme about the relationship between art and class, but the flashy denouement is underprepared. The characters are underdone as well, particularly a Mrs Malaprop who crashes the Caribana parade in spectacular fashion. There are a lot of w11at are not so much loose ends as extraneous ones, and dangling participles of dialogue: there are too many passages of plot filler that are only plot filler, that in their two-dimensional function are boring and even sometimes stilted. 111 tlle Time of the Angry Queen has great ideas, and occasionally great lines, but it is a loose and weak novel that probably needs to be twice as long to succeed. Jean-Guy Carrier's The End of War (Oberon, 143, $12.95) will bewilder anyone who has not read his Patriots and Traitors (1992), the first part of a multi-volume historical novel of Quebec. The End of War falters in its tracks when the plot of the first volume is suddenly needed to explain some of its workings. On its own this second volume is a vehemently anti-war novel set in the 1914-18 period, and concentrating on Quebecois reactions to first the war and then conscription. As such the novel explicates many of the tensions contributing to the present political situation between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Carrier dramatizes key incidents in this four-year period, integrating his fictional characters into them, reconstructing how events must have appeared, in their sequence, to people at the time. The narrative thus contains much of interest historically, and Carrier is able to draw out subtly connections to our own time and to contemporary prejudices. The interplay of church and political leaders with Sam Hughes, and the Easter 1918 anti-conscription riots, are the key historical notes, set against the placid peace of pre-war rural Quebec. And in the background of all this lies Carrier's own interest in the psychological impetus for war, and in why so many French Canadians who did not have to go did, in fact, volunteer. Even with so lnuch interesting material, The End of War is a poor novel. Organizationally it is heavily weighted towards one family at the beginning , spending enough time with these characters that they become important on their own; yet the ending throws them away, when historical 42 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 forces take precedence, and hurries them on through the crisis as twodimensional puppets. Literary device and history are not artfully integrated , but instead are increasingly clamped together with awkward suddenness and without explanations in the final third of the book. It is a difficult job to mix these elements well, and Carrier would need a lot more room than he takes to achieve it with the characters and plot he collects here. Ultimately, The End of War is a simple and somewhat awkward novel that moves too fast over events and characters that deserve better. Blueberry Cliffs (Oberon), 70, $11.95) is a novella more experimental in form than most of the works considered here. In this short text David Helwig has three strains of narrative reacting to an invisible fourth. One strain is a child's stories, another, her mother's diary, and the third, a series of letters by the father, a Toronto journalist. These letters form the bulk of the text, and describe a fast-developing relationship with a younger man, the fourth and silent partner. The father seems unaware that these are love letters, as he wraps up his feelings in the aesthetic rituals of his class, conscious that something has stirred within him. His eventual realization brings the one-sided correspondence and the book to sudden closure. Yet while unrequited love hiding inside self-deception is one motif, the way the father entangles his feelings with artistic goals is another. He is as much in love with youth, idealism, and authority as with the young man who personifies them. Equally, he is infatuated with the idea of telling his own life with compelling truth and sensitivity, freeing it of the burden of his wife and daughter's hold upon him. I have thought that if I could relive the hours we spent in the canoe, I might find in them a whole new source of inspiration, and so I pick the bones of each minute, and there is a kind of chill radium glow, but nothing more, and at last that vanishes, and I am left myself, the clever, hard-working parson's son with the secret moods that can be told to no-one. Once I was able to tell some part of this to Janet, and on the strength of those conversations we married. Welt it's what men and women do, and no doubt it always makes its way toward silence. What this character desires is everything he once admired, but which the nature of his upper-class, son-of-the-rnanse, establishment life has suppressed. He is a hack writer who has intimations of what real writing is, and some idea that a real life must underlie it. In his painful unravelling of himself and the forces that made him, this character becomes a very strong and fascinating one, as he pushes towards honesty. The other two strains are easily recognized for their contrapuntal effects alongside the letter, but their contributions are not very helpful, although the diary entries do force a tone of choking desperation into the spaces between the self-indulgent letters. In spite of this, the overall effect of HenON 43 Helwig's chosen form is, a prose that is taut with the unspoken finally being spoken. Blueberry Cliffs is a book that grows ideas as its protagonist grows a new sense of self. It is truly idiosyncratic fiction that succeeds impressively, and although it may be a cliche to say so, it is a book that will appeal to many different readers for many different reasons. Barry Dempster's third work of fiction, The Ascension of Jesse Rapture (Quarry, 258, $14.95), is a light-hearted romp through the many varieties of contemporary Christianity and its responses to the challenges of modern life. Set in Toronto, the novel provides a surprisingly detailed urban backdrop to the Rapture family and their discrete reactions to the religion they have inherited. 'Once superstars like Jim and Tammy and that Jimmy Swaggart started falling, people lost faith in faith itself.' Upon the death of the Old-Testament patriarchal Daddy Rapture, his wife remakes his church in her image, while his mother, in her efforts to save the £amiliar authoritarian rituals, creates a media event by faking her own crucifixion. One son, a performance artist of anarchy, pursues God frantically to destroy him. The other son, Jesse, levitates benignly over Southern Ontario, performing miracles of faith-healing. In their own pursuit of God, the four Raptures forget each other, and it takes a bizarre accident for family love to pull them together in what is a weak but structurally neat conclusion. Dempster writes with a bubbling lightness that disguises the gravity of his main theme, and of the passions engendered by tributary themes such as women's equality in the Baptist church. This lightness seems to have a strategic quality, as it is attached most obviously to the lightest character of all- the levitating son, Jesse. However, in its run-on vacuity it drags at the plot in an irritating manner. The ubiquitous characterbased humour undercuts all the characters, so that while parody of character-type is continuous, parody of theme is by extension always suspiciously close as well. The book is thus so close to being a send-up of itself that the neat conclusion is suspiciously too neat, and is at least forced and inadequately prepared for. Dempster's bouncy vitality of style plays with the surface life of modernism's loss of faith: the phenomena on the surface may be playful, but the depths are barely glimpsed in this novel, and then are related more to psychology than to any possible divinity. There is an awkward lack of correlation between Dempster's playful forms and his serious illemes. Perhaps this is a fitting artistic product of a year that saw a federal election contested by the levitating evangelists of the Natural Law Party. The Crew (Coteau, 193, $14.95) is Don Dickinson's first novel, after two collections of short stories. Like Dempster, Dickinson is at his best in characterization, in this case adroitly providing perfect -single-paragraph character sketches. The characters are the eight members of a landscaping crew who try to work together on a private job when their union takes 44 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 them ouf on strike. Plastered around the front cover is a dictionary definition of a scab, and much of the characters' efforts are intended to deceive and placate the union while earning extra money on the side. The hard ambiguities of union rules constitute the most prominent theme, but Dickinson has a subplot and a subtheme for all eight players, and the novel is a blend of themes of human nature in the Dickensian manner, but achieved with brevity and efficiency. Kozicki, the conniving foreman who holds all the plots together, has the most coverage as his attempts to maintain a decent life, in what seems an ongoing social war, insistently impel the other characters towards their own individual acts of recognition of integrity. These private jobs complement the more social bonding of co-operative labour as the human condition. A droll and contained sense of humour mediates the serious nature of the novel. The Crew is an entertaining fiction that digs into the unruly paradoxes of contemporary working life more than one might think from its rather conventional comic surface. The eerie art on the cover of Barry Callaghan's When Things Get Worst (Little, Brown, 191, $24.95), along with the large, bold print (only fiftytwo characters per line, and twenty-four lines to a page), is preparation for an unusual novel. The almost two hundred pages of monologue by a backwoods Ontario widow are very reminiscent of the work of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, in the stark home-grown symbolism set solidly on revolving comments on rural poverty, violence, ignorance, and self-destruction. Men with first names like Jaylord, Telford, Hedrick, and Luther are the stonepickers of a dirt-poor township, and when they get tired of picking each year's crop of rocks out of their fields, they go into the wholesale gravel business, selling their land out from under their own feet. LWhen things get worst' the narrator feels her land is all she has left, and in trying to defend it she defends her identity against the crazy forces of malevolence, greed, and bizarre fate that crash into her life. Black humour is well handled by Callaghan, but is abandoned near the end of the novel to permit the didactic conclusion to emerge cleanly. The environmentalist theme with which the novel finishes seems somewhat tacked on to provide an ending to an otherwise ongoing cri de coeur from a passive victim. Far more fascinating is the give-and-take of dialogue (and symbol) within the monologue, the weight of knowledge squashing the life out of innocence: I knew how, even when I was locked in my room for idleness, lying face down on my mattress, I knew how to make fun in my mind and to make my mind the sky the bird flew in, or the earth the worm wormed in and as a child I told my daddy what it was like to be a worm, and then I told him worms could fly if I wanted them to. 1'hat may be okay for worms,' he saidf liking to keep a hand on me, 'but you can't blow your nose if I don't want you to.' FICTION 45 The Welty-like use of language for interpersonal warfare by characters who seem to have little else to do except fight has, one must admit, a dark fascination of its own. Anumber of Canadian writers - notably D.A. Richards - have been typed as bringing Faulkner's South north, but this is the first novel I have seen that truly does it. The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon (McClelland and Stewart, 144, $18.99) by W.O. Mitchell is a small book, not quite eight inches by five, attractively packaged in Mitchell tartan, with ten illustrations by Wesley W. Bates. The endpaper displays the book's genealogy, tracing its genesis back through a play and a radio drama to a short story. Basically it is a parodic black mass for curling fanatics, and as such will probably sell well in the Christmas gift market. Its literary merit is negligible. It does hold together as a novella, but it lacks the sensitivity and emotional appeal of Mitchell's best work, and it does not take the time to develop the western cultural foundation that underlies that work. Mitchell's exuberant and earthy style flourishes in patches, and even his talent for home-grown metaphor is spotty. One character, speculating on his rink's chances, says 'We'll be hotter'n a fire cracker. I bet Doc Fitzgerald won't stand no chance agin us. No more'n a gopher through a thirty-six-inch threshin' machine.' This is vintage Mitchell, but the novella as a whole does not live up to it. In fact, it is very much a dated book, and dates its author too for drawing out writing that has had its day. Lone Angler (Goose Lane, 259, $14.95) is Herb Curtis's third novel of the rural Miramichi settlement, Brennan Siding, and the by-now established and maturing cast of characters he drew out of it. He sends DryfIy and Shad to New England, and Paladin to Texas, in two separate subplots that provide ongoing contrasts between life in the States and life in backwoods New Brunswick. Stin the same mystique orthe bush and the same materially but not spiritually impoverished background lie behind Lone Angler as The Americans Are Coming. Yet it is the comedy of eccentric characterization that gives the book what limited appeal it has. This novel is put together with sensible organization, and Curtis certainly has a unique writing style. It is not deep, refined, sophisticated, or allusive, and most of the text is dialogue. This style has a running vitality to it, but is uninteresting except for its contribution to characterization. The environmental theIne is portrayed with earnest strength, and probably even benefits from the simplicity of the writing. It is hard to take seriously a novel that seems so unaware of tile state of the novel in 1993. This is the Beverly Hillbillies of Canadian literature. ...