It took me three tries to get into the States, and even then I had to fake the papers. They wanted to know that I was going to come back to Canada—that I wasn’t going to stay down there.
The dust jacket of The Girl with the Botticelli Face (W. D. Valgardson, Douglas & McIntyre) promises an “explicit rendering of sexual politics,” a dissection of “the nature of male rage” and even “one of the most hilarious scenes in CanLit.” This reviewer never got that far, but stopped after fifty-seven pages that felt like thousands.
Nevertheless, Canadian writers do persist in the genres, and one is always gratified to come across a Canadian thriller or a mystery novel like Paul Grescoe’s Blood Vessel (Douglas & McIntyre) for the sheer pleasure of watching Canadian places and times entering into literature. Grescoe offers some of the necessaries of the genre: arcane information (in this case about cruise ships, hi-tech fishing industry and the Japanese underworld), a quirky detective (single father with two daughters) and a well-convoluted plot.
In 1945 Molly Lamb Bobak became Canada’s first female war artist, but it took her three years of army life to win that appointment. During those years she kept a unique diary in the form of a handwritten newsletter, as she traveled back and forth across Canada by train, and as she hitchhiked her way around southern Ontario and as far south as Detroit and New York City. Double Duty, Sketches and Diaries of Molly Lamb Bobak, Canadian War Artist (Dundurn Press) is well designed and edited (by Carolyn Gossage), so that the original flavour of the work is preserved.
In his new book, The French Quarter (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross), Ron Graham sets out to illuminate French-English relations in Canada by exploring the French-Canadian side of his own family. Sounds promising, and sets us up brilliantly with a description of his Westmount childhood, comparing the domination of Quebec to India under the Raj.
Hard Core Logo, by Michael Turner (Arsenal Pulp), is first a rock ‘n’ roll book, second an irrepressibly Canadian rock ‘n’ roll book, and third a book about how the present turns irrevocably into the past. Reading it I am much reminded of—of all things—Griffin and Sabine in a rather more hard-core version.
A Circle of Birds by Hayden Trenholm (Anvil Press) might serve as a benchmark for the Geist Distance Writing Contest: it crosses more than the requisite number of time zones, and it might certainly be said to be as far out there as the author can take it. The protagonist is an old man suffering from aminesis, struggling to hang on to the present while his “mind is peeling away like an onion.
Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama (Vintage), contains two “experiments in historical narrative” that should be on the reading list of anyone interested in how we imagine the past, and how the past is imagined for us. The first piece, “The Many Deaths of General Wolfe,” is a triumph of imagination and alone worth the price of the book.
Felicity’s Fool, by François Gravel (Cormorant), is a novel with history and science in it, and both the history and the science are very good. Its protagonist is a mild-mannered doctor driven to search for the organ of happiness in the human brain.
