Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984

by T. F. Rigelhof ~ Cormorant Books

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2010

“For me,” writes T. F. Rigelhof in the introduction to Hooked on Canadian Books, “reading a novel means any of at least a half dozen things, three of which are reflected in the phrase ‘good, better, and the best’.”

In this collection of reviews, essays and commentaries, the opinions expressed are unashamedly Rigelhof’s. For him, the book is “a celebration of novels written in English by Canadian writers that have made a difference in this reader’s life”.  For readers, it is a thoughtful discussion of the Canadian literary landscape in the context of individual writers and their work.  Rigelhof opens the door to discussion about the works presented and about the meat and bones of Canadian literature, and what sets it apart from, say, American literature.

Rigelhof has collected one hundred of Canada’s finest, gathering in one place a list of titles and authors who have contributed to the landscape of Canadian writing over the last twenty-five years.  “To be ‘good’ reading”, he says, “a book must insist on being read . . . A ‘better’ book makes you stop after fifty pages and start afresh ...[and] the ‘best’ novel is one that can be read over and over again ...”

This is not a book for the faint hearted. “There is blood in this book - gusto, passion, zest, good humor” and just opening it will add significantly to the lengthy list of ‘must reads’ pinned to your fridge. So many books.  So little time. You might need a taller fridge!

T. F. Rigelhof is a retired professor of literature from Montreal’s Dawson College. He is a contributing reviewer to the Globe and Mail and the author of nine previous books.  He lives in Westmount, Quebec.

You Better Watch Out

by Greg Malone ~ Knopf Canada

  Review: Halifax Herald March 2009

                       

‘Our memories are the bread crumbs that lead us home.

Without them, we stand bereft and alone.’

Greg Malone is a former member of CODCO. He is also a screenwriter, actor, director, activist and a one-time wannabe politician. Now he has added author to his impressive list of credits. ‘I love performing,’ he says as we drink mint tea in a busy Halifax coffee shop. ‘But there’s something very satisfying about [writing], to write something that’s just how I see things. I’ve always wanted to write.’ So he did. He wrote a book about growing up in Newfoundland. He began over ten years ago, writing down the more traumatic stories ‘for my sanity. I enjoyed it and people laughed, so I kept going.’

You Better Watch Out is a series of vignettes, snapshots of a childhood where friendships with Andy Jones, Cathy Jones and Danny Williams (who went on to become the Premier of Newfoundland) are cemented. The clarity of remembrance is striking and I asked Malone if he had embellished them at all. ‘No,’ he says. ‘They’re childhood memories. I don’t have these memories as an adult. I was a child, totally dependent and nowhere to go, which feels like life and death to an 8 year old, life and death in terms of your heart. This fascinates me, these dramas where the heart changes. It’s Jane Austen stuff, the little stuff that means so much to your whole life. And when you are 8 years old, it’s everything.’

It is the young Greg who tells these stories. He begins school but he ‘could not warm to Miss Snow. She carried a bright red stick, which she rapped our fingers with.’ There is a simplicity in the beginning stories as Malone sets the stage on St. John’s hilly, cramped streets. They are factual and descriptive. But as the young Greg settles into his narration and moves through grade school, the stories mature with him. He is able to see glimmerings of understanding in the incomprehensibility of the adults around him.

Malone does this well. He holds fast to the young boy, letting him tell it like it was, warts and all. Never does it seem to be imposed from an adult perspective and it is always infused with humour and insight, even those moments of terror that was part of growing up Catholic in Newfoundland.

Malone maintains his childhood perspective throughout, along with a fantastic sense of the absurd – even in Brother Clancey’s class. Br. Clancey is ‘six feet tall, (and) this overwrought celibate was not at his best in grade two.’ Br. Clancey has serious anger issues, and he has a profound and negative effect on Malone’s life.

But Greg was very young and the contradictions of religion and cruelty in the name of god and love are not to be challenged. He is traumatized. His understanding of the powerlessness of his situation develops, and by the time he is 9, his narrator’s voice has matured into the sophistication of a child who realizes that survival was not going to be on his terms.

An occasional PG warning would be in order for the more sensitive souls among us. Disasters. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,’ was the comment from the dentist ‘as (Gregg) went out holding his raw, bloody mouth.’ Betrayals. The Strap and Who is God horrify, taking the glory from school days when being strapped and terrorized was considered discipline. But even the harshest stories are softened by the humour of a bright and tender child who is determined to make sense of it all.

Malone’s love of St. John’s infuse these pages. His connection to Newfoundland is deep and clear and he has remained friends with many of the kids in the book, kids from early grade school. ‘It’s so rich,’ he says. ‘I’m so lucky. People from the Grade 4 class came to the launch (in St. John’s), kids from my street that I hadn’t seen in years. One of the [teaching] brothers came, friends came. It was a great laugh.’

           

When he can, in between acting and writing, Malone reads. ‘Sometimes I have to stop my life and read. Jane Austen is so fun, the way she plays with language. Dostoevsky, Margaret Lawrence. Doris Lessing sends chills down my spine. The Edwardian writers, Thackerary, they have so much passion.’

                                   

Will there be a sequel? We must hope! But now it’s time for something completely different! Malone is already writing another book, this time about Newfoundland joining Confederation. ‘I’m a history buff,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘and there was so much politicking and intrigue surrounding that period. It’s my type of history!’

‘What’s it like to win a Gemini?’ I ask as we finish our tea. Malone laughs out loud. ‘It’s a bit of fun!’ he says.

Greg Malone is a Newfoundland actor, AIDS activist and writer. He lives in St. John’s.

Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis

by Alanna Mitchell ~  McClelland & Stewart

   Review: Halifax Herald, March 2009

When Alanna Mitchell set out to write a book about the oceans of the world, she was unclear where to start. “ It is such a huge topic,” she said,  “and the concepts are vast.  I expected to write it in chunks, but it changed organically as I researched it.” Mitchell’s new book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, is a call to arms that we can ignore at our peril.  There is one thing that becomes clear when reading it, a thing that scientists around the world repeat over and over in different words and ways - the oceans of the world are one, and it can live without us, but we cannot live without the ocean. “The vital signs of this critical medium of life are showing clear signs of distress.”  Some scientists believe that the ocean is dying.

                                                                                               

Mitchell traveled the world talking to these scientists, men and women who spend their lives researching and studying the ocean, both in and out of it.  They uniformly believe the ocean is sick and getting sicker.  Indeed, there are some who believe that we are fast reaching a tipping point, that place where systems stop trying to repair themselves and begin the process of shutting down. “I had been thinking about vital signs,” said Mitchell. “Then I met Tim Flannery (an Australian ecologist and author).  He said it looked like I was cataloging the death of a system.”

Sea Sick is the first book to examine the current state of the world’s oceans, a body of water that regulates our climate and provides most of the world’s oxygen.  Mitchell does this thoughtfully and methodically, and because she is a award winning environmental reporter and not a scientist, she has written a very readable and accessible book. The clarity of her writing causes the reader many ‘EUREKA!’ moments as understanding dawns. These moments make for thoughtful walks and impassioned dinner convewrsation.              

Mitchell managed to have a lot of fun while writing Sea Sick.  She went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, attended a coral spawn on a boat in the dawn of a Caribbean morning, and went deeper than any journalist has ever gone in a submersible, trembling with fear in an isolated back compartment while the scientist who was ‘driving’ read a novel. “ It was terrifying,” she said. “I was a wreck, before and during. I was in a dark cramped space and the intercom didn’t work. I always like a plan B and there was no Plan B.”

Mitchell’s research took her to far flung countries, following leads and suggestions as she gathered information and data from scientists and their research studies. “Scientists,” she says, “all work in isolation on their own part of the puzzle. No one participates in the big picture - there is a holistic piece missing.” Sea Sick puts those pieces together.

Traveling the globe made Sea Sick an expensive book to write. “I made a deal with the researchers and scientists that I would pay my costs,” she said.  “I wrote and sold magazine articles and got a grant from Canada Council.  I did it on the cheap, people I met billeted me. Sometimes I worked as crew and spent long hours with scientists - no email! They were very generous with their time.  They want people to ask questions, they want to tell their stories.  They were uniformly fabulous.” 

In Halifax, she found Boris Worm, whose work at Dalhousie University calculates present and future populations of fish in the sea.  He believes we are at an exceptional point in time, that we are “at the stage of losing the ability of things to come back on their own . . . That would represent a threshold, he said.”

In spite of the gravity of her topic, Mitchell’s clear writing flows with a softening humour. “The coral,” she writes, “was frankly hard to bond with.  It is the most urgently endangered group of life known in the world.”  For those that want proof or more scientific theory, there is an excellent bibliography.

China is a key player in all of this, Mitchell believes.  It is a country big enough to already feel the impact of climate change, a country where ‘water quality is appalling and glaciers are in retreat’.  But China is developing muscular environmental policies.  A recent article in the China Daily says, “In China . . . the conservation of energy and other resources (is) of paramount importance. It indicates just how civilized a country really is.”  Perhaps all is not yet lost.  Perhaps we can follow China’s example and show just how civilized we are.

Alanna Mitchell is an environmental reporter and author. She was named the best environmental reporter in the world in 2000, by Reuters Foundation, and has won international awards for her work. She lives in Toronto and is working on her next book.

Skin Room

by Sara Tilley ~ Pedlar Press

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, May 2009

More and more, Canada is producing exciting new writers who present the Canadian culture and landscape in ways that are as different and unique as the individuals who write them. With the publication of Skin Room, we can add another writer to the list.  Sara Tilley shows us a north that is “white and flat and goes on forever”, a dream-scape of white and snow. I talked with her earlier this week when she was in Halifax for Atlantic Ink: TheWriters’ Festival.  Skin Room was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Prize for Fiction, an excellent achievement for a first novel.

                       

Like her fictional character, Tilley’s family moved to Sanikiluaq, NWT, when she was in early grade school.  Like Theresa, she is pale, white, and there is no way she can slip unnoticed into a class of bronze, black haired Inuit children. “It was a difficult book to write,” said Tilley.  “The north was a buried subject for me after we left and no-one talked about it. It was hard, living in the north.  I was a supersensitive kid in a class of Inuit teenagers who didn’t want me there.  My brother was younger so he slipped under the radar, but I stuck out.  I was an easy target.”

Tilley started working on Skin Room in 2001, writing in bits and pieces. At Banff in 2003, she ‘started going at it hard’. Twenty-three drafts and four years later, it was done!  “It was a very intense time,” she says.  “Theresa is a strong character, damaged but strong, and she kept teaching me things I needed to know.  While her view of the world is not mine, I learned from her.  Her voice wrote itself and it kept me going.”  

Tilley captures the awe of a pre-adolescent girl who is captivated by the northern landscapes, the geography, and who falls deeply and silently in love with Willassie Ippaq, the boy who flicks a pencil at her on her first day, resulting in several stitches in her face. Willassie is a schoolboy, a bully and a sculptor who can “look at a stone and see an animal living inside.”  Theresa yearns and loves with a childish simplicity that fully understands the impossibility of the cultural chasm, and an internal sophistication that allows her to hold that love for years after she leaves the north.

Skin Room alternates between the older Theresa who lives in St John’s, and her younger self.  Tilley has managed the timelines perfectly. Both realities feel real and immediate. The adult Theresa continues the internal intensity of her connection to the north, mourning as Willassie fades.  “... you’ve slipped too far into the past and I don’t have the skill to bring you back.”

“When I was in theatre school at York University, I did a project about problems in our childhoods,” says Tilley. “When my teacher asked how my voice felt, I told her sometimes it feels like there’s a fist in my throat.  She encouraged me to write my memories, to get out things that had not been discussed.  Once I started, the character took over and I understood that the story was about someone whose memories are still affecting their life a decade later.”

As a reader, there can be anxious moments when we are unable to know where the writer is going, willing them not to cross that line into cultural appropriation.  “I worried about that,” says Tilley, “about taking ownership of something that is not mine.  But I write from a child’s point of view, as a white child in an alien culture. I grew up there, it was my home and I still connect with the landscape.  It’s the landscape I think about.”

Her next novel is also set in the north, Alaska this time. She received an inheritance of letters from her great-grandfather, who kept a daily logbook of his life in Alaska during the gold rush.  For 14 years, he noted everything, journaling the minutiae of his daily life. “I am working with this,” she says, “but its taking a long time to transcribe and compile.  While it’s definitely a work of fiction, I can feel my great-grandfather, my father’s father, becoming vibrant, coming alive. It’s a little nerve-wracking, opening up family closets, but that’s how life is.”

These days, Tilley is a busy person.  As well as the novel in production, she writes, acts, and runs She Said Yes, a small theatre company based in St John’s. “It started as a way to produce my work when I graduated,” she says. “We get enough funding to put on shows and run a dramaturgy program.”  She finds theatre production very complementary to writing novels.  “They are finite,” she says.  “They end!”

Sara Tilley is an actress, playwright, theatre producer and author. Skin Room is her first novel and was short listed for the Thomas Raddall Fiction award at Atlantic Ink: The Writers’ Festival in 2009.  She lives in St John’s, Newfoundland.

The Story of a Widow

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi - Knopff Canada
 ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2009

Mona Ahmad is recently widowed. After the initial shock, she is surprised to find she has been left in very comfortable circumstances. She settles back into her house in Karachi, her days no longer defined by her husband’s presence.  She is gently intoxicated by her new freedom.

An unexpected marriage proposal, brokered through her neighbour, disrupts Mona’s quiet widowhood.  Her daughters, uncles, aunts and in-laws rush to her side, determined to protect both her and the family’s honour.  Their well oiled, highly effective gossip machine springs into action and in the absence of hard facts, hearsay and innuendo suffice.  Mona’s peaceful life collapses.

Surprising everyone, most of all herself, Mona rebels against tradition and remarries.  The consequences of this decision lead her to a contemplation of her life so far. She questions her first marriage and the roles she willingly shouldered as wife and mother, until finally she asks a profound question of herself.  The answer comes clearly as she begins to understand that her unhappiness is “a condition of her own creation”.  Her path becomes clearer.

The narrator takes a back seat in this book, functioning as a keen observer whose role is to keep us informed.  It is an effective technique, allowing the story to flow through the intricate nuances of family and Pakistani tradition.  Farooqi’s first novel is an entertaining and touching account of a traditional woman moving toward an understanding that life can be hers for the taking.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a writer and translator who was born in Hyderabad, Pakistan. His first children’s book, The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Where Shoes was released in 2008.  Musharraf Ali Farooqi lives in Toronto.

The Disappeared

by Kim Echlin ~ Hamish Hamilton

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald June 2009

Serey is a young Cambodian sent to Montreal to study.  He meets Anne and they fall in love, prowling the jazz clubs of Montreal.  But the rise of the Khymer Rouge closes Cambodia’s borders, and years pass before Serey is able to return home to look for his family.  He vanishes without word.  Eleven years later, Anne sees a blurred likeness on a TV news clip and flies to Phnom Penh to search for him.  

The backdrop of the Khymer Rouge’s regime of terror in the 1970's, which leaves an entire population traumatized and was responsible for the deaths of almost 2 million people, is not an easy counterpoint for a love story.  The challenge for Echlin ‘was to find a language that could tell the stories’, not just Anne’s story but of the people who suffered around her. 

Echlin writes with poetic intensity, moving through place and time with ease. The desperate poignancy of the stories Anne hears as she searches for her lover, and the sensual language of the love she feels is a mix that seems incompatible.  There are times when the magnitude of loss and grief seems beyond words.”  But Echlin’s ability to pare language to its essence is near perfect.

When an old woman tells Anne that she “lost my whole family during Pol Pot”, Anne is unsure how to respond, but there is nothing to say.  “I only want you to know,” she the woman.  It is for  Anne to bear witness. “And once we know, what do we do?”

In the final chapters Anne’s now middle-aged heart grieves for her lost lover, for those long lost and her story ends with a lament that has resounded through centuries.  “People everywhere look for their missing . . .Can no one find me even a bone to bury?” 

Kim Echlin is an author who completed her doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling.  She has travelled the world in search of stories and spent time in Cambodia researching The Disappeared.  She lives in Toronto.

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb ~ Doubleday Canada

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

           

Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon. 

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.” 

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

by Molly Peacock ~ McClelland & Stewart

~ Review: Halifax Herald, February 2011

Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born into a minor branch of an important British family at the turn of the eighteenth century.  At the tender age of 17, this vivacious young woman was married off to a boorish drunkard old enough to be her grandfather, to improve the family fortunes.  She was widowed after seven difficult years.  She married again twenty years later, a union which afforded her much contentment and happiness, but it wasn’t until after the death of her second husband that Mrs Delany picked up scissors and paints and invented a medium now known as mixed-media collage.  She was 72.

Over the next ten years, Mrs Delany worked tirelessly at her art, creating botanically correct cut-paper flowers, precisely accurate in both detail and colour. These exquisite reproductions are often hard to recognize as paper and paint. In all, she produced 985 flowers, and it was her failing eyesight that finally stopped her.  The collection, known as Flora Delanica, is housed in the British Museum.

In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock focuses on eleven of these extraordinary pieces of art, weaving through the narrative snippets of her own life as it parallels that of Mrs Delany’s. Her language is both visual and poetic, with an attention to detail that takes her readers into the heart of court life in eighteenth century England.

In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, McClelland & Stewart have triumphed. An electronic version of The Paper Garden would be a mere shadow, only hinting at the pleasure readers will get from this miniature art book.  The silken pages, the writing, the careful stitching, the wonderful reproductions, the subtle perfume of new ink, the size (it tucks perfectly in the corner of a bag) – these all combine to a whole that is a pleasure to hold and to read.  M & S and Molly Peacock have done Mrs Delany proud, and she would surely have been delighted.

Molly Peacock is a poet, essayist and author.  She was one of the creators of New York's Poetry in Motion program and is the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.  A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.

I Am a Japanese Writer

by Dany Laferrière ~ Douglas & McIntyre

  ~ Review: Haliax Herald, January 2011

I Am a Japanese Writer is a book about a writer who pitches a title to his publisher, takes the publisher’s advance and immediately develops writer’s block as he contemplates actually writing the book. While he waits for it to pass, he decides he must understand a little of Japanese culture.

Trolling the city for insights, he finds the self-obsessed Midori and her hangers-on, who are immersed in the decadent, ‘uber-cool’ subcultures of fashion and drugs. They amuse him. He reads haiku master Basho on the subway. He is transported. He begins to believe his artifice.  “... when I became a writer and people asked me, ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality.  Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer.” 

When the writer announces this in a mall, the results are astounding.  The book becomes a cult phenomenon and he is suddenly an international celebrity.  He is now famous for a book not yet written. Without reality, it exists because the writer is celebrated for it and therefore it no longer matters whether or not it exists, because it has taken off and, in the words of Tom Waites, he’s “Big in Japan”, which clearly raises the question of who makes art!

Translated from French by David Homel.

Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti and immigrated to Canada in 1978.  He is the author of twenty novels, and has won several awards, including the Prix Medicis for his semi-autobiographical novel, L'Enigme du retour (The Enigma of the Return).  His first children’s book, Je suis fou de Vava, won the Governor General’s award in 2006.  He lives in Montreal.

Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas ~ Thomas Allen & Son

  ~ Review: Halifax Herald, January 2011

           

Meg is a writer, just managing to get by writing book reviews and ghost writing genre fiction for adolescents, which nets her just enough cash to buy groceries and keep her damp basement apartment slightly above freezing.

Her moody, jealous boyfriend seems oblivious to the ever rising damp and Meg’s efforts to jolly him out of his funks are met with indifference at best.  It is hard to understand what Meg sees in this sad-sack boyfriend, and when she finally makes a break for freedom from both him and the damp-infested apartment, Thomas’s reader will be thankful and slightly puzzled as to what took her so long.

A book mysteriously arrives in the mail, The Science of Living Forever, a pseudo-scientific book

about the end of time.  The very idea stops Meg in her tracks. Instead of dismissing the content as pop-psyche at best, Meg is pulled into the book’s premise.  Her‘proper’ novel morphs into a ‘storyless’ story, untidy and plot-less.

Our Tragic Universe is brimming with existential energy and philosophical debates as Meg struggles to extricate herself from her marginal existence.  Once again, Thomas explores relationships and the human condition, but these explorations are tempered by the application of the ‘storyless’ story, which does mean that the plot (or non-plot) takes place primarily in the debates of the characters.  Our Tragic Universe meanders, as was Thomas’s intention.  However, the wit and nuance of her writing hold it together, making Meg’s story sympathetic and compelling.

Scarlett Thomas is a teacher, award-winning novelist and book reviewer. In 2002, she was listed as one of the twenty best young British writers.  She teaches at the University of Kent in the UK where she specializes in the contemporary novel and narrative theory and practice.