All My Puny Sorrows
by Miriam Toews
Alfred A. Knopf Canada
ISBN 978-0-345-80800-4
$29.95

The title of Miriam Toews’s latest novel was taken from a line in a poem by 18th Century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a portion of which I quote (my emphasis):

To A Friend, With An Unfinished Poem
Thus far my scanty brain hath built the rhyme
Elaborate and swelling; ­ yet the heart
Not owns it. From thy spirit-breathing powers
I ask not now, my friend! the aiding verse
Tedious to thee, and from thy anxious thought
Of dissonant mood. In fancy (well I know)
From business wand’ring far and local cares,
Thou creepest round a dear-loved sister’s bed
With noiseless step, and watchest the faint look,
Soothing each pang with fond solicitude,
And tenderest tones medicinal of love.
I, too, a sister had, an only sister —
She loved me dearly, and I doted on her;
To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows;
(As a sick patient in a nurse’s arms,)
And of the heart those hidden maladies ­
That e’en from friendship’s eye will shrink ashamed.

The characters are unforgettable. Elfrieda (Elf) and Yolanda (Yoli), sisters. Elfrieda is beautiful, wealthy, sophisticated, happily married, and an internationally acclaimed pianist; yet, she wants to die. Yolanda is opposite, divorced, broke, looking for love with all the wrong partners, reckless: a mess. She bumbles along, with best intentions trying to keep her teenage kids happy–also her mother. And she wants so much to help her sister live. She loves her sister. How much does she love her? What kind of love can save her? How can she reduce her suffering? She’s willing to do anything. Assisted suicide? Their Mennonite family has had its share of suicides. Their father was assisted to his death by a train on the tracks. Their cousin Lina took her life three years after their father, now seven years ago. “Where does this violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?” (271)

“Are Mennonites a depressed people or is it just us? We’ve been here before. Everything is a repeat, another take” (135).

“Canada” plays an integral role in the novel. Yoli’s dream of having Margaret Laurence’s stone angel lying beside her; her father’s love and admiration of Lester B. Pearson; their mother’s love of the Winnipeg Jets; various landmarks in both Winnipeg and Toronto where the story takes place; Elf’s reference to Nellie McClung.

It is a story of life versus death. Life is funny, it’s ridiculous and absurd, and Toews deals with the tragic events with humour and almost entire disclosure. Her biographical novel–tragic and personal though it is–needed to be told because people who cope with mental illness suffer great pain and despair, and sometimes they are not heard and sometimes they become isolated and silent. Toews gives them a voice:

She’s a human being, my mother whispered.
[My mother] couldn’t bear to see Elf in the psych ward.. That prison, she said. They do nothing. If she doesn’t take the pills they won’t talk to her. They wait and they badger and they badger and they wait and they badger
(205).

Despite all of these tragedies, when narrator Yoli reminisces, she exposes a tightly knit family, replete with their joys and silliness, and a brave mother who pulled herself together to attend university to study social work, and thereafter to work as a therapist, helping the Mennonite women deal with their problems, paid with sides of beef, chickens and eggs, and other bartered services. Yoli asks how brave must she be? “Well, said my mom, at least as brave as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” (249).

Miriam Toews is the author of five previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction), The Flying Troutmans (winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize) and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.

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The Long White Sickness
by Cecelia Frey
Inanna Publications and Education Inc. (2013)
ISBN 978-1-026708-90-4
$22.95

I attended the launch of this novel in July of this year. I observed the popular local author Cecelia Frey, a diminutive woman, pretty in a pink and floral dress as she worked the room with grace and ease, generous with her time as she greeted each friend or family member, eventually relinquishing this role to step up to the large crowd to introduce us to The Long White Sickness, her fifth novel. Frey has also written three collections of short stories, five books of poetry, and one play. She began reading from sections of the Prologue:

This is my official autobiography, a scorching tale of desire and betrayal. A deeper reading, however, suggests that it is more exactly a story about being in love, a fool’s story of too much heart and not enough head (3).
I have spent considerable time contemplating where to begin . . . . After much thought and measured deliberation, since, as I have said, things became more interesting at the end, I have decided to start with my suicide (9).

And, with this, she thanked everyone for coming to the reading, and stepped away, preparing to autograph copies of her latest novel.
This was a stunning, dramatic reading, and I have no doubt that most people in attendance plunged into the pages of this book at their earliest opportunity.

Frey’s posts on Facebook (May, 2013), “My wisdom for this year: Life, like a novel, is the development of all the inferences contained in the beginning.” And to further, “This [novel’s] about one woman’s lifetime pursuit of an uncooperative and perfidious muse, a black comedy.”

I believe Aristotle said that plot is character. The physical actions of Frey’s characters move the story, even, and perhaps especially, when the story yields itself to magic realism with comedic spin. Black humour, oh yes, it is “laugh out loud” funny. And it is also serious, sentimental, and always told in the author’s authentic voice.
Only a gifted writer like Cecelia Frey can persuade her readers that the voice of her narrator is a person of righteousness, intelligence, and goodwill; her tone garners the readers’ respect and persuades them to provide witness to the events. That same voice skilfully acts as a chameleon when it exploits the prose and/or poetry of other characters in the book; for example, daughter Lara’s partner Rowlf’s hip hop renderings; or Sergeant Rock’s detective manuscript.

Frey takes the reader on a carefully calculated suicide mission up a snowy mountain on the 1st of January with the intention of reaching the summit of the mountain, then “shoving off” (19). As her “Constance” scales the mountain, her stream of consciousness deliberates many of her memories and regrets from the past, thus allowing the reader glimpses of the people in her past and her wounded connections to them. Perhaps Gully, her first husband, was correct when he said, “The trouble with you, you live backward instead of forward” (4). And he would also be wrong, because a lone skier on a snowy mountain must have her wits about her, and she does, as is evidenced by her observation of the whiteness around her. “White is death in our cold climate. White can invade brain cells, occupy spaces of the mind. It can muffle you so that you scream and scream but can’t be heard. I hate white” (15). Frey’s exploration of white as metaphor on this page and in this first chapter culminates in a veritable homage to the word when Constance makes it around the bend, to the place of her departure.

And then I was around the bend. And then I was struck with awe. The earth was a living moving thing, taking on new shapes by the instant. A fantastic ballet of various forms of white – the snow swirled into heaps, heaps that then took off with a life of their own, creating an evolving landscape that was both distorted and magical. I had forgotten that aspect of white. I had forgotten that it could be magic (18).

Readers will discover their own interpretations of “white”, but the word and its implications cannot be ignored, as it appears in every chapter of the novel. Nor can the overall theme of the novel be ignored: perception is reality from someone else’s point of view. Cecelia Frey generously provides her characters with every necessary accoutrement to bring the novel to successful completion.

Since Constance is dead, the Afterword is narrated by one of the main characters, quite silent until now, who concludes, “The writing life is a failed life. Every serious writer knows that, knows he has failed to live outside the page. Every serious writer accepts the fact and gets down to work” (184).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXIV Number 1.

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Oolichan Books
ISBN: 978-0-88982-275-7
$21.95

Betty Jane Hegerat is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories, and this, a book of creative non-fiction.

Hegerat had been struggling with a fictional piece about a teacher, Louise, who marries Jake, an older widower with a delinquent son. Could Louise love this child named Danny? A vague recollection of an event that happened forty years ago streams into the author’s memory when she was a child of eleven, a memory made more vivid because of the “gruesome details of a nearby crime” (18):

The Cook murders. In Stettler, Alberta. Robert Raymond Cook. The whole family bludgeoned to death, bodies hidden in a grease pit in the garage. (18)

And she becomes obsessed with the reasons why Robert Raymond Cook was charged with the commission of these murders, and if indeed it was he who committed these heinous acts. “He was tried twice, convicted, lost an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, lost a last ditch bid for a commuted sentence and was hanged at Fort Saskatchewan Provincial Gaol on November 14, 1960. . .the last man hanged in Alberta.” (21)

What we have here is an author who usually writes fiction, some of it gleaned from a plethora of her experiences as a social worker, and who now has embraced studies in a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her instructor has advised and encouraged her to veer off into creative non-fiction and to also include herself as one of the characters. No small feat, yet Hegerat accomplishes this with the greatest awareness of the facts integral to the Cook murders, and her compassionate treatment of her fictional family.

This is how she does it: Chapters titled “The Boy” are dedicated to the fictional characters—Louise, Jake, Danny; “Roads Back” mine the memories and research of the author as she investigates facts, evidence, key players and attitudes surrounding Robert Raymond Cook and the murders he was hanged for. And throughout these chapters, in italics and lighter print are nagging questions posed by the fictional Louise; and Hegerat’s expressions in lighter print, but not italicized, which serve to remind the reader of the difficulties faced by writing about a crime that was tried on circumstantial evidence and, after all these years, divided public opinion about the guilt of the convicted and hanged Cook.

Interviews were conducted with those whom might have known the Cook family, with those whom were involved in the assessment of Robert Cook, including the defense lawyer, the head nurse on the psychiatric unit at Ponoka, and biographer Jack Pecover. Reams of notes were taken. Piles of written records were read and recorded. The author relentlessly sought the truth “to find these people, restore them from their infamy as the ‘murdered Cook family’ to seven ordinary human beings.” (76)

Cemeteries were visited. In the Hanna cemetery: “Seven names, one date of death. Ray, Daisy, Gerry, Patty, Chrissy, Kathy, and Linda. Ever Remembered. Ever Loved.” (79) In the cemetery close to the Prince Albert penitentiary, “a row of white crosses.” (271) These were the graves of Robert Raymond Cook’s fellows. Men who had died incarcerated . . . Men who had been boys in families of one sort or another, but in the end, were unclaimed.” (274-5)

There is no grave for the convicted Bobby. His body resided at the University of Alberta, Department of Anatomy. Even he did not predict this in his “letter home just before his eighteenth birthday: ‘I mean everything I say for if I get into another jam, it will go on and on until I kick the bucket in a pen or some dirty provincial jail.’” (275) That is how the author concludes her story about the boy called Robert Raymond Cook. And the persistent voice of Louise asks about the other boy: “But what about Danny? Where does he end?” (276) Troubled by the dichotomy of these two boys, one real and one fictional, and unable to effect a different ending for the real boy, the author concludes the fictional story of Danny with grace and humanity.

Since the publication of The Boy, Betty Jane Hegerat has availed herself tirelessly to readers at book signings and book clubs throughout Alberta, and continues to do so with a dizzying schedule well into 2012. Her other Oolichan titles are A Crack in the Wall (2008), and Delivery (2009).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 2.

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The Beauty of Humanity Movement
By Camilla Gibb
Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 978-0-385-66322-9
$32.95

Hu’ng’s neighbours have begun to line up with their bowls. The old man has special power—he is the heart of this place, was the heart of the Beauty of Humanity Movement—he brings people together, keeps them fed (223).

Camilla Gibb has chosen this fictional character, an ageing Hu’ng, to tell the story of about seventy years of life in Vietnam, particularly Hanoi, seventy years of turbulent history–political unheavals and customs of the Vietnamese. From the 1930s through colonization by the French, occupation by the Japanese, communism, the American War (Vietnam War) and economic liberalization, otherwise known as Doi Moi, the story evolves through five characters Chien, Hu’ng, Dao, Binh, and Tu–each representing a successive generation faced with its specific tensions.

The ninth of ten children, born with a large dark mark on his face, Hu’ng is sent from home in 1933 by an unloving mother to live with his Uncle Chien in Hanoi. Chien teaches the boy all the intricacies of preparing pho, the aromatic noodle soup enjoyed by Vietnamese for breakfast. Following Chien’s demise, Hu’ng inherits the pho restaurant which could be compared to the French cafes that once also attracted the creative minds who met there—writers, poets, and artists–intellectuals whose work was considered critical of the government. And because this group, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, was deemed to be critical of the government, it was shut down, forcing Hu’ng to relocate his cart-driven pho kitchen almost daily; but his loyal customers, bowls and chopsticks in hand, find him. As the following scene unfolds, Hu’ng “has set up shop in the empty kidney of a future swimming pool attached to a hotel under construction near the Ngu Ha Temple”

Hu’ng recognizes each man by the state of his hands: the grease moons under the nails that mark a mechanic, the calluses of one who works a lathe, the chewed nails of a student writing exams.

But then whose lovely hands are these amidst this parade of manly paws? The delicate hands of a woman
who has, improbably, never engaged in manual labour. And the bowl. Shining, Translucent. Porcelain. ….

You’ve come to me for breakfast before?

No, she says, revealing herself a foreigner with just one word.

Maybe I knew you when you were a child?

I don’t think it’s possible, sir. I grew up in the U.S. But perhaps you knew my father—Ly Van Hai.(9)

So, on page nine, the novel’s second raisonneur is introduced in the person of Maggie, art curator, born in Vietnam, but who was forced to flee with her mother to the United States some twenty years previously.

Maggie moves the narrative along because of her desperate insistence on finding information about her beloved father. Hu’ng is forced to delve into his faded memories to cogitate past experiences and, in doing so, weaves together the various strands of each of the five generations, skillfully connecting these characters through their basic humanity. Gibb uses Tu as Maggie’s guide to illustrate the modern Vietnam, vibrant and bustling. Tu is ambitious and modern. Even so, he sees Hu’ng as his grandfather and fully expects that the woman he would marry should respect and love Hu’ng as much as he does.

Gibb’s anthropological background and thorough research are what inform the reader; her gentle treatment of the universally recognizable human traits of the characters is never compromised because of age, privilege, war or peace.

Camilla Gibb’s other published works are Mouthing the Words; The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life; and Sweetness in the Belly.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXI Number 2 Fall 2011.

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Memoir of a Good Death
by Anne Sorbie
Thistledown Press
ISBN 978-1-897235-81-2
$19.95

Anne Sorbie’s novel is of duality and contrasts, of landscape—both land and water; of the natural world, both beautifully breathtaking, and so ferocious, it takes one’s breath away; of death and living; of grieving and celebrating; of holding on and letting go. It is told by two narrators, one dead, the other, an unlikely survivor. Rhegan and Sarah Flett, daughter and mother, describe their attachment to Ed, recently deceased father and husband. Perhaps each woman needs her own narrative because neither is able to communicate effectively with the other.

Both women loved Ed, and each jealously guarded her particular attachment to him. As Sarah goes through Ed’s personal items, deciding what to do with his clothes etc., Rhegan asks for an item of his, a white shirt. Sarah does not consider this request; instead she flaunts the shirt by wearing it tied in front at the waist. Later, Sarah is surprised when Rhegan shows up at Ed’s interment wearing his Macintosh. It’s this tug of war dynamic that drives the story. On page 79 Rhegan says, “I struggled to have a whole conversation with Sarah, but we always got off track”, and on page 83, “I was attempting to get close to her but she was still distant.”

Rhegan Flett “was conceived next to the Bow on July twenty-seventh, 1963” (57), and died on the Bow on July twenty-seventh, 2001. She was a high-spirited, independent woman, married and divorced five times. She was a woman of property who came from a centuries-old matrilineal tradition.

My father’s family came from Orkney where my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother had lived with a bear. The animal was a gift, given to her by the Norseman who stayed in her croft for ten years avoiding war. During that
time, my ancestral grandmother gave birth to a daughter. Her contemporaries assumed the obvious, but somewhere in the gap that exists between legend and life is a family trait that hints otherwise: my father, Ed, had vertical ridges on his tongue. His mother passed them on to him, and he gave them to me (9).

Mathea Flett, the daughter of my ancestral grandmother Gudrin, moved to the Scottish mainland from Orkney after the old bear mauled her mother to death eight centuries before I was born. After that, Mathea’s land passed from mother to daughter – until my granny gave birth to Ed (36).

Rhegan bought and sold properties located along the Bow River. She was also the owner of several properties in this area, and collected rent for those she did not occupy herself. Autonomy was important to Rhegan. So was hanging on to the tormented feelings of love and passion for her second husband Liam Richards who sent her packing following a certain disclosure Sarah made to him regarding the roadtrip she and Rhegan took to Kalispell a few months before the wedding.

My mother, strange as it may seem, kept the details of our trip to herself – until a week after my wedding at Assiniboine Lodge. . . . In a moment of what she called clarity, she told Liam about Kalispell. To me, she said that our relationship, if it was to last, should be based on honesty. For the next nine years, I rarely spent time with my
mother, and hardly spoke to her until Ed died (45).

Sarah had been married to Ed for 43 years, and she and Ed never owned property. Although she was petite, she was capable, capable enough to share the arduous tasks associated with paddling a canoe on the Bow River with her daughter in an adventure, one of letting go. Sarah would disburse Ed’s ashes into the river. She had divided him into five baggies, her way of containing him, described in Rhegan’s black humour narrative as “man-in-a-sack” (156). “Finally, you understand. Your father did the same thing to me all those years” (157).

Rhegan took an unassembled box kite that she and Ed worked on when she was a Brownie. And she took a headpiece, a missal, a veil, garters–a variety of wedding paraphenalia from her marriages to Dominic, Jack, Raj, Lynn, and Thomas. She and Sarah and friend Nemit and her nine-year old son Adam had played with these items before the trip on the river, and Sarah fussed over Rhegan’s collection of wedding rings.

There was something that I held on to, one set of wedding paraphernalia that I didn’t store in the wardrobe or let anyone else try on, that I hadn’t included in my selection of disposable belongs. It was the dress that I’d worn for my wedding at Assiniboine Lodge. I stored it in the basement as if that would help me to keep my feelings about Liam underground (162).

Of Liam’s, she took “one sixteen-inch chain and a small oval Saint Christopher medallion in twenty-four-carat gold intended to protect the traveller” (221). She wore it around her neck under her wet suit.

Anne Sorbie knows Calgary well, and especially the areas in the vicinity of the Bow River. She mentions Kensington where she has dinner with ex-husband Jack at the Muse bistro at 10A Street that runs perpendicular to the river. Almost as an aside, she names Osteria de Medici restaurant where she once took prospective buyers. And further west, in Parkdale, she speaks of Saint Bernard Catholic Church where she attends Sunday Mass with Sarah, where they whisper behind their missals, where she can finally tell Sarah the details of the errant diamond ring that Jack gave her.

Still, while the complicated relationship unfolds between Rhegan and Sarah, the reader is reminded, chapter after chapter, of the hazards of the natural world. Beyond the logistics of preparing for a river adventure in a canoe, capable though these women may be, a larger force threatens to wreak havoc with their lives.

When I finished reading Anne Sorbie’s Memoir of a Good Death, I sighed. I turned the novel over in my hands, fanned the pages and came back to the epigram: “[w]e made our speech from moving water/a sound that seems to ache”
– Al Purdy, “In the Beginning was the Word”.

This was a most satisfying read. Thank you Anne Sorbie. I echo Robert Kroetsch’s remarks found on the back cover: “When the dead speak we must listen. Anne Sorbie’s dead and eloquent narrator is full of wild humour, pain, rebellion, compassion, wisdom. And she tells a wickedly good story.”

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXI Number 1 Spring / Summer 2011.

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The Shore Girl
By Fran Kimmel
NeWest Press, 2012
ISBN 9781927063170
$19.95

I haven’t finished reading the first page of this novel and already “my eyes are wet” (9). Fran Kimmel has managed to unhinge my emotions in only five short paragraphs. I sense I’m in for an unforgettable, uncomfortable reading experience. Annabel Lyon, author of The Golden Mean, was right when she said, “Rebee is a bittersweet creation: heart-rending yet utterly unsentimental, a frail warrior who both distresses and disarms everyone who encounters her — including the reader.”

Kimmel’s language is precise and lacks any affectation, not even in tender moments. The Shore Girl is Rebee — Rebee Shore.

The hope in his voice brought a lump to my throat that tasted like warm honey. . . [b]ut that’s the thing isn’t it. Hope has soft edges. Only after does it cut you to shreds. When he found us at the campground, I was so bloated with it I thought I might burst. Mile after mile I thought about him, about the man named Jake, about the man who was my father (179).

Kimmel has created realistic characters, characters who resonate with the reader–people we have met, either in real life or in news reports: real, raw, hurting, coping, failing, surviving characters. Each character is created to tease out the essence of Rebee. It’s as if Rebee is a composition of patches being sewn painstakingly onto a quilt. It is her story from a frightened four-year old to a self-sufficient twenty-one year old woman.

The female characters are marred, scarred, dealing with their own particular demons; still, the author uses them artfully. Miss Bel, Rebee’s grade two teacher, tries desperately to insinuate her kindness and understanding into Rebee’s life; but perhaps her own troubled psyche renders her an obstacle, rather than any solution. Nevertheless, Miss Bel gives Rebee the Wintergreen Lifesavers light show, the magic of which remains with Rebee. Aunt Vic, Harmony’s sister, is incapable of influencing Rebee’s life in a positive way; however, her boyfriend Eddy brings a little hope until Aunt Vic’s tyranny drives him away.

The greatest female influence on Rebee is her mother Harmony. There is such an appreciation and love of this woman by the girl that only highly emotional language would suffice to describe this. The author does not stoop to sentimentality; instead, she has Rebee say, “I can tell you now that I’m all grown up, that I don’t need a mother to keep me safe. That might be a lie. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I stand at her window, and I think I see her haunted eyes staring back at me” (177).

Rebee is strong, much stronger than the two male characters that remain at the end of the novel.

Jake, a man’s man, has a heart of gold, and though he is so broken, physically, having fallen off an oil rig in Kenya, he feels a palpable tenderness towards the two “girls” (Rebee, age 12, and her mother, Harmony) he encounters at his fishing spot. He thinks of Rebee, “This kid needed homemade chicken noodle soup in the worst way” (90). However, he realizes that Harmony “was not exactly needy” (100). Jake longed for a wife and family, a lasting relationship:

I thought about the men in this world who settle next to the rhythm of a woman, one woman, their whole lives . . . I’m a believer. I just don’t know how it’s done is all. What kind of chromosomes, hormones, cyclones bring all that together? Do you fall hard for a woman because of the light in her hair? The look she gets when she’s looking at you? And if you fall for one reason do you stay for another, until there comes a time when you can’t remember why you fell in the first place but you don’t even notice because it no longer matters. Somewhere between your falling and landing, what floats in between? What anchor drops to hold a man steady (97)?

Perhaps his longing scares the ever-vigilant Harmony away.

Joey is the other male character that endures. Through parallels drawn between the lives and circumstances of Rebee and this strange, skinny, pukey, pubescent boy, the author reveals Rebee’s history. Furthermore, the author allows Rebee to express her feelings of longing for a regular life when she says to Joey,

Every kid without a dad makes up stuff about a dad.
We met a man at a campground once. There was snow.
He took Harmony for a drive in the middle of the night.
Joey: And not you?
Afterwards, I made up stuff. I might have pretended he was my father.
Joey: Well, at least he brought your mom back. Obviously. That was good.
Were you scared?
Maybe a little. Not so much. Not when he took her away. Just when he brought her back and everything stayed the same (145).

The Shore Girl is a novel that continues to haunt well after it’s finished. Congratulations to Fran Kimmel for writing this novel, her first. Fran graduated from the University of Calgary with a degree in Sociology. She has been a youth worker, and a career counselor. Her stories have appeared in literary journals across Canada and have twice been nominated for the Journey Prize. Fran lives with her husband in Lacombe.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

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Egos are stuffed. Hunted animals are stuffed. Little nylon sacks are stuffed. A large stuffed mouse is given as a gift. Brother Tom’s snakeskin shit-kickers are stuffed with the newspaper on which his obituary is written. A young woman’s “fibrousy red stuff like red algae” (62) is stuffed into a jar. Emotions are stuffed, as in “Breaking the Mould,” until they can no longer be contained or controlled.

Perhaps the picture of a stuffed white owl adorning the cover of this collection serves as a harbinger of what follows in these 196 pages. This predacious bird aptly introduces the title story, a gathering of “Rurban acreage [women]” (12) at a “baby celebration.” (9) Kay, the narrator, is a taxidermist whose client is Bob, the father of the baby girl, and husband of the new mother Deirdre, and a shameless flirt. Kay is clearly alien among the plastic women, all perfectly coiffed. She observes silently, “I know quite a bit about hair and I can tell you, there wasn’t a natural pelt at the party.” (11) Question: Why was she invited? Answer: Bob. “Everything I had done for Bob, five hunting season’s worth of work, was junked [in the basement trophy] room”. (15) As layers of the story are stripped away, the disenchanted Kay admits, “Maybe Bob just likes the hunt.” (16) She returns to her shop and works on an audacious revenge.

Howard’s irreverent stream of consciousness continues as each subsequent narrator tells the story. In “Big Fork Campground” a conscientious Jeanie takes charge of a poorly planned camping adventure by Craig, “legendary outdoorsman . . . asshole” (21) who passes out on her chest after a clumsy attempt at seduction in his tent that “looks like a body-bag.” (24)

“Basic Obedience” tells a poignant story of a father’s love for his daughter and her dog. The father sacrifices his time to take the dog to obedience classes while maintaining a safe distance from which to observe the upwardly-mobile boyfriend whom the father suspects is physically abusive to both his daughter and the dog.

“It’s all about control” (125) is the overriding tenet that advances the drama in “Mrs. Goodfellow’s Dog”. “And Mrs. Goodfellow wore an elegant velvet choker around her neck.” (122) Following the debacle of the dog getting out of his cage, and the furtive groping of the babysitter by Mr. Goodfellow, “She brought her hands to her neck and unclasped her velvet choker, letting it dangle like a pendulum from her fingers.” (131)

Unrequited love and a mutual determination to leave it in the twenty-year past are the emotions that prevail in “Still Making Time.” Nadia and Scott, separately and privately reminiscing about “the heat of a summer fling.” (182)

Whether Howard is describing the anguish a mother feels when her daughter leaves for university in another city Hydro Cyst, or the naϊvete of a newly divorced Paul who flees to the country with new dreams of reclaiming his manhood in “Marking Territory,” her writing seems effortless. Her wry sense of humour flawlessly teases out contemporary social characteristics and practises.

“Vacuuming the Dog” offers total comic relief. The pace and diction in this zany story is what drives the narration. It’s the kind of story that begs to be read aloud for extra appreciation. If I ever get the chance, I’ll ask Barb Howard to read this story to me.

When you are near a library or a bookstore, pick up a copy of Barb Howard’s Western Taxidermy. This is her fourth book. Her previous publications are Whipstock (NeWest Press, 2001); Notes for Monday (Recliner, 2009); The Dewpoint Show (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.

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McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-7710-4632-2
$21.00

“Patrick Lane has always walked the thin ice where truth and terror meet with a kind of savage intuition.” This quotation is taken from The Vancouver Sun and appears on the dust jacket of Lane’s There is a Season (Toronto McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 2004).

The reading of this memoir was my introduction to Patrick Lane, author of more than twenty books of poetry, and recipient of most of Canada’s top literary awards. I was going through an excruciatingly sad time in my personal life, and reading Lane’s stark realities was somehow soothing to my tortured soul. How could that be? It was his writing, his lyricism that transcended the raw truths of his past that he exposed while tending his garden in the present, planting for the future. It was redemptive. And I was hooked on this writer.

Patrick Lane’s first work of fiction Red Dog Red Dog was published in 2008. It is a novel that takes place during a week in the lives of two brothers, Eddy and Tom Stark, young twenty-something men living in a small community in the Okanagan Valley in 1958. And it is about more than this single week—it goes back as far as the 1880s told by the ghost of a younger sister Alice, who lived only six months less nine days.

Father gave me a little charm on a string. He tied it around my neck in the hope it would necklace me to heaven. Instead, it hung me here on earth, my spirit roaming (87).

Lane’s use of an omniscient narrator puts the reader in touch with members of the family tree, their unrelenting grip on the lives of Eddy and Tom. It’s a device that allows the reader to examine the legacy that these young brothers inherit. “The past makes us what we are” (p 3).

Is there any salvation? Look to the title for a clue. Were it not for exceptionally beautiful descriptions of the natural world, it would be difficult to read this dark novel that describes unrelenting violence. This novel records the cycle of procreating, birthing, dying, burying, and burning; the savagery of dog fights; the antsy desperation of a heroin addict needing a fix; and the alcohol or drug-induced calamities of the dysfunctional Stark family.

Elmer and Lillian Stark’s progeny consists of Eddy, the first born, fiercely loved by his mother, Tom, an after thought, born two years later, and denied maternal love. Then came Rose who lived for only a week; then Alice; and finally unknown “Starry Night”, the burnt offering, born of a different mother, but fathered by Elmer Stark.

At age fourteen, Eddy is caught drinking whiskey, laughing as he throws coins at drunks in the park the day after he and his buddy Harry had broken into the bar in the Legion, stealing liquor and cash. Harry manages to disappear into the crowd, but Eddy is apprehended by Sergeant Stanley and sent away to Boyco, a correctional school for boys in Vancouver. This is the event that starts the downward spiral in Eddy’s life and, indeed, the lives of the entire family.

There was something dead in Eddy’s head when he came back from the coast. The boy he’d been was no longer there, and in his place was someone gone past feeling, who thought nothing of pain, his own or anyone else’s.
Even Father stepped sideways when Eddy walked behind him (18-19).

Eight years later, stoned on heroin, Eddy carries out his plan for retribution against Sergeant Stanley by setting his shed on fire, and days later, poisoning his beloved German shepherd.

So what if he’d been throwing money and laughing at the drunks scrambling in the gutter for coins? But it wasn’t just being sent to the coast, it was the three days before he was put on the train, his two nights in the cells. Stanley was worse than the guards and older boys in Boyco. Twenty-two years old now and he had never stopped living what happened (20).

In contrast to damaged Eddy is Tom. Tom, bereft of maternal love and devotion, somehow instinctively avoids the traps and temptations to which Eddy succumbs. Tom is the good brother, but not entirely untouched by his sense of justice to right the wrong. There is a gnawing, unconsoled hurt from his childhood that just won’t surface, and Eddy tells him not to remember.

It was Eddy who told him that everything would be okay, and not to think, and never to remember. But he had remembered . . . (319).

Here’s the salvation:

And he tried to understand, because now, right now, none of it seemed to matter (319).

Redemption!

If you want to meet some memorable characters, experience life on the edge, and delight in astounding descriptions of nature, then be prepared to be overwhelmed by Patrick Lane’s Red Dog Red Dog.

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XX Number 2.

The post Book Review of “Red Dog Red Dog” by Patrick Lane appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

And Me Among Them
by Kristen den Hartog
Freehand Books
ISNB 978-1-55481-054-3
$21.95.

Almost five feet tall when she starts school, Ruth towers above the other children.

Imagine being Ruth; imagine being the other children; Ruth’s parents. What to do? The doctor says everything seems normal. Should we get a second opinion? If only . . . and then, regrets.

Kristen den Hartog gives her narrator an omniscient point of view which enables her to not only soar above everyone else, but to know intuitively how her bigness affects everyone around her. Moreover, she is also able to see the past—her mother’s past, her father’s past; therefore able to reveal the innermost feelings and vulnerabilities of her parents, Elspeth and James.

From the womb of Elspeth, the story unfolds chronologically, piece by piece, inch by inch, focusing on the minutiae.

I had tunnel vision, but an eye for detail. In fact, I suppose this has always been true of me: I can hardly pull my eyes from the infinitesimal details to take in the broader picture, so vast and vague that I don’t know what to make of it.(68)

The author embellishes her fiction with references to real people and characters from pop culture “who’d grown to great heights”; ergo, the title “and me among them”. She has skillfully interwoven fact with fiction and recognizable fictitious characters to produce a credible story of Ruth whose most ardent wish is to belong, to have a friend to love, and to be loved, to be accepted. And she finds this special person, Suzy, who moves into the house next door. Witness the longing:

One day she caught my eye, waved, and motioned for me to come outside. No one had ever been so familiar, so casual with me, and I rushed to put my shoes on and get out to her before she changed her mind and wandered away . . . . We were closer than ever, then. She was right beside me, holding my wrist, and she looked up and said, “Wow—you really are tall. No matter how much I see you I just can’t get over it. You seem bigger each time.”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “I know it’s strange.”

I turned to go, but Suzy called to me, “Strange, yeah. But pretty amazing too. See you tomorrow?”(73-75)

Kristen den Hartog has written a provocative novel, one that I urge you to read for all its truth and elegance.

This review was first published in Prairie Journal magazine and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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