When Gordon Lockheed’s response to the publishing industry questions raised in my early reports was posted on dooneyscafe.com, it summarized some of the larger issues facing book publishing and book-selling:

So what are the big questions and answers being skirted here, the ones beyond the immediate situation? Are we approaching some sort of cultural Armageddon that will wipe out our book publishing industry while transforming Chapters/Indigo into a purveyor of cultural bric-a-brac and scented candles in which a few novels aimed at the diminishing stock of novel-reading little old ladies occupy a small corner of the stores? I hope not, but personally, I can’t see any way past the Chapters/Indigo mess for either publishers or writers.

At the macroscale what has happened is partly the result of the evolution of consumer capitalism and partly the product of technological changes in media, which together have reduced both the number of readers and altered the attentional choices (and perhaps, capacity) of the average citizen by creating alternative, and largely emotion-based reception and transmission devices for information. Yet another cause, perhaps particularly in Canada, is weakening government resolve. Governments across the West have decided their mandate is to act primarily as a component of the economic system and a cheerleader for the corporate sector, and now merely seek to serve those purposes—whatever they happen to be aimed at at any given moment. We can also lay some blame on the disintegration of our education systems, which has taught the young little more than how to have a nice day filled with consumer preferences and emotionally-authenticated opinions for several decades, and has transformed our higher education system into a job-training pipeline for the corporate sector, for which knowledge is simply another form of merchandise.

But behind that is the most difficult question of all, one that we have neither experience with, or any perceivable will to answer: what happens to a society that loses the technical ability to analyze and mediate its own activities?  Because that will be the consequence of the collapse of book reading, which is the primary platform for this depth of analysis in contemporary civilization, and the ground of the political and intellectual discourse required to keep the cognitive equipment operational.

McLuhan’s multi-disciplinary committees within the Global Village have failed woefully to do anything to head off this unforeseen scenario. The academic world has degenerated into ideological gang warfare, translating “multi-disciplinary” to “inter-disciplinary”, which is little more than shoals of ambitious professors vying for jargon supremacy.  Newspapers, trying to compete with the Internet and television, have imposed limits on most reportage to 800 words or less, thus obviating any serious analysis of issues. And television, likewise following McLuhan’s lead, has news anchors pestering flood victims and the like for some sort of expression of their feelings. And then there’s the Internet, where unargued opinion and unresearched blogging has supplanted research and analysis.

The trouble is real and profound, and it ain’t going away anytime soon.

*                              *                            *

I wonder if similar concerns and discussion are happening with other art forms, in other areas of the humanities? When I was teaching at university and Mike Harris was slashing education spending, unless you were in science or business, there was a lot of discussion about the humanities being at risk in academia.

In late October 2010 SUNY Albany’s President announced that several departments in the Humanities at that institution were to be eliminated. What follows is an open letter to George M Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany

Dear President Philip,

Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can’t really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn’t disagree. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. I hope, when I’m through, you will at least understand why.

Just 30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that ‘there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.’ Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure – in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.

Let’s examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of enrollment. I’m sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn’t have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn’t required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it’s because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs – something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

Young people haven’t, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it’s hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.

That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I’m sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it – if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don’t.

Then there’s the question of whether the state legislature’s inaction gave you no other choice. I’m sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are serious. They certainly are at Brandeis University, where I work. And we, too, faced critical strategic decisions because our income was no longer enough to meet our expenses. But we eschewed your draconian – and authoritarian – solution, and a team of faculty, with input from all parts of the university, came up with a plan to do more with fewer resources. I’m not saying that all the specifics of our solution would fit your institution, but the process sure would have. You did call a town meeting, but it was to discuss your plan, not let the university craft its own. And you called that meeting for Friday afternoon on October 1st, when few of your students or faculty would be around to attend. In your defense, you called the timing ‘unfortunate’, but pleaded that there was a ‘limited availability of appropriate large venue options.’ I find that rather surprising. If the President of Brandeis needed a lecture hall on short notice, he would get one. I guess you don’t have much clout at your university.

It seems to me that the way you went about it couldn’t have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn’t want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There’s so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders – if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don’t.

And do you really think even those faculty and administrators who may applaud your tough-minded stance (partly, I’m sure, in relief that they didn’t get the axe themselves) are still going to be on your side in the future? I’m reminded of the fable by Aesop of the Travelers and the Bear: two men were walking together through the woods, when a bear rushed out at them. One of the travelers happened to be in front, and he grabbed the branch of a tree, climbed up, and hid himself in the leaves. The other, being too far behind, threw himself flat down on the ground, with his face in the dust. The bear came up to him, put his muzzle close to the man’s ear, and sniffed and sniffed. But at last with a growl the bear slouched off, for bears will not touch dead meat. Then the fellow in the tree came down to his companion, and, laughing, said ‘What was it that the bear whispered to you?’ ‘He told me,’ said the other man, ‘Never to trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch.’

I first learned that fable, and its valuable lesson for life, in a freshman classics course. Aesop is credited with literally hundreds of fables, most of which are equally enjoyable – and enlightening. Your classics faculty would gladly tell you about them, if only you had a Classics department, which now, of course, you don’t.

As for the argument that the humanities don’t pay their own way, well, I guess that’s true, but it seems to me that there’s a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about. You seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might generate intellectual property more than you do ‘old-fashioned’ courses of study. But universities aren’t just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I’ll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world’s number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn’t – well, I’m sure you get the picture.

I know one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything. Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I hope I’ve just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today’s backwater is often tomorrow’s hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren’t too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I’m willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word ‘university’ derives from the Latin ‘universitas’, meaning ‘the whole’. You can’t be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.

I utterly refuse to believe that you had no alternative. It’s your job as President to find ways of solving problems that do not require the amputation of healthy limbs. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, had a lot of pithy, witty and brilliant things to say (my favorite is ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh’). Much of what he wrote would be very useful to you. I’m sure the faculty in your French department would be happy to introduce you to his writings, if only you had a French department, which now, of course, you don’t.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have trouble understanding the importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly ‘dead’ subjects. From your biography, you don’t actually have a PhD or other high degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I’m now Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn’t just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my sciences courses did any of that.

One of the things I do now is write a monthly column on science and society. I’ve done it for over 10 years, and I’m pleased to say some people seem to like it. If I’ve been fortunate enough to come up with a few insightful observations, I can assure you they are entirely due to my background in the humanities and my love of the arts.

One of the things I’ve written about is the way genomics is changing the world we live in. Our ability to manipulate the human genome is going to pose some very difficult questions for humanity in the next few decades, including the question of just what it means to be human. That isn’t a question for science alone; it’s a question that must be answered with input from every sphere of human thought, including – especially including – the humanities and arts. Science unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and self-absorbed. It’s also unimaginative: some of my best ideas as a scientist have come from thinking and reading about things that have, superficially, nothing to do with science. If I’m right that what it means to be human is going to be one of the central issues of our time, then universities that are best equipped to deal with it, in all its many facets, will be the most important institutions of higher learning in the future. You’ve just ensured that yours won’t be one of them.

Some of your defenders have asserted that this is all a brilliant ploy on your part – a master political move designed to shock the legislature and force them to give SUNY Albany enough resources to keep these departments open. That would be Machiavellian (another notable Italian writer, but then, you don’t have any Italian faculty to tell you about him), certainly, but I doubt that you’re that clever. If you were, you would have held that town meeting when the whole university could have been present, at a place where the press would be all over it. That’s how you force the hand of a bunch of politicians. You proclaim your action on the steps of the state capitol. You don’t try to sneak it through in the dead of night, when your institution has its back turned.

No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it’s performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get – well, I’m sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don’t, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It’s awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That’s the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven’t given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

                *                               *                           *

It is worth noting that in August 2003, Pontecorvo’s masterpiece film “The Battle of Algiers” made the news after the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at The Pentagon offered a screening of the film, regarding it as a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq. A flyer for the screening read:

“How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”

Ah, stories and art as propaganda.

*                                  *                            *

1993 Jury: Lord Gowrie, a Conservative Party politician for some years, including a period in the British Cabinet, and was later Chairman of Sotheby’s and of the Arts Council of England; he has also published poetry. Professor Gillian Beer, now Dame Beer, a literary critic, specialty Victorian literature. Anne Chisholm, biographer and critic. Nicholas Clee, is the joint editor of the book industry newsletter BookBrunch and the author of Eclipse. Olivier Todd, writer and French journalist.

Michael Ignatieff—Scar Tissue VPL

This novel received great reviews when it was published, all of them deserved. The book is an examination of loss, grief and acceptance. The first-person narrator watches his mother drift into dementia and his father struggle to cope. The father dies first; his two sons are left to cope with the mother.

I was deeply moved by this book. It was the first Booker novel in a while I’ve had trouble putting down. Perhaps it is because the book touched my own grieving, and acknowledgement that you must grieve in your own way, in your own time. But it would be dismissive to say it was only the personal connection. This is a powerful book. Articulate and well written, deeply philosophical, recognizing both intellect and feeling but also exploring the lines between. Everything is complicated and nuanced. Nothing is easy or quick. I was impressed by the thoroughness of argument but also the concise nature of the book.

It is also an examination of stories, the telling and recording of stories. It’s about words. The book affirms the power of fiction.

Scar Tissue is the work of a powerful and uncompromising intellectual. Perhaps that is why Ignatieff is so challenged by politics where fast, knee-jerk sound bytes seem to be the current method of running for office, and running the country.

Carol Shields—The Stone Diaries VPL

Guest report from Frank Davey:

I included The Stone Diaries in a graduate course in postmodern Canadian literature at Western in 1994. I didn’t mention to the students that it had been a Booker winner – didn’t want to prejudice them against it. And today I don’t know if any of them knew. I still think of the Booker mostly as a sign of commercial ambition and, for Canadian books, of necessarily minimized reference to Canada. I hadn’t paid much attention to Shields before. Most Canadianists at the time thought of her as a Readers Digest version of Alice Munro – Munro without complexity or covert critical intelligence. Somewhat later in Paris, after her much-publicized death, there was Carol Shields conference. I enjoy being in France, but I was as much tempted to go as I would have been to attend an exhibition of Hallmark artists. I also regretted her early death, but not the empathetic narratives which accompanied it and reiterated the predominantly humanistic readings that had been given to her fiction.

            But The Stone Diaries did seem a good text with which to begin a study of postmodernism. Its postmodernist devices were laid over an otherwise mundane chronological narrative with such obviousness and awkwardness: suggestions of indeterminacy were laid over a narrative that otherwise seemed to assume an omniscient narrator; coy hints of genre ambiguity – hints that the story might rest on actual diaries, be ‘faction’ rather than fiction, or perhaps even be autobiography – were inserted into a text published as “a novel.” In this regard it could be read not only as Alice Munro for dummies but as Daphne Marlatt or Gail Scott for them as well, whose novels the course would be looking at subsequently. Or perhaps as a watered-down version of bpNichol’s novel Andy (1969) or of David McFadden’s intermixing of poems and family photos in Letters from the Earth to the Earth (1968). Not that I am suggesting that Shields might have read many of these.

            There were other things I liked about The Stone Diaries. I liked its portrayal of the porous US Canadian border of pre-World War II. The portrayal of Manitoba as closer culturally to Minnesota than to other parts of Canada reminded me of BC’s historical relationship to the US west coast, of Toronto’s to Buffalo and Detroit, Quebec’s to Vermont, Halifax’s to Boston, although I found the characters’ superficial and careless understandings of citizenship annoying. As is so often in Shields, the portrayal is evocative but the novelist’s implied understanding of it seems uncritical. I liked its use of photographs and the challenge to ekphasis that they constituted. I liked the concept, that is, although I didn’t like the imprecision of their effect. Umberto Eco would include photographs much more effectively to hint at autobiography in 2004 in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Also intriguing in Shield’s novel was the fate of the failed artist, stone carver Cuyler Goodwill. He is carving at the height of the Art Deco period in North America, a period which left much greater art works than The Stone Diaries, including Vancouver’s Marine Building, Burrard Bridge, and Lions Gate Bridge, but there is little indication in the novel that anyone, include him or the narrator, has insight into its aesthetics. That art is reduced to an “ugly piece of backyard sculpture” that awaits a wrecking ball – arguably a pomo reference to the novel we are reading: a novel that has a relationship to historical postmodernist art similar to that of Cuyler’s backyard pyramid to historical Art Deco. I suspect that Booker jurors could have had minimal awareness of North American architectural Art Deco, and have missed that reference.

            There is a possibility I suppose that I am misreading a work of attempted self-satire. With simplistic chapter titles – “Birth,”: “Childhood, “Marriage,” “Love,” Motherhood” – Shields does overdetermine the elements of predictability and superficiality in her events and characters, even while also contrasting these with utterly unpredictable events such as Mercy’s birth or Harold’s semi-suicidal death in the town of “Corps”  when drunkenly surprised by his bride’s sneeze. This is a novel whose central character Daisy aims above all to be “moving right along. And along and along. The way she’s done all her life, Numbly. Without thinking.” Who leaves behind descendants whose greatest ambition is to retire in bourgeois comfort to Florida. Could Shields have been trying to mock such ambitions? Like Munro does? Of course The Stone Diary chapter titles could also be merely devices to foreground its genre gestures to being a diary. I can’t tell.  It can be difficult to create art out of boredom. John Cage did it well though. Call this John Cage for Canadian readers in Florida.

I agree with Frank that there are things in this novel to admire, but Shields is no Munro. And the monotonous domestic detail, egad.

She sat down at her aging Mac computer to write her report. She didn’t really need to write anything since a reader had agreed to do a guest report, but her Scottish protestant upbringing obliged her to say a little something, at the very least. The keys on the computer looked smudged. She made a mental note to get the cleaner out from under the sink, where all the household cleaning materials were kept, even though these days the cleaning ladies brought their own supplies. A movement out the window caught her eye. That darn squirrel was after the spring bulbs she had just planted. Perhaps she didn’t put in enough bone meal, or the bone meal isn’t as good since Mad Cow disease swept the UK and the media. Wasn’t there something about that problem in the recent newsletter from the local plant shop? She’d ask Bob next time she walked through the nursery on the way to the video store.

David Malouf—Remembering Babylon VPL

Gemmy, a lad from the British slums finds himself at 12 as a cabin boy, and then is cast off on the coast of Australia where he is taken in by an aboriginal tribe. He lives with them for 16 years until a new Scottish settlement draws him to his white roots. But Gemmy has learned about the land from the aboriginals and although he tries to tell the whites the language of the place, except for the socially inept pastor, they can’t understand. Malouf uses a shifting narrative voice, often retelling an event from the perspective of another character. This device underlines the cultural divide, and the inability of the community to see beyond its own whiteness. The family that takes Gemmy in finds itself an object of those fears, and even after Gemmy disappears they find they have been affected for the rest of their lives.

We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. I think of our early settlers, starving on these shores in the midst of plenty they did not recognize, in a blessed nature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our senses to other forms, even the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there.

Caryl Phillips—Crossing the River VPL

Another historical novel about the slave trade using endless letters and journal entries as the narrative device. This post-modernist approach is getting old, let me tell you.

There are several distinct sections in this book with a short piece at front and back acting as bookends. The front piece and back piece are from a large omniscient voice. The book begins: “A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them (two boys and a girl) along a weary path, until we reached the places where the mud flats are populated with crabs and gulls.” The sections between the bookends are lives of these children, not literally but lives of example.

1830s. Nash, given freedom by his American master, goes to Africa as a Christian-educated minister to bring the word of God to the natives of Liberia. He goes native.

Late C19th. Martha’s daughter and husband are sold, dispersing the family and Martha heads to California. This section particularly falls into the category: alternative views of history. This is not the wild west of Bill Hickock or Hollywood.

1940s. Travis, a US GI stationed in Yorkshire meets a lonely young woman, and they conceive a child. When the young mother learns Travis has died she is persuaded to give up her mixed-blood child for adoption. Years later, the son returns to find his mother.

The final 21/2-page section explains through the large omnipotent voice, again, that he is listening “as the many-tongued chorus of the common memory begins again to swell.” This last section is pretty heavy-handed. Shouldn’t an attentive reader have figured out that is the whole purpose of the rest of the book? “Survivors all”

Phillips was one of the Hot Young Writers in the UK in the early 90s.

Category: Alternative View of History

Tibor Fischer—Under the Frog UBC

After 58 rejection letters, Polygon press in Edinburgh published the novel which established Fischer’s career and put him on the world stage.

The book won a Betty Trask award, “awarded to a writer under the age of 35 for a first novel. The author must be a Commonwealth citizen, and the work must be of a romantic or traditional nature, i.e. not experimental.” Nino Ricci received this award in 1991 for Lives of Saints. Well, neither Fischer nor Ricci won the £10,000 prize. They received an “award”: £3,000 and £1,500 respectively. In other words, you must be careful to distinguish between “prize” and “award.” It’s a way of getting around “4^th place in the 1992 Betty Trask competition.”

Under the Frog has been much praised as a brilliant presentation of Hungarian life under communism. The bookjacket claims it is “very witty and very sad.” It’s also very hard to follow. Gyuri and Pataki belong to a traveling basketball team. Twelve patchwork sections tell about their friends, womanizing, drinking and dreams of escaping to the West. And it is a patchwork, not a coherent narrative. It would probably help to know a lot of the history of that time.

Often the writing is self-conscious, sometimes simply preposterous.

“Gyuri thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition was a handicap, as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made Gyuri realize that there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design.”

Or

“He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do up her blouse or the buttons didn’t feel like working but light was taking off from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri’s retinas.”

The text is littered with unnecessary, showy works; sesquipedalian, manumittance, mulierosity, stultiloquence. And then there’s the contrived noun-verbs, ozymandiased or frankensteined.

“Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac.”

Had those breasts had too much coffee?

And the final sentence of the novel: “Tears, in teams, abseiled down his face.”

If you are interested in UK publishing bitchiness check out Fischer’s scathing attack on Martin Amis: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3594613/Someone-needs-to-have-a-word-with-Amis.html#dsq-content

Roddy Doyle—Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha UBC–WINNER

Fictional Barrytown, again. This time through the eyes of 10-year-old Paddy of the title. The book is remarkable for capturing moments of childhood, things mostly forgotten; pulling tar off the road on hot days, reading with a flashlight under the covers, obliviousness to the happenings of the adult world. But there is no nostalgia in this telling, rather childhood is not a place of innocence but the ongoing excitement and terror of the uninformed. Several times I thought, when I was a child I thought that exact same thing but I never told anyone. How does he know? It is that deep sense of intimacy that carries the book.

From Magill Book Reviews:

Family life largely centers on the television; school seems little more than an endless round of intimidation and humiliation. In the world between, the world of disappearing farms and half-finished building sites, Paddy and the other Barrytown boys play soccer, defend their territory, run through their neighbors’ yards, steal boards and nails, and, in neighboring Bayside, magazines. Mostly they try to belong, though to a group that can only define itself in negative terms, on the basis of someone being excluded. Helpless witness to the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Paddy becomes that someone, his vulnerability like some physical weakness that the others find vaguely threatening. With great sensitivity and without a single misstep, false note, or moment’s condescension, Doyle renders Paddy Clarke’s world in terms of what his young protagonist can see but only dimly and reluctantly understand.

This novel has surety and utter lack of pretentiousness.

I’d got the bike for Christmas, two Christmases before. I woke up. I thought I did. The bedroom door was closing. The bike was leaning against the end of my bed. I was confused. And afraid. The door clicked shut. I stayed in bed. I heard no footsteps outside in the hall. I didn’t try to ride the bike for months after. We didn’t need them. We were better on foot through the fields and sites. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know who’d given it to me. It should never have been in my bedroom. It was a Raleigh, a gold one. It was the right size for me and I didn’t like that either. I wanted a grown-up one, with straight handlebars and brakes that fit properly into my hands with the bars, like Kevin had. My brakes stuck down under the bars. I had to gather them into my hands. When I held the bar and brake together the bike stopped; I couldn’t do that. The only thing I did like was a Manchester United sticker that was in my stocking when I woke up again in the morning. I stuck it on the bar under the saddle.

Gillian Beer from The Guardian

Olivier Todd, the French novelist, shrugged his shoulders at our second judges’ meeting: no lunches with publishers, no approaches from agents, he complained – what an odd English bubble of propriety we were gathered inside. He was joking, but only just. And it is one of the remarkable things about being a Booker judge that no one tempts you with hospitality. You simply sit and read, and talk, and read again, over several months. The pleasure is in the reading, and in the talk. One of the rewards of going to see a new film is the conversation straight after, but reading new novels can be a lonely business. Not in this case. In 1993 I remember impassioned defences of books one of us had grown attached to, but no quarrels, just engrossing talk. Our chair, Grey Gowrie, came up with an ingenious criterion: novels must have “radioactivity” to stay in the running. He meant we must remember them weeks, months later. They mustn’t fade. A self-proving criterion perhaps, but reassuring.

One novel that certainly had that quality and yet just missed the shortlist was Trainspotting and it was in arguing about Irvine Welsh’s book that we came nearest to quarrelling. Getting from long to shortlist was painful, worse than sorting out the winner among that final six. Some wanted the prize to go to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, while Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries had strong support as well. But Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the day with its extraordinary technical achievement and its emotional force, taking us inside the voice and experience of a 10-year-old boy in the midst of family break-up.

December 16^th 6377 words

Frank Davey sends yet another reading of Mistry’s Such a Long Journey:

What’s most interesting to me about Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey is the alternate view of world history that it constructs. That may have also interested a Booker jury – one would hope. In this it resembles M.S. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, although without quite the same narrative emphasis on chronology and family descent. Like Vassanji’s expatriate South Indian Ismaili Moslem community in East Africa, Mistry’s Parsi community in Bombay is one defined by religion and ethnicity but not by nationalism. Unlike the Ismailis, however, the Parsis can recall a lost national identity: in the Zoroastrian Persian empire of Xerxes and Darius, and in its smaller medieval successors. Gustad Noble, the point-of-view character of the novel, has named his sons Darius and Sohrab, the second after the legendary warrior-son of Firdousi’s medieval Persian epic, the Shah-nama. The Shah-nama is also cited in the first of the novel’s three epigraphs, which begins

He assembled the aged priests and put questions to them concerning the kings who had once possessed the world. ‘How did they,’ he inquired, ‘hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has been left to us in such a sorry state?’ 

This question about history gestures to two questions which haunt the bank clerk Gustad Noble: how have the Persians or Parsis so declined from the romantic times of Xerxes and Darius, or of Sohrab and Rustum, and how has his own family declined from the prosperity of his grandfather’s and father’s generations. In the opening chapter Mistry shows Gustad sitting at his long-dead grandfather’s large black desk, a desk that he has dishonestly inherited, and recalling the grandfather’s shop.

Gustad remembered the sign on the shop. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes: Noble & Sons, Makers of Fine Furniture, and I also remember the first time I saw the sign – too young to read the words but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words…. like the furniture in my childhood home.

Later in this chapter he undertakes a semi-disastrous project to buy a live chicken and kill, dress, and cook it just like his family had been able to do, with the help of many servants, during his childhood.

            Throughout, the novel focuses on Gustad’s longing for affiliation: with his Zoroastrian/Parsi past history, with the wealth and status of his grandfather’s generation, even with belonging to a larger possible family of Mother India, personified for him in the early parts of the novel by Indira Gandhi. While death, government treachery, municipal corruption, and family betrayals make it impossible for anyone in the novel to keep or recover most material things — goldfish die, businesses go bankrupt, the municipality at the end of the novel destroys the wall that protects the apartment complex in which Gustad and his fellow tenants  live –  memory persists, and eventually comes to act as a substitute for Gustad for what has been lost. He may not be able to hand on his grandfather’s furniture business and carpentry skills to his son Darius – only the grandfather’s hammer remains – but he can pass on the memory of the grandfather. His friend Major Billimoria cannot be saved from betrayal by a corrupt Indira Gandhi, but the story of his betrayal can be passed on through Gustad and remembered.

            At a cultural level Such a Long Journey acts to insert both Parsi memory and a period of twentieth-century Indian history into Canadian literary textuality – implying that there are other journeys than those recounted in Western literature from Homer to Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot, from whose poem “The Journey of the Magi,” and its quotation from Andrewes, the title is taken. Contrary to the suggestion of Eliot’s arguably Eurocentric poem, and Andrewes’ arguably Eurocentric sermon, both of which put Western words into the mouth of a middle-east speaker, Christianity has not caused  “bitter agony” and “death” of all pre-Christian mid-Eastern religions and cultures. However, I doubt that such an insertion was Mistry’s aim. The novel’s implied audience seems more likely to have been an Indian one, or a Booker one, than a Canadian one. The epigraphs seemed aimed mainly at British readers, and the Parsi narrative at Indian ones. Parsis are invisible in Canada but in India have been attacked and killed, as a somehow over-privileged minority, during inter-ethnic rioting.

Frank’s point about alternative views of history is useful, because during the 1980s and 90s it seemed to be a focus for the Bookers, whether or not the novels involved merited international recognition for quality of writing. It’s a category: alternative view of history. For 1991 the novels by both Okri and Mo would also fit the category.

***

When I first began this project I included my choice of winner for the year. I’ve noticed I’ve stopped that practice. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but on reflection I realize that making the judgment has ceased to interesting me. Is this book better than that book? So I was particularly interested in the following piece:

Montreal’s Miguel Syjuco disappointed to be shut out of Canadian book prizes

Wednesday, 20 October 2010 14:33 Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press

TORONTO – Montreal writer Miguel Syjuco admits he got the career boost of a lifetime when he won the Man Asian Literary Prize for the manuscript that would become his debut novel “Ilustrado.”

But that early acclaim may have set expectations so high for his resulting book ”a sprawling historical analysis of the Philippines and an indictment of its pampered elite” that satisfying the critics was impossible, he suggests.

Syjuco, 33, says he’s disappointed to be shut out of Canada’s three major book prizes, and posits a variety of reasons for the snub, ranging from “Ilustrado” (Penguin) being too political, not Canadian enough, or just plain inadequate.

“There are so many theories that anyone could come up with,” Syjuco says from Vancouver, where he is attending the Vancouver International Writers Festival this weekend.

“Essentially, the judges have their own tastes and opinions and it does become something of a lottery. The novelist Julian Barnes called the (Man) Booker Prize, for example, ‘posh bingo.’ And in a way, it is. I got very lucky with the Man Asian Literary Prize and I’m happy with that. Prizes are important, I think, to writers because they push your work to more readers and that’s ultimately what we want….. (But) it is a little disappointing.”

Syjuco exploded into the spotlight in 2008 when he claimed the $10,000 prize for his ambitious manuscript, marking an auspicious start to a fledgling career that had until then been marked by rejection letters.

But his name was notably absent among the Canadian writers who appeared on the recent nomination lists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Syjuco is among the finalists for a Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards, to be handed out Nov. 23.

The soft-spoken writer, who was a copy editor at the Montreal Gazette when he submitted “Ilustrado” to the Man Asian Literary Prize, says the intense publicity that followed the win made him nervous about his prospects as a published author.

“The book hadn’t come out yet and I thought, ‘Well, I’m worried about all of this hype. It can’t be good for it.’ I would rather the book came out and people decided for themselves rather than the book comes out two years after I won a prize so everybody’s thinking, ‘This is fantastic, it must be a masterpiece,’ and then they see it as a flawed, baggy first novel by somebody who’s trying to reach beyond his own capacities and grow as a writer,” says Syjuco.

“I’m still new to the Canadian writing scene. I’m still something of an outsider and I think my book is different from some stuff out there and maybe it just takes a little bit longer for people to enjoy it, if ever they do.

“Or maybe the book just isn’t good enough. I have good days, I have bad days.”

Syjuco’s first novel is a complex and ambitious work.

Ostensibly, it’s about the death of a Filipino literary hero and the student who investigates his mysterious demise. Woven throughout are snippets of the hero’s novels, essays and newspaper articles, leading the reader across centuries, continents, and generations that defined the island nation.

Reviews have ranged from glowing celebrations of the book’s unique blend of genres as a way to piece together a fragmented life and country, to derisive for a difficult, complex structure that some felt was overwrought.

“I’ve learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn’t be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus,” says Syjuco, who moved to Canada at age one, returned to the Philippines at age 11 and settled in Montreal three years ago.

“It took me awhile. At first I was disappointed that the book wasn’t flying off the shelves in the U.S. or Canada or elsewhere. It’s doing OK, it’s doing fine, but it’s not one of those bestselling books and that’s really because there are those people who love it and there are those people who hate it or don’t get it or give up on it. And that’s great. because it creates discussion and it’s a great book for book clubs, I’m told, it’s good for lively conversation.”

He’s particularly disappointed that major newspapers in the Phillipines largely ignored the book, noting that “less than a handful” of articles appeared upon its release.

“It was a big deal when I won the prize,” he notes.

“So it’s not about the book; it’s about winning. It’s about succeeding and that’s really quite troubling. But maybe it’s just that people read the book and didn’t like it or maybe they found it too confronting, I don’t know.”

Syjuco says two things here that resonate with me, after so much time reading nothing but Bookers. I agree with him—the long list doesn’t matter, the short list doesn’t matter, only winning matters, though that isn’t the way it should be. Writers should not write for consensus. Now keep that in mind when you read the following.

Kim Goldberg was on the jury for the 2010 GG for poetry. There was a lot of discussion on her facebook page about the 5 short-listed writers. Kim decided the long list would be of interest to other poets and poetry readers so she made the following post:

I’ve been thinking about sharing this list ever since our earlier Facebook discussion of the shortlist of five finalists (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150303943260301). And I have been feeling kind of cowardly for not sharing it. Nobody ever said we couldn’t release this list. And I don’t see how its release does anything but give some much-deserved recognition to some additional poets and their publishers. I would hope in future years that the Canada Council itself would release the GG long lists in mid-September, prior to the release of the finalists (shortlists) in mid-October and the winners in mid-November.

 171 poetry books published between September 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010 were submitted by their publishers for this year’s English-language Poetry GG. The three jurors were: Kimmy Beach (Red Deer, Alberta), Norm Sibum (Montreal) and me – Kim Goldberg (Nanaimo, BC).

 We each read all 171 books in private, with no communication with each other. Then ten days before we were to meet in Ottawa for our one-day adjudication process to determine the five finalists and winner, we were each asked to submit a list of up to ten titles that were our top contenders. Our three separate lists were compiled into one cumulative list (which I am calling the unofficial ‘long list’). And that cumulative list was emailed back to each of us so we could study those books more closely before we left for Ottawa. The books on that cumulative list were the only books we discussed when we met for our day-long adjudication session in Ottawa.

 Here is our cumulative list (the ‘long list’) of 22 books, alphabetical by title. The five finalists are marked with an asterisk.

 * &: A Serial Poem by Daryl Hine (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)

 A Good Time Had by All by Meaghan Strimas (Exile Editions)

 After Jack by Garry Thomas Morse (Talonbooks)

 Attenuations of Force by Lori Cayer (Frontenac House)

 Back Off, Assassin! by Jim Smith (Mansfield Press)

 * Boxing the Compass by Richard Greene (Signal Editions/Véhicule Press)

 * Circus by Michael Harris (Signal Editions/Véhicule Press)

 Decompositions by Ken Belford (Talonbooks)

 * Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert (McClelland & Stewart)

 * Exploding into Night by Sandy Pool (Guernica Editions)

 Huge Blue by Patrick M. Pilarski (Leaf Press)

 Ivan’s Birches by Barry Dempster (Pedlar Press)

 Lookout by John Steffler (McClelland & Stewart)

 Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

 My Darling Nellie Grey by George Bowering (Talonbooks)

 Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf (Coach House Books)

 Ossuaries by Dionne Brand (McClelland & Stewart)

 Tattoo Land by Kathleen McCracken (Exile Editions)

 The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam (House of Anansi Press)

 The Reinvention of the Human Hand (Paul Vermeersch (McClelland & Stewart)

 The Semiconducting Dictionary: Our Strindberg by Natalee Caple (ECW Press)

 Wait Until Late Afternoon by David Bateman and Hiromi Goto (Frontenac House)

You will notice that the long list has some really good titles with a great range of poetics, while the short list is, well, pretty one dimensional. Kim says not all 3 jurors submitted lists with 10 books, that some lists were shorter. So the long list of 22 in itself confirms there wasn’t much consensus on this jury.

The posting prompted more discussion, including this from Shane Neilson, and good for him:

Better to have my own two feet in my mouth than the CC’s thumb. Or, teat. Your post reads like CC propaganda. Kumbaya etc. There’s no acrimony here! And by the way, the Schier fiasco can’t happen again! Not that we take responsibility for that in the first place!

It seems like you’re too nice… Stuart and Zach pulled you away from your initial post and you’ve agreed with them, in the Canadian way. If there really was an argument in the judging process, if there were strenuous disagreements, if there was an honest way to get to the best book, then I’d be glad for the CC to let us hear about it, not a nicey nice we all got along, aren’t we civilized, patty cake post. All the high fives you’re getting here attest to me that the whole CC process is rank, and no one wants to give offense, lest retribution come.

But since you mentioned it, a points system is stupid too. People should be allowed to not be mathematical about poetry. They should be allowed to persuade. Duel. Argue. Get mad. Feel a conversion. A points system is like phoning it in.

I can’t help but feel that the best books this year weren’t on the list (gasp! I risk offending the judges! The CC! The nominees!) because the consensus process necessarily excluded them, and in pathetic fashion, you seem to agree. How valid a process is that? Isn’t that my point?

Now for my favourite part of the story. Someone phoned the Canada Council to complain that Goldberg had posted the long list. The CC got in touch with her and asked her to remove the information from her facebook page, which she did. The CC also informed her that in future GG jurors would have to sign a confidentiality clause saying they will not disclose the long list. Just what we need—more rules and restrictions.

1992 Booker Jury: Victoria Glendinning, novelist and whining 2009 Giller juror. John Coldstream, at the time the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford—also does BBC work and reviews extensively. Dr. Harriet Harvey Wood, then literature director of the British Council. Mark Lawson, journalist, broadcaster and writer.

Christopher Hope—Serenity House UBC

Max Montfalon is declining, his enormous house is too much so he makes a deal with his daughter and her ambitious politician husband—if they buy a new house with an apartment for him they get all his money. After 7 months the daughter is about to crack up dealing with her cranky and incontinent dad, so Max gets shipped off to Serenity House. The Lear overtones in the beginning are quickly taken over by black comedy, murder mystery, and anti-American themes—particularly the US media’s obsession with (glorification of?) death and killing.

The novel has a cast of eccentric characters, my favourite is Max’s granddaughter, a devotee of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or at least until she takes up a new fad. Max had been a doctor, then made a fortune through corporate takeovers. Cledwyn Fox is doing his best to administer a home for the aged in an increasingly competitive market:

More and more people born. And living longer. Present population increase was about two per cent a year. At this rate the living space available to each of us by late in the next millennium was reduced to a few yards. Fifty billion by 2100 and a century later, 500 billion. Project the figures into the third millennium and the space available to each human being had shrunk to one square inch! Even if you could shoot them into space, you would have to expel around 10,000 an hour, for ever, to make much difference.,,A certain individual freedom was fine, but in the end, only large-scale intervention would deal with the problems.

The novel is deeply disturbing in its presentation of the industry and ugly commerce of aging and death. It’s both brutal and funny—a doctor who supports euthanasia pens a book titled The Joy of Passing. The novel is stinging, and no one gets off the hook. It puts euthanasia of British elders beside the holocaust, and Disney World. The last chapter of the novel absolutely clobbered me. When I finish this Booker project, I’ll search out other books by Hope.

Michele Roberts—Daughters of the House UBC

Loosely based on the real life of martyr St. Therese, the novel begins with Leonie waiting for the return of her cousin to the family house—Therese has spent the last 20 years as a nun. To fill the time waiting for her cousin Leonie is preparing an inventory of the house and those items become the titles for the very short chapters of the book—The Bed, The Biscuit Tin, The Cellar Key, etc.

The novel (maybe) begins with a short, heavy-handed, gothicesque dream, though it took me many readings to make any sense of it. It’s obviously written to make the reader think of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher or Hawthorn’s The House of the Seven Gables. Lots of doom, gloom and foreshadowing and a house that becomes a character, in essence.

Quickly (and the whole book is quick—if you added up all the white space it might not make the page count to qualify as a novel) the narrative (maybe) tells the story of the girls’ early years and the “miracle” that altered both their lives.

I’m reminded of Possession since this novel is clearly written to explore literary theories and specifically feminist themes. The few male characters in the novel are incidental. The concern is female relationships, mother and daughter, servant and mistress, and all other manner of womanhood, female martyrdom, virginity, sexuality, nurturing and secrecy. A brief online search does indicate that feminist critics are all over this one, and as far as I’m concerned, that can have it.

At its best the novel is examining the line (if there really is one) between fact and fiction, the act of storytelling, or stealing stories and making them your own. Leonie is the one who goes to the secret glade and has a vision of the Virgin. Therese makes modifications to the story, takes it as her own and convinces the clergy that she has experienced a miracle.

The writing is highly poetic in places, and mystical. It’s the sort of stuff you’d expect from a student in a conservative creative writing program (like the one at UBC) who thinks she is being edgy. It’s a poorly written YA novel, an imprecise fairy tale, about the passage into adulthood (both girls begin menstruating). Too much fussy description and way too many metaphors.

Did saints ever bat their eyelids and look sleepily self-satisfied as cats? Therese, lowering her lashes like a lacy brown veil and trying to smile too obviously, did not look modest. It was the same look she’d directed at the men all through lunch and they’d loved it. Leonie thought men were stupid to be so easily taken in. Look flutteringly at them, pout with all your maidenly charm, above all don’t say a word, and they were yours. She vowed that never would she resort to such cheap tricks. She would die rather than roll her eyes and wriggle and blush.

Patrick McCabe—The Butcher Boy VPL

The 1992 Picador edition has a scary portrait on the cover. The novel is as menacing as this cover image suggests.

Francie Brady is the first-person narrator, a young boy living in a small community where his broken-down mother and alcoholic father are known as the Pigs. Representing the upper class of the community is the Nugent family, and their son Philip, perpetually in his school blazer.

It’s chilling, right from the start, “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.” Some disturbing events take place during the narrative of the novel. At one point Francie is sent to a home for “bad” boys, which is run by bad priests (Francie works out payment for services with chocolates). But it isn’t so much the plot that is disturbing; it’s the increasing mental disturbance of Francie. He shifts from misguided to demented, and takes the reader on that ride. The reader is in Francie’s head, though you wouldn’t want Francie in your home. Or chumming with your children.

Francie is scary, but his innocence underlines the cruelty of the town. He runs away from home, his mother commits suicide and Francie is blamed. The community shuns him because of his family and class situation. He is emotionally abused by the authority figures who should be helping him.

Not far into the story Francie can’t always tell the difference between a real situation, one on television, and one in his head. It’s hard to like Francie but it’s impossible not to feel compassion for his situation, without condoning his actions. In Francie’s situation, he is cornered into anarchy.

Category: Scream of consciousness. We’ve seen this one before, repeatedly. Except this book goes way past eccentric. The line between the real and the imagined cracks, as Francie spins out of control. As so often with Irish novels, at heart is the class disparity and the usual Irish clichés, such as drunkenness. There is a larger sense of doom from the world’s situation with occasional mention of the Cuban crisis and predictions of the end of the world.

Mary had the same face as ma used to have sitting staring into the ashes it was funny that face it slowly grew over the other one until one day you looked and the person you knew was gone. And instead there was a half-ghost sitting there who had only one thing to say: All the beautiful things of this world are lies. They count for nothing in the end.

A movie has been made. And here’s an interesting site PSYCHOANALYTIC MEDIA CRITICISM BY HARVEY ROY GREENBERG, MD

“Harvey Roy Greenberg, M.D., a graduate of Columbia College, and Cornell University Medical College, is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, New York, where he teaches adolescent psychiatry and medical humanities. He practices adult and adolescent psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology in Manhattan. Dr. Greenberg writes frequently on the psychoanalytic study of cinema, media, and popular culture.”

Here is his review of the movie:

http://doctorgreenberg.net/butcherboy.htm

Ian McEwan—Black Dogs VPL

Back cover blurb: “A terrifyingly beautiful political allegory in the form of a sublimely readable novel.” Ottawa Citizen

I wonder when people are writing book reviews if they are thinking, “quote me, quote me.”

This book is a fable disguised as a memoir about the nature of good and evil, the inherent evil in all of us and the possible redemption of love. June and Bernard are idealist, sexually they are highly compatible but are at odds about politics. June suffers a violent encounter with some Nazi dogs, left behind after the retreat, and makes the decision to assume a life of introspection and isolation. Bernard continues with the communist cause. They stay married and have children, but live apart. Or as Bernard accuses, she trades one utopia for another. Years later, with June dying in an old age home, their son-in-law tries to sort it out.

The writing is first-rate, and atmospherically the novel is a huge achievement. But the fable content makes the story/morale too obvious.

Michael Ondaatje—The English Patient GB library copy—WINNER, shared

Is there anyone in the Anglophone world who doesn’t have a story about this novel? Heck, it even became a special episode on Seinfeld, about how to bore someone. And I must admit that the first time I tried to read it, not long after it was published, I got to page 100 or so and packed it in. But it’s a Booker winner and under the rules I’ve established I had to finish it. And I did, and really liked parts of it.

When the novel captured me, it was by the quality of the writing. Specific scenes are wonderful, such as Kip’s relationship to his English mentor or the exploration of the Sistine Chapel by flare light. Ondaatje creates scenes and atmospheres that are luscious, sometimes ethereal. And it’s that quality that sometimes seems inappropriate, as others have charged, the aestheticization of war and suffering. Ondaatje often writers, in prose and poetry, about violence and endless academic papers have be written about this theme, or as some charge, obsession. Christian Bok notes, “Ondaatje in effect receives critical acclaim for his ability to stylize violence, to endow it with aesthetic integrity through both technical precision and emotional detachment.” In part, that’s what irritated me on my first reading and made me abandon the book.

One night George and I were having a drink with Mike Matthews, and we chatted about the novel. Mike said he thought Ondaatje is a brilliant scene writer but can’t tell a story. George said he has had conversations with Ondaatje who claims he writes scenes and pins them to a board, then when he is finished the scenes, stands back and decides in which order they should be placed. In other words, not a story in the usual sense but a collage. Then Mike M had an “ahay” moment, “Ondaatje is a painter trying to get out of a writer’s body.”

Hana is laying a fire, the shelled chapel—all lit suddenly, without shadow. Kip will walk with no qualms under the trees in his patch of garden during such storms, the dangers of being killed by lightning pathetically minimal compared with the danger of his daily life. The naïve Catholic images from those hillside shrines that he has seen are with him in the half-darkness, as he counts the seconds between lightning and thunder. Perhaps this villa is a similar tableau, the four of them in private movement, momentarily lit up, flung ironically against this war.

Ondaatje writes spots in time. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a better book, I think, but this novel followed by the movie made Ondaatje a superstar.

Barry Unsworth—Sacred Hunger SHARED WINNER

Category: Overwrought Historical Novel

Prologue, page 2:

The mulatto invented himself—it was why he was tolerated in the bars. Some aura of my own invention lies about him too. The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever; and I have had to rely on memory, since the newspaper itself has been long defunct and its files have been destroyed or dimply mouldered away.

Page 2, people. Egad. Dough of fiction, indeed.

William Kemp is a merchant who has seen a decline in his business so he invests in the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship that sails for Africa under the leadership of Captain Thurso. The ship’s doctor is Matthew Paris, nephew of Kemp, recently released from prison for publishing pamphlets that disagree with the church. The other major character is Kemp’s son, the highly ambitious Erasmus. When the fortunes of Thurso collapse (and he offs himself) the son is left to bear the shame, and the great grudge he has against his cousin Paris.

Unsworth’s method is to use lots of description. The descriptive details for atmosphere are clumsily intruded on the narrative:

Light played over the long, beast-footed sideboard, flickered on the heavy brass clasps that held its doors, on glasses and decanter, on the triple-headed silver candlesticks that had belonged to his mother’s mother. These, and the gilded mahogany clock above the fireplace and the ebony book-ends carved as ravens holding the big Bible with its purple silk marker, were thing she had grown up with, as was his father’s voice, which had never to his recollection sounded the faintest note of doubt or misgiving.

That’s from page 14. I feel like I’m stuck inside a C18th House and Gardens Magazine.

One storyline follows the adventures and misadventures of the ship as it travels to Africa and collects slaves, then departs for the new world. The other is the path of Erasmus, his failed courtship of the rich girl after his father’s death, his loveless marriage to a wealthy heiress and his rise in both economic and social stature. The novel hits the themes you’d expect; historical ideas about race (at one point Erasmus in involved in rehearsal for a production of “The Enchanted Island” which allows for discussion about Caliban who has “no soul”), trading in heathens and ministering to them, marital customs, the destructive element of foreign trade, redemption, greed, malice, corruption, and so on. It’s historical in a big way, trying to hit all the appropriate themes.

The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities — which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough.

Things on the ship go terribly wrong; slaves die and/or are thrown overboard, disease afflicts almost everyone and living conditions become intolerable. In the second section we find out after the event that mutiny has occurred, the captain dies and the few who remain hide the ship up a river in Florida and begin a utopian society, whites and blacks living in a community, even sharing the women (since there aren’t enough to go around).

Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present to his mind the marvellous opportunity the mutiny presented to test theories, vindicate man’s natural goodness in this dream of a community living without constraint of government or corruption of money. A ship blown off course, a scuffle of sick and desperate men, the blood of a madman clumsily and almost casually spilt, he had seen in these a truth of politics, a revolution, the founding of a new order.

Does the new order work? Of course not; trade develops into commerce, which creates power, and the ability to enslave the lesser blessed. And just as the community is about to self-destruct on its own, Erasmus shows up to put them all back in shackles and recoup on his father’s investment.

The big ideas, observations and philosophies come from the strange narrative voice—none are truly embodied in the characters. For a morality play—and essentially that’s what this is with the bad slave traders, etc—it’s a shortcoming to use stick characters. The only character who holds any promise or hope is the mulatto child of Paris and one of the black women, but this son ends up a drunk in New Orleans, babbling about his birth in Eden. The two really interesting characters are Erasmus’s first love and his mother, but both women just disappear.

On the despicable scale Erasmus Kemp scores a 9. The novel also fits the Alternative View of History category.

From The Guardian 1992 Victoria Glendinning

My fellow judges were John Coldstream, literary editor of the Telegraph, Harriet Harvey-Wood, literary director of the British Council, Valentine Cunningham and Mark Lawson. We became intimate in the way of people thrown together in a scary but non-fatal railway accident. John dreamt one night that he was Spartacus, with the Roman legions advancing on him in the form of piles of new titles. It was a vintage year for rent-a-sneer in the media. Prominent journalists whinged chauvinistically about “far-flung authors”, deaf to the explosion of energy from Commonwealth novelists, which has been the most significant feature of the Booker’s 40 years. The prize was “essentially trivial”, pontificated AN Wilson in contemptuous mode in the Evening Standard; and, enraged, I wrote to the Guardian letters page to contest Richard Gott’s clichés about the decline of the novel and what he called the “tokenism” of the inclusion of Michèle Roberts on the shortlist.

Every book on our shortlist had one passionate supporter and one furious antagonist. When at the final meeting we locked horns over the frontrunners, it was suggested that we should reach our decision by taking into account second choices – proportional representation. This procedure gave Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger) equal points. I turned to Martyn Goff, sitting behind me discreetly – or as discreetly as anyone can who is wearing a gold satin tie – and asked if we could share the prize between the two. He conceded there was no rule against it. So that’s what we did.

Before the meeting, I was so unnerved that I left my bag with all my notes in it at the bank. When stressed I become sharp-tongued, and at one point told a fellow judge that he was a condescending bastard. My notes on our sessions are, at this distance in time, enigmatic. What in the world, for example, was Val Cunningham on about when he said: “I am very interested in Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and their role in literature”?

English: “The judges that year failed even to choose an outright winner, dividing the prize between Barry Unsworth and Michael Ondaatje; the evening seemed flat, anti-climactic, given over to timidity, compromise, and decorum. But soon after the two winners made their speeches, Ian McEwan, a shortlisted also-ran for the second time, took his publishing entourage and left Guildhall. Geraldine seized eagerly on this gesture. “Is it possible?” she wrote. “Yes! He’s walking out! Before the closing speech and the toast to Poor Salman, Who Can’t Be With Us!…What a relief. The Booker Prize for 1992 will have its scandal after all.”

Someone recommended that I have a look at the first chapter of Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale. Just as promised, it’s a pretty funny parody of the Booker award ceremony, and a real slap at blue-rinse female novelists. Published in 1992, it’s hard not to think Bradbury is pointing at the 1990 ceremony, the year A. S. Byatt won and Beryl Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald were short-listed. Bradbury makes it very clear that the press and readers really don’t care about the short-listed books. It’s all about winning.

I didn’t read beyond the book’s first chapter but it’s obvious the book was going to be another literary-theory academic-conference novel. Why is that such a big tradition in UK novels? Or am I just missing it in Canadian and American novels? Can you name some? I asked my Booker readers and they came up with a few:

Robertson Davies—The Rebel Angels

Carol Shields—Swann

David Arnason’s—King Jerry

Lynn Coady—Mean Boy

Earle Birney—Down the Long Table

Not a long list.

Speaking of my Booker readers, I got complaints about my 1990 report. Imagine! Complaints. Honestly, what a tough group. What annoyed my gentle readers was my soft touch with Possession. I didn’t think I was that kind, but here’s another stab…

Possession is one of the most self-indulgent novels I’ve read during this exercise, and at 20+ years into the Bookers I have quite a few under my belt. It’s showy in the worst way. I don’t believe the novel would have been published in any other country than the academia-obsessed UK. Offered to a Canadian or USAmerican publisher a good editor would have insisted on a major rewrite. Possession is a glaring example of a writer’s and publisher’s abuse of a big name in favour of quality literature.

***

The following is from my 1985 report:

In a recent chat with Patrick Crean, Publisher and Editor Thomas Allen Publishers, we talked about the current messy state of publishing in Canada. Patrick says that Canada is one of the most difficult book markets in the world. The country is large, the population by comparison is small and there is just no economy of scale. Patrick believes that:

• There are too many books being published. He was recently on the CC jury for publisher book grants and suggests we could afford to lose half the existing book publishers without any huge loss to the industry. Karl Sielger at Talonbooks agrees.
• There’s too much emphasis on growing talent and not enough effort made to connect books to readers! The monies poured into grants to emerging writers and publishers who publish them are creating mediocrity. We have more talent than we know what to do with and not enough people wanting to read the books.
• The sales and marketing departments in the big houses want to cherry pick,* which results in lists with no personality. Patrick says he has never seen a time in publishing with so much risk aversion. He believes the corporate nature that has taken over is destroying book publishing.

Rolf Maurer of New Star Press sent the following response:

Patrick claims that Canada is one of the most “difficult” book markets in the world. I don’t know what he means by this: that it’s one of the most competitive?

Canada is, in fact, one of the most desirable places on earth to publish. It’s one of the richest countries in the world. A very high percentage of the population has a post-secondary education. We have, relatively speaking, a lot of leisure time, and per capita we buy, and maybe read, a lot of books. What’s not to like about that? Everybody in New York, London, and Paris knows this, which is the only reason we are blessed with their presence.

Canada’s population is small in relation to the US, to Russia, to China, to India, to Indonesia; but it’s not particularly small compared to the other 150+ nations on the planet. And did I mention that it’s a relatively wealthy 34 million people we have here?

Canada is large if you count the entire landmass. But it’s a moderate-sized country, if you think of it as being 3,000 miles wide and 200 miles high. And within that belt it’s not particularly sparsely populated either.

Much is made of the supposed difficulty of distribution in Canada, as if it really is a problem that it takes 4 to 6 days for a parcel to get from Vancouver to Toronto—or, maybe it’s the other way round, Toronto to Vancouver—that’s the problem? About a week, either way. The size of the country doesn’t seem to be a problem for Amazon.

Patrick, and Karl, and seemingly just about every other member of the book trade seem to think “there are too many books”. Never mind the fact that there have *always* been too many books. Let’s re-pose this question a couple of different ways. (a) Compared to what? (b) If we’re publishing the wrong number of books, what’s the right number?

In 2004, the Literary Press Group attempted to raise some consciousness around this issue (an attempt that seems to have been abandoned). At the time, Stats Can kept comparative statistics about book publishing activity around the globe, and from them we were able to find out how many books are published in a given country for every 100,000 people in the population. Out of 62 countries where data about this was available — and, for this reason, the sample was skewed towards wealthier western countries — Canada ranked 19th. This was ALL titles, regardless of nationality of author: the Raincoast editions of Harry Potter counted, for the purpose of this survey, as Canadian-published books. Canada was tied for 58th in the world in terms of the percentage of books defined as literary out of the total number published. (Presumably, the “too many books” is primarily about literary publishing: poetry, fiction, short stories, that sort of thing.)

The study publishing in 2004 relied on 1994-96 stats, which has to be kept in mind. Whatever the situation is now, there’s certainly no evidence that in the mid-1990s Canada was anything like awash in books, not compared to the rest of the world, anyway. There is no reason to believe that the increase in book publication in Canada since 1994-96 has outstripped that in the rest of the world.

If there *is* a problem, what’s more likely the cause: the Penguin / HarperCollins  / Random House-Doubleday / et al., and their ten- twenty-fold increase in title output over the last generation, or the smaller domestic houses, which might have doubled their output? Funny, but when Patrick and Karl or whoever goes on about the “too many publishers” problem, why do I get the feeling that it’s presses like New Star, publishing exactly the same number of books as we did in 1990, that are the superfluous presses?

Let’s dwell for a moment on this question of “too many books”. Patrick thinks there are too many books, and Karl seems to agree. Maybe you do too. Likely, in fact. It sometimes seems that way to me. Let’s say that we all agree there are too many books: 6 billion people on the planet all agreeing on the same thing. Trouble is, there is no agreement on which are the superfluous books. Chicken Soup For The Timid Publisher’s Soul? i bleev iv ritn ths n bfor, by bill bissett? The thing is that when you aggregate all those individual too-many-books notions into something approximating a global market snapshot, you get the opposite result: the market says there are not enough books.

Everybody in the book trade knows this, or ought to. Average sales per title have been in steady decline for decades. That’s why most publishers increase their title output every year: otherwise, their sales would go down. Do you think these companies are run by idiots? I don’t. In fact, if I had the capital, I would be increasing New Star’s title output by two-, or five-, or tenfold too. Because that’s what the market is in fact demanding: more books, not fewer of them.

Not sure why Patrick would complain about government money to develop new literary talent. Somebody has to. It’s a well-known fact that the branch plants, and the quasi-branch plants, the Thos. Allens which rely on the sale of Chicken Soup For the Soul series to keep the lights on, almost never develop new talent and are the ones cherry-picking from the presses that take the trouble to do so. Patrick is a good one to talk — Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut, for instance, began life as a New Star title. Atwood and Ondaatje were initially published by Anansi, not by a foreign branch plant. Liz Hay was originally published by Mosaic and Thistledown, not by Random House-M&S. David Bergen, same thing: Turnstone. Etc., etc., etc., etc. There are a few exceptions, but that’s what they are.

And isn’t it the publisher’s job to promote the writer anyway? If a publisher like Thos. Allen isn’t spending enough to persuade people to read Virtual Clearcut, why is that the Canada Council’s fault?

In his third point, Patrick is talking about his own employer, and their ilk. I presume he realizes this. There is nothing risk-averse about anything I do, or that my colleagues in the LPG do.

With Rolf’s permission I sent his rebuttal out to a few Booker report readers and received the following from Gordon Lockheed:

While I generally agree with the points Mr. Crean makes about the state of Canadian publishing, I have some disagreement with Rolf Maurer’s rebuttal, which at several points seems at odds with the specifics of bookselling in 2010, and at one or two other junctures, little more than wishful thinking. For both publishers, there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room that they’re not willing to talk about directly. It is Chapters/Indigo, which currently holds roughly 70 percent of the Canadian retail book trade. Its trade practices, which include charging publishers for prominently displaying their books, large initial book orders coupled with equally large and quick returns, capricious and often messy book return procedures, have bankrupted at least one major Canadian publisher, and has made life miserable for nearly all the others for almost a decade now. Its sheer size has decimated the independent bookselling sector in Canada, and has changed the way that books are sold in this country, the kinds of books that get published, and even the way that books are valued by the reading public. No country in the world has this degree of market concentration in bookselling and while it has made the proprietor of Chapters/Indigo, Heather Reisman, famous and even more wealthy, it’s hard to find any other positives.

But neither Crean or Maurer can talk about the 800-pound gorilla, and neither can any other publisher without risking a blacklist by the notoriously vindictive Reisman and/or the three or four risk-averse marketing graduates who now control, in a de facto sense, not just what books get presented to readers in Canada, but also what Canadian publishers bring into the book market: if they can’t get Reisman’s buyers to carry their titles, their books aren’t going to get to readers. This situation has given an ostensible advantage to the country’s larger publishers, simply because they can afford the large print runs a single buyer demands, and they can afford the unconscionable fees Chapters/Indigo charges for prominently displaying a book.

The virtual monopoly that Chapters/Indigo enjoys has enabled it to secure a number of competitive advantages that regularly endanger the large publishers, and have created a bizarre kind of merchandising monoculture that has sharply curtailed their publishing options. One advantage Chapters/Indigo has is a discount level that exceeds the one given to independent booksellers, and that has reduced the profit margins of all publishers. But a much more telling advantage for Chapters/Indigo was negotiated during the liquidity crisis that ensued during Indigo’s takeover of Chapters earlier in the decade, which allowed it 110 days to pay for books instead of 30 days. Under these terms, Chapters/Indigo was permitted to return books before it was obliged to pay the publishers for them, resulting in a situation in which virtually all the books in Chapters/Indigo being there on consignment, and paid for only after they’re sold. Chapters/Indigo manipulated this advantage mercilessly, frequently returning books that haven’t sold within the first 60-90 days, and often more swiftly than that. That particular advantage has lapsed, but its spirit remains.

To be sure, Canada is a lovely country, but it is country in which its indigenous literary culture lives under permanent threat. We are, along with Australia, a small player in the world’s largest and most dominant language group, and we are working in an increasingly deregulated international market system where the larger players constantly attempt to destroy the smaller players by dumping in their market below cost. Maurer would be better to see cultural publishing within the WalMart model, in which the U.S. is Walmart. That tilted playing field is why a cultural exemption was negotiated in the Canada/U.S and North American Free Trade Agreements, and it is why various subsidies have been granted Canadian book publishers and writers for the last 40 years. If those subsidies weren’t in place, we would have no book publishing industry in Canada, and he knows this. We would have a few book distributors wholesaling books written by American and British authors, and the few Canadians who escaped the local wasteland.

I’m not sure why Maurer ignores the reality of Canada’s geographical distances, and its culturally dispersed populations. He must be fully aware that the cost of shipping has quadrupled in the last 20 years, and that a package of books sent from Vancouver costs notably more if is going to Newfoundland or Toronto from Vancouver than if it’s being shipped up to the Chapters Store in, say, Kamloops. The postal subsidy Canadian publishers once enjoyed has been removed, and it now costs nearly the equivalent of the cost of the book to ship it across the country. This is particularly damaging to smaller publishers, since the per-unit cost of shipping small quantities is vastly more expensive than it is to ship 50 or 500.

Maurer’s argument that Canada is “not particularly awash in books” and that it is middle-of-the-pack in relative terms with respect to the number of book titles published per capita is similarly specious. That he counts, somewhat vaguely, Canada’s position as somewhere in the “low 20s” of 31 countries surveyed when it comes to books authored (or was it published?) by Canadian nationals ignores the statistical nuances that need to be established before we start high-fiving one another. We don’t know what the per capita gap is between the top ten and the bottom ten we’re in, for one, and we have no idea what kinds of books we’re talking about (Harlequin Books is a Canadian publisher) or whether we’re talking about large percentages of our current sales having been written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Similarly, his argument that we’ve overproduced for years is specious in that it ignores the fact that the Canadian book market was much more complex and profitable 15-20 years ago than it is now, before Chapters/Indigo and its marketing graduates gained a near-monopoly and a built-in censoring apparatus. And, anyway, if someone has been, say, shooting themselves in the foot monthly for 30 years, it doesn’t follow that continuing to do it is a good idea, even if the shooter has become desensitized to the pain.

When Maurer acknowledges that “average sales per title have been in steady decline for decades,” and suggest that this is “why most publishers increase their title output every year: otherwise, their sales would go down” he’s ignoring the fact that there are now actually fewer titles in print than in 1975 in the English language. This is because of tax law changes, which tax publishers on their backlist, and that, along with Chapters/Indigo’s merchandising strategy of holding progressively fewer titles in backlist has book publishers manufacturing books the same way Maple Leaf foods manufactures those stale-dating cello-packs of pressed ham: More books, smaller print runs, shorter in-print duration. For the larger publishers, the prize culture that is the primary means of merchandising books has made publishing formally unorthodox books virtually suicidal. If Maurer can find a way to put a positive spin on any of this, good luck. His plan of going with the flow and producing more titles in smaller volumes falls apart when it arrives at the 70 percent of titles being bought by the buyers at Chapters Indigo. The chain has sharply reduced the number of titles they carry in the last decade, and most small press titles these days are simply being turned away.  Maybe these extra titles he’s talking about are going to be cunning disguised as candles or CDs of children’s inspiration music, because that’ll be his best shot at getting them into Chapters/Indigo.

Finally, Maurer’s argument that Thomas Allen & Sons, Crean and the other large publishers are cherry picking their talent from small publishers like New Star isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as he makes it out to be. Crean and Thomas Allen in particular have an unusually good record of publishing writers off the street, despite the risk. And when Maurer cites Brian Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut as his example of how large publishers steal books from smaller ones, he’s putting his foot in one he created himself. Fawcett informs me that indeed the book started out as a project for Terry Glavin’s Transmontanus imprint, which New Star publishes, and was meant to be an environmental expose on the 53,000 hectare Bowron Clearcut in Northern B.C.. But when the book began to morph into something well beyond Transmontanus’s 100 or so page limit, Rolf admitted that he couldn’t handle it, and Fawcett took the book to Crean, who did have the resources to develop it fully—and then lost a pile of money on it because it was too unconventional. It’s also worth noting that Fawcett continues to publish with both New Star and Thomas Allen, and that he has done this for 20 years.  This sort of situation is far more common than Maurer cares to admit.     

You can begin to see how complicated the world of Canadian publishing has become.

***

Jury: Jeremy Treglown—“Much of Jeremy Treglown’s work has been linked by a biographically-based concern with the relations between social history and literary high culture, especially in the twentieth century, including the practicalities of authorship and the nature of the ‘literary establishment’” In the 1980s he was editor of Times Literary Supplement. Penelope Fitzgerald, novelist. Jonathan Keates, biographer, novelist and critic. Nicholas Mosley, novelist and whiner, see below. Ann Schlee, author of that whimpy book short-listed in 1981.

Martin Amis—Time’s Arrow VPL

The bookjacket blurb says, “Tod T. Friendly, now living in a peaceful American suburb, is a doctor who once worked in the medical section at Auschwitz. Narrating Dr. Friendly’s story is one of the strangest and most original creations of modern literature: a doppelganger imprisoned within Dr. Friendly, sharing his every sensory impression, a separate consciousness that is literally living the doctor’s life moment by inverted moment, backward from death to birth.”

The backward aspect upsets conventions and expectations:

The women at the crisis centers and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis center is not called a crisis center for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them.

Or:

Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to going places they’ve just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

Think about the implications for eating and defecating. Or the Holocaust. The doctors at Auschwitz bring people back to life, connect them with family, provide clothing. The Nazis find them homes. And so on.

Category: Smart Novel. Well-written and probably fun to write because of the backwardness. It forces the reader to work since the first-person narrator doppelganger is completely reliable but also totally unaware of world events since they haven’t happened yet. So, the reader is forced to think, for sure. But in the end, it seems rather facile.

Martin Amis—Reading Turgenev VPL

Guest report from George Stanley:

Mary Louise Quarry, née Dallon, is discovered in the first chapter of William Trevor’s short novel Reading Turgenev at breakfast in some kind of institution. She is ‘not yet fifty-seven.’

In chapter two, she is twenty-one, a farmer’s daughter in rural Ireland. She marries Elmer Quarry, a small businessman who owns a ‘drapery’ in a village sixty miles from Wexford. Elmer is thirty-five, living with his two older unmarried sisters. The year is 1955, and the drapery business, which Elmer’s father and grandfather ran before him, is in decline. All these people are Protestants.

Protestantism in Ireland, apart from Ulster, has been in decline since the late nineteenth century. Like W. B. Yeats’ ‘romantic Ireland,’ it’s nearly ‘dead and gone.’ The old ascendancy has been supplanted: ‘All over the county wealth had passed into the hands of a new Catholic middle class, changing the nature of provincial life as it did so.’

But neither commercial nor confessional decline much affects the composure of the Quarry household: ‘Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry’s would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood.’ But Elmer disrupts this idyll by marrying — he wants a son.

Mary Louise’s reason for marrying Elmer? To get away from the farm. ‘I wanted to be in the town.’

The novel’s crisis arrives early. It’s a matter of what doesn’t happen rather than what does. Mary Louise’s girlish figure never swells with pregnancy. ‘[W]omen would glance down her body, the movement of their eyes briefly halting when it reached her stomach, then swiftly retracted. She knew what was in their minds.’

Back at the farm, Mary Louise’s parents ‘wondered more often why they were not yet grandparents.’ And the reader wonders too. The reader, I think, suspects (correctly, as it happens) impotence on Elmer’s part, particularly since Mary Louise confides in her young cousin Robert that her husband had passed out drunk on his wedding night, and that the marriage was ‘unconsummated.’ But the townspeople tend to blame Mary Louise’s ‘seemingly barren state.’

This cousin, Robert, is the catalyst of the novel, a delicate invalid whom Mary Louise went to school with but has not seen since childhood (somewhat implausible, since he only lives a few miles away). Cycling one day about the countryside, Mary Louise comes unexpectedly upon the gate to her Aunt Emmeline’s house, is invited in, and meets Robert again. Or rather, she is spiritually and emotionally reunited with him, since it turns out (each admits) they were in love at age ten, and are of course still in love. They meet for romantic rendezvous in a nearby abandoned graveyard (Protestant of course) and Robert reads to Mary Louise from the novels of Ivan Turgenev. ‘She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.’

But Robert does not have long to live, and indeed Trevor kills him off so abruptly that the reader wonders if he has read the sentence right: ‘He put his arm around his cousin’s waist [he is dreaming] and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.’

After Robert’s death Mary Louise mainly lives in a fantasy world. She dips into the Russian novels ‘opening the books at random.’ All that is real to her is the memory of Robert and his beautiful voice. She becomes increasingly distracted, neglectful of household duties, and unavailable, particularly to Elmer’s sisters, who now blame her too for her husband’s immoderate drinking. So off they go to visit Mary Louise’s parents, and everyone agrees (the parents more unwillingly than the sisters) that if would be better if Mary Louise were sent to ‘an asylum for women who were mentally distressed.’

But now we learn (flash forward) that in 1991, the institution where Mary Louise is to be confined will close, and those residents who still have family living will be returned ‘to the community.’ ‘The community’s where you came from,’ one resident explains. At this point the novel looks fearfully in two directions: towards the asylum, and to what will happen when Mary Louise is let out. I think I’ll stop recounting the plot at this point.

Mary Louise’s marriage may not have been consummated, but William Trevor is a consummate storyteller. The reader hardly notices he is an ‘omniscient narrator,’ so unobtrusively does he move from mind to mind. As from Mary Louise to Robert, at the graveyard:

‘”He has begun to drink,’ she said. “And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.”

“But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?”

“Nobody knows.” He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even . . .’

Trevor creates characters whose sensibilities are made up of recollections, expectations, and especially, dreams:

“Toward dawn, Mrs. Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.’

The narrative is marked by precise Chekhovian detail. Elmer’s sister Rose and Mary Louise’s mother are observing Mary Louise ride away on her bicycle: ‘She still held the edge of a curtain between her fingers, and Mrs. Dallon approached the window to see for herself.’

A thoroughly absorbing tale, the realism of the human situation conveying a sense of sociological accuracy as well. Mary Louise reflects on leaving the institution: ‘You pick and choose among the dead, the living are thrust upon you’ . I don’t see her as being “mentally ill,” just a person who made different choices of what to think about.

In many regards I agree with George’s read of the novel, though I didn’t like it as much as George. In part it’s probably the project and not enough variety in my reading (Back in the good old days, before the Booker project, I would have 4 or 5 books on the go at any one time. A history. A biography. Novel. Short story collection. Etc.) I found much of the book to be Stage Irish; the town and its inhabitants are claustrophobic, and I didn’t see much “choice” available to Many Louise or any of the other women. What interested me was how Trevor managed to create a tale that is both horrifying and sentimental. “People think the worst of you.”

Rohinton Mistry—Such a Long Journey VPL

I don’t understand the fuss about this novel. It won the 1991 GG in Canada, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award as well as being short-listed for the Booker. To me it seems a pretty straight-forward narrative Victorian-type novel. Political information is provided in lengthy and sometimes trudging paragraphs, a device often poorly used in historical novels. When Leon Rooke was on Canada Reads as a panelist while many of the other jurors said they looked for a good story that was accessible Leon said he looked for “technical wizardry.” There’s none of that in this novel. As if modernism never happened.

“His words were cold fingers tracing shivering lines down Gustad’s spine.”

“His style is precise, deceptively simple. It’s writing in which the author doesn’t seem to want to call attention to the writing itself,” says editor Ellen Seligman. “The writing is there to serve the story and the characters, so it always reflects those two things.” Yes, Mistry is interested in story and characters not in language. But I don’t think it’s deceptively simple in the way, for example, of Al Purdy’s poetry. This prose really is simple. Any complexity is in the plot and characters, and I wasn’t terribly persuaded in those areas, either.

The Plot? It’s 1971. Prime Minister Indira Ghandi controls a corrupt government with an iron fist. Gustad Noble is a bank clerk who finds himself caught up in a political scandal while he watches his family and neighbourhood fall apart. Gustad is a Parsi and the novel dabbles in explaining the Caste system along with politics, different religious beliefs, hangover from colonial rule and the usual things to be expected. And I guess that is the heart of my problem. It’s all so expected, the complexities don’t go much beneath the skin and there is a heavy-handedness to the symbolism. Partly it might be the nostalgia that we so often see in writers in exile.

But I did learn a new word—Indo-nostalgia.

Roddy Doyle—The Van UBC. The novel is available at VPL in a collection with 2 other Doyle novels. But there were 3 other requests in front of me, each able to keep the book for 3 weeks which would really throw off my reading schedule so I got it from UBC. But that’s a first, a waiting list for a Booker short-listed book.

This is the final novel in the Barrytown trilogy, set in Dublin. Jimmy Sr. and Bimbo, both on the dole, buy a chip wagon. And that’s about it. We see some strain of the unemployed. Doyle makes much of the camaraderie among men, who only want to share a few pints and tell stories. But this is mostly stage-Irishmen. A nice little story, told in a straight-ahead fashion, working hard to capture the authentic speech of Barrytown. For the most part the characters are oblivious to the rest of the world, though there is an occasional toss-off line; “Saddam Hussein was still acting the prick over Iraq.” Funny if not profound.

Timothy Mo—The Redundancy of Courage UBC

If you believe in the common creative writing adage to “show, don’t tell” then this novel scores badly. Adolph Ng, the first-person narrator, tells us about the politics of a nation in crisis, the fictional Danu, which we are to understand is East Timor. The bad and obvious title sets the tone for the novel. Mostly it’s like reading a history book; this happened, then this happened. The first-person narrative makes the point of view limited and, for me, monotonous. This may be a brilliant novel, as many claim, but it didn’t work for me. I read 120 pages, scanned a bit or the rest, then packed it in.

“During that first week we kept our heads down. In the first forty-eight hours you hardly dared breathe. There was a curfew. Redundant regulation! No one wanted to be about after sundown. But no one! The Danuese scampered indoors, like Transylvanians in a Dracula movie. At 8 p.m., midnight, and 4 a.m. malai patrols would move through the town, kicking store doors (long since looted) and smashing with their rifle-butts any windows through which the merest chick of light might show. Food fuel, and news were in short supply. Of work—unpaid—there was no scarcity. All the fires, except the one at the oil tanks, had gone out, but rubble and splinters infested the roads and town, worse than the time of the IP coup. On the third day there was an explosion in the park near the Marconi Centre. Idiots that we were, we all came rushing out, having learned nothing from experience. Curiosity was stronger than fear. The malais came rushing, too. It was an unexploded shell which one of the labourers had hit with a pick. Fortunately, no soldiers were killed, only two Danuese. They’d have put a few of us against the wall, otherwise.”

Ben Okri—The Famished Road UBC WINNER

Category: African magic realism, kind of. Our narrator, Azaro, is a spirit child who keeps being born to the same mother but quickly returns to the spirit world, to keep away from the pain and suffering of this world. But he has decided to stay on earth after this birth, for the sake of his mother. The novel is also a complex metaphor of Africa, specifically Nigeria, on the cusp of independence.

I was captured by the first 50 pages or so, the complex multi-layering of mysticism, black magic, Christianity, goddesses, superstitions, myths, as Azaro is pulled back and forth from world to world, as the spirit world seeks to have him return and honour his oath to them. “Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer” but the book provides none of those, merely insisting instead that there is always more than the eye can see. Everywhere is menace. Like the Rushdie novel, I wasn’t familiar with the myths and stories and the novel didn’t enlighten me—though unlike Rushdie, Okri doesn’t seem intent on blasphemy.

The novel captures the bustle of poverty, the hand-to-mouth existence, bad food, disease, bad water and no sanitation, with the occasional celebration for which you pay and pay, for long after. After 50 pages or so, after Azaro’s celebration of his return to life, my interest lagged. The writing just isn’t very interesting. And the numerous split infinities were irritating.

Again, like Rushdie, repetition of the same characters in the same situations is part of Okri’s method. By page 100 I knew the next 400 pages would be more of the same. It really is more about atmosphere than plot, or even character. “Mesmerized by the cobalt shadows, the paradoxical ultramarine air, and the silver glances of the dead, I listened to the hard images of joy.”

One thing that did interest me is the large context that Okri creates for the present situation of Nigeria. He does not take the familiar post-colonial approach—translation, bad white guys. Rather, he points to larger and deeper patterns:

All around us voices were raised in laughter and in pain. We passed a patch of bushes behind which resonated the singing and the dancing of the new church. They sang with a frightening vigour, with terrifying hope, great need, great sorrow. They made me feel that any minute the world would end. The signing from the church made me afraid of life. We passed them and could hear them long afterwards. Further on, behind a grove of trees, the earth throbbed with more chanting, dancing, singing. But this was different. The chanting was deeper, the dancing more virile, making the earth itself acknowledge the beating on its doors, and the singing was full of secrets and dread-making voices. They sounded like the celebration of an old pain, an ancient suffering that has refused to leave, an old affliction renewed at night. They were the worshippers at the shrine of suffering and we listened to their cries for the secrets of transforming anguish into power. We could hear the incantations, the money-creating howls, the invoked names of destiny-altering deities, gods of vengeance, gods of wealth, womb-opening gods. They too made me afraid of life. They too had come from the hunger, the wretchedness, of our condition…

I could feel the intense gaze of an ancient mother who had been turned into wood. She knew who I was. Her eyes were pitiless in their scrutiny. She knew my destiny in advance. She sat in her cobwebbed niche, a mighty stature in mahogany, powerful with the aroma of fertility. Her large breasts exuded a shameless libidinous potency. A saffron-coloured cloth had been worn round her gentle pregnancy. Behind her dark glasses, she seemed to regard everything with equal serenity. She gave off an air of contradictory dreams. I was mesmerized by the musk of her half-divinity.

It could have been done in 250 rather than 500 pages.

It’s strange to me that Okri is hailed as “one of Africa’s greatest writers”. He wasn’t born in Africa, and was educated and spent most of his life in England. But that’s about PR, I guess.

1991 Nicholas Mosley from The Guardian

I was asked to be a judge probably because I had just won the Whitbread the previous year. This had itself been a surprise, because it seemed I was out of favour with the literary establishment, having been labelled a “novelist of ideas” while what was in favour was “style”. And style seemed most easily to be exhibited in stories that were outlandish, or grim, or quaint. I looked forward to judging the Booker because I thought I might give a boost to “ideas”. There were five judges, and we had to choose six books out of 100 for the shortlist. I thought – well, surely, with this set-up I’ll be able to squeeze in one choice of mine. But, in the event, I got none of my choices on to the list, because of the inflexibility of the voting system and of the other four judges, who were devotees of “style”. So I resigned, partly in a huff, but also because I thought that by so doing I might still be able to strike a blow for “ideas”, as I might be asked to explain myself in the press – which I did.

The winner chosen by the remaining judges was Ben Okri’s The Famished Road – a beautifully written (yes) story of a boy in a west African village who goes to and fro between his family and the local witchdoctor. My choice would have been Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father, which confronted the issue of what was possible or impossible if the child of a notorious ex-Nazi and the child of a Jewish victim fell in love after the second world war. What could be forgiven, and by whom, and what could not. But these are controversial questions, and thus conventionally to be avoided.

Martyn Goff, long-time administrator of the National Book Trust and The Booker says, “Over the years one of the things I’ve learnt to understand is that the chemistry of the personalities of the judges is more important than anyone believes. People don’t understand when I say to them how could they have chosen this or that because x actually couldn’t stand y and it was y who wanted such and such a book. They don’t realize that as the judging goes on they develop interpersonal relations which can just as well be interpersonal dislike—Nicholas Mosley and Jeremy Treglown for instance in 1991 couldn’t stand each other and this led to Nicholas walking out.”

Am I correct that the administrator of the Booker is publicly declaring the decision is based more on the personalities of the jurors than the quality of the books?

6549 w. October 25, 2011

I bought a bunch of Booker nominated books for a recent trip so I wouldn’t be hauling library books. The other day I took a bunch of them to a used book store, along with some other things George is thinning from his library. They didn’t want any of them. The owner explained that just because a book is nominated for the Booker Prize,  or wins, doesn’t mean that once the dust settles anyone wants to read it.

***

How much does it cost to administer prizes, and are the costs any of our business? It’s always interesting to know how these budget items line up, money to writers versus the expenses involved to run the award. As noted previously in the James English book, sometimes the expenses involved seem steep compared to the dollars that go to prizewinners.

In Canada, in the instance of the Griffin, for example, I would suggest that since the Griffin Foundation, funded by Scott Griffin, pays the entire amount that the only responsibility is to the board of directors. If Scott wants to throw the best party in town, then why not? And apparently he does—late in the evening at the 2006 awards I was sitting beside John Ashbery. According to English, Ashbery has won more literary awards than any other writer. Ashbery was gently shaking his head. He said he had been fortunate in his life to win many awards and attend many celebrations but he’d “never seen anything like this.” The painter John Boyle was also there that night, “You never see anything like this for the visual arts,” he lamented. So good on Scott Griffin for making poetry a first-rate event in this country, second to none.

I asked the Canada Council for budgets for the past few years related to the Governor General’s Literary Award which the CC administers. I am in full support of national arts awards, but it is public money so I’d hate to see an 80% administration expense. Here are the numbers for 2009-10:

Program Grants/prizes                                    448,000.00

Program services—Assessors (peers)                        203,399.89

Prize presentation                                             99,257.13

Professional service fees                                   59,748.64

Staff travel costs                                                    204.52

Professional service contracts                                420.08

Postage and distribution                                   10,919.66

Courier                                                                2,301.26

Catering on premises                                             126.75

Other meeting costs                                               158.93

Printing supplies                                                      24.31

Salary expense                                                259,107.52

Total                                                            1,083,668.69

Some clarifications on these numbers:

Program Grants is the money given to writers and includes no other travel or accommodation expenses.

Program services includes all expenses related to juries including accommodation, transportation, etc. I asked for a breakdown. The amount paid to jury members is $158,873.

Professional services fees are for publicists. All printing costs for posters and bookmarks are identified under Prize Presentation. The CC are now putting more emphasis on web promotion so both printing expenses and distribution costs are declining.

The salary line does not include Rideau Hall staff, or the Rideau Hall related expenses.

To be as fair as possible in the ration of administration expenses to money paid to artist, I’ll include the fee paid to the bookbinder that for 2009 was $19,182.

So for 2009 the total paid to writers (winners), writers (peer jury) and artists (bookbinder) was $626,055 or near 58% of the budget. Keep in mind that does not include Rideau Hall expenses.

The prize program at The Writers’ Trust is streamlined. Emphasis is placed on treating writers well, but the celebration does not stack up with the GG winners’ trip to Rideau Hall or the lavish party of the Griffins, nor should it.

In 2008-2009 The Writers’ Trust gave $449,304 directly to 99 writers. That includes workshops, lectures, the Woodcock Fund and all the other programs. Here’s the budget for the nine prizes:

Prize to winners                      159,000

Finalists                                    34,200

Juries                                         60,150

Travel                                        30,000

Office costs                                 6,177

Promotional Costs                    38,942

Staff costs                                 69,624

Total costs                              $398,093

The Trust receives $224,900 in direct sponsorship support for the awards and prize programs. The budget doesn’t include overhead like rent, photocopier etc. But neither does the GG budget. After direct sponsorship revenue is counted the rest of the money for these prizes comes from other fundraising, primarily the Writers’ Trust Gala in Toronto and the Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa.

But the financial sponsors often contribute in other ways that are not reflected in the budget. Rogers Communications through its publications arm gives the Trust in-kind advertising in Macleans Magazine specifically for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.  This is worth about $45,000 for the full-page ad.

Walrus Magazine contributes about $50,000 of in-kind advertising support for the awards. The Globe and Mail also provides in-kind support for the awards both in print and on-line.  The value is about $75,000. The Trust gets discounted hotel rooms for writers travelling from outside Toronto and this varies each year but is equivalent to about $600 on average. The organization is trying to get airline sponsorship. It also gets some small discounts on beer, wine and food for the Writers’ Trust Awards event but the amounts are negligible.

The total to writers is $253,350 or about 64% of the total budget.

***

1990 Jury: Sir Denis Forman, was Director and later Chair of The British Film Institute, Chairman and Managing Director of Granada Television, and also for nine years the deputy chairman of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London. Susannah Clapp, editor, theatre reviewer and one of the founders of the London Review of Books. A Walton Litz, US literary historian and critic, and Rhodes scholar. Hilary Mantel, writer and winner in 2008. Kate Saunders, British author, actress and journalist.

Beryl Bainbridge—An Awfully Big Adventure VPL

Unlike the main female characters of Bainbridge’s previous Booker short-listed novels Stella isn’t feckless. Disaster follows her, but she’s full of feck. Stella is 16, an abandoned child being reared by her aunt and uncle. The local Liverpool theatre company has agreed to take her on as assistant stage manager. The novel is so tightly written it will make your head spin. I’ve already given away too much information. It is fast, focused and sharp. The atmosphere is tense from the first two pages. Bainbridge has huge confidence in her reader. You get the sense that she threw 90% in the trash and kept only those elements that were vital. Pay attention. Don’t blink.

Attraction, love, and betrayal explored through the staging of Caesar and Cleopatra and Peter Pan. And that is the intrigue of Stella, like the lost boys, stuck somewhere through no actions of her own. It’s a short novel, 193 pages. When I finished I shook my head, muttered “what just happened?” and immediately read the first 40 pages again. Plus I want to find Peter Pan and read it again. Every theatre and book reference links, and pulls—well, the ones you catch do.

John McGahern—Amongst Women VPL

Someone online calls William Trevor and his gang “potato laureates.” Yes, this is another lament for Ireland. Michael Moran is the foul-tempered father who rules his house with iron will. An ex-IRA man, he is disgruntled by what has become of Ireland, the country he fought for. He remembers his IRA days, “the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and clear again.” Moran is easily enraged by anything—“an air of friendliness” or things seeming too much at ease.

His second wife, Rose, tip toes around his moods, as do the rest of the family, except for the oldest son, who has escaped to London. Moran is a tyrant with his family, and the women allow him to continue. Regardless of the severity of his verbal (or sometimes to the boys, physical) abuse, they make excuses for him, “Daddy didn’t mean anything.”

The only good thing about Moran is his rugged goods looks and the fact that he doesn’t drink. The moral: live in the present and learn to forgive.

Penelope Fitzgerald—The Gate of Angels VPL

Another tightly written little gem from Fitzgerald. Pre-war Cambridge, a young scientist in an all-male college literally falls for an young woman not of the “marriageable class”—their bicycles collide and they end up in bed together since the woman who rescues them assumes they are man and wife. The book considers many tensions of the changing times including the suffrage movement, class discrimination, superstitions, legal systems, medical assumptions including attitudes toward mental illness, religion, etc. As I’ve said before about Fitzgerald, the book sweeps you quickly along and it’s only on reflection that the complexity really hits.

Brian Moore—Lies of Silence VPL

The writing style of Moore to provide background information about the characters seems very contrived, particularly following on the minimalist clarity of Fitzgerald. This is a thriller set in Belfast, complete with IRA hostage taking and bombs. The thriller style pulls you along, creates tension and does make the book difficult to put down. But the characterizations are simple or cliché. It’s a rip-roaring good read but great literature it ain’t. It helps if you can ignore the Irish sentimentality and melodrama. It gives the pretence of thoughtful examination of the issues but it doesn’t get beyond the shallow.

Michael Dillon runs a hotel in Belfast, his hometown he has earlier escaped to take a job in London where he meets then marries the bulimic Moira who only want to return to Belfast. Michael is having an affair, has decided to leave Moira and head back to London with his new love. Then the IRA intrudes on their lives. All of the characters are snivelers.

Mordecai Richler—Solomon Gursky Was Here VPL

In my head I can hear Richler saying, “Magic realism, eh? Okay, Rushdie, watch this.” In my opinion, the most ambitious and successful of Richler’s novels, Solomon Gursky Was Here makes Illywhacker look bungled. Huge, romping, funny, irreverent, goofy and utterly readable—and that doesn’t mean easy. Often in Richler novels the characters seem carbon copies from other novels, and cliché. Not here. Shaman/Raven Ephraim and Bad Boy Solomon versus money-grubbing Bernard. The scope of the novel is huge, from Gold Rush, formation of the North West Mounted Police, Franklin expedition to the arctic (yesterday in the newspaper was the announcement that they’ve found M’Clure’s boat HMS Investigator!), London theatre scene, to penal Australia. And unlike Rushdie, Richler builds and crafts the story rather than repeating and repeating. The narrative is not chronological, bouncing from 1920 to 1960 then back to 1940, but always with a new twist.

It has often been suggested that the Gurskys are thinly disguised Bronfmans. And although the novel zooms the characters over the surface of the globe, bumping into anyone of note in the process from George Bernard Shaw to Golda Meir to Jackie Onassis, this novel is completely Canadian, particularly the humour. Richler infuses Canadian history with the Jewishness of the Gurskys. Eskimos mysteriously wearing Jewish sashes. Mystery, comedy, and who-done-it.

This novel received no nod in Canada. It was not short-listed for the GG. (The Giller did not begin until 1994 and The Writers’ Trust award for fiction began in 1997.) The novel was published in Canada in 1989, which means it would have qualified for either the 1989 or 1990 GG. The fiction jury for 1989—Robert Harlow (chair), Sharon Butala and Kent Thompson—selected the following books as the short-list The Golden Thread by Ann Copeland, Whale Music by Paul Quarrington and A View from the Roof by Helen Weinzweig with the win going to Quarrington. The fiction jury for 1990—Leon Rooke (chair), Sandra Birdsell and Henry Kreisel—selected the following books as the short-list Disappearing Moon Café by Sky Lee, Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro, On Double Tracks by Leslie Hall Pinder, Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, and Man of My Dreams by Diane Schoemperlen with the win going to Ricci. The absence of Richler’s novel is a mistake.

A S Byatt—Possession VPL WINNER

I suspect this novel was written to prove, or perhaps to be fairer to explore, a literary theory. Two young, lonely academics stumble upon work that will change the scholarship about two Victorian poets. Roland Michell works in the “Ash Factory” furthering the scholarship about Randolph Henry Ash, a respected Victorian poet who reminds me of Robert Browning. Dr. Maud Bailey labours away in the Women’s Resource Centre of Lincoln University working on Christabel LaMotte—Maud is a descendant of LaMotte. LaMotte (an Emily Dickinson type) does not have nearly the reputation of Ash but has recently become the darling of feminist scholars. It is believed that LaMotte had a fulfilled lesbian relationship with her housemate Blanche but Roland and Maud discover LaMotte had a passionate though brief affair with Ash.

The delights of the book include the send-up of all things academic, and US clichés:

“Honestly I’ve lost interest in all his footnotes and things and all those dead letters from dead people about missing trains and supporting Copyright Bills and all that stuff. Who wants to spend their life in the British Museum basement? It smells as bad as Mrs Jarvis’s flat up there, full of cat piss. Who wants to spend their life reading old menus in cat piss?”

“Nobody. They want to spend their lives in lovely hotels at international conferences…”

Complex, challenging and highly ambitious, the book considers mating rituals, feminism (both in theory and in practice), the nature of independence (actions and thought), modern versus Victorian thought, morality, and on and on. But primarily this is a book about reading, and writing. And lots of discussion about those two activities:

No, I have not told it like Gode. I have missed out patterns of her voice and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid, a kind of prettiness or portentousness which makes the difference between tales of the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouque’s Undine.

The writing is sure and clever, but it may be too clever. I found much of the first half pretentious and contrived. The structure forces the reader to go through the same path of discovery as the sleuthing academics that results in some tedious and long-winded sections. The book discusses the “ponderous obfuscation” of C19th poetry, and then inflicts exactly this style of poetry on the reader. Pages and pages and pages of it. Byatt writes poetry (the invented poetry of Ash and LaMotte) that is every bit as overwrought as the argument insists. Great if you like that sort of thing, but so much of it.

Ellen Ash, the long-suffering virginal wife of the poet, seems by all reports (letters, Ash’s journals, etc.) to be a rather dull person. The academic who is supposed to be editing and publishing Ellen’s journals has never completed the task. She feels tricked somehow, that Ellen is deliberately withholding information in her dull journals. Byatt supplies us with about 30 pages of the journal.

Much of the book is more argument than fiction. There are many things beyond the text. But some things that should remain beyond are included—Byatt supplies a chapter of the affair between Ash and LaMotte and given the structure she herself has created (you must have supporting evidence and text) how could she know? This reversion to the omnipotent narrator, I think, is a serious lapse. I also think the grave-robbing scene with the tree-toppling storm would make Daphne du Maurier blush. As would the ultra-sentimental final chapter that brings together Ash and his daughter (and again, a lapse in the narrative structure).

Yes, the book forces the reader to participate and think, if you are paying attention (I’m guessing many readers just scanned or ignored much of the poetry and journal writings). Yes, it levels postmodernism. But there is so much literary baggage (the book could as easily be titled Obsession) that at times this reader feels she is watching the author masturbate. It’s showoffy to a fault.

1990 Hilary Mantel, from The Guardian

Not a discourteous word was exchanged between the hardworking 1990 judges – much to the disappointment of the administrator Martyn Goff, who praised us to our faces and later whined that we were boring. Denis Forman ran the meetings with smooth expertise, and largely kept his own opinions dark until he cast the final vote.

Weeks before I was appointed a judge, I’d read John McGahern’s Amongst Women and said, reaching page 20, “This will win the Booker”. So I was disappointed, but AS Byatt’s Possession was a good book and a popular choice, and the discussion was fair. The process exhausted me, and I declined to do it a second time. What I despised was the leaking by the publicity machine of trivial non-stories to the press – I felt the prize had enough status and news value without that. I also believe the judges shouldn’t review the books under consideration or talk about them in public, and in 1990 we didn’t.

I’m glad I was a Booker judge relatively early in my career. It stopped me thinking that literary prizes are about literary value. Even the most correct jury goes in for horsetrading and gamesmanship, and what emerges is a compromise.

For me the best of the Bookers is The Siege of Krishnapur. I read it again a few months ago and its supple humour, its insight, economy and narrative drive make it an enduring delight.

I wonder if she remembered her own sage advice, that the prize is not about literary value, when she won in 2009?

2930 words, October 20, 2011

The National Book Trust administers the Booker Prize in the UK. The organization appears to be networked with everyone, with connections to anything and everything connected to books. Its motto is “inspiring a love of books.” Notice that it’s all about books, not about writers.

As well as the Booker, the Trust administers an array of other book prizes that includes  BBC Short Story, Early Years Awards (for books for pre-school children), Teenage Prize, John Llewellyn (writer under 35), Orange Prize (women), Power of Reading, Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Sunday Times Short Story Prize, Kim Scott Walwyn Prize (for women in publishing), Nestle Children’s Book Prize, New Writing Ventures. Notice also that not once is the Trust’s name attached to any of these prizes. The Trust runs numerous reading campaigns including Children’s Book Week, Children’s Laureate position, Diversity in Publishing and Get London Reading. The Trust also develops and produces an astonishing array of Resources for Schools.

The Writers’ Trust of Canada also administers a stable of prizes, including lifetime achievement, non-fiction, fiction, children’s writing and many others. In the Trust’s literature it says the organization was founded to “encourage a flourishing writing community in this country.” While that is certainly true, the impetus to start the organization was to produce a series of teachers’ guides about Canadian literature that had been produced by a combination of teachers and writers for The Writers’ Union of Canada. Once the project was complete, TWUC felt it would be in a conflict situation to promote and sell the guides so The Writers’ Development Trust was born and took over that aspect. Teachers who used them still remember the guides as a great resource. Sadly, nothing has replaced that service to educators in the many years since.

Over the years The Writers’ Trust (“Development” was dropped along the way) has administered other projects involved in education. For a time, Writers in Electronic Residence found its home with the Trust. There was once a fund to supply funding for writers in schools. Canada Book Day, which developed into Canada Book Week, was also administered by the Trust until it was cancelled by the Trust, not by its funders, in 2003. For a time I was the Director of that program. In addition to the prizes, the Trust administers the Woodcock Fund, a fund created by George Woodcock during his lifetime to provide grants to writers “facing unforeseen financial need.” After Woodcock’s death, and then that of his wife Inge, a large portion of their estate was left to this fund. At the time of this writing, Don Oravec reports that the Woodcock Fund has supported 162 writers and given out $752,773 in financial support.  He anticipates reaching the million-dollar mark in another 2 ½ years. The capital is preserved and has held up well even with the 2008 financial meltdown, continuing to earn about 4.5%  annually with no risk.

For many years the Trust has also supported emerging writers through the Humber scholarship and the Margaret Laurence lectures, the latter given annually at the Writer’s Union AGM. The Margaret Laurence lecture is designed to provide a small honorarium to a senior writer and the lecture is designed to inspire younger writers, even though the Union is currently short on younger writers.

Like most non-profit organizations that support the arts, The Writers’ Trust has had its share of ups and downs. These days the executive director, Don Oravec, is trying hard to stabilize sponsorship for its prizes (you can imagine the challenge of fundraising in the recent economic environment) and to develop new projects and programs. Since his tenure began, the Trust has taken over ownership and running of the Berton House in the Yukon, and has launched a cross-country workshop program organized in conjunction with local libraries. Currently, the Trust has no programs or projects involving education or promoting Canadian literature into schools.

During my time at the Trust, the Canada Council approached the organization. There was high concern at the CC that the amount of Canadian literature being taught in secondary schools was in decline. Might it, asked the CC, be time to dust off those teachers’ guides and rewrite them? Since I had published a national art and literature magazine for high school students and worked with schools across the country on that project as well as Canada Book Week, I was called into the project. Too much had changed in both education and publishing to start producing secondary materials when we didn’t know what primary materials were being used, or why, so I developed an extensive research project. The executive summary can be found here:

http://www.canadacouncil.ca/publications_e/research/aud_access/di127234254927656250.htm

The final report included a series of recommendations about what could be done to improve the situation, which turned out to be even worse than had been imagined. The Writers’ Trust board at the time was very excited about the report and its potential, but nothing further has been undertaken. Subsequent reports, notably one looking at school library collections, confirmed the veracity of the research. When George and I moved to BC it continued to bother me that no action had been taken. Since education is provincial it is difficult to initiate effective changes at a national level. I developed a provincial project called BC Bookworks, and under the umbrella of ArtStarts we applied for and received funding from CC and Heritage. The aim was to initiate ways to get more CanLit into BC high schools. We had meetings with all stakeholders, educators and librarians. In the middle of the project the English Language Arts Curriculum for grades 8 to 12 came up for review, the first time in many years. Because we already had the communication networks in place, we decided to respond to the curriculum and request CanLit be mandated.

We considered pushing for a distinct CanLit course but were concerned it would be an elective, as the grade 11 course is in Ontario; without sufficient enrollment, the course is often cancelled. Here’s an excerpt from my final report:

Mandated curriculum

English 12 First Peoples

Research suggests that in the environment of a Canadian literature course students learn context and cultural literacy. Considering the support for a distinct Canadian literature course (as indicated from the teachers’ survey) we carefully reviewed a new ELA course in B.C. that was in development and pilot during this project; English 12 First Peoples (ENG 12 FP) provides a template for the development of a Canadian literature course, or a series of classroom assessment models for various grades.

An education steering committee (educators, administration, Ministry, elders, writers, approximately 40 members) worked with six ELA teachers to create a vision for the course. The teachers worked as a unit to develop classroom assessment models (CAMs) and exams based on the new ELA curriculum, then wrote teachers’ guides and exams.

At the time of the writing of this report the pilot for this course has been completed but the final curriculum and CAMs are not available until September 2008. Jean Baird was able to review the ENG12 FP CAMs but the document is not available for distribution.

Response to curriculum draft

The ELA 8 to 12 curriculum in B.C. had not been reviewed or revised since 1995. A draft revision was scheduled to be posted in the spring 2007, was delayed several times and eventually was posted for feedback in the fall 2007. A thorough review of the draft revealed no mandate for Canadian literature. In the Achievement Indicators there were examples of Canadian literature but there was no clear prescribed mandate.

We consulted with our now established education network and developed a response. The draft curriculum provided a timely opportunity to address the number one priority for educators and stakeholders. Those who had worked on the curriculum, administrators and executive of BC Teachers of English Language Arts (BCTELA) all concurred that mandating the inclusion of Canadian literature at all grade levels would have greater long-term impact and by necessity, involve every ELA secondary teacher; we decided on this approach rather than a distinct course that would have been difficult to place in an already very full course selection.[1]

We drafted and revised dozens of letters until all the educators being consulted agreed on approach and wording. We then reviewed our databases, specifically the stakeholders’ network, and drafted a request for support. That request was also vetted through the stakeholders. Finally we circulated the request. We hoped for a list of responses of between 50 and 100 individuals and organizations to indicate a broad base of interest and support. It also seemed the best course for ArtStarts to collect those names and compile one response to make it easier for people to support the initiative.

Response far exceeded our target. The final list of individuals and organizations ran more than 50 pages and represented hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals. We were not prepared for the level of passion about the issue. We only asked for people to indicate they supported the initiative and to give name, contact information and position (i.e. Jane Doe, Vancouver, teacher). Many people took the further step of writing detailed and passionate letters.

At the end of December packages were sent to the Minister of Education Shirley Bond, Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell and the person in the Ministry responsible for ELA curriculum, Gail Hughes-Adams.

We worked closely with executives of BCTELA, and in the end, the formal response from BCTELA also included support for mandated Canadian literature on the new curriculum. We know that the English department at UBC made a formal response as did various Boards of Education across the province and many individuals. In February at the BCTELA professional development day, Gail Hughes-Adams told the educators in attendance that she received about 200 responses to the draft curriculum. The number one concern was to mandate Canadian literature into the final curriculum document. Insiders at the Ministry believe the response is directly attributable to the ArtStarts initiative.

The final curriculum will not be completed until the end of May, so at the time of this report we do not know the language that might be used for the inclusion of Canadian literature. We have received a letter from Joel Palmer, Director Learning Initiatives Branch responding on behalf of Shirley Bond and Gordon Campbell, indicating the Ministry “will be changing some of the Prescribed Learning Outcomes for ELA 8-12 to include specific reference to Canadian literature.” The PLOs are essential to real impact and change since that is the part of the document that becomes law in B.C.

Rallying the troops on the response to curriculum allowed the project to:

• Illustrate the effectiveness of the new networks;
• Expand those networks (a database of curriculum supporters creates a broader network that now includes more educators but also parents, grandparents, prior students, etc);
• Create a model of advocacy that can be duplicated in other provinces;
• Increase awareness around the issue of Canadian literature in schools;
• Illustrate the broad level of concern for this issue.

Here is what we reported and requested to the Ministry in the letter mentioned above:

…Both the teachers and the stakeholders noted that a key to achieving a higher presence for Canadian literature in the classroom is clear direction from the provincial curriculum. Currently only Saskatchewan has a mandated Canadian literature course, a unit in the grade 12 course. According to the research, elsewhere in the country it is possible, and more likely probable, that a student can graduate having never studied a Canadian novel during high school. The exception to this trend is private schools where Canadian literature is taught on a regular basis.

Please accept this letter and the material in the accompanying package as a formal response to the BC Ministry of Education’s draft of the new English Language Arts Curriculum for grades 8 to 12. We are suggesting that in each year from grade 8 to 12 each student should “read, both collaboratively and independently, to comprehend a variety of literary texts, including one or more significant works of Canadian literature.” The proposed amendment allows for the study of a play, several short stories, a collection of poetry or poetry by three or four different poets, one or two novels, or work by Canadian literary critics.

You will note that the IRP developers have already included many Canadian literature examples in their Achievement Indicators, so this addition merely affirms the study of a selection of Canadian literature texts as a requirement at each grade level. Since Achievement Indicators are suggestions only, we believe the curriculum needs the force of prescription.

Included with this letter is a list of organizations and individuals—writers, publishers, parents, educators and educational administrators at all levels, provincial and national writing, publishing and literary organizations—that are in support of this proposed change to the curriculum. We are also including a selection from the many detailed and passionate letters received. A copy of this package has also been sent to Premier Campbell and the Honorable Shirley Bond.

The development of the English 12 First Peoples course indicates that the province of BC recognizes the importance of cultural literacy in the classroom. The organizations and individuals listed believe that cultural literacy must include Canadian books and Canadian literature for all students.

The proposed amendment to the curriculum would position BC as an education leader. Canadian literature in BC classrooms would also support the ambition to make BC the most literature jurisdiction in North American, for surely we cannot make such a claim when we are not teaching our own literature in all our classrooms.

When the final curriculum was released, our suggestion had been implemented. Supporters cheered, said “Good for you, Jean. What a wonderful precedent this sets for the rest of the country.” I said, Baloney. Nothing will happen without passionate and organized advocacy across the country.

So I’ve continued to push. Here, another excerpt from my final report:

CanLit Education Coordinator

BookWorks BC has made great strides in making Canadian literature a stronger presence in the classrooms of B.C. secondary schools. It has worked to unify communities—publishing/education—and create a unified approach. In order for the momentum to continue there needs to be a focused coordinated approach. It is recommended that the position of CanLit Educator Coordinator be created. Jean Baird has had discussions with Don Oravec at The Writers’ Trust and Susan Swann at The Writers’ Union about a joint initiative of these two organizations to create this position.

A CanLit Education Coordinator could also work to create other partnerships. Poetry Out Loud is a joint initiative of The Poetry Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, www.poetryoutloud.org This program democratizes poetry excellence in a classy, enduring way, accessible to young people regardless of background. It contributes to cultural heritage, to oral heritage and showcases the variety and wealth of aesthetics and activities in poetry. In order to participate, teachers and young people need to read poems and think carefully about them. It could work beautifully in Canada and would have a much richer impact than a spelling bee (referred to by many educators as The Geekfest). An Education Coordinator could work with the Union, the Trust and the League of Canadian Poets to see whether Poetry Out Loud could be expanded into Canada.

Susan Swann was very excited about the possibility but couldn’t get any action at The Writers’ Union. The board at The Writers’ Trust weren’t convinced that organization should be involved in education—even though its roots are in education and it has been involved in various education programs over the years, it has strayed from those roots and the current board has no interest in going back. CC and Heritage had expressed interest in funding such a position. Again, to my knowledge, no action has been taken.

A group of publishers in Ontario did get as far as meeting with the deputy Ministry of Education. He got it. Immediately. He understood, as does the Department of Canadian Heritage, the huge impact it would have for the Canadian publishing industry (most of which is in Ontario) if Canadian educational dollars could be repatriated. But after the suggestion floated around the response came back—it would be perceived as “protectionism” to mandate CanLit in ON schools. Huh? Is teaching Canadian history or geography protectionism?

I wrote to Ian Wilson, then head of Library and Archives Canada about the following section from my final report:

Better resources/working with other organizations:

Library and Archives Canada/CanLit Educators’ Database

Educators believe that a user-friendly and constantly updated online directory of Canadian books, writers, and related curriculum materials is the most important resource that could be developed.[2] Teachers would like easy one-stop access to resources, ideally a database of Canadian Literature titles recommended/reviewed by teachers that is sortable by grade level, and themes. Such a database could also indicate whether other support material is available, such as films, interviews with the author, lesson plans. In short, a website designed specifically with teachers for the needs of Canadian ELA teachers.

It is important that such an initiative be housed with an organization that has the administrative structure and expertise to take on a project of such large scale. The host organization must also have an understanding of the education system as well as a thorough knowledge of the complexities of the publishing industry—concerns of writers and publishers. The ideal organization would have an established record of success working with schools. And, it would need easy access to Canadian books.

Library and Archives Canada fits all these requirements. Library and Archives Canada has an established reputation with educational/cultural projects. The holdings of the Library, the depth of the Archives and the expertise of its staff and librarians make the institution uniquely positioned to host such a project.

A letter of inquiry was sent to Ian Wilson at LAC. Mr. Wilson responded with interest, asking for a brief, detailed proposal which was completed and sent March 2008.

Teachers and students from coast to coast would use a CanLit Educators’ Database. Educators around the globe would quickly use it. Such a website would:

• Create links among writers, artists, publishers and students, educators;
• Work to create better links between literary/language arts and fine arts, social studies, and history studies;
• Increase writer visibility and title viability in schools;
• Supplement school resources;
• Respond to curriculum needs;
• Provide a reviewing tool about Canadian literature that is distinct to schools.

A CanLit Educators’ Database would benefit schools, libraries, readers, and researchers both nationally and internationally. The database would make LAC’s vast archives accessible to Canadian schools in a format that is pertinent and user-friendly.

I never received a response to the requested detailed proposal and to my knowledge nothing has happened.

Can you see why I’m a little frustrated?

By odd coincidence, on the very day I was working on this report, George forwarded the following request he’d received from the Globe and Mail:

Hello, Mr. Bowering. The Globe and Mail is doing a spread this Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and I have been asked to solicit quick comments from prominent writers about what the book meant or means to them. Do you have any thoughts? I am looking for no more than 100 words, an email or a quick phone call.

Thx  for your attention.

George replied:

If To Kill a Mockingbird were a suggestion rather than a book title, I would be all for it. For a long time this book has been a staple on the reading lists for Canadian high schools. I am thoroughly tired of it. When teachers are asked why it is there, they say because the stockroom is full of copies from last year, and because it is pretty cheap, compared to Canadian books. Then when asked, they can’t think of any Canadian books. Do we wonder why?

I wrote the Globe guy, explaining about BC Bookworks. I told him that during the project a teacher had suggested we call the campaign “Kill the Mockingbird.” Harper Lee must have made several fortunes from royalties from Canadian education dollars.

He thought that was funny, then confessed he’d never read the novel. How, I asked him, did you avoid that? Turns out he attended a private school. At private schools they do teach Canadian literature—administration and parents expect it, and there is funding for books.

It’s problem that has been researched for years, yet no organization will take responsibility and take action. BC Bookworks indicates that the public does care, and want to see changes—which both surprised and pleased me. As for decision makers, anecdotal or parental experience should not trump extensive and thorough research.

There is a glimmer of hope with the National Reading Campaign. Its first summit happened in the fall with two more scheduled. So, more talk and more research. Let’s hope this time some action also occurs.

http://nationalreadingcampaign.ca/

End of Lecture, and back to the Bookers.

Jury: David Lodge, novelist and academic. Maggie Gee novelist and academic. Helen McNeil, critic. David Profumo, actually Baron Profumo, avid fisherman and writer. Edmund White, American novelist and academic.

Sybille Bedford Jigsaw: an unsentimental education VPL

One of the most interesting things about this book is that it is so interesting. Bedford has written a memoir of a certain time of her life using the novel form, and she had an interesting life. Born of an aristocratic German father and a roving promiscuous mother, Billi, as she is known, is raised for a while by her father in gentile poverty. Her mother has some money, but has divorced the father, leaving him with a palace but no income to sustain it. Billi learns to cook, and farm, and work hard. The father dotes over his art collection, and to some extent over the daughter.

But then Billi is summoned by her mother and leaves for France. Engaged to be married to a painter, the mother is also being pursued by a man young enough to be her son. Eventually she succumbs to the young adoring Alessandro. In her absence Billi’s father has died. The rest of the novel follows Billi’s adolescence and young adulthood as she moves around from various homes of her mother, to friends who are commissioned to care for her. The education of the title is not anything that occurs in a formal classroom.

The novel is about the birth of a writer; how Bedford learned to observe and to write. And man, can she write. Billi comes of age in the generation between the wars, and she captures the tension between pain and loss, and desire to create a world without war. The reader knows that Hitler is in the horizon. Most of the characters in Billi’s life are without jobs—the idle-but-not-rich. They play tennis, redesign houses and refurnish them and immerse themselves in reading. Billi’s mother introduces her to the classics, and the new writers including Alduous Huxely, who for a while is a neighbour. (The books mentioned in this novel would comprise a more interesting reading list than much of the 1969 to 1989 Booker winners and short-list). She rubs shoulders with the intellectual set, has her photo taken by Man Ray. In various ways they are all gambling away fortunes, buying cars and squandering time on tennis, the shared “heroics and banalities.”

Then Alessandro has a brief affair, the mother seeks assistance for her grief and anger from a local doctor who prescribes morphine. There is a quick descent into addiction, secrecy and increasing seclusion. In the end, Alessandro, beaten and near-destroyed himself, leaves. Billi is left with the morphine-mad mother, and Alessandro’s Remington typewriter.

The morality of this age is pretty forgiving, as is the press. One character, a prominent judge, several times is on the abyss, but the time does not allow good men to be brought down by scandal. On the other hand, there is a whiff now and again of condescension: “What Louis felt the morning after his abduction is not known. He did not return to France until some fifteen years after the war, that is after an absence of over thirty years, as a middle-aged man (with a Tahitian wife in his baggage) who had not become a latter-day Gauguin but a moderately unsuccessful export-import man.” In this world, one would not want to be the exotic Tahitian wife!

Unrequited love. There is nothing new to be said about it. Whether it befalls one at eighteen, at thirty, at seventy, the pangs are much the same: the delirium, the hopes, the despair, the waiting. At eighteen one may believe oneself to be uniquely stricken, at thirty one may be able to say that no pain is irreversible, at seventy one knows that it is: irreversible

Rose Tremain—Restoration VPL

Guest report from Michael Matthews:

Do you want to know about Bedlam, who was there, what sorts of things happened there, what that looked like and smelled like? Rose Tremain can tell you, because she does the research. She is also outstanding in her attention to misery, whether it is a penniless immigrant sleeping in an outdoor London concrete stairwell in London at the end of the 20th century, or a man in the middle of the 19^th century prospecting for gold with no equipment but a small spade, sleeping on a New Zealand beach with no shelter, no resources save his coat rolled up as a pillow beneath his head.

Her miseries or hardships aren’t merely (merely!!) physical. Tremain’s people can have a very bad time if they fall in love with the wrong people, as in The Way I Found Her, or they may simply be the wrong sort of person, like Mary Ward in Sacred Country, who eventually gets to change her sex, becomes Martin, and finds the change just does not make life much less miserable.

Her protagonist, her agonist, in Restoration, Robert Merivel, is a medical student turned painter, turned musician, turned happy cuckold when his beloved King Charles chooses him to be married, strictly for show, to a royal mistress. Complication arises when Merivel falls in love with his wife, whose ardour goes only to the King. Out of favour with his King, Merivel loses his house and lands, loses a bird pet, loses his horse, Danseuse, and ends up in a curiously modern situation, as a volunteer help among the Quakers at the Bedlam hospital in Norfolk There’s lots of agony here, of course, and the greatest portion of it for Merivel comes with the death of John Pearce, a fellow medico, and a friend and conscience to Merivel. In all my life I have loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King,” declares Merivel as his friend is “put into his grave and the yellow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him.”

In Restoration the miseries and the extasies are…extreme. Lots of sobbing and shrieking, and the sobs and shrieks and grunts and yelps are those of joy or anguish— and it doesn’t seem to matter much which. To be human is to cry out and blubber, and to lick your tears

as delicate sauces to the meats that your tongue or your genitals are tasting. She caterwauls like an infidel…a wailing of pleasure worthy of an African wildcat” is a typical description.  When the Friends join in playing and dancing the tarantella in the Bedlam madhouse, the ecstasy and transport of the experience is the greatest that Merivel knows: “I have never seen nor heard nor been any part of any thing that was like this hour…I was no longer merely myself, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.” The genius in that simple sundering of the word “anything” into two words, whether it comes from the idiom of the 17^th century or from the author, is typical of Tremain.

And Tremaine’s brilliance isn’t only in her rendering of drama or sensations, highs or lows. Look at this profoundly serene passage, Merivel’s thoughts occasioned by contemplating his horse: “I am most fond of animals. I enjoy about them in equal measure that which is graceful and that which is gross. And they do not scheme. No man, woman or child exists in this boisterous Kingdom who is not full of plotting, yet the animals and birds have not one good ploy between them. It is for this reason above all others I suspect, that the King is so attached to his dogs.”

Restoration ends with Merivel’s horse restored to him, and his country house, and favour with the King, and we see him at last in an open, airy upper room with birds and a lovely infant daughter. I enjoy that, for I certainly don’t seek agony in my life, nor do I wish any more news of agony anywhere else, or at any time or place. But Rose Tremain can be puttin’ on the agony and doin’ it with her style any old time, and I’ll just come running.

I had already done my report before Mike sent his, and I’ve decided to include it in its entirety. I like the different perspectives.

Written in three sections, the first part introduces Robert Merivel, the orphan of the official glovemaker to Charles II, recently restored to the crown. For a time he studies medicine but gives that up to become the official vet of the royal court. Robert is a glutton for foolishness, food and fornicating. At court he is a clown, always causing laughter if only for his ability to produce a fart at will. Tremain creates the world of this court, with its excess and pursuit of pleasure. It is a world made at court. Nothing else matters.

Robert is married off to Celia, the mistress of Charles II, to appease another mistress who is jealous. “He used you, Merivel. He looked around for the stupidest man he could find, the densest, the most foolish, the one who would accept whatever he did like a dog and cause him no trouble—and he found you! I begged him, don’t marry me to that idiot, I begged him on my knees, but all he did was laugh. ‘Who can I ask,’ he said, ‘to be paid cuckold except an idiot?’” In return for being a dupe, Robert becomes Sir Robert and receives an estate and a handsome income. His only task is to protect Celia on the rare occasions when she is not wanted at court. Alone in Norfolk, Robert proves to be the uncouth mirror of the King’s excess.

When Celia demands the king be monogamous she is sent packing to Norfolk where, to his surprise, Robert falls in love with her. In retaliation, the king strips Robert of his estate and possessions.

Part two tells of Robert’s retreat to the New Bedlam where his Quaker friend, John Pearce, is taking care of mad people. Robert is feeling mighty sorry for himself but John explains that the Act of Praemunire has allowed the King to strip Quakers of all their possessions: “Hundreds of Quakers have lost their houses and their land under the terms of this loathsome edict. The suffering caused by it has been beyond what you could imagine. So do not believe you are singled out, Robert. You are merely one of many.” Robert returns to his skills as a trained doctor and ministers to the mad inmates, all the while missing his beloved monarch.

As to be expected, much of the novel is about the concerns and traditions of the time—medical beliefs and procedures, morality, religion, politics, etc. But the novel is so much more, successfully creating a convincing texture of the time—smells, light, movements, the day-to-day workings of London and New Bedlam.

I’m less persuaded by the final section. Robert succumbs to his physical desires, gets one of the patients, Katherine who he has tried to help, (though inmates seems a more accurate term) pregnant and again is sent packing. He returns to London, does his best to save the life of Katherine and infant during childbirth, but Katherine dies. He sets himself up as a doctor to help the victims of the plague and during the Great Fire of London, saves a woman trapped in her burning house. It turns out she was the wife of a dear servant of the king and for Robert’s unselfish act he is returned to the graces of Charles II. Yup, restoration.

If a movie has been made of the novel, I try to watch it. A young Robert Downey Jr. was cast as Merevil, a part better suited to John Goodman. It’s bad. The script has been condensed to make it 90 minutes or so, and as a result the plot is muddled, the symbolism is lost or misplaced and the world of the Restoration totally Hollywoodized, and trivialized. Pomp and grand but hollow gestures. The best part—all the King Charles Cavalier dogs.

Margaret Atwood—Cat’s Eye GB collection

Elaine Risley is an artist, back in her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective—both of her work and her life, as her trip ignites a retelling of her life from childhood on. Compared to most children of the war and post-war era, Elaine has had a rather exotic upbringing. The family does not attend church. The mother is unconcerned with appearance or shopping. Dad is a scientist and the family travels with him, collecting bugs and doing research. When Elaine is 8 the father takes a job at the university in Toronto and the family settles down. Despite loving, tolerant liberal parents, Elaine has “no backbone” and in her efforts to fit in and make friends she discovers the terrors that little girls can inflict on each other. Much of the novel is about women’s capacity for nastiness, particularly to each other. What is chilling about the abuse of the children to Elaine is that it is condoned by the other girls’ mothers under the excuse of helping Elaine to “improve.” Elaine’s mother eventually becomes aware of the situation but “doesn’t know what to do” either. As a teen, Elaine becomes the verbal abuser, and reconnects with Cordelia, one of the childhood tormentors.

The growth and development of the artist’s story is most interesting in the descriptions of the paintings Elaine produces. All of which is happening during the emergence of the feminist movement, global terrorism and increasing urbanization. Like many of Atwood’s heroines Elaine isn’t particularly likeable, or interesting. The power of the book is in the exploration of childhood trauma and the astute observations of small gestures.

John Banville—The Book of Evidence VPL

Freddie Montgomery is a privileged son of an Englishman with an estate in Ireland who gives up a promising career as a scientist for a wandering dissolute life in the Greek islands. He makes a foolish loan, which he uses to have a good time for a few weeks, then leaves his wife and son as collateral to return to Ireland, planning to sell his late father’s art collection to pay the debt. His mother has beaten him to it, having sold the paintings to back her new business with ponies. Freddie robs a painting from a nearby estate, is caught by a maid and murders her with a hammer. In jail he writers his story for the judge, hence the novel.

Freddie is unreliable, in his life and as a narrator. The power of the novel are those things just barely under the surface, occasionally erupting, like Bunter who is Freddie’s inner demon. Sometimes controlled, other times self-justifying, the narrator makes us constantly aware of the process of storytelling, creating fictions, naming characters. Sexual tension predominates as well as themes of betrayal and self-deception. And it all takes place with the backdrop of bombings so you have to consider the whole shebang as an allegory of Ireland under England, trying to regain control through what often seems to be psychopathic behaviour. The novel has been compared to Camus, though I don’t remember Camus being so funny.

James Kelman—A Disaffection purchased, out of desperation, not available anywhere

Now we’ve bounced from Ireland to Scotland, Glasgow to be specific, complete with brogue. Patrick Doyle is a teacher, almost 30, unmarried, disillusioned with his job, and everything else. The novel takes us inside his head, sharing each thought in a stream-of-consciousness approach, swinging from suicidal despair to hilarity. And that’s about it. Nothing much happens—that’s not the point.

“But this is because he was a single chap and single chaps are single persons ergo they dwell on the past and there is nothing wrong in dwelling on the past. How can you dwell on the future? There is nothing to dwell on! It doesni exist. It is a blank. Everything has yet to take place. This is what the future is, the place where things have yet to occur. So how can you dwell on that? You’re cheating. Okay but just think of it as an empty room. No. Well then…. ”

“Doesni” is part of the brogue.

Patrick obsesses about everything—his job, unrequited love for a fellow teacher who is married, separation from family, and further from his personal life the work of Goya, Descartes, Holderlin, Copernicus, Schopenhauer, and on and on. He thinks he might be having a breakdown. No kidding—compared to this guy Larry David and Woody Allen are not neurotic. In places the onslaught of Patrick’s internal monologue gets monotonous. Several times I considered packing it in. But just as often I would plan to read 10 pages and would be swept along for 30. Or, I would get frustrated and scan then find that I was reading closely again.

The classroom sections are both hilarious and terrifying. The things he tells these 14-year olds. The things they tell him.

Kazuo Shiguro—The Remains of the Day VPL Winner

Guest report by Colin Browne:

I didn’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day when it was published in 1988. My daughter Susanna was a year old, and I only had eyes for her. But I think I see now why some people wanted me to read the novel. I suspect they felt it was right up my alley; that is, that I’d benefit from reading about the fictional experiences of the central character, a vain and neurotic butler named Stevens. By unravelling the butler’s history during the 1930s, Ishiguro explores the limits and perils of duty and the compromises required by a certain concept of dignity, or perhaps by dignity itself. I’m daily vexed by the pressures of duty, so my friends may not have been wrong. An almost religious sense of duty led to the undoing of my father, not in the way it undid Stevens, or Istvan Szabo’s Colonel Redl, but it made him too trusting, too firm a believer in a greater justice. In the end, he did not give enough credibility to the machinations that sideswiped him and that led to the end of his career in the Royal Canadian Navy. He believed, with a faith that would have put Joan of Arc to shame, that a man of honour and dignity would always be rewarded. Circumstances proved otherwise. Circumstances proved that such a man could be the perfect patsy.

In a 1995 CBC radio interview, Ishiguro told Eleanor Wachtel that he began with a theme, and while this provides the spine of the novel, its single-minded thrust allows the novel to become increasingly one-dimensional as time goes along. The narrative, or narration, takes place over five days in a series of interior monologues in which Stevens interrogates his career in an attempt to allay worries about his loneliness and approaching decrepitude. It’s 1956; England has changed, the great houses have changed, the role of servants has changed and Stevens has changed. He has recently been responsible for one or two minor errors at Darlington Hall and his new master, an American, fond of banter, has given him the Ford and encouraged him to take a trip, to loosen up, to get out and see the countryside. (I imagined that on his return his employer would have a severance package ready, and this is left open.)  Stevens tells us that he has never permitted himself such an indulgence and decides to aim the car towards Little Compton in Cornwall where a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, resides. Miss Kenton once carried a torch for Stevens, but after years of being neglected she left Darlington Hall to marry. In a modest flush of submerged desire, Stevens hopes she might return to Darlington Hall after twenty years to become housekeeper once more. The book’s prologue and six sections chronicle the motor journey of this repressed, fussy, fastidious, delusional man as he encounters the shades of his past and present—a carefully-plotted metaphorical journey on which the reader is cast as an eavesdropper in the back seat, listening to the wheels of repression rolling over unwitting nuggets of self-discovery. Was it a coincidence, or was it something in the air that moved Alan Bennett to employ the same strategy in his 1987 Talking Heads series? In both texts, the subjects are elderly witnesses to the painful denials and inevitabilities of Britain in the 1930s. With their unsteady memories, these self-propelled ruminators are apparently unconscious of the transparency of their confused, self-serving monologues. If Bennett and Ishiguro can be said to be mining similar territory, it’s because their subject is memory itself, memory being the central and overwhelming concern of 20^th century literature and art.

Stevens the butler has convinced himself, and tries to convince us, that during the 1930s, his master, Lord Darlington, was at the centre of the world’s great affairs. Parroting his master’s words and ideas, Stevens recalls the clandestine, late night meetings by distinguished visitors to Darlington Hall. By virtue of his proximity to these visitors, Stevens began to believe that he himself was at the heart of world-shaping diplomacy. A reader may guess that the fictional Lord Darlington, whose guests included the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, is modelled after the real-life Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5 and at the time one of England’s wealthiest men. Like Londonderry, Lord Darlington was a well-meaning aristocratic amateur whose flawed vision of world affairs was that the upper classes of Great Britain, who shared so much history and culture with Germany, and whose great families, after all, had the same blood flowing in their veins, ought to convince parliament to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler. In Darlington’s mind, the wise men of both nations recognized that the true enemies were radicals, Communists and Jews (often conflated), and that the future lay in an alliance against those who would challenge and destabilize the status quo. In the novel, the naïve, pliable Lord Darlington also flirts with Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the Blackshirts, and with anti-Semitism, firing a Jewish servant and asking Stevens to do the dirty work. Stevens, who believes that his dignity remains intact throughout the distressing procedure, complies. In an equally disturbing moment in the novel, Stevens abandons his dying father in an attic room in order to serve brandy downstairs to Darlington’s Fascist toadies. He fails to recognize that his father is asking, on the edge of the grave, for his son’s blessing, and leaves the old man to die like a sheep in a ditch.

In 1989, when The Remains of the Day was published, the complicity with Nazi Germany of some members of the British ruling class was becoming better known. The skeletons were being dragged out of the closet. Many of the gentry, especially those alarmed by Communism or Socialism—Londonderry’s town and country houses and his 50,000 acres of agricultural and industrial land were obvious targets for confiscation—were Nazi sympathizers in the early days of the Reich, and some remained so. Many Britons, including a disturbing number of intellectuals, were anti-Semitic. Many on the right and the left felt that democracy had run its course and that England needed a strong man like Franco, Stalin, Mussolini or Hitler to whip the nation into shape. Most changed their mind as the decade wore on, but their class allegiances had been exposed and appeasement discredited. Lord Londonderry, an early proponent of rearmament who went on to schmooze Herr Ribbentrop in the hope that a non-aggression pact might be crafted, came to abhor the Nazi martinet, yet by the time war was declared it was too late; he’d been sidelined.

The revelation of Lord Darlington’s Fascist sympathies, which leaks out during the first three days on the road, will not surprise a reader today. The form demands it. Not long ago, a text like The Remains of the Day, constructed of meditative flashbacks, produced surprise and elation, but it’s become an overworked form. The structure is predictable and the revelations, which come with an almost mechanical frequency, can seem overdetermined. The inner secrets of neurotic, sexually-confused mid-century European men have become woefully familiar. The fictional character with the troubled past is now expected to be a metaphor for childhood trauma either at the hands of family or state, or likely both. I’m not making light of this, and the need to identify and address the trauma is as urgent as ever, but the necessary excavations of the 20^th century’s civilized brutality have become in many hands the stuff of cliché; the disturbing revelations of yesterday have become the plot-points and vulgar shorthand of the present. Ishiguro’s surprising work of 1986 has come to feel familiar and predictable today.

Perhaps he was not unaware of the shortcomings of his fictional or docudrama-like strategy, or of the possible sound of machinery whirring behind the crafty, knowing, deflective, self-deluding, first-person voice. It’s right to praise the almost perfect pitch of Stevens’ voice throughout the novel. Only on the occasions when it carries a little extra freight—in the foreshadowing, for example—does the tone waver or feel forced. But the result is that the careful plotting and release of information begin to reveal themselves like bones sticking out of a riverbank at regular intervals. In the 1995 interview, Ishiguro told Eleanor Wachtel,

I felt with The Remains of the Day I had actually come to the end of something. I felt that it was the end of the project I’d started with my first novel in my mid-twenties, and I finished The Remains of the Day in my early thirties. And while I was happy enough with that, I felt that I had come as far as I could with that project and I’d become somebody else. The kind of voice that seemed to me correct and authentic when I was in my mid-twenties no longer felt like the right voice for me…Although those earlier books are about life being hard to control, there’s something about the tone that suggests life is something that is controllable and rather orderly, that you can look back and say, ah! that’s where I took a wrong turning and that’s the path I’ve come. Whereas by the time I got to my mid-thirties, paradoxically, things were looking more and more complicated to me and more and more chaotic, and issues seemed much more complex than they did to me when I was in my twenties…I wanted to write a book that contained some of the chaos and confusion I felt.

This realization was the genesis of The Inconsolable. According to Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day was “almost a rewrite of my previous book set in Japan, An Artist of the Floating World.” By setting the novel in England, he was searching for a way to reach more readers: “I thought I could use this mythical figure [the butler] and play around with the associations of that stereotype. I was dealing with a mythical England rather than a real England, and because it was something English, I think it was much more readily understood….” Hmmm. A mythical character in a mythical nation. A mythical narrative drilling through layers of mythical sediment. Wachtel suggests that The Remains of the Day is “a study of the failure of emotion.” This is partly true, but the social cannot be ignored. In his own words, Ishiguro’s subjects are “crucially flawed in terms of what they did and how they gave their energies and how they placed their loyalties,” especially when attracted to Fascism’s temptations and efficiencies. At the root of Ishiguro’s theme is the question of how he might have behaved if he’d grown up in Imperial Japan or Hitler’s Germany during the approach to the Second World War. (He was born in Japan in 1954.) Would he have gladly donned boots and tunics and sung marching songs in an idealistic pact with the future? Quite possibly. Would he have remained indifferent to the fate of his neighbours being assassinated en masse? Quite possibly. These are necessary questions, and at its best The Remains of the Day is intended to provoke them in every reader. Roth’s The Plot Against America takes them in hand more forthrightly. We should never forget that in Nazi Germany many of those who flocked first to the Swastika were university professors.

How would this novel fare vis-à-vis the Booker Prize candidates today, I wonder? This is an impossible question to answer. The care with which it was written is admirable. The mythical/metaphoric aspect to the characters, the mythical landscape and the interior monologue take it out of the realm of the naturalistic novel (I don’t think Ishiguro intended it to perch there anyway) and place it interestingly within the range of opera. It would satisfy on an emotional and a symbolic level if sung by a baritone of remarkable sensitivity, someone who would be able to embody the disembodied text. As it is, we glimpse in the novel the wheels of destiny grinding the faithful, the proud, the arrogant, the altruistic, the innocent and the timid beneath their weight. The wheels have a certain resplendent beauty that is reassuring and chilling in almost equal parts. They’re mirrored in this novel’s structure, and their prominence is amplified by virtue of the novel’s having lost its secret. But a reader who may find the text wanting for this reason must still contend with the narrator’s failure to budge himself from his comfortable delusions, his narrative of dignity. He will die as his father did.

For the interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, please see Eleanor Wachtel, More Writers & Company: New conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996).

Bookjacket: “Kazuo Ishiguro has stepped into the one-dimensional cliché of the butler and found there a wonderful humor and tenderness that P. G. Wodehouse and J. M. Barrie never imagined. The narrative is as sly as Ford Madox Ford at his best.” Michael Ondaatje

Colin’s thoughtful and thorough review captures the intensity of the novel, but also in 2010 a dated quality. Colin did not have the advantage of reading the other short-listed books of 1989 so I will point out that both the Margaret Atwood and Sybille Bedord novels are using the same tool of reflection. As I mention below, I think Ishiguro’s win might have more to do with the influence of Malcolm Bradbury on the writing scene of the 1980s.

1989 David Lodge from the Guardian

Our shortlist meeting was the longest to date, and much of it was taken up with discussion of Martin Amis’s London Fields. It is public knowledge that two of the judges on the panel, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, successfully resisted its inclusion on the shortlist, an outcome I still regret. The final judging session was uncontroversial – all but one of us were unequivocally in favour of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I consider it one of the best Booker winners I have read.

The success of the prize has had an enormous impact on the reception of literary fiction and other kinds of writing, not only directly, but also indirectly through the proliferation of new prizes that have imitated it. But the overtly competitive nature of these prizes, heightened by the publication of longlists and shortlists, takes its psychological toll on writers; and, given the large element of chance in the composition and operation of judging panels, the importance now attached to prizes in our literary culture seems excessive. A committee is a blunt instrument of literary criticism.

English notes the excessive influence that some Brits have had on the prize results, notably that Malcolm Bradbury has now been chair twice, a short-listed author once and a long-time member of the management committee. He was also the director of the creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. Helen McNeil was an East Anglia colleague as was Rose Tremain. The winner Kazuo Ishiguro was an East Anglia graduate and a former student of Bradbury’s.

Category: the increasingly odd world of prizes. One day the following two emails showed up in my inbox within 10 minutes of each other.

Dear friends —

I need your help!

Reliable sources tell me that I am running neck and neck with one other book for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award — and only you can help me win the $10,000 prize and the opportunities that the award might open up for me!

My book Buying Cigarettes for the Dog is one of five short-listed for the award, out of 225 books published last year in Alberta. Maybe you’ve read it, and hopefully you liked it. It has received over 20 reviews: all but one of them positive.

The writer then suggest giving him a boost, and supplying the online voting address, adding that I could vote every day if I wanted to, and on different computers if I had them. The letter also provided some YouTube addresses in case I wanted to see him read from the book.  It was from Stuart Ross.

The other e-mail went like this:

Dear friends of Alberta Lit,

The top five books for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award have been selected. Two Alberta authors are qualified finalists. One of them is me, and the book is The Frog Lake Reader.

Voting will take place until April 30, 2010. That’s how the winner will be chosen: by number of times the book gets “clicked” on the website below. It seems you do not have to be in Alberta to be an Alberta reader. Mirabile dictu! And you can vote as many times as you want!

Of course I would love to have your vote(s).

So put this up on your Favourites bar and click away.

For more information about the prize, its finalists, and how to vote, visit http://www.albertareaderschoice.ca/

Myrna Kostash

I really like Stuart Ross. He’s a good guy who writes and edits good books. And he cares deeply about writing. But on his Facebook page he was taking a bashing about this fan-fest approach to selecting a winning book. Stu responded:

The organizers *designed* this prize to work the way it is working. At the finalists’ panel on Saturday, they trumpeted that 8,000 votes had been cast. They consciously chose a system where one can vote repeatedly: every two hours. They could have designed it differently, but they didn’t.

They also said that the prize is being monitored to avoid “ballot-stacking” and that it hasn’t been a problem.

So all your moralizing and pontificating (in my living room) about ballot-stuffing is entirely bewildering to me. I’m tempted to theorize on what it’s rooted in, but I won’t, because it’s not fair to project.

But I’ll tell you: I have been working in Canadian literature, mostly of the small press variety, for 35 years. I have run reading series, started book fairs, published the works of dozens of other writers out of my own pocket, in the magazines I’ve run and the books I’ve published, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars never recovered. I co-run a volunteer list-serv that sends news of Toronto literary events to 700 people, I mentor younger and older writers.

I have never won a prize, except in a Cracker Jacks box. So for me, no, literature is not a popularity contest, it’s not about ego, it’s not about prizes.

But I could use the $10,000, and I could use the doors this could open for me if I won.

And, frankly, I think my book is the most adventurous of the lot, and the best-written.

Hell, I voted for his book. A couple of times.

Meanwhile Rob Mclennan is looking for votes to be the poet laureate of the blogosphere and the Toronto International Festival has started a new poetry-reading contest—the winner gets an official invitation to the festival. For better or worse, shifts are happening on the Canadian prize scene.

1988 Jury: The Rt Hon Michael Foot, British Labour politician and editor of the Tribune. Sebastian Faulks, British novelist and journalist. Philip French, film critic and radio producer. Blake Morrison, writer and poet. Rose Tremain, you know.

David Lodge – Nice Work VPL

Guest report from Colin Ellard

A barrel-chested captain of industry clashes with a willowy feminist English scholar during Margaret Thatcher’s era of decimation of higher education in England. Some bright bureaucrat has the idea that an exchange program where professors spend time inside factories will somehow enhance the lives of both working stiffs and inhabitants of the Ivory Tower. I liked most of this book, even though its portrayal of academics was a little hackneyed (or maybe things are just that different in England). There were a few laugh out loud lines: “all the men on campus were married, gay or scientists,” for one. I recounted this line in an elevator conversation and it turned out that one of the other riders was a young female assistant professor. She guffawed her agreement. The big sex scene, though one knew it was coming from page one, was still great fun, especially the gender reversal with the powerful male character falling head over heels in love while the woman offered him a literary deconstruction of the very idea. The ending of the book drove me nuts. What’s the plural form of Deus ex Machina? It’s as if Lodge suddenly became bored with the whole premise of the book and tried to find a way to wind everything up quickly and not-so-cleanly.

If you’ve spent much time in the academic world, Lodge does provoke loud laughs. In this novel, one of my favourites—“A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn’t herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that ‘character’ is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism…” Colin is a scientist so he might not have hooted so much over this sort of English department nonsense.

Bruce Chatwin—Utz VPL

Guest report from Aaron Peck

Utz is, at least, the most successful of Chatwin’s three novels and his funniest book overall. Even compared to the two travel books, he feels more focused here than he does in the entropic Songlines or the maundering In Patagonia (both of which I admire for different reasons, despite their factual errors). Utz is the first book wherein the line between reportage and fiction is successfully blurred.

On rereading, I found myself laughing out loud at the scenes in the Restaurant Pstruh or etymology of the Utz’s family name. His characters are more developed, or sustained, than they are in any of the other books (with the exception of On The Black Hill). However, at times his characterizations verge on caricature. But this works because the subject of the novel is a collector of porcelain dolls, and because those dolls become allegorical the reader can imagine that the characters are like porcelain dolls themselves (e.g. Utz’s best friend the Dr. Vacláv Orlík, a paleontologist who studies the common house fly, musca domestica; Dr Frankfurter, the New York porcelain dealer, and his ugly hands).

Chatwin has also fine-tuned his digressions. The excursus on Rabbi Loew’s golem is fascinating, for example. Because of the lives of the characters (collectors, writers, opera singers, and academics), the erudition never feels out of place, and Chatwin’s lucid prose makes some potentially distracting topics feel like a natural part of the story.

The use of the past perfect tense, however, is a little odd particularly because the crux of the whole book surrounds whether or not Utz had a moustache. Because of the choice of tense the telling feels too contrived when it is finally revealed whether or not the narrator remembers there being moustache, the way this acts as a key to Utz’s character. The ending gets away with itself, and Chatwin tries too hard to conclude things conclusively.

Utz resolves an ambiguity in Chatwin’s writing: how to blur the line between fact and fiction convincingly. For the first time, whether or not a character (i.e. Kapsar Utz) is based on a real person or not is moot in a first-person Chatwin account (Chatwin claimed he was based on a person he met in Prague as a young man). Also taking on a European subject (as he also did in On The Black Hill) feels more honest. In his books set in far off places, I can’t help but feel irritated by narrator who wants us to feel pathos for the lonely rich English nomad. What, in the end, makes his earlier works stand a cut above neo-colonial ethnography was his irony, observation and (much like Michel Leiris’ ethnography) his first person perspective. In Utz he is closer to home, and his depiction of Europe, particularly Prague, in the 1960s is compelling.

As the study of the psychology of a collector, a complicated look at how a person can survive totalitarian regimes, and (also like On the Black Hill) an elegy for the twentieth century, Utz is rich, funny, and brief. The biggest failings it has are the final section, but there is much in this book to learn from and to enjoy. Much like his late admirer W. G. Sebald, Chatwin’s books leave at least this reader saddened. With Utz it felt that Chatwin was getting his stride, trying new things, and for the most part succeeding, and we can only wonder what he would have written next.

Utz was Chatwin’s last novel. He succumbed to AIDS in 1989.

Penelope Fitzgerald—The Beginning of Spring VPL

Many critics and readers rave about Fitzgerald. Some go so far as to claim she is the best British novelist of the last half of the 20^th century. Her reputation has increased since her death in 2000.

Frank Reid runs a printing company in Moscow, 1913. Born and raised in Moscow, a child of British parents, Frank has been schooled in England, married while there and has returned to Russia to run the family business. Without any apparent cause, his wife has left him to return to England, initially taking their children, then returning them mid-voyage. Frank is faced with a household of domestics, a business to run and children to supervise.

It’s another version of “The Fall of Icarus” with our narrator (for most of the novel) always looking in the wrong direction, or not grasping the facts of what he does see. And, of course, neither can the reader. It’s not a book about questions and answers, or plot, or character motivation. Fitzgerald can deftly present a complex character in a few sentences, and with as much ease and certainty have a main character remain vague.

Communism is shifting, and Frank and the little details of his life are caught in that larger pattern. If I were on a jury, this is a novel I would want to discuss. It’s accomplished, but I found parts of it frustrating—the symbolic Lisa, the mystical tree-hugging scene—and would want to hear others’ thoughts.

Marina Warner—The Lost Father VPL

Multi-generational romance story mostly set in Italy. The whole thing is just too familiar—a scandal that affects a family for generations, the shifts of women’s rights, blah, blah. Before the first chapter is a map and a crib sheet of the various generations.

Rosa is the older, ugly sister. Cati is the younger, gorgeous sister. Rosa falls for bad boy Tommaso. Cati acts as their go-between. Brother Davide is forced by honour and custom to fight a duel to defend his sister’s honour (and we aren’t sure which one he is defending, though we do know Rosa gave Tommaso a hand job). A shot ricochets off a rock into Davide’s temple and he dies a slow 18-year death from lead poisoning. He couldn’t die right away, eh, or we wouldn’t get the next generations to suffer, and look back.

During those 18 years Davide immigrates to the USA, the first-born child, a son, dies on the ship. He returns to Italy and his wife eventually follows and the youngest child, Fanina is born Italian. It is Fanina’s daughter Anna who is writing the story and trying to make links, to her mother and to her past.

The story line happens in chunks—early 1910s, 1930s, 1985, but not in chronological order, and there are flashbacks within each section. Anne is writing a novel The Duel based on the family story. Anna addresses her mother in the second person, as though the 1985 sections are a letter. It’s off-putting. There are also long passages from Davide’s diary. His style seems pretty much the same as Anna’s.

Sections of The Duel, and most of the novel are passages from the novel-in-progress, are pure bodice-ripper. In the following section, Davide has returned from America to a troubled time in Italy, under The Leader. A desperate woman approaches him, hoping for help for her missing son:

She had refused to get up, now held his legs in a hug, and her face against his thighs, turning now one cheek then the other into the material of his trousers, just below his crotch, and he was dismayed that she might smell him, that his buttoned fly, however spick-and-span—and they were freshly laundered—might carry some old aroma all the same, for he knew how bodies animate and inform even the most lifeless paraphernalia, how Maria Filippa surely with her scent as a sore leaves spoor for a hunting dog in a forest. When the ironing was being done, if he came in, holding out a shirt or a collar for a special attention before he put it on, he caught sometimes, among the warm breadlike goodness of pressed linen and cotton, fragrant from soap and water, the stab of pungent humanity, a momentary trace as the heavy iron stamped the blood lingering around the soft white squares of cotton they wore during their time of the month. The woman sensed his fear and, perceiving that he had placed this construction upon their encounter, pressed herself closer to the soft protuberance of his cock, touching his balls with her cheeks, one side and then the other, wheedling the while. He had a moment—it was more than a moment, it was minutes together—when he wanted to cup a hand around her head and for all that they were still almost in the street, open his trousers and feel her tongue lap him and her lips close on him. But the moment passed, for there was something in her grasp of his legs that was so awkward, so inexperienced, and the pitch of her entreaties remained so anguished that he knew she was only doing what she imagined might persuade him to help her; and a wave of self-loathing washed over him, that a woman like her could think of a man like him in such a light.

It’s a tale of women suffered through, and carrying their children through the trials of a patriarchal society. The strength of the women—learned through ironing and daily chores—allows the family to survive.

There’s a nifty twist at the end that undermines the entire novel, and particularly Anna’s research and writing of The Duel. It might all be a romantic lie. The men have further let the women down through risky politics. The last part becomes too didactic, though that approach does suit the character of Anna. If you stand back from the novel, the structure does ask for an examination of our yearning to romanticize our pasts. But the reading of the novel is too much like plowing through 1950s Ladies Home Journals.

Salman Rushdie—The Satanic Verses VPL

This novel gave Rushdie huge fame because of the fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. The novel was banned in many countries. Bookstores were bombed, translators attacked and the Japanese translator was murdered. Riots in India and Pakistan resulted in dozens of deaths.

Broadcast on Iranian radio, the judgment read:

In the name of God the Almighty. We belong to God and to Him we shall return. I would like to inform all intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, and those publishers who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, where they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctity. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God-willing. In addition, if anyone has access to the author of the book but does not possess the power to execute him, he should point him out to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God’s blessing be on you all. Rullah Musavi al-Khomeini.

A few days into reading, or trying to read, this novel, the following arrived in my inbox:

Quillblog, Censorship, Egyptian literature

Egyptian author could face jail term for novel accused of “insulting Christianity”

May 10, 2010 | 11:33 AM | By Steven W. Beattie

Last year, Egyptian author Youssef Ziedan won the Man Booker prize foundation’s $60,000 International Arabic Fiction Prize for his novel Azazeel. This year, that same novel could land the author up to five years in jail if his book is found guilty of “insulting Christianity.” From the Guardian:

Azazeel has provoked controversy in Egypt ever since its publication. The Coptic church denounced it as offensive for its violent portrait of Coptic church father St. Cyril, and one critic said it “tries to Islamise Christian beliefs and takes the side        of heretics.” Now a group of Egyptian and international Coptic organisations             have filed a complaint with the country’s public prosecutor against Ziedan, a         philosophy professor, accusing him of insulting Christianity.

Ziedan claims not to have expected the book to be charged with “disdaining religions,” and goes on to say that he and “the majority of intellectuals” in the country thought the charges would be dismissed. Instead, they have been referred to the Egyptian State Security Prosecution for trial.

Azazeel has already been the subject of numerous attacks and attempts to have it banned, according to the Guardian:

The author said that there had been many calls to ban Azazeel, with four books     written attacking his novel, but so far the Egyptian government has not complied            with the demands. “Other books have been published to defend the novel, not to mention hundreds of pro-Azazeel articles,” he added. “Azazeel has kept on its             wide circulation; 18 editions have been published within two years – an      unprecedented incident in the history of Arab literature. All such events have         increased the ire of the church, which resorted to a new technique last week.”

Remember Aaron Peck’s comments about this novel? I’ll repeat them:

Satanic Verses — another of my favourites. I think this book only makes sense to apostates (myself being, of course, a Baha’i apostate, so I really don’t know how well it could resonate, with people coming from Christian backgrounds — the meat of the book is so particular to understanding what is not supposed to be said, and how it is not supposed to be said, within certain cultures and religions — for him, specifically, Islam; for me it also resonated as a Baha’i). I found the way the book blasphemed to be riveting. Also, I think for a book written in the mid-to-late eighties the way it explored the links between fundamentalism and terrorism is way ahead of its time, or rather of its time. It just took most of the world — and the WTC atrocity — to recognize this. The Blakean themes were of interest to me as well. And, finally, I think, it is his most successful example of Rushdie’s use of magical realism. I read the whole book in under two days; I couldn’t put it down.

Unlike Aaron, I avoided picking it up. I’d force myself to sit down and read 10 pages, then go off to do dishes, anything. I fought my way through to page 100 then decided to give it up. I think Aaron is probably right. I didn’t get it. And while from time to time a description or section would capture me for a few pages, it wasn’t enough to keep me at it.

This book is a milestone for many reasons. Not only did it have political repercussions, it made many Brits reconsider Rushdie and his motivations. British author Roald Dahl called Rushdie’s book sensationalist and Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist”. The scandal also resulted in millions of book sales.

Peter Carey—Oscar and Lucinda VPL Winner

At this point I confess I’m a bit leery of Carey. I wonder if much of the attention he has received is a combination of his themes and his high ambition, and an increasing tendency for critics to confuse literary value with social value. Certainly with Illywhacker I think he set out to write The Great Australian Novel, or the Australian version of Midnight’s Children or The Tin Drum, take your pick.

Oscar and Lucinda does hit on Carey themes—strength and fragility, commerce, dreams and ambition, fears, religion. But there is a soft touch here, perhaps even gentleness. The reaching and overreaching ambition of his previous novels takes a different tone in this novel. If magical realism from the pen of Rushdie mimics the brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock, in Oscar and Lucinda the brush strokes mimic Vincent van Gogh. The metaphor may be clumsy, but do you see my point?

Much of the first two hundred pages introduce the two main characters of the title. We know almost immediately this is a love story, of some sort, though it is hundreds of pages before the two will meet. Oscar and Lucinda are gambling addicts, of the most unlikely sort. Lucinda is the teenage heiress of a fortune acquired from her farmer parents (though her mother always fancied owning a factory). Oscar develops a passion for the ponies as a training cleric at Oxford. Both flaming redheads are ill equipped to live in this world. They are frail, naïve and vulnerable. Oscar’s knees click whenever he moves. Lucinda is almost transparent. Yet, both are full of strength. Ah, that Carey theme of strength and fragility.

In this novel Carey weaves his themes through the symbols and metaphors of water, glass and faith. Oh, and the great quest. To give details would ruin the fun, if you haven’t already read the book or seen the movie. The novel was one of six for the Best of Booker on the 40^th anniversary of the prize. Better than the Rushdie that won, I’d say.

And speaking of Rushdie, one of the many Rushdie stories is that at an award dinner for the Booker when another novel was named the winner, Rushdie slammed his fists on the table and declared that the judges knew “fuck all about literature.” That pompous gesture might better explain the distinction I am trying to make between the style of Rushdie and Carey’s use of magic realism in this novel. The Carey gesture would be to mutter “Aw, shit” under his breathe then choke on his brandy and have to excuse himself, embarrassed, to the bathroom so he could throw up.

1988 Blake Morrison

We were a jury of writers that year: Sebastian Faulks, Rose Tremain, Philip French and, in the chair, Michael Foot, who seemed keener to talk about Byron than to reminisce about leading the Labour party. As early as our first meeting, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was the clear frontrunner. The only arguments were about which novels should be with him on the shortlist. I read the bulk of the 100 or so entries during a fortnight’s holiday with two small children in Wales, rising early and retiring late. Those we finally settled on were Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (which I read with innocent pleasure – the controversy over it didn’t erupt till the following year), Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (his last novel – his funeral was the day of the fatwa), David Lodge’s Nice Work (one of his best), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (one of her best) and Marina Warner’s The Lost Father.

My biggest regret was failing to get Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child on the shortlist – though in retrospect Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was a graver omission. The final meeting lasted 25 minutes: Foot was for Rushdie, the rest of us were for Carey, so that was that. Rushdie has sometimes been caricatured as a bad loser, but at the ceremony he behaved impeccably and was generous in his praise of the winning book. All in all, a pleasing outcome. My other experiences of sitting on prize juries have been grisly in comparison.

One last note: Like hell he read “the bulk of the 100 or so entries during a fortnight’s holiday with two small children in Wales.” That’s simply impossible to do.

1988

Category: the increasingly odd world of prizes. One day the following two emails showed up in my inbox within 10 minutes of each other.

Dear friends —

I need your help!

Reliable sources tell me that I am running neck and neck with one other book for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award — and only you can help me win the $10,000 prize and the opportunities that the award might open up for me!

My book Buying Cigarettes for the Dog is one of five short-listed for the award, out of 225 books published last year in Alberta. Maybe you’ve read it, and hopefully you liked it. It has received over 20 reviews: all but one of them positive.

The writer then suggest giving him a boost, and supplying the online voting address, adding that I could vote every day if I wanted to, and on different computers if I had them. The letter also provided some YouTube addresses in case I wanted to see him read from the book.  It was from Stuart Ross.

The other e-mail went like this:

Dear friends of Alberta Lit,

The top five books for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award have been selected. Two Alberta authors are qualified finalists. One of them is me, and the book is The Frog Lake Reader.

Voting will take place until April 30, 2010. That’s how the winner will be chosen: by number of times the book gets “clicked” on the website below. It seems you do not have to be in Alberta to be an Alberta reader. Mirabile dictu! And you can vote as many times as you want!

Of course I would love to have your vote(s).

So put this up on your Favourites bar and click away.

For more information about the prize, its finalists, and how to vote, visit http://www.albertareaderschoice.ca/

Myrna Kostash

I really like Stuart Ross. He’s a good guy who writes and edits good books. And he cares deeply about writing. But on his Facebook page he was taking a bashing about this fan-fest approach to selecting a winning book. Stu responded:

The organizers *designed* this prize to work the way it is working. At the finalists’ panel on Saturday, they trumpeted that 8,000 votes had been cast. They consciously chose a system where one can vote repeatedly: every two hours. They could have designed it differently, but they didn’t.

They also said that the prize is being monitored to avoid “ballot-stacking” and that it hasn’t been a problem.

So all your moralizing and pontificating (in my living room) about ballot-stuffing is entirely bewildering to me. I’m tempted to theorize on what it’s rooted in, but I won’t, because it’s not fair to project.

But I’ll tell you: I have been working in Canadian literature, mostly of the small press variety, for 35 years. I have run reading series, started book fairs, published the works of dozens of other writers out of my own pocket, in the magazines I’ve run and the books I’ve published, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars never recovered. I co-run a volunteer list-serv that sends news of Toronto literary events to 700 people, I mentor younger and older writers.

I have never won a prize, except in a Cracker Jacks box. So for me, no, literature is not a popularity contest, it’s not about ego, it’s not about prizes.

But I could use the $10,000, and I could use the doors this could open for me if I won.

And, frankly, I think my book is the most adventurous of the lot, and the best-written.

Hell, I voted for his book. A couple of times.

Meanwhile Rob Mclennan is looking for votes to be the poet laureate of the blogosphere and the Toronto International Festival has started a new poetry-reading contest—the winner gets an official invitation to the festival. For better or worse, shifts are happening on the Canadian prize scene.

1988 Jury: The Rt Hon Michael Foot, British Labour politician and editor of the Tribune. Sebastian Faulks, British novelist and journalist. Philip French, film critic and radio producer. Blake Morrison, writer and poet. Rose Tremain, you know.

David Lodge – Nice Work VPL

Guest report from Colin Ellard

A barrel-chested captain of industry clashes with a willowy feminist English scholar during Margaret Thatcher’s era of decimation of higher education in England. Some bright bureaucrat has the idea that an exchange program where professors spend time inside factories will somehow enhance the lives of both working stiffs and inhabitants of the Ivory Tower. I liked most of this book, even though its portrayal of academics was a little hackneyed (or maybe things are just that different in England). There were a few laugh out loud lines: “all the men on campus were married, gay or scientists,” for one. I recounted this line in an elevator conversation and it turned out that one of the other riders was a young female assistant professor. She guffawed her agreement. The big sex scene, though one knew it was coming from page one, was still great fun, especially the gender reversal with the powerful male character falling head over heels in love while the woman offered him a literary deconstruction of the very idea. The ending of the book drove me nuts. What’s the plural form of Deus ex Machina? It’s as if Lodge suddenly became bored with the whole premise of the book and tried to find a way to wind everything up quickly and not-so-cleanly.

If you’ve spent much time in the academic world, Lodge does provoke loud laughs. In this novel, one of my favourites—“A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn’t herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that ‘character’ is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism…” Colin is a scientist so he might not have hooted so much over this sort of English department nonsense.

Bruce Chatwin—Utz VPL

Guest report from Aaron Peck

Utz is, at least, the most successful of Chatwin’s three novels and his funniest book overall. Even compared to the two travel books, he feels more focused here than he does in the entropic Songlines or the maundering In Patagonia (both of which I admire for different reasons, despite their factual errors). Utz is the first book wherein the line between reportage and fiction is successfully blurred.

On rereading, I found myself laughing out loud at the scenes in the Restaurant Pstruh or etymology of the Utz’s family name. His characters are more developed, or sustained, than they are in any of the other books (with the exception of On The Black Hill). However, at times his characterizations verge on caricature. But this works because the subject of the novel is a collector of porcelain dolls, and because those dolls become allegorical the reader can imagine that the characters are like porcelain dolls themselves (e.g. Utz’s best friend the Dr. Vacláv Orlík, a paleontologist who studies the common house fly, musca domestica; Dr Frankfurter, the New York porcelain dealer, and his ugly hands).

Chatwin has also fine-tuned his digressions. The excursus on Rabbi Loew’s golem is fascinating, for example. Because of the lives of the characters (collectors, writers, opera singers, and academics), the erudition never feels out of place, and Chatwin’s lucid prose makes some potentially distracting topics feel like a natural part of the story.

The use of the past perfect tense, however, is a little odd particularly because the crux of the whole book surrounds whether or not Utz had a moustache. Because of the choice of tense the telling feels too contrived when it is finally revealed whether or not the narrator remembers there being moustache, the way this acts as a key to Utz’s character. The ending gets away with itself, and Chatwin tries too hard to conclude things conclusively.

Utz resolves an ambiguity in Chatwin’s writing: how to blur the line between fact and fiction convincingly. For the first time, whether or not a character (i.e. Kapsar Utz) is based on a real person or not is moot in a first-person Chatwin account (Chatwin claimed he was based on a person he met in Prague as a young man). Also taking on a European subject (as he also did in On The Black Hill) feels more honest. In his books set in far off places, I can’t help but feel irritated by narrator who wants us to feel pathos for the lonely rich English nomad. What, in the end, makes his earlier works stand a cut above neo-colonial ethnography was his irony, observation and (much like Michel Leiris’ ethnography) his first person perspective. In Utz he is closer to home, and his depiction of Europe, particularly Prague, in the 1960s is compelling.

As the study of the psychology of a collector, a complicated look at how a person can survive totalitarian regimes, and (also like On the Black Hill) an elegy for the twentieth century, Utz is rich, funny, and brief. The biggest failings it has are the final section, but there is much in this book to learn from and to enjoy. Much like his late admirer W. G. Sebald, Chatwin’s books leave at least this reader saddened. With Utz it felt that Chatwin was getting his stride, trying new things, and for the most part succeeding, and we can only wonder what he would have written next.

Utz was Chatwin’s last novel. He succumbed to AIDS in 1989.

Penelope Fitzgerald—The Beginning of Spring VPL

Many critics and readers rave about Fitzgerald. Some go so far as to claim she is the best British novelist of the last half of the 20^th century. Her reputation has increased since her death in 2000.

Frank Reid runs a printing company in Moscow, 1913. Born and raised in Moscow, a child of British parents, Frank has been schooled in England, married while there and has returned to Russia to run the family business. Without any apparent cause, his wife has left him to return to England, initially taking their children, then returning them mid-voyage. Frank is faced with a household of domestics, a business to run and children to supervise.

It’s another version of “The Fall of Icarus” with our narrator (for most of the novel) always looking in the wrong direction, or not grasping the facts of what he does see. And, of course, neither can the reader. It’s not a book about questions and answers, or plot, or character motivation. Fitzgerald can deftly present a complex character in a few sentences, and with as much ease and certainty have a main character remain vague.

Communism is shifting, and Frank and the little details of his life are caught in that larger pattern. If I were on a jury, this is a novel I would want to discuss. It’s accomplished, but I found parts of it frustrating—the symbolic Lisa, the mystical tree-hugging scene—and would want to hear others’ thoughts.

Marina Warner—The Lost Father VPL

Multi-generational romance story mostly set in Italy. The whole thing is just too familiar—a scandal that affects a family for generations, the shifts of women’s rights, blah, blah. Before the first chapter is a map and a crib sheet of the various generations.

Rosa is the older, ugly sister. Cati is the younger, gorgeous sister. Rosa falls for bad boy Tommaso. Cati acts as their go-between. Brother Davide is forced by honour and custom to fight a duel to defend his sister’s honour (and we aren’t sure which one he is defending, though we do know Rosa gave Tommaso a hand job). A shot ricochets off a rock into Davide’s temple and he dies a slow 18-year death from lead poisoning. He couldn’t die right away, eh, or we wouldn’t get the next generations to suffer, and look back.

During those 18 years Davide immigrates to the USA, the first-born child, a son, dies on the ship. He returns to Italy and his wife eventually follows and the youngest child, Fanina is born Italian. It is Fanina’s daughter Anna who is writing the story and trying to make links, to her mother and to her past.

The story line happens in chunks—early 1910s, 1930s, 1985, but not in chronological order, and there are flashbacks within each section. Anne is writing a novel The Duel based on the family story. Anna addresses her mother in the second person, as though the 1985 sections are a letter. It’s off-putting. There are also long passages from Davide’s diary. His style seems pretty much the same as Anna’s.

Sections of The Duel, and most of the novel are passages from the novel-in-progress, are pure bodice-ripper. In the following section, Davide has returned from America to a troubled time in Italy, under The Leader. A desperate woman approaches him, hoping for help for her missing son:

She had refused to get up, now held his legs in a hug, and her face against his thighs, turning now one cheek then the other into the material of his trousers, just below his crotch, and he was dismayed that she might smell him, that his buttoned fly, however spick-and-span—and they were freshly laundered—might carry some old aroma all the same, for he knew how bodies animate and inform even the most lifeless paraphernalia, how Maria Filippa surely with her scent as a sore leaves spoor for a hunting dog in a forest. When the ironing was being done, if he came in, holding out a shirt or a collar for a special attention before he put it on, he caught sometimes, among the warm breadlike goodness of pressed linen and cotton, fragrant from soap and water, the stab of pungent humanity, a momentary trace as the heavy iron stamped the blood lingering around the soft white squares of cotton they wore during their time of the month. The woman sensed his fear and, perceiving that he had placed this construction upon their encounter, pressed herself closer to the soft protuberance of his cock, touching his balls with her cheeks, one side and then the other, wheedling the while. He had a moment—it was more than a moment, it was minutes together—when he wanted to cup a hand around her head and for all that they were still almost in the street, open his trousers and feel her tongue lap him and her lips close on him. But the moment passed, for there was something in her grasp of his legs that was so awkward, so inexperienced, and the pitch of her entreaties remained so anguished that he knew she was only doing what she imagined might persuade him to help her; and a wave of self-loathing washed over him, that a woman like her could think of a man like him in such a light.

It’s a tale of women suffered through, and carrying their children through the trials of a patriarchal society. The strength of the women—learned through ironing and daily chores—allows the family to survive.

There’s a nifty twist at the end that undermines the entire novel, and particularly Anna’s research and writing of The Duel. It might all be a romantic lie. The men have further let the women down through risky politics. The last part becomes too didactic, though that approach does suit the character of Anna. If you stand back from the novel, the structure does ask for an examination of our yearning to romanticize our pasts. But the reading of the novel is too much like plowing through 1950s Ladies Home Journals.

Salman Rushdie—The Satanic Verses VPL

This novel gave Rushdie huge fame because of the fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. The novel was banned in many countries. Bookstores were bombed, translators attacked and the Japanese translator was murdered. Riots in India and Pakistan resulted in dozens of deaths.

Broadcast on Iranian radio, the judgment read:

In the name of God the Almighty. We belong to God and to Him we shall return. I would like to inform all intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, and those publishers who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, where they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctity. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God-willing. In addition, if anyone has access to the author of the book but does not possess the power to execute him, he should point him out to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God’s blessing be on you all. Rullah Musavi al-Khomeini.

A few days into reading, or trying to read, this novel, the following arrived in my inbox:

Quillblog, Censorship, Egyptian literature

Egyptian author could face jail term for novel accused of “insulting Christianity”

May 10, 2010 | 11:33 AM | By Steven W. Beattie

Last year, Egyptian author Youssef Ziedan won the Man Booker prize foundation’s $60,000 International Arabic Fiction Prize for his novel Azazeel. This year, that same novel could land the author up to five years in jail if his book is found guilty of “insulting Christianity.” From the Guardian:

Azazeel has provoked controversy in Egypt ever since its publication. The Coptic church denounced it as offensive for its violent portrait of Coptic church father St. Cyril, and one critic said it “tries to Islamise Christian beliefs and takes the side        of heretics.” Now a group of Egyptian and international Coptic organisations             have filed a complaint with the country’s public prosecutor against Ziedan, a         philosophy professor, accusing him of insulting Christianity.

Ziedan claims not to have expected the book to be charged with “disdaining religions,” and goes on to say that he and “the majority of intellectuals” in the country thought the charges would be dismissed. Instead, they have been referred to the Egyptian State Security Prosecution for trial.

Azazeel has already been the subject of numerous attacks and attempts to have it banned, according to the Guardian:

The author said that there had been many calls to ban Azazeel, with four books     written attacking his novel, but so far the Egyptian government has not complied            with the demands. “Other books have been published to defend the novel, not to mention hundreds of pro-Azazeel articles,” he added. “Azazeel has kept on its             wide circulation; 18 editions have been published within two years – an      unprecedented incident in the history of Arab literature. All such events have         increased the ire of the church, which resorted to a new technique last week.”

Remember Aaron Peck’s comments about this novel? I’ll repeat them:

Satanic Verses — another of my favourites. I think this book only makes sense to apostates (myself being, of course, a Baha’i apostate, so I really don’t know how well it could resonate, with people coming from Christian backgrounds — the meat of the book is so particular to understanding what is not supposed to be said, and how it is not supposed to be said, within certain cultures and religions — for him, specifically, Islam; for me it also resonated as a Baha’i). I found the way the book blasphemed to be riveting. Also, I think for a book written in the mid-to-late eighties the way it explored the links between fundamentalism and terrorism is way ahead of its time, or rather of its time. It just took most of the world — and the WTC atrocity — to recognize this. The Blakean themes were of interest to me as well. And, finally, I think, it is his most successful example of Rushdie’s use of magical realism. I read the whole book in under two days; I couldn’t put it down.

Unlike Aaron, I avoided picking it up. I’d force myself to sit down and read 10 pages, then go off to do dishes, anything. I fought my way through to page 100 then decided to give it up. I think Aaron is probably right. I didn’t get it. And while from time to time a description or section would capture me for a few pages, it wasn’t enough to keep me at it.

This book is a milestone for many reasons. Not only did it have political repercussions, it made many Brits reconsider Rushdie and his motivations. British author Roald Dahl called Rushdie’s book sensationalist and Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist”. The scandal also resulted in millions of book sales.

Peter Carey—Oscar and Lucinda VPL Winner

At this point I confess I’m a bit leery of Carey. I wonder if much of the attention he has received is a combination of his themes and his high ambition, and an increasing tendency for critics to confuse literary value with social value. Certainly with Illywhacker I think he set out to write The Great Australian Novel, or the Australian version of Midnight’s Children or The Tin Drum, take your pick.

Oscar and Lucinda does hit on Carey themes—strength and fragility, commerce, dreams and ambition, fears, religion. But there is a soft touch here, perhaps even gentleness. The reaching and overreaching ambition of his previous novels takes a different tone in this novel. If magical realism from the pen of Rushdie mimics the brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock, in Oscar and Lucinda the brush strokes mimic Vincent van Gogh. The metaphor may be clumsy, but do you see my point?

Much of the first two hundred pages introduce the two main characters of the title. We know almost immediately this is a love story, of some sort, though it is hundreds of pages before the two will meet. Oscar and Lucinda are gambling addicts, of the most unlikely sort. Lucinda is the teenage heiress of a fortune acquired from her farmer parents (though her mother always fancied owning a factory). Oscar develops a passion for the ponies as a training cleric at Oxford. Both flaming redheads are ill equipped to live in this world. They are frail, naïve and vulnerable. Oscar’s knees click whenever he moves. Lucinda is almost transparent. Yet, both are full of strength. Ah, that Carey theme of strength and fragility.

In this novel Carey weaves his themes through the symbols and metaphors of water, glass and faith. Oh, and the great quest. To give details would ruin the fun, if you haven’t already read the book or seen the movie. The novel was one of six for the Best of Booker on the 40^th anniversary of the prize. Better than the Rushdie that won, I’d say.

And speaking of Rushdie, one of the many Rushdie stories is that at an award dinner for the Booker when another novel was named the winner, Rushdie slammed his fists on the table and declared that the judges knew “fuck all about literature.” That pompous gesture might better explain the distinction I am trying to make between the style of Rushdie and Carey’s use of magic realism in this novel. The Carey gesture would be to mutter “Aw, shit” under his breathe then choke on his brandy and have to excuse himself, embarrassed, to the bathroom so he could throw up.

1988 Blake Morrison

We were a jury of writers that year: Sebastian Faulks, Rose Tremain, Philip French and, in the chair, Michael Foot, who seemed keener to talk about Byron than to reminisce about leading the Labour party. As early as our first meeting, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was the clear frontrunner. The only arguments were about which novels should be with him on the shortlist. I read the bulk of the 100 or so entries during a fortnight’s holiday with two small children in Wales, rising early and retiring late. Those we finally settled on were Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (which I read with innocent pleasure – the controversy over it didn’t erupt till the following year), Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (his last novel – his funeral was the day of the fatwa), David Lodge’s Nice Work (one of his best), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (one of her best) and Marina Warner’s The Lost Father.

My biggest regret was failing to get Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child on the shortlist – though in retrospect Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was a graver omission. The final meeting lasted 25 minutes: Foot was for Rushdie, the rest of us were for Carey, so that was that. Rushdie has sometimes been caricatured as a bad loser, but at the ceremony he behaved impeccably and was generous in his praise of the winning book. All in all, a pleasing outcome. My other experiences of sitting on prize juries have been grisly in comparison.

One last note: Like hell he read “the bulk of the 100 or so entries during a fortnight’s holiday with two small children in Wales.” That’s simply impossible to do.

4208 words  May 17, 2011

In The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, James F. English notes that, “to most observers, cultural prizes represent an external imposition on the world of art rather than an expression of its own energies. The rise of prizes over the past century, and especially their feverish proliferation in recent decades, is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success, and that is fast replacing a rich and varied cultural world with a shallow and homogeneous McCulture based on the model of network TV. Prizes, from this vantage point, are not a celebration but a contamination of the most precious aspects of art.”

English argues it’s all about cultural power and how that power has shifted in recent years. English is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the book takes a broad, detailed and pretty thorough if academic approach to the topic including the historical context going back to Greek drama and arts competitions in the 6^th century BC. The tremendous growth of prizes in the 20^th century is “the fact that they are the single best instrument for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital—which is to say that they are our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion.” I did warn you that he’s an academic.

Rather than take the Prizes-are-bad side or Prizes-serve-publishing position, English argues “the more crippling naiveté rests with the masters of condescension, who have failed to consider their own position in the larger system. Modern cultural prizes cannot fulfill their social functions unless authoritative people—people whose cultural authority is secured in part through these very prizes—are thundering against them. The vast literature of mockery and derision with respect to prizes must, in my view, be seen as an integral part of the prize frenzy itself, and not as in any way advancing an extrinsic critique.” He insists he isn’t going to take sides but will do an “analysis of the whole system of symbolic give and take.”

Hmmm. Does this assertion make me a collaborator, and you too, Gentle Reader? Maybe. But what I am attempting in this ever-increasing document is an extrinsic critique. James English’s job is dependant on the literary industry. Mine isn’t. And here’s a kicker—the anthology on grief that George and I published doesn’t qualify for any prizes, not ones that I know of, anyway.

English argues that prizes provide “an institutional basis for exercising, or attempting to exercise, control over the cultural economy, over the distribution of esteem and reward on a particular cultural field—over what may be recognized as worthy of special notice…The prize places a certain power (very widely underestimated by sociologists of culture) in the hands of cultural functionaries—those who organize and administer it behind the scenes, oversee the selection of members of judges, attract sponsors or patrons, make rules and exceptions to rules.” In Canada which institutions are welding the power? The Canada Council. The Writers’ Trust. Griffin Prize advisory board. And within those institutions, who is welding the power? Prizes give the impression that it’s the jury, but that is not necessarily so.

A few years ago a board member from The Writers’ Trust phoned me and asked if I would agree to participate in a survey. The board was concerned with branding and whether The Writers’ Trust brand and logo had good visibility. A professional consulting firm was compiling information (and I’m pretty sure this work was done pro bono). I was rather horrified. I think not-for-profits, charities and NGOs should be known for the work they do, not for the prominence of their names or slickness of their logos. Be warned; don’t show up at my door asking for funds for World Vision unless you want an earful.

Administering prizes is a lot of work, and that work requires funding. In The Economy of Prestige, English reports on the Orange Prize that at the time of publication had an annual prize of 30,000 British Pounds. Peter Raymond of the cellular phone company Orange PLC that sponsors the prize told English the company spends 225,000 British pounds annually to administer and support the prize. English also reports “The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which presents a cash award of just $20,000 to its first-prize winner, costs more than $3 million to run.”

English further argues that administrators have another vested interest, “the dominant optic of art-versus-money neglects to take account of the intermediaries, the awards administrators or functionaries whose specific interests coincide neither with those of artists nor with those of publishers, produces, and marketers. Their immediate concerns are neither aesthetic nor commercial but are directed toward maximizing the visibility and reputation of their particular prize among all the prizes in the field.” The challenges for administrators are many, but include maximizing the investment of the financial sponsor. Is that the reason the board of The Writers’ Trust is concerned with branding? When it comes to literary prizes has the line between philanthropy and marketing disappeared? Is it possible that sponsors are climbing onto the literary prize wagon because literary prizes are, when so much of the work is done by volunteers, cheaper to sponsor than sports events?

James English is an open market advocate. How much of his approach is fashioned by his well-funded chair in a consumer society where celebrity is the norm? How much are Canadians, and the industry of CanLit being swept along? I was once with a group of people taking Pierre Berton out to dinner before a reading. It was a small restaurant in a small Ontario town. Half way through our meal an older man approached the table, “Mr. Berton, I’d just like to shake your hand. I’m never read any of your books, but I greatly admire you.” Front Page Challenge watcher, I figured.

English insists that prizes are essential to the literary economy. Prizes birth new prizes. The more there are the more there need to be since “each new prize that fills a gap or void in the system of awards defines at the same time a lack that will justify and indeed produce another prize.” If the system treats art as a commodity then it is acceptable to use business practices. The publisher of The Bishop’s Man placed a call to his printer from the dinner table at the Giller, ordering 40,000 copies.

In a New Yorker review by Louis Menand of The Economy of Prestige, Menand also looks at The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova and concludes: “Between them, English and Casanova list the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities. If you add in a high level of technical and intellectual sophistication, this is a pretty accurate generic description of a novel by Toni Morrison.”

Or Salmon Rushie, or Keri Hulme, or Peter Carey, or…

1987 Jury: P D James, you’d have to live under a rock not to know P D James. Lady Selina Hastings, writer, journalist, one-time assistant literary editor on the Daily Telegraph and literary editor of Harper’s & Queen, and biographer of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann. Allan Massie is a well-known Scottish journalist, sports writer and novelist. Trevor McDonald is a Trinidadian-born British newsreader and journalist, news presenter with ITN, notable for having been the first black news reader in the UK. John B Thompson—I couldn’t find anyone who seemed a likely fit so I wrote to the Booker Archive and the following information was supplied from the press release for 1988 announcing the jury: “John B. Thompson has been Director of Radio for IBA since 1973. Previous jobs have included the Daily Express Drama Critic; Editor of Time & Tide; Editor of the Observer Colour Magazine; and Editorial Director of BPC Publishing.”

1987 Shortlist: Iris Murdoch-The Book and the Brotherhood; Nina Bawden, Circles of Deceit; Peter Ackroyd Chatterton; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah; Brian Moore,  The Color of Blood; Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger.

Iris Murdoch-The Book and the Brotherhood UBC

If an editor removed the description of characters and what they are wearing for various events, little of which really matters to the narrative, this 601-page book would be about 450 pages. The main cast of 14 characters with very complicated interrelations are all introduced in the first few pages with clear-as-mud explanations such as, “Tamar’s mother Violet, never married, was the child of Gerard’s father’s deplorable young brother Benjamin Hernshaw, also never married, who abandoned Violet’s mother.” So another book that requires a crib sheet of characters in order to follow along.

George is reading Justine By Lawrence Durrell. Sometimes he sets projects that force him to read books from his “Books I must read immediately” bookshelves, ones he’s often been avoiding for years. His present project is to read 25 books by writers whose surname starts with D. The Durrell novel isn’t that long, about 250 pages, but he’s been at it for ages. Whining a lot, too, if you can imagine. Often I hear him reading out sentences and groaning. You’ll remember Durrell is the guy with the “sadness the size of a cauliflower.” George, looking for sympathy, read me a paragraph. One sentence had at least five similes. “Oh yeah,” I shot back, “take this,” and read him a paragraph from my Murdoch. “Wanna trade?” He left.

It’s the usual cast of overwrought Murdoch characters, often blubbering about love. Here’s Jean who has abandoned Duncan for Crimond, the guy who is writing the “Book” of the title, “Crimond, understand, I have left a husband whom I esteem and love, and friends who will never forgive me, in order to give myself to you entirely and forever. I hereby give myself. I love you. You are the only being whom I can love absolutely with my complete self, with all my flesh and mind and heart. You are my mate, my perfect partner, and I am yours…We are, here, in this, necessary beings, like gods. As we look at each other we verify, we know, the perfection of our love, we recognize each other. Here is my life, here if need be is my death. It’s life and death, as if they were to destroy Israel—if I forget thee, O Jerusalem–”

Most of these characters have tremendous inner turmoil. Category: Murdoch Angst. These are not so much characters as symbols or embodiments of certain ideas which Murdoch can manipulate. For example, what will happen if illegitimate Tamar, daughter of a mother who was herself an illegitimate child, becomes pregnant out of wedlock? Or how will Ruth, who has devoted her life to Gerard who loved her brother Stephen who died in a car accident, respond if Crimond, who she loathes and has just abandoned her best friend, proposes marriage. Yes, it’s as contrived as it sounds.

A group of bright students at Oxford decide to fund one of their brilliant peers to write a book. Years later their beliefs have shifted but Crimond clings to Marxism. They are worried about what might be in the book, if it’s ever finished. That’s the basic plot that drives the complicated dance of these characters. They spend a lot of time musing about religion, politics, love and above all, responsibility. Murdoch takes the reader inside all their heads for these often-fretful monologues.

“History as a slaughterhouse, history as a wolf that wanders outside in the dark, an idea of history as something that has to be, even if it’s terrible, even if it’s deadly.”

The resolution, what little there is, at the end of the book comes about through witchcraft and snails. Which, I suppose, is Murdoch’s point; in the modern world one’s destiny is just as likely driven by snails as politics, religion or fate. In the later part of the 20^th century the world is in transition and no one knows which way things are going.

Nina Bawden—Circles of Deceit VPL

The first chapter begins with “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I haven’t read the poem in years so went online and looked at the painting. I’d describe the painting, but William Carlos Williams does it so much better:

Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

the edge of the sea

concerned

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings’ wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning

In some ways Bawden is trying to do with the novel form what the painting achieves—how life goes on despite and beside disaster. In the Brueghel, as Auden describes, Icarus is a small splash in the lower right corner—not the focus. In the novel, the nameless middle-aged narrator is a painter but he specializes in copying masters rather than producing his own work. His much-loved wife Helen confesses to an affair, which leads to petty fights and eventual divorce. The painter remarries a woman barely out of her teens who has a young and needy son she sometimes abuses. Here the Icarus character is Tim, the tortured schizophrenic son of the painter and Helen. The novel considers love, fidelity, guilt, nature of art versus forgery, how our own lives distort the larger picture and how hard it is to see beyond our own circle of deceit. More often than not, lies are told out of kindness rather than malice. Interesting idea, well executed and very readable. Understated rather than showy.

Peter Ackroyd—Chatterton VPL

Another book that explores the nature of creativity, real versus unreal, the implications of fame and fraud. And the biggie—plagiarism.

At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics opening ceremonies slam poet Shane Koyczan performed his poem “We Are More.” The performance itself created an online buzz, everything from other slam poets declaring the whole slam movement had finally garnered the recognition it deserved to other poets apologizing to the world for what they saw as cliché doggerel. What everyone did seem to agree on was that the exposure would be good for Shane—let’s be very clear, good for Shane not good for poetry. Well, not necessarily good for Shane in all respects. For years there has been talk that Shane doesn’t always use his own material, and doesn’t acknowledge when he is using others’ work. With the big spotlight shinning, the caliber of Shane’s work was put under the microscope. Two videos started being posted on blogs and social networking sites. One is previous US poet laureate Billy Collins reading his poem “The Lanyard.” The other is Shane Koyczan performing a piece with a few added sentences at the beginning, but otherwise is word for word the Collins’ poem. Zachariah Wells asked the question, blatant rip off or homage?

http://zachariahwells.blogspot.com/2010/02/blatant-ripoff-or.html

A quick google search seems to indicate it has been Shane’s habit to perform the poem without acknowledgement in Ontario, Australia and Vancouver. If he gets caught, and he has, he does the big mea culpa, I-got-caught-up-in-the-performance-and-forgot-to-mention-I-didn’t-write-it routine.

Just how much do poets stand on the shoulders of the poets who have gone before? Chatterton takes on that question by cleverly using one of the most famous plagiarists of the poetry world, Thomas Chatterton. What happens when a wayword poet appropriates the past? Ackyrod is arguing that the facts are of little importance—it is the artists who capture the past, not scholars. And each generation reinvents the past to meet the needs of the present. “Chatterton knew that original genius consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than in searching after thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before.”

Chatterton himself makes an appearance in the novel, explaining, “Thus do we see in every Line an Echoe, for the truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry.” Harriet Scrope is a well-known popular novelist. But in her early career, after her first novel, she couldn’t think of another plot. She stumbled across a little known late 19^th century novel and used its plot. She did the same for another couple of novels until she started using her own material exclusively. She’s spent years worried that she would one day be found out. Since she eventually does her own work is it okay that she plagiarized in her early career?

What if, suggests the novel, Chatterton hadn’t died. What if his suicide was faked and that he actually wrote most of the famous poetry of the 18^th century, the best of Blake? What a concept. But the concept of the novel is more intricate and clever than I can point to in this brief blurb. On the dust jacket a review from the San Francisco Chronicle, “One of those rare literary experiments that begins almost too clever for its own good and in the end not only justifies its cleverness but transcends it.” Sounds like review fodder, but in this instance I agree. With a cast of eccentrics that would shame Dickens, this book is funny and wonderfully written. And bonus, as a post-modern work it also challenges the scholarly theories about that art form, too.

Chinua Achebe—Anthills of the Savannah VPL

James English says prizes are used as a tool to “signify belated recognition of native and minority literatures and to favor writers of strong political conviction who have become icons of moral leadership in their particular national or subnational communities: Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrision, Gunter Grass—all of whom have received multiple humanitarian awards to arrange alongside their literary trophies.” Perhaps Chinua Achebe has found his niche as The Nigerian Novelist.

Three men, chums since schooldays, are the center of the novel set in fictional Kangan. Sam, trained as a soldier, is now the head of state. His two friends, Chris and Ikem are in his inner circle, one a powerful man in the new government and the other the editor of the paper. Until the power, and the threat of losing it, goes to Sam’s head. He doesn’t have the skills to govern and is overthrown in a bloody coup. The other two men also die—Sam orders Ikem’s murder and Chris is gunned down by a man he challenges who is attempting to rape a woman.

The novel hits the themes you’d expect: power, oppression, and corruption. And, most important, how does Africa function and rejuvenate now that the whites have left? “The English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe. Particularly those ones.” Structurally the novel allots 3 or 4 chapters to the viewpoint of each of the main characters, allowing for multiplicity.

Beatrice, who is the lover of Chris, realizes toward the end that those who are trying to rule the country are out of touch and don’t know their own people. Educated abroad, living privileged lifestyles they don’t connect, or really fit anywhere.

“The explanation of the tragedy of Chris and Ikem in terms of petty human calculation or personal accident had begun to give way in her throbbing mind to an altogether more terrifying but more plausible theory of premeditation. The image of Chris as just another stranger who chanced upon death on the Great North Road or Ikem as an early victim of a waxing police state was no longer satisfactory. Were they not in fact trailed travelers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed in advance by an alienated history? If so, how many more doomed voyagers were already in transit or just setting out, faces fresh with illusions of duty-free travel and happy landings ahead of them?

That was the day she broke her long silence and asked the two young men: “What must a people do to appease an embittered history?”

At the close of the novel there is a birth, and a ritual naming ceremony. But it is Beatrice and the community who name the child, and bless it, rather than the elders as would be the tradition. On the cover blurb from USA Today, “It’s a vision of social change that strikes us with the force of prophecy.” I’m not persuaded.

The combination of stilted writing style and patois made this a very difficult novel for me to climb into, particularly after the crisp writing of Chatterton. If I groaned, George, ever helpful, would say “just read it aloud.” “Oh, yeah,” I replied, “you try reading this.”

“You no see say because you no tell me, I come make another big mistake. If I for know na such big oga de for my front for that go-slow how I go come make such wahala for am? I de craze? But the thing wey confuse me properly well be that kind old car way he come de drive. I never see such!” And this is a fairly straightforward section. Since some the key information about the plot is delivered by characters speaking in patois, I frequently got lost.

Brian Moore—The Color of Blood VPL

Guest report from George Stanley:

I thought this was going to be a more serious novel than it turned out to be. The subjects — Communism, the Catholic Church — seemed to promise heady thought. But not at all. The Colour of Blood is a thriller — fast-paced, sparely narrated, cinematically imagined. The characters are fairly stereotypical; the situations, though borrowing depth from the reader’s own sense of history, develop exactly as one would expect, once we’re let in on the somewhat unlikely premise of the action.

The protagonist, Stephen Cardinal Bem, is the primate of an unamed Eastern European country (former Czechoslovaka is most likely – a district of the capital city is called Praha), sometime in the 1980s. Bem is an appealing figure, devoutly religious, but lacking in pride, humble and self-critical. In examining his conscience, he thinks: “I lack all charity.”

Bem is also a pragmatist; he has made made his peace with the Communist regime, for eminently practical reasons. “The right to have church schools, the right to publish religious literature, the right to worship freely.” He might even be called mildly pro-Communist: “[T]here has been much good in the social change. Of course we want our freedom. But the West will not help us. The West has never helped us. We are alone.”

Bem might remind the reader of a real historical figure, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, who opposed the Hungarian state in the late 1940s, but Mindszenty was a far more intransigent figure, more resembling the novel’s Archbishop Krasnoy, who wants not accommodation but an open break with the Communists.

The action begins with a failed assassination attempt on Bem. Soon after this incident, Bem is taken into “protective custody,” by persons who appear to be agents of the state Security Police (“the raincoats”).

But it gradually becomes clear that his captors are “impostors” –  ultraconservative radical Catholics, allies of Krasnoy, who seek to precipitate an uprising against the regime at a traditional Catholic festival, and need to get Bem, who would oppose such a move, out of the way. This leads to what appear in retrospect as double meanings, as when “Colonel” Poulnikov, a Catholic posing as a member of the Security Police, says to Bem, “To them (i.e., right wing Catholics), you are the prelate who betrayed your church, the cardinal who has sold out to the Communists. You have rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s.” (These are of course Poulnikov’s own feelings.)

Bem escapes his captors, is recaptured, escapes again, is threatened twice by men with guns, as the narrative moves swiftly through the landscape, especially along its roads, in unmarked speeding cars. Here Moore is at his best, describing complex action with utmost clarity, as in a scene where a convoy of three vehicles, carrying a total of eight persons, is stopped at a military checkpoint, and things go haywire. There’s never any uncertainty about what’s happening.

The novel moves from one set piece to another. There’s a meeting with Jop, the charismatic retired leader of the miners’ union (who may recall Lech Walesa), where Moore has a former miner refer to the status quo ante: “The men has to walk three miles to the pithead and their pay didn’t start until they lifted a pick to the rock. The good old days. The capitalist times when a man worked ten hours a day for forty droschen.” (Moore himself seems mildly pro-Communist.)

Then there’s the required tete-a-tete between Bem and the civilized (but sold out to Moscow) Prime Minister (he and Bem both went to the same Jesuit school). The real villain, Vrona, the Minister for Internal Security, i.e., the KGB man, is outside the door of this private meeting, and Moore gives him the novel’s best (unspoken) line: When Vrona enters the room, the PM says, “‘I suppose you’re aware of what’s been said.’ Vrona hesitated, almost shyly, then nodded and smiled.”

But once we know the names of the players, and the political positions they stand for, the novel proceeds in an unsurprising fashion, like a fairly dull chess game. It comes down to a standoff between the Cardinal and the Archbishop — outcome predictable.

There is one extraneous character in the novel, really present, due to the reality effect of Moore’s third-person narration: God. At the mass which comes at the climax of the action, “the celebrant ate the wafer of bread and drank the wine that had been changed into the body and blood of Christ.” I looked for some qualification, say “that he believed had been changed,” but it wasn’t there. God’s presence gives the Cardinal (and the novel) a fleeting but unwarranted glow of profundity.

For me the novel was immensely readable, particularly after the Achebe, but ultimately thin and predictable, to the point of being annoying. I’d suggest Moore’s name got him onto the list, not the quality of the novel.

Here’s the bio on the bookjacket:

“Brian Moore has received, in Great Britain, the W. H. Smith Prize and the James Tait Memorial Award; in Canada, the Quebec Literary Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction (twice); and in the United States, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a special award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He and his wife, Jean, live in Malibu, California.”

Penelope Lively Moon Tiger VPL WINNER

Contrast the Moore book bio to that for this Lively novel:

“Penelope Lively was born in Cairo in 1933 and spent her childhood there. She holds a degree in modern history from Oxford University and is the author of six acclaimed novels, including Treasures of Time, The Road to Lichfield, and According to Mark. She divides her time between north Oxforshire and London.”

Using the Moore bio model, I’ll write a new one for Lively:

Penelope Lively has received the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize and is an Arts Council National Book Winner. Her novels have twice been short-listed for the prestigious Booker award and she is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

I read this novel years ago and didn’t remember a thing about it. 50 pages in none of it seems familiar. Around page 120 the atmosphere seems a bit familiar, but not any details. Which is odd, because it is a fine novel, well and cleverly crafted. Claudia is a writer of popular histories who has achieved some fame and stature, now in hospital dying. In her mind she is writing a history of the world. The narrative is mostly Claudia’s telling of her life story, with occasional scenes of moments in the hospital, but the context for her personal story is the momentum of the 20^th century. While most of the novel is narrated by Claudia, frequently the same scene is retold by another character. The novel is an examination of memory and history. History, argues the narrator and the novel, is personal. “Time and the universe lie around in our minds. We are sleeping histories of the world.”

(It’s Margaret Thatcher’s England, again. Thatcher once asked a student why he was studying history when he could be doing something productive, making products. It does seem that novels from the Thatcher years have a high concern with the place and value of history.)

Claudia is a real pain—a conceited smart aleck, who is rude, has little interest in her only child, Iris, and goes out of her way to make life miserable for others—she demeans her daughter’s wedding dress, at the wedding. But she also has an enthusiasm and presence that makes her very interesting and compelling. Wherever she goes, she garners attention, just as she attracts the reader at the same time he/she is repulsed.

God, that “unprincipled bastard” proves to be harsh to the individual as well as the world at large. Lively contrasts the ravages of war to the ravages of Claudia’s body—the two are intertwined. The Moon Tiger of the title “is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness.” Everything ends up in the dish under the Moon Tiger. Even within one lifetime, our previous lives become inaccessible to our current selves. “History is disorder…death and muddle and waste.”

1987 PD James from The Guardian

I look back on my chairmanship in 1987 as a very happy experience, particularly as I had as my colleagues four hardworking, enthusiastic and knowledgeable judges: Lady Selina Hastings, Allan Massie, Trevor McDonald and John B Thompson. I did have a fear at the time – and still do – that to ask the panel to read more than 100 novels in a comparatively short time can result in a literary surfeit which makes the final judgment more difficult. Choosing the winner was a long process, and I remember scurrying to the dinner table a little after the meal had started. At the end, however, the vote was unanimous – Penelope Lively won, for Moon Tiger – which is what I had hoped for. The Booker may at times have tended to increase the unhelpful dichotomy between popular storytelling and books which are classified as literary novels, but most of the winners have combined high literary achievement with compelling storytelling.

Over the past several years I’ve observed George participate on several juries. Some have been good experiences for him, and resulted in top-notch winners. It was fun to see those two octogenarians—Robin Blaser and John Ashbury—ascend the stage at the Griffins. As the lone juror (when there is only one person on a jury you know it isn’t a compromise choice) of the Saskatchewan novel award George was pleased to give the prize to Gloria Sawai for A Song for Nettie Johnson, which went on to win the GG fiction prize.

He’s had other experiences that weren’t so favourable. One poetry prize had just 7 books entered, or that qualified for the prize. The administrating body wanted a short-list of 6. Huh? In that instance the jury had a clear winner and the debate, such as it was, was over the short list. But in another poetry situation—this time a contest—George and his fellow juror plowed through the 25 entries and didn’t find any they thought merited a prize. This particular competition had pre-readers so the jury asked to see the removed 75 poems, wondering if something interestingly experimental or overly difficult might have been tossed at the first stage. Nope. In the end, after an enormous amount of time and careful discussion a winner and two short-listed poems were decided on. Encouraging young/emerging writers is a general waste of time, resources and money?

I think there are too many small prizes and niche prizes, some of which are focused on ethnicity or geography, or on age or genre. One of the oldest and most prestigious is the Stephen Leacock award for humour. There are also lifetime achievement awards—the Molson, Matt Cohen, and B.C.’s George Woodcock Prize. There are prizes for children’s books, the  most prestigious of which is the Vicky Metcalf. Geographic prizes include those for provinces—Ontario, BC, SK, Alberta—cities, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa. There is the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, for best first collection of short fiction. And so on, and so forth.

While I’m suggesting above that some of these smaller prizes have little if any relevance and/or impact (except for the pleasure of being the winner) and could be lost or reconfigured—the prize with only 7 entries, for instance, might better be a biannual—even the prizes with hundreds of entries get challenged. Following are some excerpts from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” an essay by William H. Gass in Finding a Form. Gass says that being awarded the Pulitzer is “nightmarish.” He explains it thus: “Because the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill—not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley…Any award-giving outfit, whether it is the National Book Critics Circle or PEN, with its Faulkner Award, is doomed by its cumbersome committee structure to make mistakes, to pass the masters by in silence and applaud the apprentices, the mimics, the hacks, or to honour one of those agile surfers who ride every fresh wave.”

Gass acknowledges the power of a jury. “Some judges, some juries, abide by their names and treat each work before them as someone accused of a crime.”

(One day when I was listening to Canada Reads, I noticed George, across the table, cringing. “Imagine,” he said, “having to listen to someone talk that way about your book.” Perhaps that’s why most writers with nominated books don’t listen. But come to think of it, I rarely listen to the CBC these days either, and when I do catch it in the car, far too often Jian Gomeshi is interviewing some US pop celebrity. Things have come to that.)

Gass continues, “…the fact is that good taste and sensible judgment are rare, and excellence itself is threatening, innovation an outrage. On the other hand, one must be most weary of the jurors who boast that only literary quality guides their selections, because the phrase ‘literary quality’ is a conservative code word these days that means ‘I wouldn’t toss a dime into an ethnic’s hat.’ And ‘experimental’ can be more frankly replaced by ‘self-indulgent and inept’ so often as to cause one to despair of the word. In the face of all these frailties, then, is it any wonder that awards go awry?” Remember it was the Pulitzer that overlooked Absalom, Absalom! in favour of Gone with the Wind.

By comparison, how accurate have Canadian juries been at spotting the best fiction writers? Let’s have a look at winners of two or more GGs.

(Three writers, incidentally, have won the GG for both fiction and poetry, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering and Michael Ondaatje. Atwood won the GG in 1985 for The Handmaid’s Tale so she doesn’t make the cut. Bowering won with Burning Water. So from that group of three only one goes on the list: Timothy Findley won two GGs, but one was for drama “Elizabeth Rex” so he doesn’t make the list, either. His one fiction win was 1977 for The Wars. David Adams Richards has two, but one is for non-fiction so out he goes. Same for Laura G. Salverson. ) Ondaatje has won the GG five times, twice for poetry so that gives him three fiction wins. Like Ondaatje, Hugh MacLennan won the GG five times, twice for non-fiction so he also has three fiction wins.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, are the best fiction writers in Canada, as measured by multiple GG wins:

Margaret Laurence

1966, A Jest of God

1974, The Diviners

Hugh MacLennan

1945, Two Solitudes

1948, The Precipice

1959, The Watch That Ends the Night

Brian Moore

1960, The Luck of Ginger Coffey

1975, The Great Victorian Collection

Alice Munroe

1968, Dance of the Happy Shades

1978, Who Do You Think You Are?

1986, The Progress of Love

Michael Ondaatje

1992, The English Patient

2000, Anil’s Ghost

2007, Divisadero

Nino Ricci

1990, Lives of Saints

2008, The Origin of Species

Mordecai Richler

1968, Cocksure

1971, St. Urbain’s Horseman

Guy Vanderhaeghe

1982, Man Descending

1996, The Englishman’s Boy

David Walker

1952, The Pillar

1953, Digby

Rudy Wiebe

1973, The Temptations of Big Bear

1994, The Discovery of Strangers

Three of these multiple winners have also won the Giller—Ondaatje, 2000, for  Anil’s Ghost; Richler, 1997, Barney’s Version; Munroe 1998, The Love of a Good Woman and 2006, Runaway.

Are these really the top Canadian writers? Or, rather, who’s missing, and which books are missing?

The short-lists for the 2010 BC Book prizes were announced recently. I know jurors on three of the juries. I didn’t ask which books they had selected but I did ask if they knew which book would be the winner. No, they said. They did not. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this system was put in place to reduce the likelihood of one juror overpower the others. It is interesting that when I speak to jurors from various prizes the same problems are frequently mentioned: jurors who haven’t read all or very many of the books, jurors with agendas to get certain writers on the short list or to keep certain writers off the list, and jurors who dominate the discussion and/or unfairly manipulate the decision-making. Is there a way to reduce such pushiness without resorting to a system where jury members don’t talk at all? Reports I’ve gotten from disgruntled jurors and administrators indicate that a staged decision-making process would help—a process that allows for discussion, reflection, and then more discussion, as with the Bookers. With such a system if a juror is pushing, other jurors can regroup, review the book, develop arguments to show that another book is a better choice.

One thing I do like about the way the BC Book prizes have developed is the tour that happens prior to the announcements. Short-listed writers tour libraries, schools and other venues throughout the province. This is a grassroots version of the glitz and always-sold-out reading that happens with Griffin Prize short-listed poets. But why I really like the BC format is that it gets the writers out of the Lower Mainland, taking them to the Interior and other places where readers would otherwise not have the opportunity to meet and hear these writers. This aspect, at least a bit, helps to take the emphasis off the winner and put more focus on all the books.

1986 Jury: Anthony Thwaite, writer, poet, broadcaster, critic, reviewer, academic, BBC producer, literary editor of The Listener, literary editor of the New Statesman (also with Andrew Motion, literary executor of the estate of Philip Larkin). Edna Healey, well actually, Lady Healey, wife of Denis Healey, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Isabel Quigley, writer, translator and film critic for the Spectator. Gillian Reynolds, radio critic, journalist and broadcaster. Bernice Rubens, the 1970 Booker winner.

Books Nominated: Paul Bailey Gabriel’s Lament; Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale; Kazuo Ishiguro An Artist of the Floating World; Timothy Mo An Insular Possession; Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone;

Paul Bailey Gabriel’s Lament VPL

Category: Dysfunctional families, or British eccentricity

Gabriel’s elderly father comes into unexpected money, becomes a pretentious snob and Gabriel’s young mother abandons both husband and son. Gabriel yearns for his mother while trying to survive an upbringing with a lecturing, demanding father. There is a mystery to the book that keeps you reading, and its resolution very near the end forces a reconsideration of everything that has gone before, but this is not the best of Bailey. Not by a long shot.

Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale already own it (that’s a first!)

I read this novel years ago. As then, it remains immensely readable. As then, I was annoyed by its ending. Atwood’s vision is so complex that the novel seems too short to fully explore it. But how interesting to reread it now, post 9/11, in the midst of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and growing fundamentalism in the US. In this novel full of religious wars the catastrophe that collapses the USA government is blamed on Muslim terrorists. Yikes.

I finished the novel in the midst of Olympic fever in Vancouver, City of Fences. We allowed our city to be turned into a police state, the policies of public libraries to be set by corporations, and the entire visible advertising of the community to be controlled by VANOC and its sponsors. Brad Cran, poet laureate of Vancouver, refused to sign the gag order—a sane voice in the wilderness.

Kazuo Ishiguro An Artist of the Floating World VPL

Masuji Ono is an elderly artist, once of some prominence but now out of favour, who is trying to find his way in the post-war world. Morals and customs have shifted. One of his daughters had a marriage negotiation fail the year before and we slowly realize it was the reputation and war actions of the father that ruined the match. He used his art for Imperialist Japan propaganda. Ono seals the next negotiation by confessing to the misdeeds, as such activity is now viewed, to his prospective in-laws.

Somewhere in Joseph Campbell he talks about Japan as a society without the notion of original sin, and how the lack of that weight makes Japan a very different culture from those in the West. That may well be, but this novel illustrates how honour, obedience and duty in Japanese culture replaces such guilt.

The book is structured in sections, each dated. This allows the character of Ono to look back, reflect, and alter his opinion. And for the reader to re-evaluate as well. The novel explores the nature (and accuracy) of memory and how the present makes us continually revise the past.

One of the themes is the relationship of the artist to his work, and to society. At a recent writers’ festival on Galiano Island this topic was discussed at some length, in part because the “poem” that was performed by Shane Koyczan at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was actually commissioned and paid for by Canadian Tourism. Do we want our poets writing tourism brochures? It is one thing for artists to be supported and nurtured by government funding and quite another for the state to dictate content. Ono gets caught and the novel works to restore equilibrium, and show how the country of Japan is attempting the same transformation in the post-surrender years.

Timothy Mo An Insular Possession UBC

593 pages. Two font sizes, one very small. When prize jurors open boxes and something like this tumbles out their hearts must crumble. Plus the end covers are maps, United East India Company 1810, covering the extended territory around Hong Kong. Old maps make me nervous. I feel an epic coming on.

I hate a book that’s too big to read in the bathtub. George is reading “Much Ado about Nothing” and has been hauling around my Collected Works of Shakespeare, my textbook from grad school. This novel is the same size.

I’m 200 pages in and not liking it. Category: Brits Abroad. This time Macao and the time leading up to the opium wars. The first chapter is a long elegiac description of the river that flows through the land, “the highway of commerce.” Yeah, yeah, homage to Conrad. Mo strings together various types of text or created artifacts—newspaper articles, personal letters, diary entries—and you get the sense that he can’t throw away one scrap of research. He is imitating the writing style of the time, so it’s like reading a rusty, very early Victorian novel. Mo also has a tendency, particularly in the first 100 pages to use a difficult word when a simpler word would do the job. That showoffiness is off-putting.

Yes, I understand the form challenges the nature of recorded and recollected history. If that isn’t already clear, Mo draws a line under the challenge by having two of the main characters start their own newspaper, a challenge and contrast to the existing Canton Monitor. As an experiment, and comment, it’s interesting. But the resulting novel is unwieldy. The structure keeps the reader at a distance. I have no curiousity about what happens and doubt if the writing or structure will change and draw me in.

I’ve now struggled my way through to page 330, chapter twenty-seven. I am so fed up with the heavy, burdened language. Meanwhile George has started reading Smollet. How mean is that? Laudanum might help, and would fit the period.

At page 375 with hundreds of pages to go, I am no longer a careful reader. I am skimming rather than reading, something I’m sure many prize jurors resort to. This is a book with a mission—to turn our notion of recorded history on its head. It’s clever, but for such a long book it leaves an awful lot unsaid. Timothy Mo’s earlier appearance on the Booker short-list challenged our notions of Asian culture. This book completely ignores that issue. All the Asians are minor players and caricatures.

Typical sentence: “The long-dead controversy over the Chinese Rites has an unhealthy hold over Father Ribeiro’s mind, for the antique polemics between the Catholic Orders long ago ended in a reversal for the Jesuits and the end of their supple accommodation with forebear-worship and Confucius, which, quite against the overwhelming evidence of their own eyes, as they joined their converts in sacrificing and pray to the ancestral tablets, they regarded as not worship at all!”

Much of the last half of the book is description of skirmishes, on land and at sea. I found those as plodding as I usually find such war novels.

From Publisher’s Weekly: All manner of arcane information, correspondence, news clippings, characters and events are knit together by chronology alone, in an apparently deliberate attempt to recreate the tenor of those times. Possibly more attuned to British readers the book informs rather than excites and seems to echo one character’s view of the world: “It is untidy, there are no reasons, the final sum never balances.”

It didn’t excite me, that’s for sure, though I did manage to skim my way through to the end.

Robertson Davies—What’s Bred in the Bone VPL

Another honking Victorian novel. Category: Canadian Gothic

I thought I’d read this one before. For sure I read the Deptford trilogy. But by page 200 nothing is familiar. Well, that’s not true—once you’ve read one Davies novel pretty well everything in the others is familiar. It’s Ontario seen through a very specific lens, harkening back, longing for the morals and rules of a previous time. This one has all the usual Davies issues—nature/nurture, art versus nature, piety versus lust. The novel is the story of the life of Francis Cornish, a painter, spy and arts patron. The plot is contrived. There is the usual Davies mysticism (though that isn’t quite the right word), here the duo of Daimon Maimas and the Angel Lesser Zadkiel, who have helped shape the life of Francis and act as a chorus for the story of his life. And, too, the Magus-like character that seems to be in all of Davies fiction, a bit heavy-handed and, it seems to me, just variations of how Davies probably saw himself—the all-wise teacher/mentor. There are times in the novel when that role becomes The Voice from Above, which somehow fits the tone of the novel: ponderous and pretentious.

But the prose does flow and the novel is eminently readable.

From NYT Review of Books:

Mr. Davies’s reliance on many of the conventions of the 19th-century novel, on an intricate series of literary and artistic allusions and most centrally on the symbolism and patterns of the Arthurian Grail legend and the biblical story of Jesus and Mary is based on a desire to find a system of interpretation he can share with his readers. Cornish and his creator both seek a means not simply to give artistic expression to life’s pain, mystery and beauty, but to offer a means of interpreting them. And both suspect their belief that ”art is a way of telling the truth” has been eroded by a world view dominated by skepticism and despair and the contemporary artistic emphasis on ambiguity, subjectivity, free play and art for art’s sake.

But is our age really so devoid of potent symbols, patterns, terminology and systems of interpretation? There are dozens of such possibilities available to contemporary writers – those of science (dismissed here because it has only ”a miserable vocabulary” and a ”pallid pack of images to offer us”), medicine, economics, computer systems, various musical forms. It may be lamentable that many people today are more familiar with the symbols of the film ”Star Wars” than with those of ”Morte d’Arthur,” that the big bang, entropy and black holes grip our imaginations more fully than biblical creation myths or the Devil or that Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics about fast cars, urban jungles and the promise of the open road speak to some more urgently about their longings and disappointments than classical poetry. But to ignore the emergence of contemporary myths and symbols, or to deny their power to move people and help them interpret their existence, is to risk being out of touch with one’s age.

At one point in What’s Bred in the Bone, Cornish is exhorted to ”Wake Up! Be Yourself, not a bad copy of something else.” The novel is certainly not a ”bad copy” of anything; its intricate conception and intelligence are impressive on their own terms. But those terms also prevent the book from being the original it might have been.

I would argue that the Star Wars movies also depended heavily on the grail myth, and other hero myths—Joseph Campbell was seriously involved in establishing those patterns for the movies. But I fully agree that Davies is out of step with his age. Atwood won the GG with The Handmaid’s Tale. What’s Bred in the Bone didn’t receive a nod; it wasn’t even on the short-list.

Kingsley Amis—The Old Devils VPL WINNER

Alun Weaver is a writer, poet, broadcaster and “up-market media Welshman” whose career and life have been conducted in the shadow of the deceased but brilliant Brydan (thinly disguised Dylan Thomas). Alun and his wife Rhiannon return to their native South Wales to retire. The novel focuses on the relationships of this couple, and three other couples from their hometown. Basically the eight are busy drinking their way through their elderly years.

The story explores the impact on the close friends when the obnoxious and promiscuous Alun comes home. This novel has been described as “sweet” and the word is accurate. Past sins are forgiven, if not always forgotten. Partners learn to love and cherish their mates with all their flaws. And in the end, love conquers all. What? Kingsley Amis and sweet don’t go in the same sentence. What did I miss?

“Not many people unacquainted with Wales or the Welsh would have found it the easiest thing in the world to reconcile Dorothy as she would be later with Dorothy as she behaved now, when the tea-things were removed for the second time and a bottle of white Rioja was brought from the kitchen.”

Dorothy is a drunk, but I’ve cited this passage because of the Welsh reference, and I think that is what I’ve missed. Apparently, knowing Wales will make you understand and treasure this book. I read somewhere that Martin Amis said The Old Devils is the novel his father will be remembered by. No way, this is no Lucky Jim.

From The Guardian 1986 Anthony Thwaite

My chairing of the 1986 judges was marred, or enlivened, by several scandals or leaks or items of gossip. I was said (wrongly) to have lectured my fellow judges on “how to read a novel”. I unwisely wrote to Julian Barnes to commiserate with him about his non-appearance on the shortlist: I was quoted as blaming it on “all those women” (my four fellow judges were Edna Healey, Isabel Quigly, Gillian Reynolds and Bernice Rubens).

It was a splendid shortlist: Kingsley Amis, Margaret Atwood, Paul Bailey, Robertson Davies, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo. We were still going to and fro up until 10 minutes before the press announcement had to be made: two strongly for Amis, two equally strongly for Davies (What’s Bred in the Bone), and a wobbler in the middle. At the last moment the wobbler came down on the side of The Old Devils, and Amis had won. A very satisfactory result, I thought.

3800 w. February 1st, 2011

In a recent chat with Patrick Crean, Publisher and Editor Thomas Allen Publishers, we talked about the current messy state of publishing in Canada. Patrick says that Canada is one of the most difficult book markets in the world. The country is large, the population by comparison is small and there is just no economy of scale. Patrick believes:

• There are too many books being published. He was recently on the CC jury for publisher book grants and suggests we could afford to lose half the existing book publishers without any huge loss to the industry. Karl Sielger at Talonbooks agrees.
• There’s too much emphasis on growing talent and not enough effort made to connect books to readers! The monies poured into grants to emerging writers and publishers who publish them are creating mediocrity. We have more talent than we know what to do with and not many people wanting to read the books.
• The sales and marketing departments in the big houses want to cherry pick which results in lists with no personality. Patrick says he has never seen a time in publishing with so much risk aversion. He believes the corporate nature that has taken over is destroying book publishing.

Cheery, eh?

It’s harder than ever to get attention for books and the prize industry takes advantage of that situation, and makes it even worse. When the Giller long-list is announced it gets ink. Then the short-list adds speculation, and ink. All that space is diverted from reviews of other books. Booksellers give prominent space to short-listed and winning books. Book clubs use prize lists as crib sheets. And so on.

Patrick suggested that in a usual year a novel that wins the GG will sell an additional 20,000 books; a Giller win an additional 60,000. Patrick is quick to point out that prizes are not a barometer of literary merit, and that some prizes have little impact on sales (Donner, Trillium). The 2009 Giller win, predictably, put Linden McIntyre’s unexpected winning book on the bestseller list. The Pullinger novel, winner of the GG, all but disappeared. Patrick and I wondered, are readers getting smarter? Are they becoming savvy to the down side of prizes?

What might be done, we wondered, to make changes in the Canadian publishing industry where, we thought, there are too many prizes and few having much impact? Patrick and I decided if we ruled the world (calm down folks, this is only fantasy) we would take 25% of the money currently spent on prizes (prize money to writers, payment to jurors, administration, travel expenses and advertising) and invest it in education about Canadian literature. You may remember a recent report from Canadian Heritage indicating that only 53% of Canadians could name a Canadian writer or Canadian book. Our schools are dominated by UK (Lord of the Flies) and USA (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird) novels. In BC, after lobbying the Ministry of Education, CanLit is now mandated in the curriculum. Patrick and I would invest that 25% in lobbying other ministries, and creating support material for English Language Arts teachers. In the long run we believe that would be better for Canadian writers. In other words, invest in education and the next generation of readers rather than more prizes, which even from a marketing perspective is preaching to the converted.

Around the time the 2010 Canada Reads list was announced, George Stanley mentioned he was reading Generation X. Generation A was on his book club reading list and he wanted to read Generation X first. I asked him to share his thoughts:

Not much happens in this novel. Three twenty-somethings, two M one F, come from Toronto or Oregon to Palm Springs CA, where they rent “bungalows”, work at “McJobs”, and pass the time telling each other stories. A couple of superficial definitely unromantic liaisons, no sex, not even much partying – that’s it. The characterizations are not skin deep, they don’t even get to the skin. One wonders, what’s the point?

The point seems to be that this way of life has come to be typical for the eponymous generation. Douglas Coupland’s conceit is that there is nothing going on in these people’s minds but a never-ending stream of consumer consciousness – products and brands which they mostly put down as out-dated – and an obsessive judgment of everyone else (and themselves too), based mainly on their clothing and makeup. And a fear of ageing: “Not even thirty and already my upper lip is beginning to shrink.”

There’s also guilt—a diffuse guilt that somehow they don’t deserve their lifestyles. “I can’t help feeling that we didn’t merit it.” And I think that’s the key to the fascination this book may have had for readers in the 90s. This “one dimensional” (Herbert Marcuse) life is the latest stage in cultural evolution—one brought about by the ravening need of capital to control every moment of human time, 24/7. A shift has taken place in self-consciousness. These people have become just what they have been told they are: consumers—and their guilt echoes a vaguely comprehended sense that people were once more than that.

The generation born between roughly 1955 and 1980 were the first generation to be brought up on TV. But they were also the first to discover they no longer had any claim to the American Dream—a long-term secure job, a house to raise a family in, a sense of merit. And as their world changed, so did that of their parents—the boomers. Childhood, as a distinct stage in human development, ended, as the late Neil Postman wrote, in the 1980s, and along with it, adulthood. (Romantic love ended too.) There are now just older and younger cohorts of consumers, divided not by tradition and experience, but by consumer demographics—lifestyles. The pathos of the novel comes from the reader’s realization that these kids’ sad world is their own as well.

GB had read Generation X a few months back. When I read him GS’s write up he said, “it is better than any of the writing in Generation X, and more insightful.” GB says Generation X is shallow irony.

So, why is this book on the Canada Reads list? Surely neither the book nor Coupland need the visibility. It seems to me that there are responsibilities that go along with prizes. It is the responsibility, for example, of the administrating body to do its best to select a jury that will be unbiased and undertake the task with due diligence. Being mindful of these responsibilities becomes even more important when a prize (or similar promotion) welds power. Considering the sales power of Canada Reads, was it responsible to select Generation X and Fall on Your Knees for the 2010 line up? The Jade Peony also falls into this category though not at the same level.

JB: This book put Coupland on the world map. Because of the quality of the book, its insights, or because the title is so coinable?

George Stanley: Not the quality; as George says, it’s not literature. It’s some kind of sociological fiction (which verges on speculative fiction – like The Handmaid’s Tale or some of Philip K. Dick’s novels). In an odd way, too, it reminded me of Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut, though Fawcett’s book isn’t written as fiction. An imaginative work written to make a point about society.  How about Candide?

The title would never have been coinable if it weren’t for the insights—but insights is not quite the right word.  Coupland describes something that’s right on the surface of ordinary life, but apparently, few (other than some philosophers like Marcuse) had noticed it as such.  Or maybe more to the point, he describes the absence of something—of a human depth that people took for granted, like air.

(I’m about to begin reading Generation A for my NDP book club.)

… a week later…

GS: Compared to Gen A, which I just finished, X is Emile fucking Zola. A is probably the most dreadful book I have ever read.

You will remember Generation A made The Writers’ Trust 2009 short list. Was this a nod to Coupland’s reputation rather than an acknowledgment of a good novel?

I asked Brian Fawcett if he had read Generation X: Sure. I read it shortly after it was published, mainly because he stuck it in my hand and asked me to. It has the best single anecdote about our cultural condition written in the last 40 years. It’s the one where the characters are sitting on their porch with their large dogs. They notice that the dogs have a gooey crust around their muzzles, and it dawns on them that the dogs have been rooting around in the garbage at a nearby liposuction clinic, and that what they’re looking at is human fat.

The rest of Coupland’s career has gone downhill from there, sort of.

Doug Coupland is not a novelist, and to judge his opus on those terms is unfair to him–or at least to his gifts. He’s a man with an unique talent for cultural analysis, and his ability to spot and identify telling cultural detail is unparallelled. That he’s used the novel as his primary format is a commercial decision, not an aesthetic one. I don’t think it’s what he should have done, because he’s not interested in character (all his characters are aspects of himself and his sensibility) or even human interaction. So to read him, you have to plow through a lot of second rate novelistic debris to get at what he really does well: spot and elucidate cultural tropes and tableaux. Since he’s mainly interested in popular culture, this has its limits, too.

I decided to listen to the 2010 Canada Reads episodes. Has Generation X had its day or can an argument be made to convince the whole country to read it? After Oprah has issued the Golden Ring of her book club hasn’t everyone who might read that over-rated novel, Fall on Your Knees, already done so?

Day 1:

The introduction states with pride that Canada Reads has a history of “turning winning books into bestsellers.” That’s a bit of a cheat when you consider this year’s books since three of the novels are already bestsellers. Jian Ghomeshi who hosts the show cites the sales numbers for the winner of the previous year, The Book of Negroes. Claiming these figures are a result of Canada Reads is a big fat lie because The Book of Negroes won the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize in 2007 and the Commonwealth prize in 2008 before the Canada Reads win in 2009. But there is no denying that Canada Reads sells books, particularly the one that wins.

I know it’s about good radio but isn’t it dishonest to say you are presenting the rules but not giving the full information. The pretence is that each juror picks one favourite book, while in fact they pick five each then CBC staff decide on the finalists. The CBC person who blogged for the week, in response to the argument that some of these books don’t need the attention, states “no one can control what a panelist chooses to put forward” but that is exactly what the CBC does by asking for a list of five then vetting the list without disclosure to the public. The CBC has actually bargained with publishers. A few years ago the CBC contacted a publisher about a book being considered for Canada Reads. The CBC wanted the publisher to reduce the price—at $40 CBC thought the book prohibitively expensive. The publisher refused to discount the book, but suggested another book by the same writer, smaller and retailing for under $20. In the end, that was the book that was championed. CBC has a whole list of things it expects from the publisher because they know a Canada Reads selection is a windfall. But if the publisher can’t or won’t comply, out goes the book.

After the cutesy introductions the panelists make a brief statement about their books. The level of critical assessment isn’t high: “I love this book.”. “Universal themes.” Only one panelist mentioned the quality of the writing. That pretty well set the tone for the whole week.

The cleverest approach came from Simi Sara who suggested the other books have had their day and the country should be reading something new. And when the longer discussions ensued it was evident that many of the panelists had indeed read one or more of Generation X, The Jade Peony or Fall on Your Knees years before.

One of the more interesting exchanges happened during the discussion of Nikolski. The attacking panelist found the book “thin,” wanted “more character development” and a more “complete story.” Michel, who was defending that novel, pointed out that the novelist wants the reader to work and gives the reader credit. Good one. Michel is a writer, critic and editor and clearly had ways of discussing books that the others lacked.

Generation X was accused of being difficult. No forward moving plot. Characters annoying. A cult classic that’s had its day and doesn’t stand up well all these years later. Its defender, Rollie, argued that it is intensely clever, that it doesn’t define one generation but speaks to all generations of disenfranchised people. He said he identified with the characters.

Generally I would say that the jurors are an easily impressed group who for the most part read novels as escape.

Oh, and they pretended that the panelists are all heading home to think and reflect on what has been said when they actually tape the whole series of 5 episodes in one day. How dumb do they think we are? Jeeze.

Day 2:

Again the episode begins by acknowledging the sales power of Canada Reads. Winning Canada Reads means thousands of sales for the winning book.

Much of the discussion hovers around what makes a book good. Novels should: teach us something, encompass our humanity, deal with contemporary issues, explore universal themes and lessons. Reading such books should “make our lives better” as well as being “recreational.”

Several times different panelists claim that Generation X and Fall on Your Knees are Classics of Canadian literature. Really? A ten-year old book is a classic?

Again Rollie argued that the characters in Generation X are well developed. Other jurors argued (as do George Stanley and Brian Fawcett above) that the book is not about the characters. They all agree that aesthically it’s different from the other four books but are divided on the big question, “Does it stand up?” I suspect it will be the first book to leave the island.

Day 3:

The third day starts with each juror telling the book they want axed. Three pick Generation X and off it goes. Jean wins. I guess that answers my question.

The discussion today focuses on which books portray the most vivid sense of place and time. Most jurors believe it is important to relate to the book and identify with the characters. Which book is the “Most Canadian”, what does that mean and does that matter. Other broad topics included the themes of class and social status, and the complexity and diversity of Canadian culture.

In other words, much time is spent on big, hard-to-nail-down topics and little time on real discussion about the books

Day 4

Two votes against Fall on Your Knees and the melodramatic overwrought book bites the dust. Interesting that in days of “discussion” the word “incest” isn’t mentioned once.

As usual Michel is the only one talking about style, structure, tone, etc.

Some panelists complain certain books are an effort to understand and that effort frustrates them. Michel responds that in Nikolski the reader must build the story, it’s not about an easy read.

Other objections: “I didn’t get to know the characters.” “Didn’t leave me full and satisfied.” “Good to a Fault is cliché and predictable.” “The Jade Peony is disjointed—it’s not a novel.” “I don’t want to do that much work when I’m reading a book.” “You don’t want to have to think when you read a book.”

Oh dear.

Day 5

Good to a Fault gets axed, so now it’s down to Nikolski and The Jade Peony.

Simi gets to be the tiebreaker and she sticks to her guns, as declared on day one. She insists Canada Reads should be about introducing new books. Good for Simi. She successfully manipulated the process to ensure a book that had not already “had its day” in the sun got to be the winner. Nikolski “wins.”

In the end Canada Reads did highlight a book that few, well few in English-speaking Canada, knew about or had read. I’m sure people will now search it out and read it—good things. But not because Canada Reads ran an honourable promotion.

1985 Booker Jury: Norman St John-Stevas, politician and in 1985 Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission, a position which became highly controversial for his display of opulence. Nina Bawden, novelist and children’s writer. J W Lambert, literary and arts editor for the Sunday Times. Joanna Lumley, actress best know in 1985 for The New Avengers.  Marina Warner, writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of myths, symbols, and fairytales.

Short List: J L Carr: The Battle of Pollocks Crossing, Viking; Peter Carey: Illywhacker, Faber & Faber; Keri Hulme: The Bone People, Hodder & Stoughton; Doris Lessing: The Good Terrorist, Cape; Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav, Viking; Iris Murdoch: The Good Apprentice, Chatto & Windus

J L Carr The Battle of Pollocks Crossing purchase

Published as Carr’s sixth novel, this was actually his first novel but it was turned down repeatedly and he was unable to get it published until 1985. Based on Carr’s personal experience in the US mid-west. It’s 1929. George Gidner, a Brit obsessed with the American wild west applies for a teaching job, and journeys to Palisades, South Dakota. The book jacket promises that the small town has “a scarcely suppressed air of violence.”

I thought I’d conduct a small experiment with this novel. I read it, set it aside for 3 weeks without making any notes. I approach different novels in different ways. Sometimes I make extensive notes as I read. Sometimes I actually start writing my report as I read. Regardless of my reading and note-taking approach I always write my report within 48 hours of finishing the book. Now, 3 weeks after finishing I can barely remember anything about this novel. Not even the details of the shoot-out that is the climax. One of the short-listed novels from 1969, Figures in a Landscape, is as vivid as when I read it, now almost two years ago. Draw your own conclusions.

Jan Morris Last Letters from Hav purchased

I had difficulty finding this novel because used bookstores file all books by Jan Morris under travel. The clever Morris in this book invents a city named Hav then creates a book as if she (um, he?) were writing a travel book. What a neat idea, eh? When it first came out Morris fans were inundating travel agents wanting cheap fares to Hav!

The history of Hav is dense and complicated. Over the centuries it has been ruled by Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Venetians and hosts of others nations. Likewise, the cast of people who travel through the city is a Who’s Who including Hitler, Hemingway, Chekov, Nijinsky, Marco Polo, Mark Twain, DH Lawrence, Freud. And, if you can believe it, the sex life of eels is discussed!

It certainly is a work of fiction, but is it a novel? It also challenges our sense of travel, and travel writing; when you read about a place, either in a travel guide or other book, are you actually experiencing that place? But mostly the book insists on reflection about the connection of the 20^th century to other times, of one mid-planet city to the rest of the earth. A couple of years back Morris revisited Hav, and published the original novel with an epilogue, Hav now post-bombing and intent on the tourism industry. In the introduction to that new novel Morris writes, “Hav had seemed to me a little compendium of the world’s experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually.” She’s right, and that’s what makes this book an interesting read.

Peter Carey Illywhacker purchased

This is Carey’s take on The Great Australian novel, or the Australian version of Midnight’s Children. Through the complicated life of Herbert Badgery, a hundred and thirty-nine years old, “something of a celebrity and … a terrible liar” Carey explores Australian national history and the Australian inferiority complex; “we Australians are a timid people who have no faith in ourselves.” The demeaning results of British colonialism are responsible for a lot of books.

“The matter is obvious. The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody’s place it is the blacks’. Does it look like your place? Does it feel like your place? Can’t you see, even the trees have nothing to do with you.”

I had similar problems with this book as I had with Midnight’s Children. At 600 pages, it’s long and difficult to keep all the characters straight. Not that long in itself is a problem. Just ask Dickens. But when magic realism is added, this reader can get lost. Like MC I was swept up for the first 150 pages or so, most of book 1. In book 2 my interest came and went. Much of my reading of book 3 was fueled by determination, rather than real interest. Carey can write, that’s for sure. There are parts of the book that delight and shine. If you liked Midnight’s Children you should check out Illywhacker.

Hmm. I’ve just finished a big fat Carey and now I get to decide between a great bit fat Murdoch or a great big fat Lessing. What to do, what to do? George has just started reading Home Game by Paul Quarrington. It’s a fat novel at 412 pages with, as George points out, small type. “It’s going to take me forever to read this book,” he complains, with a big grin on his face. Lucky guy.

Iris Murdoch The Good Apprentice purchased

Guest review by Robert Priest

This is a book that began very well. It’s one of those tales where the protagonist makes a terrible mistake that results in the death of a friend. It’s written on the dust jacket so I’m not spoiling anything if I tell you that his crime was in secretly administering LSD to his best friend who had thus far decried its use and refused to use it. Unfortunately, for the call of sex in a nearby house, he leaves his friend asleep on the couch and when he returns an hour or two later his friend has stepped out of the window and killed himself having seen God as an elevator. All of this is gripping and the roiling of the conscience in the main character is believable. In fact for the first 20 or 30 pages I was thinking that Murdoch’s ability to explore the emotional terrain was finely honed and deftly appropriate to the theme and plot structure.

Unfortunately the book quickly goes awry. Unless a story is about coincidences my rule is you get one major coincidence. This book , when it is not wallowing in the sappy morass of the protagonist’s and everybody else’s finally exposed feelings, requires far too many coincidences to bring the various characters into each other’s presences for crucial exchanges. It also has a quite dated tone that might have delighted Victorian readers but to me quickly became nauseatingly melodramatic. Even if it had only gone on for 120 pages I would not have made it past the first hundred on several of the scores cited above. But this book is massive. It goes on and on and the characters say “Oh Jesse, I do so love you…” or “Oh Jesse I do want so badly to…” etc.. I like emotion more than many modern readers but my gag reflex was sorely tried by this overrated work out.

Doris Lessing The Good Terrorist purchased

Guest report from Rex Weyler:

Doris Lessing defies definition, a quality I admire in an artist. Is she a fantasy writer? A political commentator? A feminist? Perhaps, but in The Good Terrorist, she emerges as a matter-of-fact realist. She does not exalt the female characters or the politically correct. Rather, she bears witness to young 1980s radicals responding to decadent bourgeois society, occasionally getting it right, more often botching it horribly, and all the while revealing well-intentioned but insecure and wounded psyches.

I found this book painful because it so thoroughly exposes the contradictions of 1970s and 1980s self-styled revolutionaries, raised in privileged homes and infused with bourgeois values, attempting to set society right. As far as I experienced it in those days, Lessing nails the incongruity.

She sets the tale in a London squat house, in the early 1980s. Alice Mellings, 37, the anti-heroine, serves as surrogate den-mother to jobless idealists in the “Communist Centre Union” commune. She cleans, cooks, keeps authorities at bay, steals money from her parents to support lazy misfits, and then suffers isolation when the hard-core radicals exclude her from serious political planning. Meanwhile, Alice’s dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship with the younger, homosexual Jasper Willis provides scant comfort. No one, including Alice, appears to possess much self-awareness.

Lessing doesn’t excuse the presumptions and callousness of the status quo, even as she exposes the ineptitude of the radicals. Their cause has merit, but they do not possess the discernment or skills to achieve, or even articulate, their goals. Their meetings begin late, ramble, founder on jealousies, suffer from unspoken hostility, and dissolve abruptly without clear plans of action. I’ve been in such meetings, and Lessing’s portrayal scores a bulls-eye.

The book is not a political statement, but rather a psychological portrayal of self-appointed revolutionaries from affluent backgrounds. Lessing draws the portrayals from the history of this time, depicting the sort of amateur radicals, who likely orchestrated the 1983 Harrods department store bombing in London. The militants snub the new Greenpeace ecology crowd as bourgeois softies, precisely as Greenpeace was received at that time by diehard insurrectionists.

The tortured relationship between Alice and her divorced mother, Dorothy, provides the most emotionally poignant and morbidly humorous scenes. We witness the normally rational, capable Alice descend into spiteful nit-picking with the woman who raised her. We learn from Dorothy that she lost her home and now lives in a depressing flat because she supported Alice and Jasper for four years. Alice never quite gets it and rails against her mother for abandoning her social conscience. Dorothy coolly replies, “You spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and nannying for other people. An all-purpose female drudge.”

And Dorothy is correct. Alice returns to the commune and promptly adopts her mother’s thankless service to others, gets taken for granted, suffers the selfishness of her own “children,” the witless revolutionaries.

After a final act of pointless violence, Lessing doesn’t describe what happens to Alice and the others, but we can figure it out from observing history. They will disperse. Most will conform and find a place in society. The stubborn ones will burn out and live with resentment. Others will simply fade away.

Lessing is not unacquainted with effective agents of social change – people such as Gandhi or Rosa Parks – and she knows that genuine radicals can change society, but in this narrative, she abandons advocacy to simply demonstrate how common human frailty and self-deception can undermine the best of intentions.

I asked Rex to read the book and do a guest report because, as a founder of Greenpeace, he “was there” and knew this scene. I had already read the novel before Rex and I talked about it, and for the most part agree with his detailed and insightful reading. Well, to be absolutely fair, Rex’s reading really informed my opinion and made me think more kindly of the novel (that’s why juries need to discuss the books—sharing opinions does inform on your own reading, others spot things you may have missed).

The book confused me rather. Much of the writing is dull and trudging, deliberately so one assumes from a writer of such caliber—dull writing to match the lackluster lives. There is too much coincidence—see Robert Priest’s complaint above. Alice can’t see past the end of her nose, can’t see through the manipulative and self-destructive Jasper whom she adores, and frequently forgets things but we are supposed to accept that she has “insight” and can tell details of the lives of others just by looking at them. Alice has an explosive temper and can rant like a two-year old. There is nothing compelling about her, or any of the other characters. At one time Lessing was member of the Communist Party until she became disillusioned. Perhaps this is her explanation, or revenge.

Keri Hulme-The Bone People-purchased WINNER

Guest report by Leslie McBain

Upon a second reading of The Bone People by Keri Hulme, I am less taken, more critical, and yet more admiring of this novel and its author. I read this novel in 1985. It was shocking, unique and compelling in style and form, it had a hippy culture drift and was as visual as an acid trip.

The Bone People has, at its core, the twining specters of child abuse, and addiction. The subtext is family dysfunction, overpowering love born of need, and the Maori need for a defined national identity after the now familiar legacy of colonialism.

The almost eponymous Kerewin Holmes, the part Maori protagonist, is an eccentric artist with genius and piles of money from a lottery win. She builds a tower-like house reminiscent of a nautilus shell in a remote area on the coast of New Zealand. She is visited by a small Caucasian boy called Himi who can’t speak and will steal valued objects. The boy’s adoptive widowed father, Joe is a hard drinking, hard working, flawed yet spiritual Maori. He regularly brutalizes the child, who has already suffered an abusive past—a mysterious boat capsizing in which his abusive and apparently drug-running, parents disappear. The story follows the meeting up and entwining of Kerewin, Himi, and Joe.

Archetypal myths abound; the outcomes of situations are often predictable. Kerewin Holmes is brilliant and artistic, learned and humorous, strong yet vulnerable. The lottery win which has occurred before the novel opens, seems contrived and fortuitous; I kept searching for a symbolic meaning for this but was unable to link it to anything. It mainly removes all obstacles which would ordinarily render the lives of these folks much less colourful and adventuresome.

The style in which the novel is written defies categorization. It jumps around in voice, point of view, tense, dream and reality. It is intensely poetic. There are events which are explored in the characters’ minds without the reader ever getting the whole scoop.

But Keri Hulme is a writer who is comfortable in taking risks with her craft, which serve style and content, and inform and engage the reader. The tension is mostly well maintained and the characters are complex and well developed.

Because child abuse is arguably one of the hottest of hot buttons for us, it is difficult and perhaps unnecessary for us to detach from the subject to review the novel. I was horrified by the acceptance of child abuse by the central characters. There was concern among the all characters in the novel but the horrific abuse was allowed to continue through the dynamic of honor in the extended family. There are images of abuse of the small adopted child, Himi, which have burned in my memory for these twenty-five years. On the second read, they are as powerful and disturbing as ever.

On the down side, the dialogue, the monologues are often a slog of detail, slang, and self-serving reflection. The shifting of time and perspectives is often confusing and tiresome. The last quarter of the book seems almost to be written by someone else. Though we are following Joe’s vision quest the voice is very different and, for me, disconcerting.

There is finally mending and redemption. I was glad to come to the end of the novel, I did not want the story to continue; I was feeling tired and annoyed by the compelling need to stick with the novel. I was wishing the editor had taken a more aggressive role.

In the final analysis, The Bone People has moved me, changed me, informed me and amazed me in both readings. I have talked to other readers who think the same. The novel is not perfect but what it lacks in restraint and order, it makes up for in imagination, and passion. Twenty-five years later, as a more jaded reader, I am not entranced with the novel, but still consider it a strong literary work. It was worthy of the Booker Prize in 1985.

Found online:

Here in New Zealand, there is a joke that the only people who read The Bone People today are students tackling it as a set text, German tourists or Booker Prize completists. It caused a bit of a stir when it was published, and in the early 80s (people were clearly enchanted by the story behind the novel’s publication, which did sort of fit the whole “kiwi battler surviving the odds” cultural narrative) it was THE book to be seen reading. And then it won the Booker.

People have hailed Hulme’s refusal to succumb to editorial pressures as an individual artist’s heroic stand against the vagaries of publishing, but, in the case of The Bone People at least, a good editor may have helped streamline the book into a more unified piece of work. To me, Hulme’s inflexibility smacks of preciousness (a preciousness communicated in her wince-inducing preface, “embalm in perspex” mention and all) rather than a bid for artistic integrity.

I agree with Leslie, for the most part. The novel does have power, but much of it is also a mess. And as a result, it is often merely irritating. A good editor would have made a difference (we aren’t there yet, but Yann Martel’s million-selling Life of Pi underwent a major rewrite by its British publisher—in other words the original Canadian edition which received little recognition when published is a vastly different novel than the UK version that won the Booker).

Should deeply flawed books win prizes?

1985 Marina Warner from The Guardian

Norman St John Stevas was our chair, and early on that summer he picked out a number of books which he recommended his panel to read. Among them was a surprise, a bulky novel called The Bone People by Keri Hulme. Alongside the many gleamingly designed offerings from the major publishing houses, it had the distinction of being published by a women’s cooperative in New Zealand, who, when the book won the prize against very high odds, came up in full island dress to collect it, chanting a Maori praise song.

Feelings in the final meeting – and afterwards – ran very high about this novel, but St John Stevas unexpectedly championed it throughout. Nina Bawden opposed it very strongly on the grounds of its violence (the novel tells a terrifying story of child-beatings), and wrote later publicly to distance herself from the decision. Nina found herself significantly outnumbered in her opposition, because Joanna Lumley didn’t attend the final judging. She sent a message to say she was in rehearsal and that her nominated winner was Doris Lessing, for The Good Terrorist. When she heard The Bone People had won, she too dissociated herself from the judgment. JW Lambert and I supported the book.

I think that the best argument for the whole cruel and unfair business of prizes is that they can lead readers to writers who wouldn’t otherwise be read much or perhaps at all. I didn’t think Lessing needed the prize (and she would agree) and certainly not for a novel that is not her best (though it’s a feature of prizes that authors often win for their weakest works).

According to Booker rules the chair is supposed to be neutral and can only cast a vote in the event of a tie. From Warner’s remarks it appears that not only did Stevas champion the novel he wanted to win, he directed the other jurors from the beginning.

Whether Lessing “needed” the prize should be irrelevant. Whether the Lessing novel is her best should also be irrelevant. The task of the jury is to decide whether the Lessing book is the best of this particular bunch, whatever that means.

6194 words January 18, 2010

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. As we become more experienced readers how much do our expectations affect our response to a novel? The rest of our lives ebb and flow with our expectations so why not reading?

George and I  lost our sea legs in Singapore, but it took a while, and not until George swayed his way through several museums. We had an early flight from Singapore to Beijing on Christmas Day so we knew Christmas Eve would be an early-to-bed night. Online I found a 5-star hotel at a great rate that offered an “oasis” in Singapore and the “most restful beds in town. With a distinctively majestic atrium soaring through 21 levels of the hotel, Marina Mandarin Singapore is imbued with a philosophy of providing Asian grace, warmth and care in an atmosphere of relaxed elegance.”

When we checked into our hotel we discovered it was a pretty modern and pretentious affair—a large open atrium that indeed did rise 20+ floors. Five elevators accessed the room floors—two moved inside while the other three rose up through the atrium allowing you to see across, and down, down, as the floors passed. Each time we rang for the elevator George would go wait near the two inside ones, hoping one of those would arrive first. If we did get the atrium view he would stand just inside the door, and stare directly at it for the whole trip, with his back to the view. Hallways ran around the atrium with doors on one side and the atrium view on the other. George always walked on the inside/room side, insisting that the floor was sloped.

Just outside our door on the 12^th floor was a huge net half full of white balloons. Looking up you could see other nets with balloons. Pretty early to be getting ready for New Year’s Eve, I thought. Over the following days we noticed hotel staff continuing to fill the nets. Once in a while a balloon would pop, and in that huge atrium the noise sounded like a gun going off. You get bad, bouncy acoustics in that sort of space.

Christmas eve we finished packing and thought we’d have a quiet game of cribbage and a drink before calling it an early night. As we crossed the bridge from the elevator to the lobby/restaurant/bar area (with its running stream) where we had played the night before, we saw that the whole seating area had been converted into linen-covered dining tables. We were stopped at the end of the bridge. Did we have a reservation? No, so we sidled up to the bar. Perhaps we should have connected the balloons with the silver lame dresses worn by the female servers that had replaced the traditional garb we’d been seeing for days. At the beginning of our second game the music came on—I use the term “music” lightly but there was nothing light about the decibel level. Uh oh, we thought.

Up in our room the noise level was still deafening. Around 10:30 the sound system switched to a lower level and we were foolish enough to think that was it. At 11:30 the “Christmas Eve countdown” began. Daytona Beach during March Break is not this noisy. What do they play on Christmas Eve in Singapore? Stayin’ Alive and YMCA. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and those thousands upon thousands of balloons were released to the heart-thumping disco rock version of Christ the Saviour is Born.

I had to look. Twelve floors down, four feet deep in balloons the revelers were now busting balloons. It took them 45 minutes to complete the task.

Every time I open one of these Booker novels I am expecting balloons and a party, rather than a restful sleep. It’s an unhealthy way to read. Instead of just reading and responding, lurking in the back of my brain is The Question—good enough to win a prize? Nasty.

Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964 but refused it, stating, “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.” I wonder what Sartre would say about the “poem” read at the Vancouver Olympic opening ceremonies; it was commissioned and paid for by Canadian Tourism.

1984 Jury: Professor Richard Cobb, British historian. Anthony Curtis lectured in English at the Sorbonne, and moved to literary journalism as Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was Lit Ed of the Sunday Telegraph (1960-1970), and of the Financial Times (1970-1990). He has written on theatre, on Maugham, Henry James and Philip Larkin. Polly Devlin, author, journalist, broadcaster, film-maker, art critic and conservationist, and Features Editor for Vogue. John Fuller, poet, novelist, critic. Ted Rowlands

Penelope Lively According to Mark purchased

Mark is a well-respected biographer who is researching his next book, a biography of Gilbert Strong. With good story telling and clean prose Lively examines the nature and challenges of biography, lost loves, stifled lives, the place of books in our lives, the curious course of love and how the life of the individual fits into the larger picture.

Your own doings were interwoven with the coarser and more indestructible fabric of history, to give the movement of time a grander name than it seems to deserve when one is part of it.

And yet how unspeakably much more so it might be—had been indeed for countless millions of people in this century. Mark, like any normally imaginative person with a grasp of world events, was frequently humbled by the fact that few demands of any significance had ever been made on him.

The novel has the usual cast of required eccentric characters—though the forgiving wronged wife is less than convincing—and is readable if not really remarkable. It gets a bit maudlin and overly philosophical at the end.

Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot purchased

Guest report by Stan Persky

The eponymous parrot in Julian Barnes’ breakthrough 1984 novel, Flaubert’s Parrot  — or perhaps Barnes’ book should be called a jeu d’esprit since one of the things that it’s doing is calling into question the very notion of a “novel” — is a many-feathered literary creature.

It is first found in Gustave Flaubert’s conte, “A Simple Heart, or The Parrot” (1877), the story of a faithful servant, Felicity, and her pet parrot, LouLou, who she comes to envisage, while on her deathbed, as the embodiment of The Holy Ghost. While writing the tale, Flaubert allegedly kept a stuffed parrot on his desk for inspiration. The stuffed parrot was allegedly borrowed from a collection in Rouen, the provincial capital closest to Flaubert’s house in nearby Croisset. But in the little museum at Croisset, there’s also a stuffed parrot, whose curators claim is the real stuffed parrot that inspired Flaubert. At which point, readers of Flaubert will recognize that we’re clearly beyond the quotidean territory of Madame Bovary (1857), and well into the fanciful landscapes of Flaubert’s final work, Bouvard and Pecuchet (1880), a satiric paean to the futility of human knowledge.

The amateur scholar attempting to sort out the rival feathered claimants to literary authenticity is the protagonist of Barnes’ book, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired doctor visiting Rouen and environs, in search of Flaubert landmarks and relics. Barnes provides a very lightly sketched, but strangely touching, backstory that centers on just exactly how Braithwaite came to be a widower, but about 90 per cent of the book consists of the elderly Flaubertophile’s ruminations on literature, life, Flaubert, and the parrot(s). Which means that it’s not what most people thought of as a novel, circa a quarter century ago.

It begins with Braithwaite in Rouen, where a half dozen North Africans are playing boules beneath the town’s Flaubert statue:

“Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noticed a furled white shirt, a bare forearm and a blob on the back of the wrist. Not a watch, as I first thought, or a tattoo, but a coloured transfer: the face of a political sage much admired in the desert.”

Those contemporary North Africans at the outset of Barnes’ book wear an image of Mao on their wrists, just as Flaubert’s North African soldiers in his Salammbo, as we eventually learn, bore the sign of, yes, a parrot. So, if Flaubert’s Parrot is not a “real” novel, it is, as you can see from its opening paragraph above, real writing.

As British critic Frank Kermode said in his enthusiastic review of the book (“Obsessed with Obsession,” New York Review, Apr. 25, 1985), “Barnes’ physician hero is in search of the crumbled, junky past, of the truth about Gustave Flaubert, which, like the truth about his own life, is on some views both unimportant and inaccessible.” Amid “the decaying rubbish that testifies to the existence of Flaubert” are those now bedraggled, ambiguous, stuffed parrots. In the end, the parrots gaze at us, as Barnes puts it, like “quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men.”

Whatever else it is, Flaubert’s Parrot is compellingly readable and pretty thoroughly succeeds in raising Barnes’ bookish challenges to the state of the novel. Its “winning” cleverness (two traits associated with Barnes himself) probably got it onto the Booker shortlist (i.e., it was hard to ignore), but it was unlikely to win (a little too unconventional).

In addition to its intrinsic pleasures, Flaubert’s Parrot was part of a “postmodernist” turn that writing was taking at the time. After the post-World War II magical realist novels of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie (an attempt, I think, to reconnect the novel to the classical, picaresque “epic”), writers now attempted to disassemble (okay, “deconstruct”) the traditional novel in playful, self-reflexive experiments. Barnes’ book is contemporary with a wide range of kindred works that stretch from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to, in Canada, George Bowering’s Burning Water, both of which also ask pertinent questions about the nature of writing, reading, and the possibility of knowledge.

Stan agreed to do a guest report before I read the book. I wrote my report below before I read Stan’s. And I’m fascinated. Here’s the reason.

About a year ago I saw a production of Romeo and Juliet. I’ve studied the play at grad school and have seen at least a dozen productions and maybe as many TV and film productions. But at the end of this production, when the stage holds the bodies of two dead children, watched over by grieving parents, I suddenly saw the play very differently.

When my daughter Bronwyn died in October 2006 I turned to reading and to projects. One result is The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning. I’ve made half a dozen quilts in a ridiculously short period of time (people spend years making one). I founded the Al Purdy A-frame Trust. And, in part, this Booker project and my obsession with the impact of prizes on the publishing world are part of what I am talking about. So what I saw in the character of Geoffrey Braithwaite was a fellow mourner, and one with a project developed from that grief. What Stan sees as the “backstory” was for me a full and reasonable explanation for the frontstory—the Flaubert research. I was going to edit my report after reading Stan’s to remove any repetition, etc., but I’ve decided to leave it as written.

What a romp. This is such an exciting and fun book to read. A brief report won’t begin to capture the energy and inventiveness.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a doctor and amateur Flaubert expert (can you be an amateur expert? He is not a scholar and does not publish his extensive research) who is trying to determine which of two stuffed parrots in two separate museums is the one that was on Flaubert’s desk while he wrote Un Coeur simple. Like many of the recent Booker novels it is part exploration of the past and how people fall over it “trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process.” And also the role of biography and the uncovering of information about the dead. My favourite parts are the romp through the absurdities of academic life and research. This novel should be read just for the list of novels that should be banned.

Many critics would like to be dictators of literature, to regulate the past, and to set out with quiet authority the future direction of the art. This month, everyone must write about this; next month, nobody is allowed to write about that. So-and-so will not be reprinted until we say so…let’s play. I’ll go first.

1. There shall be no more novels in which a group of people, isolated by circumstances, revert to the ‘natural condition’ of man become essential, poor, bare, forked creatures…

4. There is to be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford or Cambridge, and a ten-year ban on the university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no subsidy to encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools’ a ten-year ban on secondary-school fiction. A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A Partial ban on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author)….

7. No novels about small, hitherto forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire, in the painstaking course of which we learn first, that the British are averagely wicked; and secondly, that war is very nasty indeed.

8 No novels in which the narrator, or any of the characters, is identified simply by an initial letter. Still they go on doing it!

Barnes takes the novel, turns it inside out, flips it on its head and forces reconsiderations of the genre and criticism. Get a copy and jump in, but don’t read anything on the book jacket. It might give away something.

While we have been on this trip The Heart Does Break has been published. As I’ve mentioned before, I think, this anthology is in part the response to the death of my daughter, now more than three years ago. In the first few months I was struck by the bad language that is used about grief, as if it were a disease, something to “get over.” The anthology contains 20 commissioned pieces by creative writers about how they responded to the death of a loved one. We picked creative writers because language matters, particularly in such circumstances, so I believe.

At the heart of Flaubert’s Parrot is grief, how to respond to the absence of a beloved, a particularly difficult and unfaithful beloved.

And then it happens to you. There’s no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time…I’ve tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that’s all it’s ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn’t; often, it doesn’t even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands.

Other people think you want to talk…Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t; it makes little difference. The words aren’t the right ones; or rather, the right words don’t exist. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people’s griefs…

‘It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you’ll come out of it. I’m not taking your grief lightly; it’s just that I’ve seen enough of life to know that you’ll come out of it.’ The words you’ve said yourself while scribbling a prescription…And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Anita Desai In Custody purchased

On the book jacket Salman Rushie is quoted as declaring this novel “magnificent.” I read most of it in India, and I still don’t get it. Cultural differences I suppose. One day in Singapore to escape the heat and get a cheap lunch we ducked into Hooters. This might be the only Hooters in the world with no cleavage. A sign on the wall said, “Danger, Blondes Thinking” but there wasn’t a blonde to be seen. Some cultural things don’t translate well.

About 50 pages in I realized this novel must have been the basis for a movie George and I watched a while back. A young aspiring poet named Deven goes to visit an Urdu poet whom he has revered since childhood. Deven is an irritating weakling and the Urdu poet turns out to be manipulative has-been. The poetry is bad and sentimental. The plot is also melodramatic and manipulative, obviously so. It’s an examination of what happens when a revered guru turns out to be a grubbing asshole.

A few days after we watched the movie George and I looked at each other, “Do you think it was a comedy and we just didn’t get it?” I’m still not sure.

David Lodge Small World purchased

Sometime in the late 80s I read Lodge’s early novel about the creaky world of English departments, Changing Places. This novel goes over much of the same territory, and with some of the same characters. Category: university professor novel. Barnes would disapprove.

This time rather than teaching exchanges the focus is the whirl of literary academic conferences. It’s full of clever literary allusions (a set of twins are left in a jet, adopted and later reunited with their parents—a deft theft from Oscar Wilde) from a rather smug know-it-all viewpoint particularly targeting English pomp and inefficiency. If you happen to be a graduate student—as I was when I read the first novel—Lodge is a wonderful giggle. But does anyone else care? Are the British more concerned with academia? Is this a novel for the university community that Lodge slams to read and nod their heads agreeingly and say, “Yes, bang on.”

There are sure to be lots of further in-jokes, guessing that most of the characters—professors and writers—have some basis on real people.

J. G. Ballard Empire of the Sun purchased

Ballard might be best known for this autobiographical novel, made into a movie by Steven Spielberg with film script by Tom Stoppard, and Crash also made into a movie, this time by David Cronenberg. After I read the novel, we watched the Spielberg film and it’s pretty good, except for the over-the-top music.

Jim is a 10-year-old boy with well-to-do British parents living a privileged life in before-war Shanghai. Jim is obsessed with planes. When the war begins Jim and his parents get caught in the melee of the attack, are separated and Jim will spend the war, alone, in various camps.

Like many coming-of-age novels Jim has a series of surrogate fathers. Basie, an American seaman who is a scavenging survivor, using the war to amass desirable products. A doctor with more advanced morality which doesn’t help him deal with the harsh day-to-day realities.

In some ways the novel is reminiscent of Treasure Island, even sharing the name of the title character. Like Jim Hawkins, Jim becomes an Everyboy. He is a symbol of all children caught in war. And also like Jim Hawkins he learns the pirates (in this case the Japanese) are not always the bad guys and are often better examples of courage than the good guys.

But this is no straight-ahead fable. Jim’s coming of age is a complicated and twisted maturity. The war and world of this novel have nothing to do with bravery. It’s a mean and selfish survivor. All are left scared. There are no clear victors.

No recognition of Chinese war effort, and Ballard suggests that will haunt the 20^th and 21th centuries.

The only forces not to be celebrated were the Chinese communists, but they had been cleared out of Shanghai and the coastal cities. Whatever contribution their troops had made to the Allied victory had long been discounted, lost under the layers of newsreels that had imposed their own truth upon the war.

What really sets this novel apart is the way the world is viewed through the eyes of a child, without anything childish. Perhaps it is Ballard’s experience with sci-fi, his ability to portray other worlds that lends the power, but power it does have. At the end as the world settles into peace, Jim settles into his new reality—he is living WWIII.

Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac purchased WINNER

This win caused a big stink, many believing the Brookner to be a much inferior book to Ballard. Malcolm Bradbury called the novel “parochial.”

Her friends have sent Edith Hope packing after a no-show at her wedding. Don’t be a spinster, and the alternative isn’t any better. The novel is a slow examination of the lives of a dull, uninteresting woman. The book uses the small painful canvas so popular with some female British novelists (Elizabeth Taylor is another) during this time. It’s slight, and contrived. And humourless. That is beat out the Ballard and the Barnes is absurd.

1984 John Fuller from The Guardian

This was the year when the hot favourite, JG Ballard (Empire of the Sun), was passed over for a relative newcomer, Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac). Hardly a scandal, but in a strong year we had already discarded some big names (Burgess, Golding, Spark, Bainbridge, two Amises, etc) before reaching the shortlist, so that journalistic antennae were twitching, and the outcome was felt to be a further surprise. The judges got on pretty well together. We were somewhat exercised by the question of whether Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot was really a novel, while in the final judging session Anthony Curtis continued to argue for David Lodge (Small World), and Ted Rowlands stuck out for the Ballard. I thought that the Brookner was, in its economy and elegance, a small triumph of moral insight worthy of the tradition of James and Forster to which it belonged. I was relieved to have support from Polly Devlin and the somewhat eccentric Richard Cobb in this, and pleased at the nudge to her career that the prize must have given.

January 3, 2011,  3812 words