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

This post from Macedonia includes observations about two cities: Skopje, the capital city of  FYROM [Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia], and Thessalonica, Greece’s second largest city and the capital of Greece’s northern province, Macedonia. I include them both in “Macedonia,” not only for the historical reason that they both occupy territory once called Macedonia before the Balkan Wars (1912-13) divided it up among Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria, but also for the much more interesting reason that both cities make a very big fuss about the ancient Macedons, Philip II and his boy Alexander, as ancestors.

Actually, they have been doing this for a very long time, and the Thessalonians do it with some justification: the royal seat of the House of Macedon was located in Pella, near Thessalonica; the magnificent Macedonian golden hoard from important gravesites (such as that of the above-mentioned Phillip) was excavated at Vergina, 80 km from Thessalonica; and the city of Thessalonica itself may not improbably be said to have been founded and named for Alexander’s half-sister. However, it is much more contentious to claim that today’s Greeks in Macedonia are in a direct line of descent from the Macedons of yore, given the mish-mash of peoples who crisscrossed these terrains over the centuries or even to claim that the Macedons of yore were Hellenes. (Aristotle, himself born in Macedonia and who tutored the young Alexander, didn’t think they were.)

In any event, I suppose that today’s Thessalonians wouldn’t be nearly so exercised about this identity if it weren’t for parallel and competing claims by their ex-Yugoslav neighbours to the north in Skopje, who have also got it into their heads (the heads of ultra-nationalists, that is) that they too are descendants of the Macedons. In order for this to be even remotely viable, the modern FYROM Macedonians would have to be indigenous to the territory they live in and not descendants of a much later migration of people (much later, as in 1000 years later), namely the Slavs who entered the Balkans in the 6th century. Which is what every sane person knows to be the case.

(An aside here for a mention of Bulgaria, of its important city, Plovdiv, originally known as Philippopolis because it was founded by Philip II of Macedon – him again – and to whom the Plovdivians have erected a statue in the middle of the semi-excavated Roman stadium: sensibly, the Plovdivians do not claim to be Macedonians.)

I have known of these issues for some time but nothing prepared me for the sight of Skopje’s central square, Macedonia Square, since I last saw it 3 years ago. In the centre now rears an 8-storey-high equestrian statue of Himself (Alexander the Great, coyly named only as The Warrior in official circles), at the base of which roar several lions who also serve as spouts for water sprays in a fountain that is very popular with citizens.)

At one end of the square has also been erected a monumental statue of Justinian – “The holy and right-believing Emperor Justinian I (483-565 CE)” -  said to have been a Slav and born in a village near the Roman town of Scupi, today’s Skopje. So far, so historical. But at the other end of the square, equally monumentally, sits Tsar Samuil, claimed by today’s Macedonians but historically known as a Bulgarian Tsar and who lost a terrible battle in 1014 to the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, forever after known by the sobriquet, The Bulgar-Slayer.  So far, so Bulgarian. But Samuil also once resided in Ohrid, in present-day FYROM, and so presto! he becomes a Macedonian Tsar. Just off the Square the finishing touches are being put to a massive (in the style of a)Triumphal Arch. “What triumph?” my friend, a retired literature professor, Ljubica snorts. “We don’t have triumphs, we are always being crushed by our neighbours.”

Among other reasons, this fantastical historiography is why some of my friends in Skopje refuse to go downtown: they are embarrassed, even humiliated. Equally egregious is the current program of constructing a series of public buildings along the Vardar River (the same river that flows down to Thessalonica where it is known as the Axios). By their imperial scale these buildings rival – I swear – those of Imperial Rome, not to mention those of Imperial Constantinople – but the effect, in this small, economically-struggling, hapless republic, is to reduce it to the downright puny.

But there is a third reason to loathe this bombastic self-display of the current government: when I asked my friends where on earth the money is coming from to build such extravaganzas, they shrugged and said “from us.” meaning from the schools and universities, the hospitals, the culture ministry, not to mention from the next generation and the one after that…. “And they call us old socialists ‘komuni,’” said one old friend, bitterly. In this charged nationalist environment – the bombast directed as much at the resident Albanian, Moslem minority as at the neighbouring Greeks – the generation whose patriotism was linked with the achievements of socialist Yugoslavia are now derisively dismissed as Commie pinko finks.

While walking along the river promenade, I take a good look at a piece of Soviet-era public art, a monument commemorating the liberation of Skopje in 1944. The style is pure Socialist kitsch, but not quite Realist: its figures are just too muscle-bound and their faces depersonalized.  And yet, however idealized these fighters are, you can still see in the group something intensely lived – the young soldier slumped in the arms of a comrade, the half-naked dying man , the barefoot peasants wielding weapons from earlier wars, the grim-faced leader launching a grenade, the big-shouldered woman for once not holding a baby or sheaf of wheat but her own rifle. They, or people like them, lived and died in such actions right here. But Philip and Alexander?

What is happening to Skopje? It’s always been an unlovely city, or at least since an earthquake in 1963 devastated most of it.  Rebuilt, it entered the modern age of Brutalist Socialist architecture, even its Orthodox Cathedral.  Yet these edifices did not quite overwhelm the public space. There was still that other city left over from the quake, ramshackle perhaps, but still proportionate and mindful of Macedonia’s historical mixture of Slavs and Vlachs, Greeks, Jews, and Albanians, Bulgarians and Armenians…or am I being romantic in the face of a capitalism that is eating its own young?

Of a Sunday, summoned to Divine Liturgy by the peals of the bells of the church dedicated to St Demetrius, I crossed the river on the lovely Ottoman stone bridge (the leaders of the Karposh rebellion had been executed here back in 1689)  into the old part of town once occupied by the Turkish bazaar. (In fact, it remains the market area, with its winding and twisting cobble-stoned pedestrian streets.) The church was full, and this being an Old World Orthodox church there were no pews. People shifted their feet every couple of minutes or, in the case of the men, left the church periodically to go outside into the little courtyard for a sit-down and a smoke. As with my church in Edmonton, a choir of enthusiastic amateurs warbled from the loft at the back while the priest and deacon officiated in the sanctuary, the rest of us having very little to do except light slender beeswax tapers and make the sign of the cross at every mention of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I deduced that  the language of the Liturgy was Old Slavonic not Macedonian, as the words I recognized had case endings [nominative, genitive, dative, accusative etc  etc) whereas modern Macedonian has none.

The service  was homely (even the clerical vestments seemed homemade) and it was a deep pleasure after to stroll into the market area and seat myself under the vast branches of a chestnut tree in full, luscious foliage, next to a chortling fountain and to be served a cappuccino by an elegant Albanian man in a suit and lavender shirt with whom I exchanged pleasantries in French.

As with all substantial towns in the Ottoman era throughout the Balkans the market or bazaar had once been enormous, with shops in the thousands, but even in its reduced state it still presents an impressive topography of narrow streets twisting every which way, with shop windows displaying idiosyncratic collections of wares, whether bolts of ornate (synthetic) fabrics, gold  bangles, antique Turkish coffee sets, shoes or sinister-looking machine parts, with the proprietor sitting in a stool in the door frame, his small cup of coffee on a box before him, not visibly concerned whether anyone was buying. A few women in hijab walked together arm in arm and I saw a few old men in round white skull caps, but if there is a majority Albanian or Turkish Moslem presence in the market area I could not discern it. There are still Ottoman monuments here – some working mosques and disused hamams and hans – and my friend Slavica, an instructor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, is lucky to work in a renovated han or inn called the Suli-An, a graceful structure from the 15^th century: Monday morning we sat in the sunny courtyard with tiny cups of Turkish coffee and admired the harmony of the arcade.

Then back I drifted across the Stone Bridge, remembering how a decade ago it was lined with Albanian and Roma men, women and children selling little piles of cheap goods – socks, alarm clocks, plastic toys they wound up and demonstrated how they jumped around – but now the bridge has been swept clean, as it were, the better to appreciate the looming proportions of the Warrior straight ahead. By the sixth or seventh encounter with Himself, I had to admit my resistance was weakening: here on a Sunday afternoon le tout Skopje was out in the enormous square, licking ice creams cones, taking pictures of the roaring lions and the dancing waters of the fountain, and posing for the friends back home as they pointed up, way up, to the noble head of the ultra Macedon.  (Judge for yourself from this CNN clip: When my friend the poet, Alexander “Sashko” Prokopiev, suggested we meet “by the lions” for a coffee date, it began to seem unsporting to keep on complaining about them. Nevertheless, when we were shortly joined by a senior poet (b. 1933 so he’s seen it all), I felt vindicated when he asserted unambiguously that the historical panorama on the Square was “inauthentic,” a word he kept repeating, while Sashko added that there had been citizens’ protests against the “development” to no avail. He was particularly incensed by the erection of the new Court House, a building of such stupefying proportions that its only rational purpose is to remind the sniveling citizens that, summoned there, s/he will be shortly crushed. To lighten the mood, Zvonko, the Senior Poet, kissed my hand then ordered large pieces of cake to celebrate his grandson’s birthday – the young man is studying clinical psychology in New York and wants to stay there. Mnohaia lita!

Sashko’s daughter lives in Barcelona where she edits a bilingual Spanish-English magazine. She is unlikely to return to Macedonia, either.

But what of these younger ones we see as we leave the Square? Into the Sunday afternoon hubbub have erupted hundreds of exuberant teenagers (mostly girls) dancing a choreographed routine set to the explosive music coming from a stage set up at one side of the Square. Sashko explains that the song is about the need for young people to respect each other; no surprise, then, to learn that the kids are part of a UNICEF project (Sashko introduces me to the co-ordinator) aimed at the eradication of “violence in education.” That’s what their big, colourful banner says: Young People Against Violence in Schools. They come from various Macedonian cities and include a couple of Albanians (most Albanian school kids now go to separate Albanian-language schools) and the main point they want to make is “for tolerance.” I cannot get a direct answer whether this refers to bullying or racism or sexual harassment or…? Perhaps all of these. Inspired by a Dutch project, One Minute Videos, school kids are being supplied with video cameras and invited to compete for a place with their own one minute videos. I am mesmerized by the dancing, by the youthfulness of bodies and souls that have no memory of a Macedonia that belonged to any other world. They are gloriously lovely.

Speaking of other worlds, I have heard nothing of Canada through the usual media – CNN and BBC World News on hotel televisions – and there are no foreign language newspapers for sale in Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia, at least not the places I frequent. Canadian headlines pop up when I open up Yahoo or Telus home pages so I know that women now are premiers of Alberta, and PEI and Newfoundland. I know that the NDP has been returned to power for the fourth straight time in Manitoba and friends in Athens are bringing me up to speed about the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the call for similar actions around the world on October 17 (including at the Toronto Stock Exchange). I’m missing everything! On October 17 I will be in Istanbul and will keep my ears open for any action there. So, for me no hockey scores (no loss there) but instead, a television interview with Michael Moore. (Clearly, I am not reading Canadian papers on line, mainly because internet cafes supplied with computers are so hard to come by that when I do find one, I catch up with mail and plug away at a blog post.)

When I decide to spend a day outside of Skopje; several people advise me to visit Bitola, known to the Ottoman Turks as Manastir, in the deep  south almost on the Greek border, and redolent of Balkan history to the nth degree.  The bus passes through Veles and Prilep so that by the time I return to Skopje that evening I feel I have been on a whirlwind tour of Macedonian geography, history, architecture, and linguistics. (Speaking of linguistics, I have been depending on my Berlitz Bulgarian phrase book to get by in Macedonia, but each of these languages has its peculiarities: why is it that in Macedonia you do not get on the bus at a “sektor ”(bus bay) as you do in Bulgaria but at a “peron,” as in Serbia? ) As I watched the landscape roll by – rolling hills staggered against each other, stretching out in dry, red plains before plunging into the clefts of river gorges – I could imagine the partisans and troops and militias and guerrillas of all descriptions who have negotiated this coveted terrain, leaving the graves of slain comrades and the ashy tumuli of scorched villages in their wake.

As with all such landscapes, this one too has been normalized, so that what we see now are fields of late summer red peppers, grape vines, corn, cabbages and tobacco, the stuff of the Saturday farmers’ market in Bitola. I watch one exhausted woman with her strings of dried peppers, her jars of preserves, her plastic bottles of I don’t know what, I watch her try to entice customers to her offerings but really they are neither more nor less attractive than all the others on view, and I ache for her: how will she make her living if we don’t stop and buy her apples? Or what about the elderly man with a single small sack of walnuts, the elderly woman with a single bunch of withering flowers from her garden going to seed?

As with all the Balkan cities I have visited, Bitola provides the single most civilized amenity of Balkan urbanism, the pedestrian street. I approach it through a large city park (another such amenity) its walkway flanked by busts of young men and women who all died in 1942, in their twenties, as “national heroes.” What happened in Bitola in 1942? Perhaps a sacrifice to the Communist state that was being born, for here is the pedestrian street, named for Marshall Tito, a hero that Bitola is not ashamed of, and here is his well-tended bronze-headed bust. The street opens into a square where, against the frame of a large and handsome mosque, an equestrian statue of Philip II, Bitola’s founder, is a gathering point. All roads eventually lead to the market place or bazaar, which first opened for business in 1389 when the Turks became Bitola’s new landlords. Wholesalers from Bitola – Turks, Vlachs, Jews – traded with Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig and east to Constantinople and south to Alexandria from their 2500 shops and enterprises, a reminder of just how “globalized” earlier empires were. Until 1920, the mosque property alone included 11 shops, 18 tailors, 7 gunpowder magazines, a bakery and a tambourine shop, among others, and its income supported fountains, a dervish residence, the kindergarten, and primary and high schools.

On to Thessalonica, my first visit in ten years to the city where I began the “Demetrius Project” in 2000, the city of the Demetrian cult from where it spread out into the Slavic Orthodox world eventually getting to the Ukrainians too. And ten years ago, the first thing I did once I had unpacked my bags in the small hotel a few steps away from the Basilica of St Demetrius was to rush over to the church and down into its crypt for a Vespers service. But this time I first make my way down to a bookstore in the city centre down by the Old Port. I have been invited by Despina, a friend of a friend in Belgrade, to her book launch.

But this is not a literary event. The book is the product of a human rights project organized with representatives of Thessalonica’s migrant (immigrant) communities who are having a very hard time of it as the economic and political crisis deepens in Greece. (It’s difficult for them at the best of times, and how the Chinese migrants with their trays of knickknacks and household gadgets for sale make a go of it, or the young African men with their handfuls of pirated DVDs, or the Philippino teenagers with their blankets spread out to display orderly and colourful rows of sneakers, how they all survive is beyond me.)

As the book launch event, with a panel of speakers, is going to be conducted in Greek, I do not linger longer than to arrange to meet Despina the next day, in the café of the new Photography Museum in the Old Port. (It is characteristic of Despina and her politics that she chooses this café with its view onto the cranes of the new port where workers are working, rather than the chic café bar that faces the other direction from the other side of the wharf, onto the picturesque scene of Thessalonica’s seaside promenade. Despina once lived in South Africa, “in struggle.”) I learn that the book launch the night before had been disrupted by an “industrial action,” a crowd of shouting protestors outside the store. Their “action” was ostensibly linked with the on-going national protests against the austerity measures imposed by the government during the economic crisis here but in fact, says Despina, they were friends of a disgruntled employee of the store who claimed he was owed vacation pay. She is incensed that this protest took place without any thought or care being given to the fact that the public inside the store were supporting a human rights initiative.

She is incensed again a couple of nights later when, at the official opening of the Youth Art Biennale in the forecourt of the new city hall, a very loud and persistent group of protestors attempts to disrupt the proceedings. The protestors are municipal employees, afraid for their jobs (reasonably enough) who are misdirecting their wrath, Despina feels, at this hopeful and co-operative event, the Biennale, at which young artists from around Europe are gathering in solidarity with each other if not with their governments.

As an outsider to all this, I find it difficult to judge the efficacy or even the purpose of the public agitation and indignation in the streets of Greece as the Greeks I have talked with are agreed that the cause is lost, that the European Union and its banks are already imposing “solutions” on the Greek economy, and that Greeks will just have to “suck it up” until the economy is put on a sound footing.  (In the meantime, a retired professor has had his pension reduced by 1000 Euros a month  and a young waiter has had his hours reduced to part-time, even though the cafes, bars and tavernas all seem to be doing a roaring business. This will all change, he says, when the weather changes—and when even these middle class patrons will be feeling the pinch on their wallets.) Even those very sympathetic to the protests, especially to the young whose “actions” have been peaceful, are disgusted by the general passivity to the pervasive and profound corruption at all social and political levels that is being exposed. My friend Stephie, a Greek-Canadian who has been living in Greece for twenty years, describes her encounters with the driving instructor who demanded a bribe to pass her driving exam and the land titles officer who declared  that her file was “missing” an important page which would cost her 3000 Euros to replace but that he could expedite matters if she gave him 500 Euros. The building in which she owns her apartment seems neither to have any elected council nor to come under any formal regulation such as a Condominium Act.  People with grand lifestyles apparently have no taxable income. It goes on and on. Stephie has been photocopying a year-old article from Vanity Fair which says it all, she feels. Read it and weep.

For a very readable account of the economic crisis and the options open to the Greek government, read John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

But I came to Thessalonica to deliver copies of my book to two scholars whose assistance at the beginning of my journey proved to be very enlightening.  Prof. Anthony-Emile Tachiaos, whose work has focused on Slav-Byzantine relations, and  Prof Aris Mentzos who is a historian of Byzantine archaeology: it was he who had guided me through the ruins of the Roman Agora and around the splendid interior of the Basilica of St Demetrius which dates back to the 7^th century (those parts of it that have survived earthquake and fire, that is). Mentzos gave me copies of work of his own, including a monograph that established that a celebrated mosaic in the basilica, so long mis-identified as St Demetrius or St Sergius, is actually St George. Here he is and he is beautiful:. A Saint by any other name…

December 18, 2011, 3837 words 

Meslier is barely a footnote to that history today, but he deserves better than that. As British journalist Colin Brewer wrote in a 2007 article in the New Humanist, “Meslier was arguably the first to put his name to an incontrovertibly atheist document.” What makes that document even more interesting, and the cultural obscurity of its author all the more confounding, is the fact that Meslier spent most of his life serving as a Catholic priest.

Meslier was born in Mazerny, France, a small village in the Ardennes region of the country, in 1664. He joined the seminary as a young man, and on January 7, 1689, he became the priest at Étrépigny, in nearby Champagne. Except for a running dispute with a local nobleman that lived in his parish over the treatment of the poor, Meslier lived the same life of worship, public service and penury as other Catholic priests of his era. But there was one crucial difference between Meslier and other men of God: he spent the last ten years of his life producing a 633-page treatise against organized religion. “All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions,” he wrote, “invented by shrewd and crafty politicians, afterward cultivated and multiplied by the false seducers and charlatans, then accepted blindly by the ignorant, and finally supported and authorized by the laws of the princes and rulers of the earth who used these human inventions to keep a tight rein on the community of men and do with them what they wanted.” Even the eternally caustic Christopher Hitchens would struggle to do better than that.

Meslier was well aware of the conflict between his private views on religion and his public duties. “I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments,” he wrote. “I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.” But, as he noted in his testament, the Church had recourse to the pyre, and he didn’t particularly feel like dying for his beliefs. Instead, he transcribed three copies of his testament and left them by his death bed, where they quickly made their way into what Brewer describes as “the lively world of illicit reproductions.”

His testament eventually found its way into other hands, and many of the ideas contained within it were borrowed – some have said plagiarized – by Voltaire some fifty years later in his own writings on the subject. Yet today, aside from the work of French scholar Michel Onfray, who wrote about Meslier in his 2007 book In Defence of Atheism, Meslier’s life remains a mystery to most of us. This is perplexing. By virtue of its ironic value alone, the story of a Catholic priest who made a convincing case against faith ought to be more widely told. But what makes Meslier’s anonymity most confounding is the fact that he is precisely what is missing from the stories that have been told by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and other prominent atheist authors in recent years: a hero.

***

I went in search of that hero, or at least some trace of his existence, this past summer. I suppose if I were a Christian or a Muslim or a member of another monotheistic faith I’d describe my trip as a pilgrimage. It was, after all, sufficiently excessive (and obsessive) to qualify as one, given that I had voluntarily left Paris – in June, no less – so that I could spend five hours navigating the treacherous French autoroutes on my way into the Ardennes in order to pay a visit to Mazerny, a village that had once been the home of a man I’d only read about.

My ambitions for the trip were modest. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find Meslier’s grave, since he was buried in an unmarked plot on the property of descendents of a nobleman that he had quarreled with repeatedly during the course of his life – more irony – and I knew better than to expect any grand monuments to his existence in the town itself. But I had expected to at least find some trace of his existence, some thread to pull on. I was wrong. There was no Musee de Jean Meslier, no Rue Jean Meslier, and no mention of his existence on or near the town’s only church.  This struck me as more than just an historical oversight. But even if his heresy had offended the town’s religious sensibilities, and they had decided to deliberately ignore his existence, it still didn’t add up. In a town with 78 official residents according to the most recent French census and a local economy that depended entirely on what the surrounding fields could provide, how could they afford to ignore him?

They weren’t ignoring me, though. Children stared from the second floor windows of their two-story brick houses, while the adults working in their gardens or trying to fix some thing or another in their garages looked up and monitored my rented Peugeot’s slow progress past their property. It was no wonder, given that it had probably been a long time since the people of Mazerny had seen a tourist in their town, much less one that wasn’t there in search of a restroom. I thought about trying to explain what I was there for but my French wasn’t nearly good enough to communicate my interest in the atheist who had lived in their village three centuries ago. After making three complete loops of the town and with dusk already on the horizon, I decided that it was time to look somewhere else for some clues.

I retreated to the commune of Poix-Terron, a town of a few hundred residents a few kilometers north that felt like New York City by comparison. I also needed to eat something, so I stopped in at what appeared to be the only restaurant on the town’s main drag, a family tavern that curiously advertised the fact that it sold pizza. Here, at least, I was more welcome, and the kindness of the family that ran the joint was sufficiently heartening and friendly that I decided to abuse them with my defective French. Had they heard of Jean Meslier, I asked? Did they know anything of this atheist priest that had lived just a few kilometres up the road from them? They huddled in order to translate both the meaning and intent of my unusual request. Eventually, the woman who ran the place came back to me with their answer. “Non,” she said. “Jamais.”

***

Meslier hasn’t always been invisible. In the early 20th century his legacy was conscripted by the Soviets, who saw it as a useful counterpoint to organized religion. They engraved his name on an obelisk that was erected in Moscow’s Red Square in 1919 along with other leading communist thinkers like Lenin, Engels, Charles Fourier and Jean Jaures, and treated him, for a time, as a significant philosopher. But they stopped talking about Meslier when it became clear that his could just as easily be seen as a role model for insurrectionary behaviour and anti-establishment thinking, values that conflicted with the unthinking servitude that the Soviet leadership demanded of its people. The obelisk was quietly moved to the Alexandrovsky Gardens, near the Middle Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin, in 1967 to make way for a timelier piece of propaganda, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

If his value to communist propagandists was obvious, his appeal to contemporary atheists ought to be even more so. Yet somehow, in spite of all the ink that’s been spilled in recent years on the subject, today’s atheists have all but ignored Jean Meslier. Colin Brewer, a British writer and dramatist who played Meslier in 2007’s The Last Priest, noted in a 2007 article that Meslier was even absent from two high-profile television documentaries on atheism, one of which was produced by Richard Dawkins. Brewer thinks this has a great deal to do with the fact that his work was both poorly circulated and widely borrowed against by atheist intellectuals who followed Meslier. There is Voltaire’s famous “Extract,” which Brewer says inaccurately described Meslier as “a fellow-deist and entirely suppressed Meslier’s anti-monarchist, proto-communist opinions.” Meanwhile, the definitive, annotated French edition of his testament did not appear until 1970, and until the 2009 publication of Michael Shreve’s Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier only fragmentary English translations could be found. Shreve’s translation, meanwhile, is ranked number 355,280 on Amazon’s best-sellers list. By way of comparison, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” checks in at number 700.

I had assumed that Meslier’s invisibility was an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and that in France I would find a more receptive environment for his message. Sure, I hadn’t found any pamphlets at Charles De Gaulle about Mazerny and Meslier, and there were no signs on the highway near the town indicating that a point of historical interest was nearby. But I had assumed that I would have been able to find some trace of his influence, some thread to tug on. How could somebody who ought to be so important remain so consistently invisible?

I spent most of the three-plus hour drive back towards Paris that same day – well, that evening – preoccupied with trying to resist the temptation to just close my eyes for a few seconds and keep my little Peugeot between the yellow lines. But in those moments where I wasn’t fighting to stay awake, I was trying to figure out what had just taken place in Mazerny. Okay, I thought, a small, rural French village probably isn’t the most appropriate environment for a shrine to an atheist apostate, but shouldn’t there have been something? Surely, some enterprising local resident would have realized that there was considerable monetary potential in branding the town as the home of Europe’s most outspoken atheist? But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a case of their ignoring him. Maybe they just didn’t need to remember. Life in Mazerny may not have been what I would want, but it was a pleasant, civilized town, in an undeniably beautiful part of the world. Maybe that was enough.

Contemporary atheist thinkers have no such excuse. Almost by the day, it seems, another unfathomably foul-smelling layer of the onion that is organized religion gets peeled back, and for all the notoriety that writers like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have earned with their atheist treatises, the project to which they’re dedicated hasn’t made any detectable progress. In this environment, the story of a 17th century Catholic priest who quarreled with the church, stuck up for those being abused by the rich and powerful and eventually committed his ideas about the failure of religion and the promise of atheism to writing ought to be tremendously attractive.

So, too, should the testimony that this most unusual priest left behind, one that is at once more convincing and more inspirational than anything written on the subject in recent years. Meslier’s testimony aims at something greater than merely rejecting religion or describing its faults, the subjects to which today’s atheist writers seem to restrict themselves. Instead, it is a declaration of the moral and ethical virtues of a Godless existence: an atheist manifesto, in the best sense of the term. As Meslier wrote in his testament, “It has been long enough that the poor people have been so miserably abused by all kinds of idolatries and superstitions. It has been long enough that the rich and the rulers of the death have pillaged and oppressed the poor. It is time to deliver them from their miserable slavery. It is time to open their eyes everywhere and make them know the truth of things.”

***

There are some curious similarities between the approach taken by people like Dawkins and Hitchens and that of the Soviets a few generations back. It was the Soviets, after all, who set up museums of atheism in old eastern orthodox churches in an effort to undermine organized religion, and it’s clear that today’s secular spokespeople would do the same if they could get away with it. While the aims of today’s atheists are both more moderate and more moderating than those of their Soviet predecessors, they share the same basic conceit in thinking that if they accumulated enough evidence of organized religion’s misdeeds the faithful would eventually awaken and realize the error of their ways. But nobody will exchange something for nothing, even if that something is demonstrably flawed.

That’s where Jean Meslier ought to come in. For all the good work that professional atheists have done in highlighting the flaws of organized religion, they have done almost nothing to present an affirmative case for atheism. According to Michel Onfray, a French scholar who has worked diligently to revive Meslier’s legacy, he didn’t write his manifesto in the hopes of destroying Christianity but instead of replacing it. “Atheism does not constitute an end in itself but a beginning, a necessary base, an ethical foundation. Meslier negates the principle of God in order to arrive at a caring morality of a joyful body, of happy existence, of peaceful relations between beings and between sexes.”

Atheists, of course, are no more a monolith than any other cultural or religious group, but they do share some common beliefs. They respect the rights of individuals, freedom of thought and inquiry, the equality of all people, and an appreciation of natural and man-made wonders. Atheists don’t discriminate, they don’t withhold rights from particular groups, they don’t fear scientific progress and the frequently baffling explanations of the world it provides, they don’t wish for the end of the world, and they don’t insist upon imposing feelings of guilt and failure onto the thoughts and actions of others. Perhaps most importantly, atheists are engaged in the one life that they’re given rather than simply enduring it in anticipation of something better to come.

Meslier articulated all of this in his manifesto almost 300 years ago. His philosophy of “social hedonism,” Michel Onfray writes, “proposes the happiness of all and of each individual. Not an ideal happiness, but a real one, concrete, pragmatic: to work, by which people can eat healthfully and sufficiently all the time, live and sleep in a decent and heated house, be nourished, be clothed, have the means to educate their children, and be cared for in illness.”

Most atheists would resist the term, but it’s tempting all the same to describe Meslier as a prophet. In the same way that Jesus Christ’s apostles articulated the values and beliefs that form the foundation of contemporary Christianity, so too does Meslier’s manifesto serve as a template for all atheist thought that has followed. And like Christ himself, Meslier serves as a role model for those who share his beliefs, his life an example of how to be good and decent in a world that often isn’t. The key difference, of course, was that Meslier was completely, and contentedly, of this world.

Maybe that’s why Meslier continues to languish in obscurity. Atheists aren’t prone to idolatry, after all, and the idea of placing someone at the spiritual forefront of the movement would be anathema to many of them. Still, maybe it’s time for them – for us – to take a different approach, given the pitiful returns of our efforts so far.  In a world where atheism ought to be making significant cultural inroads, it is instead barely able to hold its own. The odds of an openly atheist candidate getting elected to the highest office in the land in North America are about the same as those of an openly gay communist with a penchant for flag burning. With that in mind, maybe it’s time we found somebody to worship, to lead by example, to serve as an archetype for everything that’s good and decent about the non-religious life. I can’t think of a better candidate than Jean Meslier.

.

Edmonton – November 9, 2011 – 2,782 words

When I travelled through eastern/south-eastern Europe in the 1980s – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period .  But I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

Well, I have since been corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But their racial/ethnic origins change with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed the Slavic side in favour of its Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. I also noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.)  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than I remembered.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to again meet people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.)

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14^th century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields.

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning tv, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

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.”

by rob mclennan

George Stanley was born into an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco in 1934.  He attended Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School, where he read Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry and to drink. The Jesuits also dispelled some of the fear of sin and hell laid on him by the nuns in grammar school.

In 1952-53 he attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. San Francisco had been for him a city of parishes; he had rarely been north of California Street. It was in Salt Lake City that he first encountered a Bohemian milieu, which consisted, he says, of anyone who was not a Mormon.

In 1953, back in San Francisco and broke, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, in order to escape family and psychiatrist. After his discharge in 1956, he returned to San Francisco, and spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley. One Saturday night in February, 1957, seeking the real Bohemia, he wandered up Grant Avenue to a bar called “The Place”, and there met Jack Spicer. He showed Spicer a poem, “Pablito at the Corrida,” and Spicer invited him to join his Magic Workshop, which he had just begun teaching at the San Francisco Public Library.  There Stanley met Robert Duncan. Spicer and Duncan became his mentors. In San Francisco he also met Stan Persky, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, and others.

In 1960-61, Stanley lived in New York, where he met LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Joel Oppenheimer. After he returned to San Francisco, he attended San Francisco State College. There he met James Liddy, visiting from Ireland, who introduced him to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and this meeting led him back to his Irish heritage.

In 1971, following Blaser and Persky, he moved to Vancouver, not so much fleeing the Vietnam War, but because, for him, the real San Francisco had died.  He thought of Vancouver as just another West Coast city, not another country, and indeed the distinction is historically blurred. He worked at temporary jobs in bookstores and warehouses until, in 1976, through Persky, he was hired to teach English at Northwest Community College in Terrace, 500 miles north of Vancouver. It was in Terrace that he discovered that he was living in Canada. He lived in Terrace for fifteen years. Terrace, he says, was his second Rome.

In the ’90s he returned to Vancouver, taught for eleven more years at Capilano College, and then decided to retire because, as he puts it, the students and he were no longer taking each other seriously.

1 – How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook (The Love Root, White Rabbit 1958) was ephemeral. Just a few pages of mostly pretentious verse – i don’t even have a copy of it any more. It was the second chapbook (Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders, White Rabbit 1963) and the third (Flowers, White Rabbit 1965) that immediately gave me a readership in San Francisco and beyond, and were a mark of my recognition as a poet by the older poets (Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan), as well as by Joe Dunn and Graham Mackintosh, the principals in White Rabbit Press.

My most recent work (“After Desire” [The Capilano Review  3.14] ) is intensely personal. This marks a shift from much of the poetry I had been writing over the previous three decades, where my aim was to understand the world — in particular, how capitalism works, first in Terrace BC (“Gentle Northern Summer”), where being so new to the community I could see it more objectively, with less distortion than familiarity would have brought. Later I wrote poems (“San Francisco’s Gone”) to understand the history of the city and of my family, especially my parents, who were both born there.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

In third year high school (grade 11) my English teacher required all his students to write poems.  At the end of the term he took three of us aside — me, my friend Manuel, and a boy named John.  He told the three of us that we had talent as poets. (Actually only two of us had talent; Manuel was writing John’s poems for money.)

More than once I have tried fiction but could not master the middle ground, middle distance.  For me everything was either cosmic or closeup.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

All (or most of) the above.

Sometimes I’m not aware I’ve even started a poem; it’s just a phrase in a notebook that starts something a week or more later.  In fact, I think this is what usually happens.  And when I set down a few lines (or maybe paragraphs — prose poetry) what results may be a single poem but quite often it’s the first section of a serial poem.

Once I know I’ve got going on a poem I usually stick with it, and if it’s a serial poem I may be writing for several months (e.g., the first draft of “After Desire,” May ’07 – January ’08).  And the writing may go fast or slow but the idea stays in my mind.

First drafts can persist through a lot of minor revisions — or the poem can get longer or shorter.  Once in a while a poem is sheer dictation.  I was having lunch at the Pink Panther cafe in Veracruz when a poem (“Veracruz”) began to unreel in my mind.  I finished lunch, walked back to my hotel, and wrote it down.  There were just a few very minor changes later.

However, after all the drafts and revisions the poem may turn out to be crap, and nothing can be done because all the variations that might have saved it have already been tried and rejected.

4 – Where doe a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I used to write when traveling, mainly because I thought I had to — I expected it of myself.  I wrote on planes — to objectify the flight, so I could pretend it was only happening in my mind.  I wrote a lot of Vancouver: A Poem on public transit.  Now I write mostly at home — afternoons.

There’s always an overarching concept of a “book,” but also I sort of take it for granted that all the poems I’ve written over a particular period belong together and on that basis I give them a title.  (Or my publisher, Rolf Maurer of New Star Books, gives the book a title, e.g., At Andy’s.) 

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing readings, especially when I have a new poem to read.

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

What qualifies as theoretical concerns?  Perhaps a belief in inspiration, the Muse, or as Spicer called it, “dictation” — that the poem comes from “outside” — at least outside the person’s conscious intentions.

I don’t have any questions prior to the poem, but a question can arise in the writing, as to what the poem is “saying.”  Sometimes I have to think that through — help the poem come through.  Other times just leave it unclear.

I don’t attach any meaning to “the current questions.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

When poets refer to public issues (politics, science, etc.) they have the same responsibility to truth as other writers.

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Apart from suggestions that my publisher might make about the overall organization of a book, no one but me edits my poems.

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Cheat at this game.” – Joe Dunn.

10 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

If I’m writing, I write in the afternoon.  I start a typical day by checking my e-mail, the weather and news, then I usually read till noon.

11 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

If it’s stalled, I put it aside, and then very likely I don’t write for while.  But sometimes a poem, even if it hasn’t gotten anywhere, stays in my mind as an idea and I may take it up again even years later.  I don’t look for inspiration.

12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?

Not a fragrance, but a kind of day.  It’s cool, the air is slightly misty, the sky is white (it’s never as foggy in Vancouver as it is in the western districts of San Francisco where I grew up).

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My poems are seldom influenced by other art forms, and not so much by books either.  The content of my work comes from life — my own personal experience and what I observe in the world.

14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I don’t want to list direct influences — there are too many; however, there are some poets I think of as my patron saints or tutelary figures: Yeats, Baudelaire, Akhmatova.

Two Canadian poets have been especially important to me: Margaret Avison, for her magnanimous vision of the city; John Newlove, for the way he thinks in the poem.

Maybe the most important book I ever read, “for my life,” was Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, which freed me from the idea that the Freudian stages of child development were deterministic; there was some freedom.  (“Man has but a little freedom; let him use it.” – St. Augustine.)

15 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

There are things I would like to have done, like fathering a child or learning to speak another language fluently (I envy my brother’s Spanish).  And there are things I would like not to have done, like joining the U.S. Army (I should have just left home).  But there’s nothing else non-trivial I would like to do now.

16 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, my occupation was actually that of teacher.  But what I really wanted to be is a writer.  (“Poets are writers who don’t write” – Jean Cocteau.)

17 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

In 1956, after being discharged from the U.S. Army, I went back to school (University of California, Berkeley).  In the spring of 1957 I met Jack Spicer in a bar in North Beach.  A week or so later I showed him one of my poems (“Pablito at the Corrida”), and he invited me to join the Magic Workshop he was conducting at the S.F. Public Library.  There I met Robert Duncan, and others.  I wrote several more poems for the workshop (the poems in the chapbook Flowers) and they were well received.

What had happened was that for the first time elders (not that much elder, but they spoke with authority) had recognized something I had done as being of some value.

In the summer of 1957 I moved out of my parents’ home and into a hotel room on Broadway, in North Beach.  Life for me was then hanging out at the bars with Spicer and other poets.

In the fall I returned to Berkeley, signed up for a full program of courses, bought all my textbooks, and walked down to Shattuck Avenue to get the “F” train back to San Francisco.  I went into a coffee shop, ordered a coffee, and thought about what I was doing.

After about a half hour I left the coffee shop, walked back to the university, returned the textbooks, and withdrew from my courses. Then I took the train back to North Beach.

That isn’t the whole story.  I had sexual issues I could deal with more easily in North Beach than in Berkeley.  But it is the answer to why I chose to be a poet rather than get a B.A. — at that time. (I returned to college eleven years later.)

18 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.

The Blue Angel.

19 – What are you currently working on?

A new book of poems, the first part of which will be “After Desire.”  I hope to finish it by 2013.

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

http://robmclennansindex.blogspot.com/2009/06/12-or-20-questions-second-series.html

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

When I travelled in the 1980s through eastern/south-eastern Europe – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period – but I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, and hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

Well, I have since stood corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But as for their racial/ethnic origins, the account changes with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed Slavic for Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. (I noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than usual.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to meet again people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.)

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite or Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart-pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14th-century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour  with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand-strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields.

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning television, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

3071 words, 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

September 2011: my umpteenth visit to Belgrade since 1982. That first one, launched from Greece where I was spending the winter, was focused on getting to know the boyfriend, and his family, of a Yugoslav-Canadian friend back in Edmonton. Our lingua franca in Belgrade was French – the boyfriend and his sister had elected to study it and not English. With those in Belgrade who spoke neither French nor English, I cobbled together – and still do – a Slavonic mishmash, hoping for the best. Eventually, I would catch on to the particularities of Serbian – for example, the word for “head” which in Ukrainian is holova becomes glava in Serbian. Change the “h” sound to the “g” sound and drop half the vowels, and voila! You too can speak Serbian.

Back in 1982, the language was called Serbo-Croatian. That’s what my 20-year-old pocket dictionary calls it (and it is represented on the cover by the Yugoslav flag) but all that was before the blood-letting, and the rhetorical hysteria which preceded it, tore Yugoslavia apart in the vicious wars of the 1990s. Now, it appears, there are 4 languages where once there was one: Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and (the latest entrant), Montenegrin. According to an informant in Belgrade, the Montenegrin government secured two linguists who, after due diligence, discovered that the language spoken in their part of ex-Yugoslavia has two additional letters not included in any other language-previously-called-Serbo-Croatian. “Of course,” said my informant, a writer and publisher, “no one knows how to pronounce these letters: they seem to have appeared by some sort of Divine Revelation.”

In March 1982, a mild season as I recall, Miki the boyfriend in Belgrade took me on my first stroll through the great urban park, Kalemegdan, which now surrounds the Turkish-era fortress on top of the promontory overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers. (Not so long ago, ruined bridges bombed by NATO in 1999 cluttered up the waterways but all that is now removed along with any mention of it – no hard feelings? Or just political pragmatism? – and a beautiful new bridge suspended from a web of steel filaments soars in a graceful arc over the Sava.)  From one of the peddlers in the park Miki bought me a red heart on a string, fashioned from dough (I still have it). At the end of my visit in Belgrade he asked me to take back to Edmonton an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Nena. And that is how I came to be deeply entwined within their two families to this day.(Much of my subsequent travel in the Balkans and east central Europe is narrated in my books, Bloodlines: A Journey to Eastern Europe, The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir and Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.)

So, my umpteenth trip. I’ve seen the Belgrade of late-flowering Titoism, of nascent Serbian nationalism and its attendant cultural, moral and spiritual cruelties, of the wars, of the end of the wars and of Milosevic, of the resistance of civil society, and now of Belgrade the European aspirant with its subcultures of corruption, the black market, sex trafficking and Porsches parked outside Giorgio Armani shops while the percentage who are unemployed or living in poverty or eking out their old age on a small pension keeps growing.

But this is also the Belgrade of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence (which is hosting a Balkan Security Forum this week), of bookshops stuffed with books including an impressive number of translated titles, of chamber concerts in the basement of one of the oldest houses in the city’s oldest street, of the active 16^th century mosque in Stari Grad, “Old City,” of experimental theatre and galleries of modern art, and of cafes where coffee still means Turkish coffee….

Belgrade in September is the venue of the International PEN Congress (under the presidency of John Ralston Saul), which is why I’m here, not as a delegate but as a participant in the parallel literary festival (paid my own way). Festivities opened with a launch of the Serbian translation of Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, and Saul’s feisty lecture to a packed crowd in the auditorium of the downtown Cultural Centre: his verbal assault on “management” was received with particular enthusiasm.

Two nights later it was my turn – I shared the bill with three other writers, from Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark – in the reputedly hot, new cultural venue known as GRAD (“city”) which is located , I was told by way of directions, under a bridge. It took me some time to find it in the dubious neighbourhood of rail tracks, emptied-out warehouses and erotic shops all lit murkily in the deepening dusk but there it was, indeed under a bridge not a stone’s throw from where the Sava was slapping quietly in the dark. I arrived 15 minutes late but I had missed nothing. Not counting the people who had to be there – Mladen from the Ministry of Culture who was MCing, Olgica from the Canadian Embassy, two young PEN volunteers and we four writer-readers – there were two audience members.

Except for my reading – an excerpt from Prodigal Daughter – and the poems of the Slovenian poet, the entire evening proceeded in Serbian. (Even the Danish writer, a linguist, has had a book translated into Serbian and could read from it herself, something about the matriarchal cultural context of the figure of Artemis at Ephesus.) So I am at a loss what to tell you about what was being said and read.

The next night I was in Novi Sad, a charming, multicultural city (Serbian, Hungarian and German) an hour north of Belgrade on the Danube (and a NATO target too in 1999, for its bridges and oil refineries). I was on the stage with 17 other PEN writers (only two of us were women and the youngest writer was perhaps in his 50s: where are the women and the young?) Three were Egyptian, three were Greek, the Slovene and the Croatian were there again, as were an Israeli, a Kosovar, a Bangladeshi, and the venerable and enfeebled Gyorgy Konrad, veteran Hungarian writer and conscience of dissent. There was a full house in attendance (it helped that there were two busloads of us from Belgrade), and I received an appreciative chuckle or two in response to my reading (I chose an amusing anecdote from a conversation with a Serbian Orthodox priest-theologian) so I knew there were some English-speakers out there but the untranslated readings in Hungarian and Albanian remained unfortunately completely obscure.

One afternoon I invited fellow Canadian scribbler Charlie Foran (recently-installed president of the PEN Canada Centre) to wander around “my” Belgrade with me as I revisited places and streets that I find evocative. We began at the head of the “walking street,” ulica Kneza Mihaila (Prince Michael Street), a superbly-successful because enormously-popular and beautifully-restored street lined with shops, cafes and galleries; but what I pointed out was the second-floor windows of the old Press Club restaurant in the City of Belgrade’s Cultural Centre, where I had stood in 1984.

I was at lunch with a professor involved in the teaching of Canadian Literature (the now-retired Dr Ileana Cura, still reading Alice Munro) when suddenly a great blast of siren from the street interrupted our conversation. “Go to the window and have a look out,” she said. What I saw was a streetscape of Belgradians stopped frozen in their tracks. It had happened this way every year since 1980, the year of Tito’s death, and at the exact day and time of his death, 4 May, 3:05 pm: the great blast of siren, the frozen gait, the minute of silence. Within a few years as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, all mention, representation and commemoration of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, “father” of Yugoslavia,  disappeared in Belgrade– his photographs from offices, his name from streets, his birthday, uncelebrated – to be replaced in public awareness by the names of kings, queens, princes and princesses, patriarchs of the Orthodox Church and now that perennial favorite of the depoliticized public space, the scientist Nicola Tesla.

However, in the Belgrade City Gift Shop on the ground floor under the Press Club – as I showed Charlie – one can now buy Tito’s Cookbook, souvenir photographs of Tito and a glass paper weight with his image inscribed. And just outside on the street, at kiosks selling postcards, newspapers and cigarettes, I have seen buttons for sale brandishing his image alongside those of Che Guevara and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia who died while on trial as a war criminal at The Hague.

Next stop: Dom Omladine, or House of Youth, by its very title a leftover of socialist Yugoslavism but unashamed of it. In 1988 it had still been the epicentre of youthful counterculture – commemorating the heady days of protest in June 1968 known as The June Days when students accused Tito and the Party of having become a “Red bourgeoisie” – and in 1991 it had been the collection point for European youth activists descending from their “peace buses” in support of local anti-war actions. (By 1995 these had included Women in Black, lesbian groups, some media, intellectual circles in the universities, the artists at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Open Society supported by the Soros Foundation, among others.) In 2001 Dom Omladine had retooled itself again, described in Prodigal Daughter as a café bar with sleek furniture and track lights with a billiard club up the stairs. Now, as Charlie and I stood in its front lobby, these too have disappeared to be replaced by a bank of computers and a banner announcing this as a Europe Information Centre.

Upstairs in this building the alternative radio station B-92, which had never not once slackened in its in-your-face cultural and political programming during the era of yawping nationalism and grievous war, has been bought by a Greek media company and moved to chic headquarters across the river in New Belgrade, its programming  under redesign as we speak.

Next stop: 7 Francuzska Street, home of the venerable Serbian Writers Association from which dissident writers had split in the 1990s, leaving – according to one account – only an aging coterie of writers who feel nostalgic for the good old days, by which they mean the days of Yugoslavia, conveniently maintaining a silence about their own role in aiding and abetting the Serbian nationalism of politicians that led directly to war. Three years ago, the back garden of the building was under reconstruction; now Charlie and I stopped for ice coffee under an enormous umbrella in the shade of plane trees – very elegant, and an enterprise of some private company that pays the Writers Association to lease the space.

We walked one street over into Skadarlije, the curvy and cobble-stoned street that leads through a vintage neighobourhood still associated with the bohemians who used to be its denizens – artists, writers, actors, musicians-  and turned into Gospodar Jevremova Street where we came across the 19^th-century home of the celebrated Pavlovic family and a City of Belgrade cultural monument. The current Pavlovic – 7^th generation – opened the gate and in we walked into a lovely garden with fig and quince trees and a fountain, into the world of privilege unbuffeted by war, strife and want but also a world of accomplishment in diplomacy, visual art and literature. As Charlie commented, the main message from our host seemed to be: “We also are Europeans, we who have picked up the ropes of civilization broken by Communism and nationalism, and kept the faith with the West.” Well, good luck to them, who live up the street from the mosque where a group of young men sat in its forecourt and eyed us suspiciously.

Finally, we walked past leafy and elegant Student Square which had been occupied by protestors in June 1968 who had spilled out from the Faculty of Philosophy across the street, and into Plato Bookstore, once a chaos of books, journals and office supplies but now nicely rearranged a la Ikea.