1989

1989

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Mandated curriculum

 

English 12 First Peoples

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Response to curriculum draft

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

CanLit Education Coordinator

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Better resources/working with other organizations:

 

Library and Archives Canada/CanLit Educators’ Database

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Can you see why I’m a little frustrated?

 

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

 

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

Thx  for your attention.

 

George replied:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

http://nationalreadingcampaign.ca/

End of Lecture, and back to the Bookers.

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

 

Sybille Bedford Jigsaw: an unsentimental education VPL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose Tremain—Restoration VPL

Guest report from Michael Matthews:

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Atwood—Cat’s Eye GB collection

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

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

John Banville—The Book of Evidence VPL

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Doesni” is part of the brogue.

 

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

 

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

 

Kazuo Shiguro—The Remains of the Day VPL Winner

Guest report by Colin Browne:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

1989 David Lodge from the Guardian

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

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

 

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

 

What To Do With the Writers’ Union of Canada

About a decade ago, at the end of a particularly stultifying Annual General Meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada, I suggested to a fairly large group of members that the organization should disband itself.

My suggestion was greeted with stony glares, but I hadn’t made it simply to be a smartass. I’d been thinking about the Union’s growing futility for some time. It was mired at the time in a longstanding wrangle over the need to represent and be represented by minority writers that couldn’t be resolved without abrogating the most fundamental tenets of egalitarian democracy, and it was leaning, it seemed to me, the wrong way on nearly every issue it faced in its attempts to be more inclusive and comforting to the sensitivities of writers who were feeling victimized. I was also wondering why what had been, just a few years before, a prestigious and effective organization that got things done and partied hard, was increasingly being ignored by governments and internally, and internally seemed more interested in dental plans for its members than in human rights, the conditions of culture in a rapidly marketizing world or good writing and excellence in publishing.

It struck me, during that AGM, that the participants were, well, getting long in the tooth. To test this, I made a windscreen survey of the people there, and discovered that there was just one female there in child-bearing condition—and no males with detectable—or relevant—sperm counts. The Writer’s Union of Canada had, to be blunt, gotten old. Its staleness, therefore, wasn’t just accidental: it was turning into the Canadian Authors Association. The CAA, started in 1924, was Canada’s initial organization for writers. But over the years, it had devolved into a group of ascot-wearing pensioners most interested in afternoon gin-and-tonics and giving overly-encouraging advice to career amateurs.

When I thought it all through, these devolutions seemed both logical and natural: most organizations emerge as a response to specific conditions and remain relevant and vital only as long as their issues remain current. The Canadian Authors Association emerged in an era when Canadians who wrote books were the cultural equivalent of unicorns. Canadians who wrote books were either oddball professors or scions of wealthy families who’d decided that a Canadian might just be capable of writing a real book. So they wrote and published some books, usually to overwhelming indifference from Canadian readers. But they persisted, and eventually succeeded in bringing Canadian authors a small degree of prestige, and Canadian books to the edge of cultural consciousness.

The Writers Union of Canada emerged from the consciousness of the 1960s, when a few far-sighted Canadian politicians began to recognize that if Canada was going to remain a sovereign and viable country, we’d have to defend ourselves culturally against the avalanche of American media, and politically against both Soviet and American imperialisms. Thus they set out to create, without much cost or fanfare, the conditions for a confident national identity. They set up subsidies, at first tentatively, to nurture a whole range of indigenous artistic activities, including a publishing industry that would be able to publish more than the Farley Mowats and Hugh McLennans, and do it in the locales in which the new writers lived and worked.

The Writers Union, according to legend, emerged from an Ontario Royal Commission on culture in 1971 that didn’t see any need to talk to any of Canada’s writers.  A few insulted writers—including longtime Dooney’s Café patron Ian Adams, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood and June Callwood, met in a Yorkville bar after Farley Mowat organized them to appear before the Commission, and their barroom grumblings set the stage for what was to become the Writers’ Union of Canada.  The Union was founded formally in Ottawa in November 1973, with Marian Engel as the chair.  The organization’s mandate, whether we now like to admit it or not, was to co-operate with and lobby the (mostly Federal) programs aimed at building a viable national culture. This was no small matter. In the years that followed, the arts were a major contributor in building a politically strong identity for Canada. Canadians gained a self-conscious sense of the country’s worth, a vibrant if sometimes amateurish scene blossomed across the arts, and some very good books were published in Canada by Canadian writers and their Canadian publishers. Until about 1990, both the Union and the federal cultural subsidy programs were, in other words, wildly successful.

The precise point at which the game began to change and the Union’s decline set in was, I think, the 1988 federal election. The lynchpin was the Canada/U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The Union and its members campaigned vigorously if ultimately unsuccessfully against the Agreement, focusing partly on preventing the Agreement from going forward, but also, and with some success, on getting cultural exemptions enshrined in the proposed Agreement should it go ahead.

Conservative Brian Mulroney won the election when NDP leader Ed Broadbent opportunistically decided it was more important to attack the sincere but slue-footed Liberal leader John Turner—who had traveled around the country listening to enough cultural lobbies that he understood what was truly at issue in the election—than to prevent Mulroney from imposing IMF trade rules and market values on Canada. NAFTA followed, coming into force in 1994, and cultural organizations have been fighting rear guard actions ever since, defending a decaying status quo that wasn’t good enough in the first place.

The Union was a less effective lobby in the NAFTA runup, and seemed not to notice at all when, around the same time, market-modeled Chapters and then Indigo began the WalMarting of Canada’s independent bookstores into oblivion. The Union’s membership had always been overwhelmingly white and middle-class and now came under attack by its few visible-minority members for being insufficiently multicultural. The Union had no answer to the attacks except to squirm uncomfortably and to start membership drives that would attract minority writers. Unfortunately, its membership rolls seemed to swell mainly with childless but sensibly-dressed children’s authors, and I found myself helplessly referring to the Union as the “Writhers’ Union”—and losing interest.

This is not to suggest that the Union has been useless since 1994. It has done excellent work on aspects of copyright and contract law, and on other issues that I confess didn’t capture my imagination. But its organizational psychology has remained constant: it is an organization designed to cooperate with governments on intellectual and artistic expansion in an era where very few governments see any of the things writers do as more than a small and slightly irritating industrial activity connected with entertainment and tourism that would be better left to sink or swim in the currents of the global economy.

Eventually, I found myself muttering about banning polyester leisure suits, instituting mandatory drunkenness at the AGM banquets, and finally, I made the suggestion that the Union might want to disband itself. I ended up disbanding my own active membership instead.

I attended several events at this year’s Writers’ Union AGM, mainly because I was hosting some friends who’d flown out from Northern B.C. to attend.  One of the events I attended was a panel on “The New Realities in Publishing” which featured, longtime editor Anne Collins, Owen Sound bookseller Charlotte Stein, and Michael Tamblyn formerly of BookNet, now Executive Vice President of Content, Sales & Merchandising for Kobo, which is the proprietary electronic reader fronted by Chapters/Indigo.

Collins was charming and articulate about the difficulties book publishers are currently facing without being particularly forthcoming; the likeable Stein, who operates in a town with an area population of about 35-40,000 and has to face competition from Indigo, was extremely candid about the conditions of bookselling (dire), almost pleading for writers to support independents, and she was pointedly clear about how many booksellers we’re losing and what it means. Neither directly mentioned what Gordon Lockheed has called the 800 pound gorilla who sits in on every discussion of literary culture in Canada, and no one in the audience seemed to be aware of its presence. Then Tamblyn got up and slung a plethora of optimistic generalities about the inevitability of electronic readers. Not a single writer present asked a question about how writers incomes will be affected by 10 percent royalties on $3.99 electronic downloads of their books, why the royalty schedule has remained intact even though the overhead ratios have been radically altered, or why the download portals deserve 30-50 percent of the take when all a portal requires to serve the entire continent is a one-room bank of servers somewhere in the U.S. and a PayPal apparatus.

In a brief conversation with a younger writer after the panel, I was asked which aboriginal tribe I was a member of—I suspect because I was wearing a medallion based on a Joe David buquis mask I’ve owned for 35 years, and because my white hair makes me look a little like Chief Dan George. I made a mental note to get a haircut, pointed out my blue eyes to the younger writer, explained that the medallion was designed to ward off childrens’ authors, and got the hell out of there before something worse happened.

But the next night I attended, out of respect, the Margaret Laurence lecture, given this year by founding member Graeme Gibson, a man I respect and like. The lecture went 40 minutes over its scheduled time, and Gibson, as always, managed to be modest and avuncular at the same time about the way we were, but had seemingly little perspective or useful advice for the future. There was supposed to be an hour of drinks and conversation after the lecture, but most of the attendees, already past their bedtimes, scuttled away immediately, and half an hour later only a few dozen diehards were left in the room. Not one of them, as far as I could see, was getting drunk or wanting to party.

So, what to do about the Writers’ Union?

It has become an elderly organization dominated by elderly writers (a perceptive ex-chair complained to me over dinner a few nights after the AGM ended that even though the Union has twice the number of members it had fifteen years ago, the same familiar faces and numbers show for the AGMs) and it has major structural and demographic problems. The Union’s constitution is part of its problem: those who serve on the national executive (particularly those who serve as chair) are given de facto emeritus status, and are, for all intents and purposes, grandfathered and put out to pasture, thus depriving the organization of both its intellectual credibility and prestige and a powerful portion of its natural leadership. The organization, meanwhile, remains loyal to its social democratic (or Trudeau Liberal) origins: almost by instinct it continues to seek liason with government, and distrusts publishers, who it treats as the exploiting class even though a more real danger to its individual members and their incomes lies with the 800 pound gorilla, Amazon.com and other high-discount wholesalers.

There’s a schizophrenia to this: Brian Mulroney’s ghost has writers hoping for the Big Global Score, and they hope against hope for it as they watch individual income and publishing opportunities open to writers dwindle as the collective pie shrinks and the market doors close. They’ve ingested the Koolaid of the Entrepreneurs, in other words.

When I suggested, a decade ago, that the Union disband itself, I’d argued that a new organization for writers would appear within six months, spearheaded by younger writers who could cherry-pick the best of their elders for advice they’d be free to ignore without disrespect. I imagined—or maybe just hoped—that such an organization would be more focused on the conditions of writing as a political and cultural-building activity and less interested, as the young can afford to be, on the welfare of the individual writers. (The Writers’ Trust, meanwhile, with its Woodcock Fund, would be there to bail out those who crash and burn).  I also suggested that writers needed to make an alliance with publishers, who the Union has always treated with distrust, and stop hoping that governments are going to be our friends.

Today, I see things only slightly differently. A decade ago I was just half serious about the Union disbanding itself. Now I’m 75 percent serious. But I’m officially elderly myself these days, so I’m obliged to be wiser and more polite. So here’s my carefully-phrased opinion about what the Writers’ Union of Canada should do with itself:

1.)    The Union needs to conduct an open debate on its constitution, to see where and if its goals are still relevant. The wisdom of pasturing out its leadership ought to be part of that discussion, as should be the tightening (or loosening) of membership requirements.

2.)    In the face of the electronic publishing onslaught, the Union needs to make an alliance with Canada’s book publishers and their associations with a redistribution of royalty incomes and discount structures at the top of the agenda. Gordon Lockheed, here, has suggested a Canadian download portal under the umbrella of the National Library, a schedule of download pricing that isn’t going to bankrupt publishers and/or end the editing of books as we know it, along with a program to format Canadian backlists for electronic sale.  I concur on most of these ideas, even if they’re fairly distant from practical reality as currently understood.

3.)    A wide-ranging and open discussion of the likely future of cultural subsidies needs to be undertaken, and a renewal of arguments for them is a crucial element of that discussion.

4.)    Finally, I think we’ve reached a state of things where the Writers’ Union of Canada needs to become a political organization again, one that vigorously raises and articulates the relationship between free speech, open cultural activity, the education of the public, and the necessary conditions for democracy—before all of these things disappear beneath the stifling blanket of the marketplace and its neoDarwinian fantasies.

2347 words,  June 6^th, 2011

1986

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Laurence

1966, A Jest of God

1974, The Diviners

Hugh MacLennan

1945, Two Solitudes

1948, The Precipice

1959, The Watch That Ends the Night

Brian Moore

1960, The Luck of Ginger Coffey

1975, The Great Victorian Collection

Alice Munroe

1968, Dance of the Happy Shades

1978, Who Do You Think You Are?

1986, The Progress of Love

Michael Ondaatje

1992, The English Patient

2000, Anil’s Ghost

2007, Divisadero

Nino Ricci

1990, Lives of Saints

2008, The Origin of Species

Mordecai Richler

1968, Cocksure

1971, St. Urbain’s Horseman

Guy Vanderhaeghe

1982, Man Descending

1996, The Englishman’s Boy

David Walker

1952, The Pillar

1953, Digby

Rudy Wiebe

1973, The Temptations of Big Bear

1994, The Discovery of Strangers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Bailey Gabriel’s Lament VPL

Category: Dysfunctional families, or British eccentricity

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

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

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

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

Kazuo Ishiguro An Artist of the Floating World VPL

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

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

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

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

Timothy Mo An Insular Possession UBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robertson Davies—What’s Bred in the Bone VPL

Another honking Victorian novel. Category: Canadian Gothic

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

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

From NYT Review of Books:

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

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

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

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

Kingsley Amis—The Old Devils VPL WINNER

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

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

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

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

From The Guardian 1986 Anthony Thwaite

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

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

3800 w. February 1st, 2011

The Snowflake from the Snow

1.

A man is riding on a bus across Turkey, more than a thousand kilometres, from Istanbul in the west, to Kars, a provincial city in the far northeastern corner of the country near the Armenian-Georgian borders. It’s wet and snowy. He’s a Turkish poet, in his early 40s, known as Ka, the acronym of his given and family names, Kerim Alakusoglu. For the past dozen years he’s lived in political exile in Frankfurt, Germany (“even though he had never been much of an activist”), but was permitted to return to Istanbul for his mother’s funeral, and now, a few days later, he’s on his way to Kars, ostensibly as a journalist sent to cover the municipal election (which the local Islamist party is poised to win) and to investigate a rash of mysterious teen suicides by what are known as “headscarf girls.” His editor in Istanbul also mentioned in passing that a former university classmate of Ka’s, the beautiful Ipek, divorced from her husband Muhtar, was living in Kars at the old family hotel, the Snow Palace, with her father and sister.

Three-quarters of the way across the country, Ka has to change buses at Erzurum for the local one to Kars. It begins to snow. “It was heavier and thicker than the snow he’d seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d paid more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was travelling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen from the start that he had set out on a journey that would change his life for ever.” The word for “snow” in Turkish, kar, can be seen as snugly nesting between the names of Ka and Kars; and perhaps even K., the protagonist of Kafka’s The Castle is lurking somewhere in the shadows of these alphabetical affinities. Ka might have turned back, says the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow (2002; translated into English by Maureen Freeley, 2004), which I re-read recently.

Instead, Ka is thinking only about the weather and poetry. “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the busdriver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him ‘the silence of snow’.” He sees the “snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind” not as portents of a blizzard, but as “a sign pointing back to the happiness and purity he had once known as a child,” as a memory of innocence that allows him to momentarily “believe himself at home in the world.” Ka, wrapped in an elegant charcoal-grey overcoat bought in Frankfurt, slips from revery into long-sought sleep.

While he dozes, the narrator, who is named “Orhan Pamuk,” takes a moment to quickly fill us in on Ka’s background. “But I don’t wish to deceive you,” says the narrator, “I’m an old friend of Ka’s and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.” With that, we’re on our way into a fairy tale for adults in which the snow never stops falling, into A Thousand and One Turkish Nights where the magic of the magic realism is real, into a book about politics, God, love, and poetry. Snow, by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, is also, I’m pretty certain, one of the great novels of the decade.

Once in snowbound Kars, after a night’s sleep at the Snow Palace, Ka notices on an early morning walk that the snow, “veiling as it did the dirt, mud and the darkness,” continues to speak to him of purity,

but after his first day in Kars, it no longer promised innocence. The snow here was tiring, irritating, terrorising. It had snowed all night. It continued snowing all morning, while Ka walked the streets playing the intrepid reporter — visiting coffee-houses packed with unemployed Kurds, interviewing the voters, taking notes — and later, when he climbed the steep and frozen streets to interview the former mayor, the governor’s assistant, and the families of the girls who committed suicide. But it no longer took him back to the snowy streets of his childhood… Instead, it spoke to him of hopelessness and misery.

In the poorest part of Kars, the Kaleati district,

The scenes he saw as he hurried under the ice-covered branches of the plane trees and the oleasters — the old, decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window, the thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators, the pack of dogs barking at every passer-by from a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge as snow fell into the half-frozen black waters of the river below, the thin ribbons of smoke rising out of the tiny shanty houses of Kaleati sitting lifeless under their blanket of snow — made him feel so sad that tears came to his eyes… These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.

Within a few pages, Pamuk has immersed us in a world that is at once like a children’s snowglobe, and yet simultaneously presents a grimly realistic panorama of the various contradictions and circumstances — secularism versus faith, ethnic minorities, poverty and backwardness, a society of surveillance, gossip and violence  — that engulf contemporary Turkey and beyond, the whole played out in a remote crossroads of the world’s troubles.

On that first morning in Kars, Ka checks in with his eastern Anatolian journalistic colleague, Serdar, editor of the Border City News (circulation: 320, most of which are government agency subscriptions). The journalist takes the poet through the snowy city, with its architectural vestiges of the Russian-Armenian-Ottoman past, for requisite visits to the police, the deputy governor, and the families of the dead girls. Kasim, the beer-bellied assistant chief of police offers Ka “protection” in the form of a plainclothes tail, which will be provided whether or not it’s wanted, and despite Ka’s protestation, “If Kars is a peaceful place, then I don’t need protection.” But, then, Kars is not a peaceful place; rather, it’s a nexus of suspicion where all strangers, and much of the citizenry, are under constant and mutual scrutiny. The deputy governor, “a squirrel-faced man with a brush mustache,” is primarily concerned with damage control in the presence of a journalist from Istanbul who might spread bad news about the suicide girls and make the local authorities look bad; or worse, news that might be picked up by the European press, thus further humiliating tension-ridden Turkey. Then there are the homes and families of the girls who committed suicide:

The two men were shown to old divans and crooked chairs in tiny, icy rooms, with bare earthen floors or cheap carpets. Sitting next to stoves that gave out no warmth unless stirred continuously or electric heaters that ran on illegal power lines, and silent televisions that no one ever turned off, they heard the never-ending woes of Kars…

Among those woes is the intractable and puzzling epidemic of self-murder, as suicide is known in some languages. The girls are inspired by the Islamic revival to don headscarves, but in secular Turkey, the authorities, backed by the ever-present spectre of the coup-prone army, ban the wearing of head coverings in public institutions, such as the schools the girls attend. Unaccountably, some of the girls kill themselves. But why? As declarations of belief, or for more mundane reasons, like boyfriend trouble? The government’s anti-suicide posters, proclaiming “Human beings are God’s masterpieces and suicide is blasphemy,” seconded even by the local Islamic establishment, appear to have little effect, and may only inflame the situation. It is a mystery unlikely to be solved, but one that ominously pulsates within the snow-blanketed city.

Back at the Snow Palace for a brief mid-day pause of warmth and rest in his room, Ka receives a message from Serdar to return to the newspaper office. Just as he’s about to exit the lobby,

he was stopped dead in his tracks; for just at that moment, coming through the doors behind the reception desk, was Ipek, even more beautiful than in Ka’s memory… His heart began to pound. Yes, exactly — that’s how beautiful she was. First they shook hands in the manner of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie, but after a moment’s hesitation they moved their heads forward, embracing without quite letting their bodies touch, and kissed on the cheeks. “I knew you were coming,” Ipek said as she stepped back.

All of this — the first morning’s walkabout in Kars, the initial forays into the themes of Pamuk’s novel, the encounter with Ipek (they agree to meet at a nearby pastry shop in an hour) –  is but a curtain-raiser to a plot of Byzantine complexity and velocity. It’s an  entangled narrative made more dense by the propensity of the characters to tell further tales, parables and premonitions of their own, and by the appearance of transcripts, manuscripts and descriptions of inspired poems. Finally, there’s the sub-textual principle of the text, a continuous suggestion of the half-hidden symmetry, or doubling of characters and events.

“Pamuk” the narrator turns out to be a kind of Doppelganger or mirror of Ka the poet, and is fated to retrace much of Ka’s own odyssey. Ka’s beloved Ipek has a refracting sister, Kadife; both of the sisters will turn out to be involved with an alleged Islamic terrorist who bears the curious moniker, “Blue”; Blue has a counterpart in a revolution-minded actor named Sunay; a fundamentalist student from the local religious high school, Necip, whom Ka shortly meets, has a best friend, Fazil, who is his psychological twin; and the mirror-like pairings extend to the novel’s horizons. Pamuk’s characters are persuasive as people, but they are also a schematic of possibilities. Yet the resultant pattern, woven as elaborately as a Turkish carpet, is surprisingly easy to follow in the hands of its skilled storyteller. As the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, one of many enthusiastic reviewers of Snow, aptly puts it, Pamuk is “narrating his country into being,” providing an “in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul.”

2.

Back at Serdar’s office, where his two sons are running off tomorrow’s edition on an ancient German press, Ka reads an item headed, “Night of Triumph for the Sunay Zaim Players at the National Theatre.” When Ka arrived in Kars the night before, he had briefly glimpsed, among the travellers waiting for their luggage, the faintly familiar faces of Sunay Zaim and his touring theatre company, formerly “leading lights of the revolutionary theatre world” back in the 1970s, now reduced to down-at-the-heels shows in the remote provinces.

But in Serdar’s Border City News, that night’s performance, which has yet to occur, is reviewed with lavish praise in a journalese of cliches and press release puffery. The show was received with “thunderous applause,” the paper reports. “The people of Kars, who have long been yearning for an artistic feast of this calibre were able to watch not just from the packed auditorium but from the surrounding houses,” thanks to Kars Border Television’s first live broadcast. The story describes the station’s “tireless” efforts to string cable from their transmission headquarters through the city’s snow-clogged streets to the theatre, and salutes the civic spirit of citizens who allowed the cable to pass through their open front windows into their apartments and out through their back gardens “to avoid snow damage.”

At the bottom of the item, the article records that the show “included republican vignettes, the most beautiful scenes from the most important works of the Western Enlightenment and… poems in praise of Ataturk and the nation. Ka, the celebrated poet, who is now visiting our city, recited his latest poem, entitled ‘Snow.’ The crowning event of the evening was a performance of My Fatherland or My Scarf, the Enlightenment masterwork from the early years of the republic, in a new interpretation entitled My Fatherland or My Headscarf.”

Ka looks up from the freshly-inked sheet. “I don’t have a poem called ‘Snow,’ and I’m not going to the theatre this evening. Your newspaper will look like it’s made a mistake,” he says.

“Don’t be so sure,” Serdar tells him. “There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens… You should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we’ve written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.”

The newspaper that reports on the future, and the clunky running of cables through people’s living rooms for the first live TV broadcast in Kars, is Pamuk’s neat bit of satiric (and oddly plausible) magic realism, both about the nature of the media and the quest for modernization. “I know you won’t want to stand in the way of our being modern,” Serdar adds, “you don’t want to break our hearts, and that is why I am sure you will write a poem called ‘Snow’ and then come to the theatre to read it.”

So, the story about to unfold will include a real theatre, and its real curtain is about to go up on the “former leading lights of the revolutionary theatre world,” except that their concern with be less with “revolutionary theatre,” and more with a revolution in a theatre. The famous gun that always hangs on the mantlepiece in the first act, will not only be fired in the last act, but will contain real bullets, and be aimed at the audience. By now we have enough of an idea of what’s in store for us, that a scene-by-scene reprise is unnecessary. The concluding symmetry that awaits us, one that we can anticipate and has already been prepared in the narrator’s opening remarks, will be the mirror-journey to Kars by “Orhan Pamuk” some four years later to gather the details of the story he’s telling.

Although there are frequent passing references to Turkish history, Pamuk doesn’t need to dwell on them, because he can take it that his Turkish readers will be familiar with details they absorbed in their tattered schoolbooks. For those of us outside such ingrained knowledge, about the only Wikipedia-level bit of potted history that’s helpful is the story of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the founder and first president of the modern Turkish republic that emerged from World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the approximately decade-and-a-half reign by Turkey’s most prominent former military leader-turned-politician something happened in Turkey that didn’t really occur in any of the neighbouring Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. Ataturk, who was familiar with the European democracies, emerged in his native land garbed in a Panama hat and suit rather than the traditional fez, rode in touring motorcars, and offered a thorough-going program of 20th century political, religious, economic and social modernization.

The program is wreathed in historical debate and details that need not detain us here, but its primary broad strokes included: the separation of mosque and state, with the secularism of the latter clearly predominant; the formal liberation of women; an attempt at multi-party, multi-ethnic democracy (albeit a democracy guaranteed by military force prepared to step in to prevent religious or tribal backsliding); and a sweeping array of social reforms. Ataturk even called in U.S. philosopher John Dewey in the early 1920s to help set up a modern educational system in Turkey. The Arabic script in which Turkish was written was changed to Latin letters.

The variable successes and failures of those efforts can be left to interested readers willing to pursue the topic. Rather, the point here is a recognition that the republic straddling the Bosphorous Straits that link the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara (and ultimately the Mediterranean) can claim legitimacy as a genuine gateway between East and West (as its romantic tourist advertising incessently proclaims). As Pamuk says elsewhere, in “In Kars and Frankfurt,” his acceptance speech in October 2005 for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association, “Of course there is an East-West question, and it is not simply a malicious formulation invented and imposed by the West,” even though “most of the time it carries an assumption that the poor countries of the East should defer to everything” proposed by the West. Rather, Pamuk insists, “The East-West question is about wealth and poverty and about peace.” In addressing his listeners, members of a European Union in which Turkey seeks membership, Pamuk reminds them that “those who believe in the European Union must see at once that the real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism. Either we have peace, or we have nationalism.”

By contrast, much of the rest of the region has retained or returned to many of its traditional institutions. Monarchic and/or authoritarian rule, religious sectarianism, patriarchal tribalism, theocracy and near civil war, replete with terrorism, continued to be the source of much of the turbulence in places like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the first decade of the present century. This is not to claim that Turkey is without a repressed history (of the Armenian genocide of World War I), or a history of repression (against the minority Kurds). The country of the mid- and late-1990s portrayed by Pamuk in Snow is tensely poised between its amibitions for membership in the European Union and its own Islamic “revival,” but its political and social strains are recognizably modern in ways that make nearby national entities appear entrapped in feudal backwardness, not withstanding their penchant for modernized technology, up to and including nuclear weapons. If the claim that Pamuk is “narrating his country into being” is a bit grandiose, his tour of the convoluted and divided national “soul” succeeds in making Turkey interesting far beyond the tourist attractions of beautiful, melancholy Istanbul.

In Kars, Ka falls in love, meets all the local Islamist politicos, imams, and on-the-lam terrorists, becomes inadvertently involved in a local revolution which occurs in the town theatre, and most important of all, is unexpectedly visited by his long-absent poetic muse and is impelled to write an extraordinary serial poem, whose structure is based on the shape of, what else?, a snowflake.

Snow is a book of conversions and apostasies. The thematic that I somehow missed in my first reading of Pamuk and found most poignant when I re-read it a few years later is the longing for God that afflicts so many of the characters in this snowstorm of a novel, including Ka himself. Of the dozen or more scenes in which spiritual yearning is thrashed out, Ka’s visit to Ipek’s ex-husband, Muhtar, epitomizes the lure of the Islamic revival, a subject not only central to Snow, but one that of necessity has become a preoccupation of the West in the present decade.

Ka, Ipek and Muhtar were all university classmates in Istanbul a dozen years before, in the early 1980s. Typical of their generation, Ka and Muhtar were secularists, aspiring poets, young Marxists. When Ka visits his former school acquaintance at the headquarters of the Prosperity Party in Kars, “now here was Muhtar running on the Islamic fundamentalist ticket” as its mayoral candidate, “something he would have found despicable ten years earlier…”

Muhtar relates the story of his conversion, how he was transformed from an unhappy, raki-inebriated, failed poet with a failed marriage, into a believer, through his fateful meetings with a local religious teacher, the Kurdish sheikh, Saadettin Efendi. “I was accepted into the group and taken into this bright and warm little house,” Muhtar recalls.

Inside, the people were nothing like the hopeless and downtrodden folk who populate Kars: they were happy… Something was happening that I had secretly dreaded for a long time and that in my atheist years I would have denounced as weakness and backwardness: I was returning to Islam… A feeling of peace spread through me. I had not felt that way for years and immediately understood that I could talk to [the sheikh] about anything, tell him all about my life. And he would bring me back to the path I had always believed in, deep down inside, even as an atheist: the road to God Almighty. Just the promise of salvation brought me joy.

Yet the conversions are attended by inevitable doubts. Already Ka hears “not serenity but disillusionment in Muhtar’s voice.” But the longing for meaning is mutual. Ka tells Muhtar, “I live a very solitary life in Germany. When I look over the rooftops of Frankfurt in the middle of the night, I sense that the world and my life are not without purpose. I hear all sorts of sounds inside me.” What sorts of sounds, Muhtar wants to know. “It may just have to do with fear of getting old and dying,” Ka says, then adds, “If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I’d say, ‘Snow reminds Ka of God.’ But I’m not sure that would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.”

“The religious right, this country’s Muslim conservatives . . .” Muhtar was speaking rapidly, as though willing himself to be carried away by a false hope. “After my years as a leftist atheist, these people come as such a great relief. You should go and meet them. I’m sure you’ll warm to them, too.”

Pamuk takes seriously the possibility of God as one of the paths to happiness, and “happiness,” that seemingly banal notion, is one of the recurrent, constant themes of Snow. For all its shopworn quality, the incessent desire for happiness is one of the dimensions that makes Pamuk’s novel a “large” work. Certainly, it’s a motivation for “love,” but in the tempest-tossed relationship Ka has with Ipek, the certainties of mutual possession and boundless happiness spill over just as suddenly into agonies of waiting, doubt, and intimations of betrayal.

If the belief in God or love resembles a storm that alternately rages and subsides, one source of happiness that at least leaves an artifactual remainder on the page is the poem. At one point, fairly early on in the story, Ka is in the town’s bleak railway station disputing theology with three boys from the religious high school. One of them, brasher than the others, sneers, “Mr. Poet, Mr. Ka, you’ve made no secret of the fact that you were once an atheist. Maybe you still are one. So tell us, who is it who makes the snow fall from the sky? What is the snow’s secret?”

For a moment they all looked across the empty concourse to watch the snow falling on the tracks.

What am I doing in this world? Ka asked himself. How miserable these snowflakes look from this perspective; how miserable my life is. A man lives his life, and then he falls apart and soon there is nothing left… Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself heart and soul to the melancholy course on which his life was set. His father had a certain smell after shaving, and this came back to him now. Then he thought of his mother making breakfast, her feet aching inside her slippers on the cold kitchen floor. He had a vision of a hairbrush; he remembered his mother giving him sugary pink syrup when he woke up coughing in the middle of the night; he felt the spoon in his mouth.

Notice there is no ellipsis between the gloomy ruminations in the middle of a seemingly inconsequential debate with the schoolboys and a sudden avalanche of childhood memories.

As he gave his mind over to all such little things that make up a life, as he thought how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake.

And so it was that Ka heard the call from deep inside him, the call he heard at moments of inspiration, the only sound that could make him happy: the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years, a poem was coming to him. Although he had yet to hear the words, he knew that it was already written… He told the three youths that he was in a hurry and left the deserted, filthy station. He hurried through the snow, thinking all the while of the poem he would write when he was back in the hotel.

Ka threw off his coat the moment he entered his room. He opened the green notebook he’d brought with him from Frankfurt and wrote down the poem as it came to him, word by word. It was as easy as following dictation whispered into his ear, but nevertheless he gave the words on the page his full attention…

The poem comprised many of the thoughts that had come to him in a rush a short while earlier: the falling snow, cemeteries, the black dog that had been frolicking happily around the station, an assortment of childhood memories, and the image that had lured him back to the hotel, Ipek –  how happy it made him just to imagine her face. But also how terrified! He called the poem “Snow.”

The prediction of Serdar, the publisher-editor of the Border City News, is fulfilled, and Ka will recite his poem at the theatre that evening. What’s more, in addition to recording extensive notes in his journal about what he saw in Kars, Ka will write 18 more interlinked poems in his green notebook that together add up to a book-length work bearing the name of its first poem. It’s the quest for that missing book that will provoke the narrator Orhan Pamuk’s own journey to Kars and Frankfurt, and eventuate in a novel about that search, titled Snow. Like Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis, a story about a story, Pamuk’s Snow is a novel about, amid much else, a book of poems called Snow.

In modern English-language poetry, the sort of interlinked poems that Ka writes in Kars was discovered or invented by the mid-20th century San Francisco poet Jack Spicer in his book After Lorca (1957). Spicer and his poet colleague Robin Blaser dubbed this form the “serial” poem, a form whose unit of composition is the “book” (using that word in a way slightly different from its conventional reference).

Distinguishable from the modern “epic” and other “long” verse forms, in the serial poem each poem stands on its own, and yet integrally connects to the other poems that make up the “book.” As Spicer once described it, “It’s as if you go into a room, a dark room, and the light is turned on for a minute, then it’s turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off.” Sometimes that succession of briefly lighted rooms becomes a house, or a book. Furthermore, as is the case with Ka’s Snow, Spicer conjoins to the serial poem an Orphic theory that the poem is transmitted, from an unknown outside source, by a process of “dictation.” The source of the poem, whether muse or Martians or whatever, of necessity makes use of the poet’s own biographical details, memories, and ideas (what Spicer called “the furniture in the room”), but the poem that eventuates is not an “expression” of the poet’s life so much as it is a message transmitted from “outside,” even if the outside is not outside ourselves, but is something more like our collective linguistic consciousness.

By happenstance, I was raised among poets, and perhaps it is the familiarity with the poetic process that I acquired there that so convinces me of the authenticity of Pamuk’s account of writing poems, which in turn tends to reinforce my trust of the other aspects of the novel, from its ambivalent politics to its recreation of the streets, buildings and people of distant Kars. Of the various books that have attempted to describe or include works of art, Pamuk’s Snow, among its other virtues, is perhaps the most accurate in its account of making art. It compares favourably to such novels as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (which includes an appendix of the poems referred to in the fiction) and to Joyce Cary’s persuasive description of making paintings in The Horse’s Mouth. In Snow, the act of writing the poems is described, as are their contents, and even theorised (by Ka) as being structured by the axes of a hexagonal snowflake. Of course, the poems never appear, but dissolve like those self-same snowflakes, serving as one of the powerful enticements that draw us into Pamuk’s snowy labyrinth of desire, spiritual yearning, politics, and art.

3.

Pamuk recurrently describes himself as a man “who shuts himself up in a room.” In his Nobel Prize speech of December 2006, “My Father’s Suitcase,” he says, “When I speak of writing, what first comes to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid the shadows, he builds a new world with words.” In “The Implied Author,” a talk given at an American university in spring 2006, Pamuk reiterates this image: “For thirty years I’ve spent an average of ten hours a day alone in a room, sitting at my desk.” He adds, “Literature does not allow such a writer to pretend to save the world; rather it gives him a chance to save the day. And all days are difficult. Days are especially difficult when you don’t do any writing. When you cannot do any writing. The point is to find enough hope to get through the day…” In any case, as Pamuk told his Nobel audience, “The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in a room with his books.”

However, Pamuk admits that “once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other’s people’s stories, other’s people’s books… the thing we call tradition.” Pamuk affirms literature “as the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself.” Societies flourish insofar as “they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.” The writer who shuts himself up in a room has the possibility of discovering “literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own.”

For English-language readers, Pamuk emerged from the room in which he had shut himself up only in the first decade of this century. Though he had written a half dozen novels since the early 1980s, it was only with his sixth novel, My Name Is Red (1999; translated into English, 2001), which won the 2003 Impac Dublin prize, that he achieved broader literary recognition. That was the impetus for further translations, honours, and life as a sometimes reluctant public figure which followed in quick succession. Snow, published in Turkey in 2002 where it was a 100,000-copy bestseller, was translated into English in 2004 to wide acclaim; in 2005 Pamuk was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association; Istanbul: Memories of a City appeared in 2005 in multiple translations, including English.

In the same year, 2005, Pamuk rather unwillingly became the focus of political debate when he was charged with uttering remarks, about the Armenian genocide and the situation of Turkish Kurdish people, that allegedly violated certain nationalist laws against insulting Turkey, charges that were eventually dropped on the eve of the trial, in the wake of international protest. The following year, 2006, Pamuk was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. There was, as often occurs with the Swedish Academy’s choices, some grumbling that Pamuk had been selected for political reasons. Sometimes, the complaints about the Nobel Prize winner are justified. But in this instance, the body of Pamuk’s work suggested that he was a worthy companion to such other 21st century Nobel recipients as Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul. In 2007, Pamuk published Other Colors, a volume of essays, talks and interviews that had been significantly expanded from an earlier volume of the same title that appeared in his native tongue in 1999; and a new novel, The Museum of Innocence, already published in Turkish, was slated for publication in English translation in 2009. Apart from his requisite but sporadic public appearances, Pamuk, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 2005, remains shut up in a room in a “flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul.” It also has within it one of the best observers of Istanbul, and points East and West.

The near-unanimous chorus of acclaim elicited by the publication of Pamuk’s Snow is such as to require some reprise of the book’s reception among English-language reviewers. John Updike immediately picked up on the novel’s abundance of “modernist tracer genes. Like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, it bares its inner gears of reconstituted memory and ends by promising its own composition.” Its setting echoes “the mountainous, debate-prone microcosm of Thomas Mann’s sanitorium in The Magic Mountain… Like Italo Calvino, Pamuk has a passion for pattern-making; he maps Kars as obsessively as Joyce did Dublin…” Updike presciently suggests that “Pamuk, young as he is [born in 1951], qualifies as [Turkey's] most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize… To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused… entirely contemporary in its settings and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.” (John Updike, “Anatolian Arabesques,” The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2004.)

Margaret Atwood, as noted, credits Pamuk with “narrating his country into being,” and also finds Snow “not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times.” She says, “Kars is finely drawn, in all its touching squalor, but its inhabitants resist ‘Orhan’s’ novelizing of them. One of them asks him to tell the reader not to believe anything he says about them, because ‘no one could understand us from so far away.’ This is a challenge to Pamuk and his considerable art, but it is also a challenge to us.” (Margaret Atwood, “Headscarves to Die For,” The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2004.) Veteran literary critic Richard Eder calls Pamuk “the great and almost irresistibly beguiling Turkish novelist.” The snow, he says, “is of surpassing beauty and hauntingly rendered. For Pamuk, beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors begotten by human passions and obstinate memory. Neither do the horrors diminish it.” (Richard Eder, “A Blizzard of Contradictions in Modern Turkey,” The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2004.)

Christian Caryl identifies Dostoyevsky as “the literary forebear whose spirit haunts this book most palpably… The Possessed, driven by moral quandaries posed by terrorism and political extremism is a particularly strong influence… Where Pamuk really excels in this novel is in the deftness with which he allows these forces to tug at one another.” Unsurprisingly, Pamuk is the author of the introduction to the Turkish translation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, which he declares to be “the greatest political novel of all time.” Says Caryl, “Pamuk the novelist illuminates his country’s quandaries of identity, and the crisis of confidence between Islam and the West, with an imaginative depth we had not known before.” (Christian Caryl, “The Schizophrenic Sufi,” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2005.)

One significant voice of dissent from the general praise bestowed on Pamuk is that of the self-professed “contrarian” critic Christopher Hitchens, who is suspicious of the search “for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East,” a role into which he sees Pamuk as being too-conveniently cast. Hitchens finds the novel’s characterizations “disappointing, precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of individuals,” the work as a whole “prolix and often clumsy,” and he’s not at all happy that “the author leaves no room for doubt that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous.” This last is a curiously skewed reading of Pamuk’s refusal to demonize the book’s religious characters. But at the time he was reviewing Snow, Hitchens was embroiled in an acrimonious debate regarding both Islamists and his own support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which might have warped his perception of other writers’ treatment of similar issues. (Christopher Hitchens, “Mind the Gap,” The Atlantic, October 2004.)

The occasional dissent aside, Snow was the novel that made readers ask what Pamuk calls “the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question: Why do you write?” In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pamuk replies,

I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey… I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else… I write to be happy.

Even the dissenting Hitchens grants that Pamuk’s Ka moves between “visions of snow in its macrocosmic form — the chilly and hostile masses — and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet.” It was Yeats, in “Among School Children,” who famously asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Among the lengthy list of reasons to write, Pamuk might add that he writes to distinguish the snowflake from the snow.

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Berlin, June 16, 2009