Robert J. Wiersema, The World More Full of Weeping

I'm an avowed fan of Rob Wiersema's novels, as I've said more than once. He's got the chops to write literary fiction, for whatever the hell that's worth, but clearly he'd rather write something that affects his readers. Before I Wake offered up an intimate portrait of a collapsing family, trying to stand around a seriously injured child; Bedtime Story blends high fantasy (swords! magic! arcana!) with a realist novel about a father's love for his damaged son; Walk Like a Man is a great mix of memoir with music commentary.

Now that I've read it a third time, I can say unequivocally that The World More Full of Weeping is one of my very favourite novels: technically it's a novella, shut up with your definitions already, seriously, shut up, but it does a great deal more with its 70 pages than I need a novel to do before I call it successful.

Brian Page, the 11-year-old son of recently divorced parents doing their best, is missing in the woods, and the whole town of Henderson's out looking for him. Thing is, he might not want to be found -- and he might not even be missing, at least not in the way the grown-ups understand the term. The novel's title is from the Yeats poem "The Stolen Child," which naturally means that we're in the realm of matters possibly mystical, but it also means that we're immersed in a natural world with an absolute claim on our attention.

Timothy Taylor, Blue Light Project

Conspiracies, media corruption, violence, and art: Timothy Taylor's impressively convoluted The Blue Light Project is a mature novel, and that's both a very good thing and a step up from his already celebrated previous work.

The thing is, as much as I enjoyed Taylor's Stanley Park, with its smart Vancouver-focused parody of locavore foodies and corporate restauranteurs and coffee culture, eventually I got to feeling it was a little under-polished. Great setup, great concept, but the satire started to feel too much like failed realism, and my enjoyment started to feel like homerism for a novel giving its readers an immersive experience of my home province.

That's not at all the case with Taylor's more recent novel. Although it takes around a hundred pages before enough of the pieces are in play for you to know where the novel will likely end up, The Blue Light Project is a cracker of a story. (Not that everybody liked it, mind you. And heck, some of the negative reviewers even preferred Stanley Park: madness, that.)

Whom do [people] trust? You can bet the list is short and there's not a powerful person on it. Our cattle are cloned. Our seeds are terminators. Our pipelines are full of blood. (p272)

Zane Grey, The Vanishing American

Imagine, if you will, a novel from the 1920s, set in the western half of North America. Imagine, more specifically, that it's set in First Nations territory. What are the options for your imaginary author? What's your author going to do with this place's Indians? Is there any chance of winning here?

It's important simply to recognize that there are options, first of all. I'm not necessarily going to recommend Bertrand Sinclair's move in The Inverted Pyramid (hide them! For God's sake, hide them!), but you don't have to go all Zane Grey about it.

Just finished reading my first Zane Grey #Western in probably two decades. "Oh, so THIS is why we need #decolonization...." Lordy.
— Richard (@rwpickard) April 26, 2013

Mind you ... some folks do loves them some Zane Grey. Some people even teach his novels. Much to my surprise, there isn't a single hit on Google for "goddamned Zane Grey" (or "goddamn" or even "god damn").

Bertrand Sinclair, The Inverted Pyramid

My paternal grandfather, whom I loved enormously, was wrong: every BC bookshelf needed not just the two crucial books he insisted upon (apocryphally, at least), but three. Alongside the galloping metre of the Collected Works of Robert Service and M. Wylie Blanchet's indeterminately fictionalized non-fiction Curve of Time, we should also have Bertrand Sinclair's 1924 glorious mess of a novel The Inverted Pyramid, newly republished by Ronsdale Press.

And make no mistake, this is in many ways a mess of a novel. On the formal side of things, for example, characters don't always engage in dialogue so much as deliver unto each other speeches, sometimes multi-paragraph speeches running to nearly a page in length. In line with the novel's handling of dialogue, Sinclair's characters tend toward the representative rather than the real, so to speak. Ideologically, it was at times hard for me to read over the noise of my subconscious shouting, "Where are all the First Nations people, and why do these long-ago Chilcotin warriors keep getting mentioned?"

But it's a product of the early 1920s, etc., both formally and politically. It's a message novel, and the message Sinclair is trying to deliver has something to do with the foundation myths of colonial British Columbia. As such, it's no surprise to see him using the formal conventions of the message novel and responding in kind to the politics in play immediately after the First World War.

In other words, I greatly enjoyed this messy old novel's impassioned denunciations of capitalist consumerism, industrialism, union-busting, and war. Sinclair develops a precise but sweeping attack on those who would start and prolong a war simply in order to make a profit, in effect killing others' children in order to buy more expensive toys; his critique of industrialist looting generally was to me a delight.

This, finally, is a version of British Columbia history that I can maybe identify with.

From anarchosyndicalism.net

Except that I can't, not really. The Norquay family attempts something utopian, but however well-intentioned, their ultimate success (such as it is) comes from environmental devastation inside an industrial-scale framework of social relations. Other paths to similar success could have been imagined for the Norquays, though Sinclair would've considered them less realist and hence less viable within his novel: revenge, basically, either judicially or through more underhanded means. Accordingly, I'm left wishing I couldn't remember just enough Ayn Rand to distrust the individualist honour system supported by Sinclair's moral schematic.

(Mind you, I'm also NOT able to remember enough Ayn Rand to be quite sure how Sinclair's ideas map onto hers. And I'm also NOT looking it up. Do yourself a favour, and remain similarly ignorant, okay? Nothing good has ever come from paying sustained attention to Ayn Rand.)

I found this flawed novel, such a product of its troubled times, to be utterly fascinating, particularly the chance to watch a novelist try to wed Wobbly-style sympathies with the worker (including a rousing rendition of the Marseillaise!), with something like a positive proto-Randian hero or Übermensch. Also a romantic plot, family values, and something like tree-hugging. Lots to love here, as well as to distrust and to mock self-validatingly.

In sum, Bertrand Sinclair belongs on a hell of a lot more BC bookshelves than he currently occupies! I'm now scheming ways to force the book club to take a run at one of his other novels....

Frances Greenslade, Shelter

Thank you, Bolen Books: sometime ago, as I was wandering your aisles, I noticed Frances Greenslade's novel Shelter. How a novel set in the BC interior of the early 1970s had escaped my attention, especially when it had been nominated for the BC Book Prize on its publication, I'll never know, but you set me straight, and I'm grateful to have found this entrancing slice of high-realist fiction.

Admittedly, I'm not the only one who missed Shelter, but this is SO my kind of novel that it just shouldn't have slipped past my radar.

Or is it my kind of fiction? After all, I found myself wanting to respond more positively than I did to Matthew Hooton's wonderful, accomplished Deloume Road, which is similar enough to Greenslade's that if you read them both, you'd end up with a terrifically nuanced view of rural BC childhood that allowed you to compare the 70s and 90s, plus the interior and Vancouver Island. There's a high-quality thesis just begging to be written on these novels, and I'm confident that they would both support that degree of close reading.

I'm not sure how I've ended up jaded enough, if that's what it is, not to fall instantly in love with the very best writing you're going to read from the high-realist tradition of Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, but here I sit. Hmm.

It's a lovely, wonderful novel, Shelter, and I'm delighted to see it getting so much international attention. The story of young Maggie Dillon and her older sister Jenny, growing up mostly parent-less in and around Williams Lake in the early 1970s, Shelter is filled with rich characters: some of them are mostly plot devices, as in every novel, but I really appreciated the complexity that Greenslade brought to so many of the minor ones. These two girls are growing up without their mother, not sure whether she lives or dies, or will ever return to them, but rather than obsess about her, Maggie feels her way deeply along. One reviewer wondered whether the novel's pace came from Greenslade's day job as an English prof, but for me, it's the right pace for worrying, hyper-aware Maggie. Through Maggie, we get a layered, detailed sense of her town's social complexities at that time (including some Carrier characters who aren't just there to provide localist cred) as well as of the natural setting each character has to navigate.

Honestly, this might be the perfect novel for a Canadian book club. Not for mine, because you're a bunch of beer-drinking punks, but for every other Canadian book club!

Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl

It's going to be such fun, seeing how my students handle Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl in the fall of 2013! Mind you, I'm going to have to figure out before then how I'm handling it myself, and I'm not quite sure just yet.

Image from a blog I can't read

The back cover describes the book as "a remarkable novel about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against the dark forces of biotechnology," so clearly it's a novel for everyone. In terms of the novel's insurgent transfeminism ... sorry, what? You disagree that just anybody will enjoy it?

Well, you're not the only one: critical opinion is divided on Salt Fish Girl, not entirely along gendered lines, but oddly near to it. Guy Beauregard in Canadian Literature wasn't keen on the novel, and Craig Taylor in Horse & Hounds Quill & Quire wasn't sold on it, either, though both were generally complimentary in spite of their overall meh. The brilliant Rita Wong, on quite the other hand, has a great deal to say about the book's artistry and activist potential (PDF auto-download), and Elizabeth C. Harmer has thought carefully about Lai's overlapping use of mythos and cyborgs. Less academic are these very positive reviews by Genie Giaimo and Anne Jansen.

The novel's braided stories do come together, but the way they reflect on each other left me productively uncertain about how I understood the novel and its characters. One portion of the novel is set in 19th-century China, the other in mid-21st-century Vancouver, but the novel opens with something of a creation myth, too, the timing (and intended reliability) of which continues to puzzle me. I'm comfortable being puzzled, distrusting certainty as I so confidently do, of course, so that's not a complaint.

A decaying future Vancouver; the triumphant survival of shoe companies, right to the edge of global apocalypse; escapes into forests; lesbian clones; procreation in a world that hasn't earned our trust: Salt Fish Girl gets a lot of West Coast alt-lit checkmarks, and yet it's a version of BC that I haven't quite seen before. Totally worth your time -- though you might hate it anyway, in which case I get it, but you're wrong.

This isn't the first time that I've committed to teach a book before having read it, and while it isn't a comfortable experience, I've always come away thinking that it was the right decision. The mixed critical reception has me thinking that working through the novel in class should be interesting indeed!

Extinction fiction

It's going to be a great course!

At least, it's going to be great once you help me finish building it in Google Docs, and then once it's open, I hope you'll either sign up or hang out with us.

Image from Planetary

In January 2014, I'll be teaching at UVic a section of English 478, Special Studies in Literature and Environment. It's one of our department's "variable-content" courses, which means that the same themes or texts can't be addressed in any three-year window. This coming year, we're going to be talking about fears of human extinction in an SF-heavy version of 478 called "The End of the Human."

When I proposed the course, I had some ideas about where to take the course, and about what books I might want to read with the course's students, but I always knew that I wanted to let the course evolve. This post is the first step in building a learning community in and around "The End of the Human," within our Environmental Humanities research group. Let me give you some details, for background, and at the bottom I'll post a link to Google Docs that you can edit yourself.

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Etc.

I'm a sucker for a great book title, and there are some readers I'm always prepared to trust (even when I disagree with them), so I'm not at all surprised to have really enjoyed Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Through a complicated series of deficiencies and poor life choices, I've read too few of the core SF classics, so it's nice to get this one off my list.

Maybe I'll even watch Blade Runner now. Who knows.

(I've been saying it to students for a long time, so let me say it publicly as well: academics generally make poor SF readers, because we just don't have the mental space both for the literary canon we're supposed to carry around in our brains, and for the special SF canons required to make full sense of a particular SF writer or text. There's some very weak academic literary criticism of SF, speculative fiction, and fantasy. Usually it's very well meant, of course, but "well meant" ≠ "well done." Caveat lector, is what I'm saying.)

There's precious little point to my saying much about this novel, I think: caveat lector certainly applies to my readers on this blog, especially when I'm swallowing a novel as rapidly as I did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Regardless, because I'm an academic and therefore congenitally unable to stop opining.....

It's a fascinating small triumph, this novel. People love it, I get that, and I can totally understand it, but for me, maybe because I'm reading it so out of sequence historically and personally, it's one gem among many, rather than the touchstone that some of its fans consider it. I've appreciated so many of the insights and confessions I've read over the years when reading about Androids that the novel was really never going to meet those expectations. I didn't expect that it would, so maybe that helped, but hard to say.

When I posted recently on Ender's Game, similarly a genre classic that I'd failed to get around to reading, a frequent commenter on this blog remarked that I now "qualify to be a 15-year-old SF nerd/geek." I'm a startlingly long way past that age now, and teenagers weren't the target market for SF in the 60s, but maybe he's saying that I'm incapable of having my mind blown by SF novels. Sad if true.

Charles C. Mann, 1491

If you're not much of a reader, or if you'd rather not read about history, there's an alternative to reading Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus -- you could watch yourself some seriously funny 1491s, and find a way to genuinely get what they're doing. (Maybe some Twilight Indian auditions?)

But if you don't read Mann's 1491, well, unless you're an active researcher in the academic fields Mann touches on, you'll never properly understand the Americas, or Indians / First Nations / what have you, or cultural evolution, or human history. Quite simply, I just can't think of another book that comes close to the significance of this one, appearing at this particular time. (Plus it's kind of a fun read, full of interesting stories and cool details and "trick the reader" plot twists: doubly recommendable!)

The gist: when Mann's child entered high school, Mann was dismayed to learn that textbooks about the history of the Americas hadn't really changed since he'd been there himself, 30 years before. History being the past, maybe you think that's okay, but in fact Mann knew that the academic understanding of the Americas had undergone almost unimaginable change over the last few decades. Disappointed, but no doubt excited as well, Mann felt he had no choice but to write the damned book he'd hoped someone with actual expertise would write, just as soon as he developed enough of his own expertise not to look like an idiot (cough *Jared Diamond* cough).

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

Our book club is approaching its seven-year anniversary, with just the sorts of tearful expectations that you'd expect from ten guys who drink beer monthly while working gamely to find something to say about a book only a few of them seriously appreciated. You'd be right to see this as an occasion deserving every bit of your attention, because awesomeness, but actually I mention it only to stress the rarity of what happened last night.

Unanimity.

Average member of a men-only book club

Every single one of us gave us the ol' Charlie Sisters thumbs up to Patrick deWitt's nouveau Western The Sisters Brothers. Heck of a book, Brownie, so it wouldn't have surprised any of us to hear that most of us liked it, but all ten members liking the same book? First time ever, among 63 books, and we've read some seriously good stuff over the years.

I loved The Sisters Brothers, I did, and you will too, so stop reading this inane blog and pick up a copy, yet somehow I found myself unable to stop complaining about the novel. In my defense, someone wouldn't leave me alone about it, but still: I had complaints, even if I'm still not sure that I trust them, so rather than rave about the book the way so many reviewers have so sensibly done, I'm going to try to explain them.

Forewarned, as they say, is four-armed.

Caveat: I should confess that I read this book in sustained bursts over three consecutive days, including while walking between my home and my work. Immersiveness always suggests that a book's really worth your time, but it's not a state of mind invariably conducive to careful thinking.

Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

It's embarrassing, really, just how affected I can be by flamboyantly gorgeous prose. That's not the only thing that Salman Rushdie has going for him in The Enchantress of Florence (love! death! fame! the exotic East! the (oddly) exotic West!), but in this 2008 novel, Rushdie confirmed his place among the very finest stylists writing in this young century.

He'd rather be one of the finest novelists, I imagine, or at least one of the finest fabulists, and he might be one of those as well, but his reputation in those areas won't be confirmed by the relatively slight Enchantress of Florence. (Yes, yes, I know, I know that you can read all over the intertubes that it's Rushdie's most researched novel: these things are not incompatible.)

The plot really is wonderful, veering in the 16th century between India and Florence, myth-making about the Moghul empire, imagining the personal life of Niccolo Machiavelli, celebrating the power of imagination and pure story. These characters, these plot twists, these images: I'm not going to read this novel again, but I'm going to remember it fondly. Here's a single sentence for you, as a sampler:

The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory — the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage — this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural — had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular — the “I.” (p.30)

At bottom, for me, it needed to be longer. The Moghul and Florentine sections of the narrative were complicated and unbearably rich with detail, prose as full of beauty as a great Simpsons' plot is stuffed with superfluous gags, but the resolution ... well, I appreciated it. But I didn't like it.

(Here be spoilers. Arr.)

You see, the first 80% of this novel is shamelessly accomplished, it really is. Every character seems maybe more alive than I am; everyone's smarter and more talented and more tragical and happier. (It's kind of like Twitter that way.) The sentences are astonishing, even when you expect them to keep washing over you. The young blond storyteller, who comes to the emperor with a tale mysterious to tell, makes a wonderful alter-ego for Rushdie himself, and the enchantress Qara Köz.

But toward novel's end, the great Akbar rejects Niccolo Vespucci. He denies the power of story, in spite of a life spent among living myths, and in consequence the novel's fabula shrink into exposition. The consequences of Akbar's denial cause his empire to start fading, becoming ephemeral, so it makes sense that when this happens the novel dies a little bit: OK, more than a little bit in my view, but still. There's an artistic purpose behind Rushdie's decision to halt the seduction and hand me a file folder, is what I'm saying.

If you want Rushdie the fabulist, then his best novel is Haroun and the Sea of Stories. If you want Rushdie the novelist, then you want either Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses. They're gems, all three; you'd love at least one of them, I promise, and when you do, you should read The Enchantress of Florence, because you'll see why there's more to love here than some reviewers thought.

Compare and contrast: Marina DelVecchio's objections to Rushdie's use of women in the novel, and Ursula Le Guin's bombastic celebration.

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Presumably someone else has made the point already about Orson Scott Card's masterpiece, Ender's Game: currently, America's most ballyhooed high school basketball player is a Canadian named Andrew Wiggins. You ballin punks who haven't heard of this fricking amazing SF novel? The kid who just might save humanity, Ender, is named Andrew Wiggin, and you can't hardly find him on Google anymore.

Strange days, indeed.

My god, but this book tricked me. For so long, so long, it's about the travails of an impossibly young, impossibly talented kid, regularly facing torments and abuse, regularly put into impossible situations. Contented, that's how I felt, contented at the thought I was reading a novel that SF readers appreciated for making sense of their own childhoods: NOT that SF readers' childhoods are worse than those of other kids, though maybe they are, what do I know, but I'm seriously comfortable with the idea that most of us still need to make more sense of our childhoods than we think we do.

In other words, I mean to slight neither the novel nor its readers in making this claim. Adults need books about children, perhaps more than children do, so I was going along happily thinking that this was one of those books, lovely in its pain, freeing in its depiction of Ender's absolute captivity.

And then the book exploded, went three kinds of sideways, ended slowly and remarkably, did things I could not have expected.

Things I'll never tell you about, newbie.

You've read it? You know me personally? Why yes, I just might be prepared to buy you a meal just to get enough time to talk it over properly.

You haven't read it? Well, consider yourself warned. It's past time, and if you read one more breathless Andrew Wiggins column from some corporate shill on Yahoo! Sports before you meet Andrew Wiggin in Ender's Game, don't blame me.

John Berger, Pig Earth

Is that the last book I'll read purely for fun, before plunging into my four entirely new course preps for the next academic year? Possibly. On the positive side, I find great joy in my teaching, so it's hardly a slog to get through those works -- not that I can speak to my students' experience of them, mind you.

But if it is the last non-work book I read for a while, John Berger's Pig Earth is clearly an excellent place to wrap things up. It's a remarkable book, though strange nearly beyond words, written from and about a recent past that for modern folk like you and me, verged on incomprehensible even when it was occurring.

In brief, Pig Earth (published in 1979) is the first volume of Berger's Into Their Labours trilogy, a series of novels collections multi-genre books depicting and commemorating 20th-century European peasant life and peasant labour. As these books are at pains to argue, "peasant" is fundamentally a separate category of human experience; there is no overlap between a money-system worker and a peasant, what we might provisionally call an object-system worker, so there's no ready insertion point into the book's represented lives that'd allow a contemporary reader to connect with them through any vehicle but nostalgic idealization.

Iain M. Banks, Hydrogen Sonata

Interesting: the commercial-type reviews of Iain M. Banks' Hydrogen Sonata are way positive (like the Guardian is, say, or the Independent), but the fan-type reviews are kind of lukewarm. I'm not an established fan of Banks' Culture books, this being only my second one, and the first in 15 years, but lukewarm sounds right to me.

I enjoyed the novel a whole bunch, Banks is a terrific writer, and clearly I've got to read Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons, but parts of this novel are like five-finger exercises. Mind you, there's no law saying a novel has to do everything that it possibly can, and given that Hydrogen Sonata is part of a series, maybe Banks' representation of the Culture realm is best served by a bunch of books that don't each try to do everything. Taken together, maybe they do it all better than they would if they were all fab, you know?

But still: I love being unable to resist a novel's reaching out to drag me under the surface, in fact that's kind of what I'm looking for, and that's never going to happen to a reader of Hydrogen Sonata.

The best blogger review I've seen of Hydrogen Sonata is this one, and it's good enough that I barely need to write my own: basically, Banks can write fiction as well as anyone can, but in this novel, he's just not interested in either the story or the characters. That's kind of a problem, but if you're excited enough about the ideas he's juggling, or about the notion of an "exciting space romp," you might not notice. The novel's full of, as Random put it, "seemingly pointless aerobatics." It's vastly more rewarding than Cirque du So-lame, but unfortunately there's a family resemblance.

You're SO going to enjoy it anyway!

(Also, this Random person deserves way more readers. No idea what the backstory is, but stop by when you've got a chance.)

Adrienne Fitzpatrick, The Earth Remembers Everything

It's a gem, Adrienne Fitzpatrick's The Earth Remembers Everything: what Eat Prey, Pray, Love might have been if its author had been more interested in the style of prose than the style of clothes, in social justice than social climbing.

From Auschwitz to Stuart Lake, Vietnam to Haida Gwaii, The Earth Remembers Everything brings together a lot of stories, and a lot of moments in Fitzpatrick's life. Basically, she's spent several years living and travelling away from her home in British Columbia, and during those years she's made a point of visiting and learning about historic sites of great violence -- including similar sites in British Columbia, in the years near European contact with First Nations here. This book is about those visits and those places, exploring the question of whether and how places remember the violence done there: "a phenomenological experience of place," as the introduction puts it.

The movement between places and stories and periods gets complicated, and Fitzpatrick doesn't give you much help. There are place-based titles for the different sections ("Vietnam"; "Chinlac"; "Poland"), and the occasional references to different years and durations, but my own experience of the book was that "adrift" seems both a good way to feel during the reading and a reasonable description of Fitzpatrick's emotional life during these years. The "Dene" and "Chinlac" sequences, too, might seem to follow each other in sequence, but they don't, and they're not about the same places. Similarly, the Haida Gwaii sections were narrated a bit like dream sequences, so all things considered, it's not a bad idea just to surrender to the flow of prose.

Fitzpatrick seems here precisely as uncomfortable as she should be with these topics and places, aware of being unable to escape finally either the colonial perspective that defines her life in Canada, or the touristic perspective that colours her time elsewhere. Settler Canadians don't have an absolute home, in this kind of language, though I don't say this self-pityingly (and neither would Fitzpatrick, I don't think): Yankee no longer has another home to go to, that's all. Really, she's taking us touring with her, including to places in British Columbia that form part of her own deep backstory, and asking us to look at the impacts that especially dark moments in human history have had on these places.