Tim Bowling, The Paperboy's Winter
The short version:
As Bowling wrote in his poem "Childhood," from the volume Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief, his work speaks very clearly to "men and women / of certain years who. having left prints on the sand, / remember the feeling / of castles in their fingers." If those lines speak to you at all, seek out this novel, and you'll find a bit of a treasure.
The longer version, which as a review is honestly kind of a mess:
Time is a river, of course, as we've been telling each other since at least Heraclitus (long before Marcus Aurelius, who had a different view of things), but a river is also time.
This was my second or third read of Tim Bowling's riverside novel The Paperboy's Winter, first published in 2003, which I regret to inform you was 22 years ago. I'm not the same man I was then, nor is Bowling the same man he was then, nor is the Fraser River the same, nor yet the world. (Yes, Heraclitus, fine, you're right, just shut up about it already.)
What's the same is the river's ceaseless changes, its perpetual ringing of unpredictable but repetitive change transformative of the whole world that surrounds the river.
Among other things, this is my way of saying that 2003's The Paperboy's Winter overlaps a great deal more with Bowling's 2023 The Marvels of Youth than I expected. The second isn't a sequel, nor a rewrite, nor exactly just a revisiting: the relationship is much stranger than that, a repetitive transformation (transformative repetition?) of what had come before, the same way that a river might experience its own annual cycles and the changed world it keeps repeatedly passing through.
I'm not able just yet to go through the two novels side by side, too low on both time and energy, but I'm already scheming to make that my April project. But for now:
- each novel features a frame narrative where the first-person narrator is around the same age Bowling was when writing the novel, set at around the time that Bowling was working on the novel (2003 for one, 2023 for the other)
- each novel devotes most of its narrative space to a first-person account of a boy in elementary school in the middle 1970s, whose father is a commercial fisherman on the Fraser River at Ladner, BC (though it's called Chilukthan in The Paperboy's Winter)
- each novel's narrator loves comic books and spends as much time as possible at the local comics shop (whose owner is constantly spilling food on himself) across from the town's clock tower whose hands have stopped
- each novel presents a cast of young boys whose lives are clearly destined to diverge from each other, sometimes tragically but mostly just because life happens
- each novel features a strange outsider inseparable from the river and the town, in each case a man whose first name begins with E. (Ezra Hemsworth in 2003, Edgar Winterbourne in 2023) whose childhood was marked by severe parental abuse, and
- each novel features the netting of a massive sturgeon, not central to the plot but symbolically important.
Self-plagiarism! Cue the lawyers, and enrage the BookTokkers!
Well, no. The thing is, these hit me as very different novels, or at least different reading experiences, so in that sense, each one's irreplaceable and utterly not the other novel.
The more you read Tim Bowling, in other words, the clearer it becomes that his work is itself a river, wearing away history's jagged edges, and alternately deepening and filling in its channels. Twenty years is long enough for a whole lifetime to pass you by, long enough to realize just how many potential lives you haven't lived, and for a writer like Bowling, that's licence to keep on fishing the same stretch of water.
To be clear, I think that's why his occasional reviewers fail to appreciate what's in front of them. (Or maybe I'm wrong for loving these books? No, no, unpossible.) There are potentials in this novel, forms of potential energy in a psychic physics kind of sense, that come from gaps and variations largely invisible unless you're reading with that kind of awareness in mind.
When The Paperboy's Winter came out, for example, Darren Alexander complained in Quill & Quire that "having the adult Callum looking back over the years from such a sombre viewpoint ultimately dilutes the vividness of the child’s perspective," and honestly he couldn't be more wrong. The vividness of young Callum's perspective stands out so clearly precisely because of older Callum's scars; it's not a "sombre viewpoint," and Alexander gives himself away by saying that the frame narrative "seems suprefluous [sic: show some self-respect, copy-edit yourself, this typo has stood for 22 YEARS at this point]."
Callum's narrative isn't the novel, it's just the energy source that powers the older Callum through what he feels -- probably correctly -- to be a diminished existence as an adult. This novel's meaning lies in the gulf between childhood and adulthood, like so many novels' meanings do, and if you can't stop staring at the childhood years, that's on you for falling in love with only one element of the novel.
And even though there are other elements, you do fall in love with Callum's childhood, you do, or at least I did, and I think it's meant to hurt that you can't stay in Callum's childhood. Darren Alexander, in other words, was right about the sense of loss but failed to understand that this loss is part of this novel's point.
My own early childhood friends have long gone out of touch, and it has been decades since I last lived on the ground my heart still recognizes as home. As the gaps between Callum and his friends start to grow, in amongst the crises large and small of his youth, your heart keeps breaking a little bit, even though the prologue should've prepared you for the loose shape of what's happening to him.
It's like life, this novel, even if it wasn't my own life. "Realist" doesn't do justice to how real The Paperboy's Winter seemed, on this time reading through the novel, and certainly I'm confidently calling Tim Bowling one of my very favourite writers at this point.
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