Sarah Louise Butler, Rufous and Calliope

Tl;dr - Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler, is for me shockingly good, deeply intimate, and irreplaceable. Buy extra copies so you can give them to people you love.

A habit I've had for decades, a small one intended just to eke small extra bits of pleasure out of my reading, is to read slowly on purpose. (As an English prof, I'm a professional fast reader, but it's more like a character flaw than an acquired skill.) Sometimes, as with Alastair Macleod's Island or Theresa Kishkan's Mnemonic or Tim Bowling's The Witness Ghost, I manage to extend my reading across multiple unnecessary days; Island, I read in the late 1990s as one story a day on the city bus, commuting to and from work, and I still look back on that as one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've ever had.

In reading Sarah Louise Butler's sophomore novel Rufous and Calliope, on the other hand, I was virtually powerless to slow down, no matter how much I wanted to. In its 250 or so pages, I found myself with my eyes prickling well before I was even halfway through. Although that's not what I look for in my book choices, and it's not a measure I'd normally rely on, I'd offer it up as testimony to this book's potential impact on its readers.

Because that's what it did to me, and for me, it's a very rare effect.

For my teaching, I have to submit my book orders four months before the course begins, and sometimes I torment myself by choosing a book that I haven't read yet. This move started from wanting to hit the semester fresh, and wanting to share something of my students' experience with their own reading. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes less well, and I'd considered doing that with Rufous and Calliope. If I had, I just don't see how I would've avoided over-personalizing things.

I mean, I've shed tears in class before (Nevil Shute's On the Beach in a course on human extinction, memorably, or Julie Paul's TNQ short story "Accidental"), and I will again, but this might've been a bit much for my first-years.

As always, there are real reviews out there if you want to read more about the book than about me: here's Selena Mercuri's from the BC Review, which is a good place to start, and Kerry Clare's teaser-ish plot-heavy summary is also a good read.

The novel's concept isn't difficult to explain, but any summary is hopelessly reductive: Rufous was one of several children abandoned by their mother to the care of their grandmother (well, the grandmother of some of them). When the grandmother died in 1979, the kids aged between five and fifteen, the children jumped a train and fled into the BC forest together. Rufous and Calliope were the youngest, five-year-old twins. and the novel is a summing-up and looking-back at Rufous' life.

The main thread follows Rufous, now nearing 50, as he solo-hikes a mountain pass in order to meet his siblings at the treehouse that defined his whole life. Apart from the hike, the novel braids together three other strands: the kids' precarious time at the treehouse; Rufous' post-treehouse school years without the siblings (1980s! Gen X!); his working life, mostly spent documenting wildlife extinction in British Columbia; and his declining health.

Everything is coloured by the inescapable fact of Rufous' galloping early-onset dementia, which has stolen the memories of most of his adult years as well as leaving holes in the rest of his memories. He's the product of his memories, intensely so, so I found it crushing to experience this with him. After being threatened by a bear, for example:

"A few minutes after she's gone, a cold wave of nausea washes over me. I'm suddenly and acutely grateful to be alive, for as long or as short as I've got. It's something I've learned many times over but can't seem to keep hold of. How precious the final stolen drops—those very same measures of time we've spent so much of our adult lives wasting—in those moments when we catch sight of it: the looming finish line that's been there all along" (p91).

It's about Rufous, his family, and his broader communities, don't get me wrong: it's a novel about a person. With a light touch, though, Taylor also sets you up to connect the loss of memories with the idea of a world losing its wildlife species, and with the deaths of loved ones. For me it was all too much, but also an entirely, entirely irreplaceable read.

Buy multiple copies, and give them to those you love. If you buy it on my recommendation and don't love it, let me know, and I'll buy it back from you.