Category: literature

Galore by Michael Crummey

galoremichaelcrummeyThe word galore means “in abundance.” In Michael Crummey’s Galore, the only things in abundance are misery, desire, greed, and a compellingly tenacious will to survive.

Galore roams the lives of the families in Paradise Deep, Newfoundland, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The landscape offers little respite. It’s bitterly cold, windy, and wet. It’s a fickle mistress given to cycles of plenty and want, imperilling those who try to eke out an existence by fishing, logging, and sealing. Death by starvation and exposure is ever-present. In living each day, we’re all that much closer to our own deaths — especially the hardscrabble residents of Paradise Deep.

…death wasn’t sudden and complete but took a man out of the world piecemeal, a little at a time.

The characters and the beautiful prose carry Galore through what I feel is an uneven narrative. The book follows mostly several generations of the Devine family. You can’t help but love them for the sheer effort they put into survival and the sacrifices they make to help one another along though a harsh world.

Judah Devine (a variation on Jonah) is adopted into the fold after being rescued from the belly of a beached whale by a woman known only as Devine’s Widow. He’s known for his bright white hair, skin, and a pervasive foul odor that he passes on to his offspring. Judah’s origin and past is a mystery — he never utters a word. He becomes a Devine only after Devine’s Widow arranges a hasty marriage to her granddaughter Mary Tryphena Devine, to save “The Great White” from a mob. The Devines are resourceful and stubborn, two qualities that sustain them over the decades.

Galore and its characters are imaginative — Crummey does a great job chronicling everyone’s longings, desires, conflicts, and losses and you become invested as you follow the burgeoning families. This book has a deep and conflicted soul of its own and I loved it for that. The characters are resolute in their beautiful, pervasive, stoic catechism.

They came finally to the consensus that life was a mystery and a wonder beyond human understanding, a conclusion they were comfortable with though there was little comfort in the thought.

My primary quibbles with Galore are narrative threads raised and dropped and seemingly random time hopping that accelerates the plot. You care about the characters and it’s irritating when they’re suddenly elderly and you’re not privy as a reader to those missing years. Critical characters like Bride Newman simply die offstage and the revelation feels rushed — an afterthought. I would have loved a longer book that followed fewer characters more closely.

Despite these irritations, Crummey is a writer I plan to explore further. In the words of Callum Devine, “what is it you wants?”

I wants me s’more Newfoundland, b’y.

June, 2016

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

agodinruins

A God in Ruins is about identity, dutiful love, and above all, self sacrifice. This book, a companion to Life After Life, follows mostly Edward Beresford “Teddy” Todd before and after his Second World War experiences.

At first I was irritated with what seemed like a propensity to live a life of quiet desperation, in an unfulfilling marriage with an exasperating child. I realized that I was looking at Teddy’s life through the lens of the present, where flaky is the norm and commitment is rare.

Teddy’s generation had no choice — his own identity is indelibly scorched in the crucible of the war. Defying death against nearly impossible odds at the controls of a Halifax bomber is the only time he feels truly alive, yet this imbues him with a duty-bound stoicism. His life is a series of sacrifices; first for the war effort, then for his wife, and finally his grandchildren. (Teddy is the only steadying force they have in their lives and they love him for it.)

I enjoyed this book. It’s layered, nuanced, and complex. There’s plenty to explore here — it’s meaty with references to poetry that I have to admit were somewhat lost on me. Duty, honor, and love are compelling themes and it got me thinking about what sort of life is a good life — what it is that etches your life with meaning? Is forsaking your own happiness and well being for country, spouse, children, and grandchildren the key to a life well lived? For Teddy, it seems so — if only for the reason that a whole life can be erased in the instant.

He had believed once that he would be framed by the architecture of the war, but now he realized, he had been erased by it.
–A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

April — May, 2016

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

lifeafterlifePractice makes perfect.

If you could go back in life and get a do-over, would you take that chance and change the course of history? Kate Atkinson’s brilliant novel, Life After Life tackles this intriguing question.

Ursula Beresford Todd, human palimpsest, gets the chance to live life after life, each time altering the future based on the sometimes not so fun events of the past. Life After Life reminded me of how the superposition principle of quantum physics plays out in Ruth Ozeki’s marvelous book, A Tale for the Time Being. Ursula’s life path has a bevy of possibilities — the array that collapses as you, the observer, follow her story.

I don’t want to say much about the plot to avoid spoilers, though Life After Life is everything I feel a great book should be. It’s a period piece, set in 20th century Europe. The characters are exceptionally deep, fully-flawed, and interesting. I loved that you get to see and experience each vivid character from many different viewpoints — their best and worst sides included — which makes for terrific, rich reading.

You’re never quite sure where Atkinson is going to take you via Ursula and you’re on tenterhooks until the very last page wondering how this imaginative book will end.

Should you read this book? In the words of Ursula’s mom Sylvie, needs must (necessity compels).

Special thanks to my friend Michelle for putting this book, and its sequel, A God in Ruins on my reading radar.

–April, 2016

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

theturnerhouseIdentity figures heavily in The Turner House, Angela Flournoy’s novel about a family of fifteen set in Detroit, Michigan. The book follows the eldest Turner son, Charles, (a.k.a., “Cha-Cha”) and the youngest Turner daughter, Lelah, who in their own ways, are struggling to find a place for themselves in the present by conquering what haunts them from their past.

For Cha-Cha, it’s a ghost — a haint that visited him as a child in the big house on Yarrow Street. This spectre is a hereditary apparition who also visited Turner patriarch Francis as a young man until he left the country for life in the city of Detroit. For Lelah, it’s a gambling addiction that causes serial eviction, a tenuous relationship with her only daughter Brianne, and of course, financial collapse.

When you have 13 children in a single family, everyone is attention starved. Each Turner child jockeys for validation. They often talk over one another, interrupt, act out, and change the subject in an ongoing attempt to capture attention. Lelah gambles in search of silence and with 13 siblings, make no wonder.

This search for silence felt all too true to me. My dad grew up in a family of 11 and my mom grew up in a family of nine, but that truth as depicted in The Turner House, carried the weight and fatigue of familiarity. It reminded me too much of how some people (close family) routinely interrupt, talk over others, and change the subject to this day in that constant wearying bid for attention — even in much smaller gatherings, of say, two.

I’d hoped for something different — something deeper to come from the sheer possibilities inherent in the story of 13 siblings and their exponentially interwoven relationships. With 11 siblings orbiting around the stories of Cha-Cha and Lelah, they and their stories seemed flat. I can’t help but wonder if one or two or three of the other Turners examined more closely might have made for more intense reading.

I discovered this book in the final round of The Morning News’ 2016 Tournament of Books. It was voted second overall next to The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

— March – April, 2016

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence

ajestofgodRachel Cameron is a spinster. She’s only 34-years old, but the school teacher from the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba, is almost as childlike as her grade twos.

She’s virginal and anxiety-laden. Her inner monologue is a cacophony of second guesses.  She agonizes over what others might think of her; she analyzes exchanges with her overbearing, manipulative mother. Her first instinct is to apologize to anyone for anything — to her mother, school principal Siddley, her friend Calla, and summer fling Nick — but she’s not without some self-awareness:

Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as though it were magnified — a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on the back of a man’s hands — or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a word.

Along comes Nick Kazlik, a grade 11 teacher home for the summer holidays to spend time with his aging parents on their dairy farm. Nick is Rachel’s key to a delayed, condensed, and frenzied adolescence on her way to adulthood.

A slang-slinging smooth talker, Nick’s only interested in one thing. Rachel — despite the potential for a pregnancy that would induce apoplectic levels of shame for her and her mother in their backward little prairie town — can’t resist his Slavic charms.

Laurence does a great job depicting sexual politics in early 1960s rural Canada, a place where women were in charge of acquiring birth control because (according to men) “it’s better like that” and “fixing themselves” after sex despite zero access to contraceptives.

Rachel can’t win. Everyone in town knows she’s unmarried. Asking her long-time family doctor for birth control would annihilate her reputation; it’s out of the question. Having the baby would induce immutable shame for Rachel, her mother, and especially the child, who as a bastard would be marked in Manawaka, doomed by whispered innuendo its entire life.

Manawaka is a place where an unwanted pregnancy means considering ways to flee the problem (leaving town, abortion, suicide).  It’s a place where men say things like:

Sh, sh, darling. It’s all right. I won’t go off in you.

Only to be quickly followed by:

“Oh hell, darling,” he says, “I meant to get out before that happened, but I –“

You can’t help but root for Rachel who finally  wrests control of her life from her mother — a cloying, pill-dependent, weak-hearted guilt machine — by leaving Manawaka behind for an adult life on the coast infused with possibility, a place where:

Anything may happen, where I’m going.

Such a beautiful and stark novel, much like the prairie on which it’s set.

— December, 2015

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

thestoneangelA fitting alternate title for The Stone Angel might have been Pride and Prejudice, but of course, by the time Margaret Laurence’s magnificent novel came out in 1964, that title was already long taken.

I’d read and loved this book as required reading in high school. Over two decades later, I’d long forgotten the beautiful prose and central plot. With several (excellent) fantasy novels in my recent reading, I longed for something closer to home. The Stone Angel, grounded in simple dirt and sweat, heavy with imagery and metaphors only a harsh prairie climate can offer, delivers — over 50 years post-publication.

The stone angel — the massive, expensive, sightless marble statue in the Manawaka cemetery — is monument to “her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one,” says Hagar Shipley, reflecting on her life at age 90, referencing her mother in the opening lines of the book.

Pitted from snow and wind and eventually toppled by random vandals — the stone angel symbolizes Hagar: her inability to love, and her tenuous grip on a civilized and respectable life.

Satin and silver and true, everlasting happiness are forever out of Hagar’s grasp — not derailed by coarse, underachieving men — but by Hagar herself. A woman who realizes all too late in life — at the very last second in fact — that she is incapable of humility, she’s forever finding fault, hung up on superficial flaws of character,  behaviour, and appearance.

Hagar is blind to that which should bring her happiness — her children, her husband Bram Shipley — the handsome man who blows his nose with his fingers, his massive winter coat pockets bursting with “scraps of frayed binder twine, a bag of sticky peppermints bearded with bits of fluff. Never of course, a handkerchief.”

Always worried about appearances, Hagar cannot relax enough to love her husband, her children, or herself. There is always the fear that others may observe and find her wanting:

I would have wished it. This knowing comes upon me so forcefully, so shatteringly, and with such a bitterness as I have never felt before. I must have always have wanted that — simply to rejoice. How is it I never could? I know. I know. Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some care too deeply buried, too concealed? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by brake of proper appearances — oh proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart’s truth?

Hagar, (Hebrew for “flight” or “stranger”) is drought in human form. Devoid of love, warmth, acceptance, humility, and forgiveness, those around her wither and die like tall grass under a relentless prairie sun:

Pride was my wilderness and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free, for I carried my chains with me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched.

This book is about expectations dashed, about self-imposed shame, and the realization that you can’t take it all back. When it comes to human feelings, there is no do-over.  “Nothing can take away those years” and the damage they’ve wrought.

The prose is exceptionally beautiful. Despite the heavy themes, this book holds hope as heady as the smell of fresh cut grass and blooming lilac bushes in a Manitoba June. The Stone Angel is worth your time.

— December, 2015