Fun Without Prairie Fiction

We had a grand old time last night at the echolocation Halloween Party, and we were truly humbled by the amazing costumes assembled there. We didn't dress up. We are lame. I did, however, give my secret party trick the light of day (or night?) and composed two spontaneous folk songs- one about the Filthy Federlines and the other about robotic dogs (naturally). They were received warmly and I did so enjoy the night out. On the walk there, my mind was shouting to the beats of my feet, "Need drink. Need drink. etc." Drink was had. Delicious.

In my previous entry, when I mentioned that The Diviners was one of "those books", I meant that it is a book I intend to be revisiting as long as visiting hours are open. What I had neglected to realize, of course, is that it is also one of "those books" in the sense of the dreaded Prairie Fiction. Remember how Prairie Fiction nearly drove me to defenestration one month ago? Now, it is distinctly possible that my Prairie Fiction issues are linked to my menstrual cycle, but I think there is something further than that. I learned recently about certain types of fiction that cause post-traumatic stress disorder in readers, and I really think Prairie Fiction does that for me. I am not being completely dramatic. Books do tend to make their impressions upon me (ie when I read Fight Club and became psychotic?) I loved The Diviners, but it stirred something up in me that needs to be left alone in order me to be functional. I become overwrought. Sarah Harmer wrote "I'm a Mountain'; I'd love to hear "I'm a Prairie" and find out what it has to say, and then maybe I could get to the root of the problem.

I am now reading Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving which should calm me down a bit.

Two fabulous acquisitions in our house: Atwood's The Penelopiad (which I read last winter and loved) and a pastry marble!

Take another chance on the prairies

I'm starting to read The Horseman's Graves today and I'm feeling nervous, which you might understand if you're aware of the problems I've had with prairie fiction. Prairie fiction makes me absolutely crazy.

However I was somewhat reassured by this (rave) review of the book from The Globe this past weekend. Particularly by this bit: "Though the geographical, cultural and temporal setting of The Horseman's Graves might generate comparisons to early 20th-century practitioners of "prairie realism," Baker displays little of their inclination to romance, nor does she set up the prairie landscape and community to represent oppressive forces to be succumbed to or transcended. Her judicious plotting avoids parable and object lesson, and insists that the story of these people in this place is worth telling for its own sake."

I do hope so. And I suspect my long-suffering husband hopes so too.

Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label

I had book trauma this weekend. I don't mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I've nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.

First, I'm now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain't the tinternet grand?) I've not read Macaulay's novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English "Catchwords and Claptrap" (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It's simply lovely.

And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).

Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can't think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it's a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn't get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we've renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn't have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.

The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.

The Horseman's Graves by Jacqueline Baker

"...or so it was supposed," writes Jacqueline Baker in her new novel The Horseman's Graves, "since no one ever did learn for certain and it was all pieced together in the usual way, as history always is, by hearsay and supposition and outright imagination". Such is the tale Baker tells, and clearly this is a "tale"-- old-fashioned and unselfconscious. The story is filtered through various points of view of members of a prairie community close to the Alberta/Saskatchewan border, and it is this union of voices that allows the story to function differently than so many other prairie stories with their isolated first-person narrators.

Though of course this community is no neighbourly idyll. I cannot pinpoint one character at the epicentre of this story, but the characters who come together to fulfill this role are each alone in their own way-- the Schoff boy who is hideously scarred after an accident; his parents who are so isolated in their grief; Lathias, the Metis hired man who caused the accident and becomes devoted to the boy; the bizarre character of Leo Krauss (whose family had been feuding with the Schoffs since "the old country"); Leo's first and second wives, whose union to him is unfathomable to the rest of the community; and Elizabeth, the daughter of Leo's second wife who arrives in town with her mother's marriage and casts various spells with her bewitching looks and her strange behaviour.

And the tangled web of all of these characters (whose ties are not substantial enough to render any of them not lonely) is conveyed by each of them, and by their neighbours with a wonderfully limited omniscience on the narrator's part. It's so effective to come to understand a character through what others see. Baker writes beautiful descriptions of landscape, reveals so much with dialogue and weaves something lovely with humour and darkness together. She develops her tale in such a roundabout way that makes it feel like a yarn, and yet momentum is present all the while. Her pacing yields a fabulous suspense, and she holds back enough to allow her realism a decidedly ghostly edge.

I liked the unfashionableness of this book, and I am not entirely in the habit of being contrary. I like what seemed to be Baker's utter concentration on a story for the sake of itself, and the manner in which the narrative seemed to be "crafted". That with a genuine skill with language and story, Baker successfully realizes her vision without having to try to be clever.

With The Horseman's Graves Jacqueline Baker has written a real-live story with legs, and it runs and it runs and it runs.

Family Literacy Recommendations from a Literary Mom: Carrie Snyder

In between mothering her four children, writing fiction, a blog and a parenting column, and all the other things that people do, Carrie Snyder found a few spare moments to write this beautiful piece about reading with her children. Carrie Snyder is the author of Hair Hat (which is currently competing in Canada Reads: Independently). Her most recent publication was three stories in The New Quarterly 112).

My favourite picture book of all time is A Day with Nellie, by Marthe Jocelyn (the original version, not the board book, which cuts some of my favourite sections.) This book has been with our family since my eldest was a toddler. He and I read it so often that we had it memorized. Both of my daughters loved it, too, and my youngest is now 22 months and "Nellie!" is far and away the first book he goes looking for on our shelves.

The charm of this book is in its simplicity. A preschool-aged child goes about her day: from waking to getting dressed, greeting her friends (mostly stuffed animals), eating breakfast, and so on. She plays indoors in daddy's shoes. She plays teacher in the backyard--her students include the neighbours' cat. She makes mud, slips and falls, gets dirty, takes a bath. Each page subtly illustrates a new concept: textures on the breakfast page, emotions on the naptime page, numbers on the picnic lunch page, et cetera.

But what elevates this book to greatness is Jocelyn's original fabric artwork. It looks touchable. Each page is beautiful and colourful, and we could look at it for hours (and we have, and we do!). The pictures are full of narrative all on their own, which makes them perfect for the pre-reader. There is so much to point to and talk about in each picture. Nellie pouring water on her head. Nellie watching the big kids come home from school. (Particularly poignant for me, now, as I remember reading it with my eldest and watching out the window as the big kids walked home from school--and now he is one of those big kids walking home from school). I've never yet gotten bored of the book. And that's high praise indeed.

I also read chapter books out loud before bedtime. The older ones are able to read to themselves, now, but they still love cuddling in on the couch and being read to. I would recommend heading into Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series. The first book, with its terrifying panther stories, is not necessarily the best place to begin (Little House in the Big Woods); that book also opens with very detailed descriptions of a pioneer family preparing and storing their food for winter, including how to build a smokehouse. (In fact, there's a great deal of lost knowledge contained in these books, from how to make a door with no nails, to how to rig up a lamp from a button and some axle grease. I'm keeping them for further reference, because you never know).

The second book in the series is the best known and perhaps also the best place to start: Little House on the Prairie. The television series based on the books bears little relationship to them: there is no superficiality. This is the real thing. The writing is quite astonishing. It is straightforward, classic, and true. It amazes me every time I read it (I was about seven when my mother first read the series to us, and I've re-read it many times since). There is little to no analysis in her writing, no self-consciousness, just pure storytelling. That leaves room for questions, for interpretation, and it means that the experience of reading the books as an adult changes them: my perspective as a parent added new flavours and nuances to the story. Best of all, all of my children were drawn into her writing, even my eldest who is a boy. And it lead to many imaginary games of Laura and Mary and baby Carrie.

Reading to my children: I looked forward to it before becoming a parent, and it's one of my favourite activities as a parent. I rarely get down and play on the floor with the kids, but they're pretty much guaranteed to get my attention with a book (I'm picky, though, and they know it: Mama doesn't read Dora ... actually, there's a pretty long list of books Mama won't read; that's what Daddy is for; and literacy).

There are so many wonderful books out there, with whole worlds waiting to be discovered. When I read to my children, I get to travel into those imaginary worlds, too. We get to go there together.

Tapestries of Place

I've been reading a lot of Sharon Butala lately, ever since I read her latest Girl in Saskatoon in April. I've read come to know her voice by heart now, present regardless of whether in fiction or non-fiction, her short fiction and her novels, and opening one of her books is like settling down with a new friend. I've just finished Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, an absolutely extraordinary book exploring Canada's west, its history and its present. Such a compelling read, an essential addition to any Canadian library, so filled with learning, and I would it upon anyone looking to learn more about this part of Canada, or anyone who thinks they've learned enough and perhaps could do with some re-examination. And some celebrating too-- for Lilac Moon is a celebration, even if a critical one.

"What makes a Westerner?" Butala asks throughout each of her chapters, considering the rodeo as an emblem, relationships to the land, with First Nations peoples, the situation of women. What it means, the pioneering spirit, to be raised in the shadow of this mythology. What this mythology might exaggerate or obfuscate. All this culminating in a beautiful chapter, "Visions of the Prairie West" about how Western Canada has been defined by its artists and writers-- "We paint, write, sculpt, dance, film, act, compose and sing and play-- however wistful, however tentative-- our claims on this place."

Strange to have read this soon after my rereading of Joan Didion's Where I Was From. I didn't plan it, and certainly could have forseen the patterns, though I didn't. Both writers reexamining mythologies of Westness, the tropes of their childhoods, of pioneering spirits and what such stories belie-- Butala explaining that when the Canadian West was settled, "it certainly wasn't to provide homes... for millions of destitute... Europeans" but because "the federal government feared that the Americans, seeing all that tempting 'empty' territory, would simply move in and take it over." Didion clarifying that those intrepid men who pushed the American frontier west towards California were in fact pushing themselves towards what then was actually Mexico.

Both writers weaving their personal histories, their family histories, into the wider stories to develop these tapestries of place, the perfect containers to hold and convey such complicated stories. Of places that both writers manage to combine a certain ambivalence for with a lifelong love. Questioning ideals they've held since childhood, those instilled by their parents, and grandparents before that, examining their own feelings of nostalgia. Inserting a woman's perspective (though Didion would shy away from this distinction, I know) into the narrative of "Westness", which is so often synonymous with "maleness". Significant also, I think, the way that both Butala and Didion have shifted between fiction and non-fiction throughout their careers, in these particular books bringing the very best of both of these, blending story and the world into something so close to truth.

(Speaking of Westness, we're going to Alberta in October!! V.v. exciting.)

As all good fiction should...

Now, I am not one to approach my fiction from a purely aesthetic point of view. I wouldn't even know how to, but even I was struck by the introduction to Patricia Robertson's review of The Prairie Bridesmaid in this week's G&M: "As all good fiction should, Daria Salaman's debut novel... triggered some happy memories for this reader." How weird.

First, that the grammar suggests all good fiction should trigger some good memories for Patricia Robertson specifically, which seems a tall order for writers (some of whom mightn't even have met her!!). More seriously, I love sentimentality as much as the next soppy git, but when reviewing fiction in a national newspaper, shouldn't one be expected to set their literary standards a bit higher? Which is not to say I have any problem with sentimentality, with nostalgia (because many of my favourite books take on a nostalgic bent, and I also realize that most history happened just minutes ago) but surely neither of these alone are substance enough to seize upon. And that Robertson goes on to write a decent review suggests to me that she knows this, so I'm confused why she chooses to open her piece as she does. Unless it is a subtle reference to "It is a truth universally acknowledged...", not wholly out of place here, but then surely a more clever sweeping generalization might have been found?

Second-- the idea that "all good fiction" could do one single thing, like a chorus. Few things get me more rankled, and I don't care what that one single thing might be. I just believe believe we have to keep our definitions of fiction, its possibilities, so broad if there is to be any hope of "goodness" at all. That if fiction, good or otherwise, just like "the novel" and the "the story", ever came to conform to these kind of prescriptions, to any prescriptions, how much we all would lose for it.

If every single book was the book that we wanted, we'd stop knowing how to fall in love.

The Octopus by Jennica Harper

I used to have this sticker with a picture of a boy and a bear standing on the top of Planet Earth, set against a black starry sky and the bear was pointing up. The words coming out of his mouth said, "Look up there." The image to me is the definition of "wonder", and it kept occurring to me as I reread Jennica Harper's book The Octopus yet again.

Wondrous things dominate this collection: prairie skies, cinema, rocket ships, spacemen, music, snowstorm, beaches, breasts, mothers, and extraterrestrial life. Some of these things ordinary but made new through widened eyes. From "Cinema Paradiso": "Only a true believer/ sits on the edge of her seat at the movies/ like they do in the movies./ I am such a believer."

In the long poem "The Octopus", this wonder is questioned, as two former lovers have the same conversations they've always had. "Something we could not let go:/ all the time spent, the conversations/ run and rerun, we didn't think we would/ have the strength to have them/ with another person." The other love who sees such wonder as self-indulgent, who "can't condone the reckless hope/ of finding some other life out there." He points elsewhere instead: "If Sagan and his crew really wanted an alien,/ you say, they would look to the octopus..." He is "afraid all this probing/ will have been a waste."

But to our narrator, the wonder has been enough, and so too the wondering: "the girl on the beach... but is it a waste that I got to dream her?" Pointing up, and wondering what is out there in the universe, asking where did we come from and where are we going. Questions that apply just as much to outer space as to our own histories; the secret to our origins might lie in the stars, but we seek the same answers in our mothers, our families, in the world all around us. In this context everything is worth examining; indeed a praying mantis is a "tiny robot", we are made up of our elements. And then we can dare to "admit we're not the only subject/ and can sometimes be the searcher, the verb".

Harper writes, "All of this talk is just talk./ The truth is, we will never know/ our own future, not even/our own past". The talk, however, and all the wondering, and the poetry-- all this stand as evidence, as an arsenal against empty claims of nothingness. Making it certain: "We Are Here."

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder

Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children's writer. She's written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, "I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was."

In terms of Snyder's writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, "Happily Ever After": "She's every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like." I recognized Snyder's poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains' second chapter: "Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow."

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.

Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy's journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that's not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.

Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there's trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home...

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.

Summer on the Shelf

I mentioned before the psychological problems books can cause me-- when I read Fight Club and became psychotic, and how prairie fiction puts the weight of the world on my shoulders. Here's a new one, though I can't blame it on the text. Remember a few weeks back when I said I was going to read Summer? I really had the best intentions, and even went and picked it off the shelf. So far so good, and I opened up the book. I was surprised by the dedication on the inside cover, by a friend who was once a best friend, and is now a friend no longer. I had forgotten the book had come from her, and to read her words and how sad they've come to be with time was positively devastating. I am not so much in the habit of losing friends, you see, and blantant proof of that loss was hard to take. And so I put the book back on the shelf where I suspect it will remain.

A False Inheritance

I was glad to read "Looking Backward: The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize", whose link-to lit-blogs had been spitting out wildly about two weeks ago. It's an essay, I think, that is ill-represented by sensational snip-snippy pull-quotes which read as idle bitching. "I don't see where's there's any room for debating the fact that M.G. Vassanji can't write," is one example, and in fact even when this quote isn't standing alone, I'm not sure Good's examples substantiate it. Whenever a critic tries to pinpoint badness by tossing out random paragraph, I am rarely convinced. I don't know much about aesthetics ("quite obviously," you might be saying), but they sometimes seem as arbitrary as taste.

Like everything in Canadian Notes and Queries, however, the article broadened my perspective. My perspective going into it being this: I don't like books being slagged off, particularly for their popularity (as what exactly are we masses supposed to be reading? and if we were reading something different, you wouldn't get to feel so smug). I also thought that Late Nights on Air was magical, the best book I read last year (and I read a lot of books last year). I didn't read Effigy or The Assassin's Song from the Giller list, because I knew I wouldn't like either of them, and I don't understand why readers who probably had the same instincts went ahead and read them anyway. Prize lists aren't required reading. I couldn't think of a more boring kind of martyrdom.

I am also bothered by the Can-Lit criticism that takes down books for being either exactly what they are, or what they aren't. Particularly when this criticism takes such a limited view of Canadian Literature in order to prove itself, for example the complaint that Can-Lit doesn't do urban, when 16 out of the 20 Canadian novels I've read this year take place in cities and towns. I realize I'm just a small sample, but perhaps it proves that Can-Lit isn't just any one thing, which I think is sort of wonderful. I have also noticed that this brutal criticism is a kind of brutish criticism, and that aesthetic arguments are turned up to render artless stories women tell.

Finally, I was reading this article at the same time I was reading Sharon Butala's story collection Fever, which is all the things Can-Lit is supposed to have outgrown-- about farmers and farms, about the prairies, so backwards-looking that history is perpetually present or on the verge of such a thing. It's an amazing collection, which was even more apparent as I read it a second time, and I didn't see where there was any room for debating that fact. That Sharon Butala is an incredible writer, that she writes about the place where she lives, and where lots of people live, and that our "inherited tropes" are still our stories, because so much never changes and it's never going to change, regardless of whether we're deconstructing our fiction or not. That we write about our geography because it's still important, and history isn't irrelevant yet, and I don't think it's even finished.

I swallowed my petty defensiveness, however, enough to properly come to understood Alex Good's point of view here-- the writers who get praised without even trying, and I get it. I was baffled by Divisidero, and I gave it much more credit than I might have if it had been first time novel (I'll be rereading it this summer, and look forward to finding out if I see it any clearer). That the dominance of the big presses doesn't make a lot of sense, nor does it represent the quality Can-Lit that is available (and I see that now, particularly as I've read such great books by small presses this year). The limitations of the judges also-- their backgrounds, their own connections. That perhaps the Gillers don't reward the very best of Can-Lit, but I wonder if the complaint isn't rather than choices are too mainstream. But I don't know if the Gillers were ever supposed to be cutting edge. Also my favourite book from last year won, but then maybe that's just me (though it's not. An awful lot of people loved Late Nights on Air...)

Good's most salient point, however-- what he calls "the Giller's most pernicious effect" is that that "the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian Literature should be." And I see that now, that the problem isn't this shortlist, but rather a lack of authenticity that is contagious. That we set out to write a Canadian fiction, and so we stick in the prairie, the combine harvester, crop failure and a dissatisfied wife. So that our fiction is put-on rather than organic, that we rely on the same tropes, those "inherited tropes" but the problem is writers who haven't even inherited them. It would be different if they had inherited them-- Sharon Butala has, and her fiction rings true and timeless, it does-- but these writers are just trying them on for size. Which is different, and fake and false and boring. Writers not listening to their own voices, telling their own stories, but rather writing within such fixed parameters of what Good Literature is supposed to be. A problem perpetuated by the celebration of the same kinds of work time and time again.

It's an important distinction, what is inherited and otherwise (though I realize it reads as arbitrary too), and upon it the argument swung round for me. I'm not sure Alex Good meant it to, or if he even meant the distinction at all, but the resulting synthesis seems infinitely sensible.

Can-Reads-Indies #3: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

I wasn't the only reader for whom the highlight of Canada Reads 2009 was Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, which was a book that we all should have read, that we were all better for having read, but I would never have picked it up otherwise. Sometimes the prospect of looking to the past for books we should have read is a bit like contemplating getting into Joyce Carol Oates-- where do we start, and how would we ever be able to stop?

So it's nice to get a bit of guidance, and I feel the very same about Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese, which I'd never even heard of until I encountered NCL obsessive Melanie Owen online. In its day (1925), Wild Geese was a bestseller, was even made into a film, and heralded a new direction in Canadian fiction (though I'm not sure who followed in that direction-- Sinclair Ross? Hugh MacLennan? See, with this early stuff, my knowledge is very sketchy. I read Ernest Buckler once. Anyway...)

Wild Geese takes place in a rural community in northern Manitoba. Schoolteacher Lind Archer arrives to board with the Gare family, and quickly realizes that something is amiss-- somehow Caleb Gare has got his wife and children stuck under his thumb, and they're terrified of defying him. He works them like animals on the farm, keeps them isolated from the community, wields his power with brute force, and he takes care to bully and blackmail his neighbours on the side. Caleb has met his match in daughter Judith, however, powerful in spirit and body (she reminded me so much of Jo March), who is desperate to get away from her tyrannical father and is inspired by Lind to finally do so.

"Powerful" is overused as an adjective to describe a book, and I wish I could coin a new way to describe exactly what Wild Geese does to its readers. The book was engrossing in way I've not very often experienced-- closest comparison is my Andrew Pyper nightmares. Usually I read at a distance from novels, keeping the literary world and my own sensibly divided, but parts of Wild Geese crept into my consciousness. I read the chapter where Lind comes home in the dark and keeps making out creepy shadows and shapes behind her and around her, and I read this in the middle of a sunny afternoon, but I was freaked out. Similar, the conclusion-- I absolutely couldn't take it anymore and had to skip to the final pages to prevent a heart attack.

I also had such strong feelings about Caleb's wife, Amelia Gare. Caleb had married her aware that she'd previously had a child out of wedlock, and he uses this knowledge to control her throughout their marriage. The control, however, comes from Amelia's fear that Caleb would tell her son of his background (which he had been blissfully unaware of, told he was well-born, by the priests who'd raised him). Amelia's feelings for this son are so strong that she is willing to sacrifice her other children for him, the spirited Judith in particular, and this absolutely enraged me as I read. Perhaps more than Caleb did himself.

Caleb Gare is a fascinating character, soft-spoken in the creepiest way possible. At first, I thought he was simplistic, his purposes far too blatent-- Ostenso has him rubbing his hands together whilst surveying his land, wondering, "what the occasion would be, if it came to that, which would finally force him to play his trump card, as he liked to call it... He firmly believed that knowledge of Amelia's shame would keep the children indefinitely to the land..."

But when I saw him interacting with members of the community with similar schemes and tricks, manipulating and blackmailing, this behaviour with his family began to seem very consistent. Caleb Gare is a completely unsympathetic character, and I am not sure this equals a lack of complexity in his moral make-up. We are tuned these days to see such characters as poorly drawn, but I'm not sure now. Ostenso has Caleb Gare making sense: everything he did was for his own gain-- he worked his family hard so that he wouldn't have to work as hard himself or pay anyone else to do so, he worked his neighbours to get his hands on their land and therefore expand his own power. He delighted in this power too, perhaps his only source of joy, save for his land, and there is a vital relationship between the two.

In addition to his sheer meanness, we are supposed to see Caleb Gare's connection to his land as part of the motivation for his behaviour, but this is a given, not wholly explored. Which I've found in a lot of books, actually. It's taken for granted that land can make a man do certain things, but I'm often left wondering exactly why. Ostenso does show that Gare (through using his family as slaves) is able to reap a bounty from the harsh northern lands in a way his neighbours are unable to do-- that his domination extends even to the crops he commands. But I would have liked to know more about why Caleb feels the way he does about his land. It could be, however, that we don't know how he feels the feels and thinks very little beyond his conniving. That Caleb is absolutely spiritually bankrupt, and this does seem to be the case.

Ostenso's treatment of the landscape itself is vivid, of the inhabitants, and elements of Norse mythology informing their lives lends to the spooky treatment. The depiction of the land is also remarkable for the way in which the delicate, lovely and elegant Lind Archer's contrast with it. Her presence as a foreign object in this strange brutal place is the catalyst for all that transpires, and also gives us a perspective on the Gares from without, which is most illuminating. Her relationship with Mark Jordan, another recently transplant (who is Amelia Gare's illeg. son! This is not a spoiler, however, as we're told from the outset) provides also provides necessary relief from the brutality of all other human relations.

In short, unlike much Canadian prairie fiction, Wild Geese didn't make me want to kill myself.

From about midway in, I was rapt by this book, but there is one big reason why it won't be top of my list of Canada Reads: Independently picks. Primarily, the way in which the prose of Wild Geese manages to sometimes reads like an undergraduate essay on Wild Geese. Such as when Lind Archer says, "That's what's wrong with the Gares. They all have a monstrously exaggerated conception of their duty to the land-- or rather to Caleb, who is nothing but a symbol of the land." There is something particularly ubsubtle about the book's structures, particularly when compared to the complexity of a book like Century.

Still though, it's a riveting read, pushes its language and imagery in challenging directions, is unafraid to shy away from uncomfortable or even horrifying situations, and tackles female sexuality in a beautiful way. (Yes-- Canadian fiction in which the woman gets to be the horse, for once.) If this book is underread, it should be no longer.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith
3) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso