Charlotte Gray: The even stranger afterlife of Weird Willie PAGE 4

$6.50 Vol. 25, No. 4 May 2017

Lisa Bryn Rundle The Animals Next Door What we owe our zoological kin

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Martin Patriquin The mythical Quebec

Devon Smither Canadian art’s people problem

Navneet Alang Cory Doctorow’s Fukuyama moment

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EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian 3 “I Love Arguing!” 19 Shadow Stories [email protected] In profound appreciation of Anthony Westell Mother issues 40,000 years ago, and now MANAGING EDITOR (1926–2017) Anne Marie Todkill Michael Stevens Bronwyn Drainie ASSISTANT EDITOR 20 upstairs the dogs howl Bardia Sinaee 4 Haunted A poem ASSOCIATE EDITOR The remarkable afterlife of our weirdest PM— Bob MacKenzie Beth Haddon and what we want from politicians 21 Goode for All Infermitys POETRY EDITOR Charlotte Gray Moira MacDougall Accounting for tastes in a collection of 17th- COPY EDITOR 6 The Animals Next Door century recipes and remedies Madeline Koch What do we owe our zoological kin? Eugenia Zuroski CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Lisa Bryn Rundle 23 Who, Us? Mohamed Huque, Andy Lamey, Molly Peacock, Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman 8 This Catechism of Possession Debunking the mythical Quebec A poem Martin Patriquin ONLINE EDITORS Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Klara du Plessis 24 How Love Settles Donald Rickerd, C.M. 9 Why Trudeau Abandoned Electoral A poem PROOFREADERS Reform Carla Hartsfield Patricia Treble The case against change RESEARCH 26 Alone in a Room Rob Tilley Patrice Dutil An artist’s arresting vision of a life in captivity, DESIGN 11 Speaking of Dying and of how power shapes our world and our James Harbeck Do public rituals of grief ever help us mourn? selves ADVERTISING/SALES Sandra Martin Nicholas Köhler Michael Wile [email protected] 28 Against the Flow 13 No Nudes, Please—We’re Canadian DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS Our national artistic fixation on landscapes Race, radio and Canada’s musical coming of age Michael Booth came at a cost Donna Bailey Nurse ADMINISTRATOR Devon Smither 29 Autumn Christian Sharpe The Outside Man A poem PUBLISHER 15 Helen Walsh Maya Tevet Dayan A celebrity memoir from a uniquely talented art- [email protected] ist on the edge of fame, and Hollywood itself 30 Where We Have Been BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Semley A bumpy, warp-speed view of the ultimate road George Bass, Q.C., Tom Kierans, O.C., trip—humanity’s Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., 17 The Post-Scarcity World Jack Mintz, C.M., Jaime Watt Capitalism meets its cyber-hippie match in a Renée Hetherington ADVISORY COUNCIL bountiful future that redefines class, politics and 32 Letters and Responses Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., personhood itself Antanas Sileika, Christopher Labos, Mark Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., Navneet Alang Lundy C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff, Reed Scowen POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.

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2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada “I Love Arguing!” In profound appreciation of Anthony Westell (1926–2017) Bronwyn Drainie

uardian angel” are the words that out to be me, for the next twelve years, followed by “ come to mind when I think about my gifted successor, Sarmishta Subramanian. Gmy friend and mentor Tony Westell, When Tony and I first met in 2003, at his although he would be the first to scoff at the religious Toronto apartment, I was daunted by his name nuance of the phrase. (Tony was a serious atheist.) and reputation and more than a little terrified I did not know Tony in the early stages of his by his braininess and brusqueness. He could see rich and eventful life: a stint as a cub reporter in I was a greenhorn at this editing business, and he England, during which he worked his way up to the hounded me mercilessly for the first three or four London Evening Standard; next, a permanent leap years. My display copy—headlines and such— across the pond with his wife, Jeannie, to the Globe lacked “zing.” Could I not make the effort to find and Mail, eventually heading up its Ottawa bureau; some better artwork? I was crafting the pieces too a lateral move to the Toronto Star as national col- short so we would end up in competition with the umnist; and then a change of hat when he joined Globe and Mail (“where I would not want to be,” he Carleton University’s faculties of journalism and said) instead of the New York Review of Books. It Canadian studies, and began passing along his seems, though, as I read back through our email skills and passions to the next generation. correspondence of those early years, that I could It was at Carleton in the 1990s that Tony first handle the barrage of criticism and even thrive on assumed his role of guardian angel for a small and it. “Keep the feedback coming,” I wrote. “It always struggling publication called the Literary Review feels like a nice bracing cold shower.” of Canada, conceived and nurtured for its first five Of course, along with the wasp-tongued critiques years by a determined and optimistic intellectual came a treasure box of advice, encouragement and named Patrice Dutil. Tony was involved almost warnings: “Mixing scholarship and journalism on from the beginning, helping Patrice raise his current affairs subjects, that was the formula I had ungainly literary child and then, when Patrice felt in mind for the LRC but could never pull off.” “When the need to pass the torch, negotiating a transfer to writers send in letters attacking the ‘incompetence’ Image courtesy of Dan Westell Carleton University Press in an attempt to keep the of the reviewer, they are also attacking the editor view did not make him popular with commenta- frail creature alive. who published the review—so watch out!” Finally, tors, especially those of a nationalistic ilk. But then But that press found itself in trouble by 1998, so in the highest praise he ever gave me, “even people Tony was not the sort of person to give popularity Tony stepped in again, locating an eager group of who don’t read the LRC now talk about it!” a moment’s notice. For him, logic carried all in its belle-lettrists who were willing to give the LRC the I learned from the veteran journalist Geoffrey wake. It was one of his most endearing qualities.” In kiss of life. Madeline Koch, the magazine’s stead- Stevens after Tony’s death that I was not the only Tony’s own cautionary words, though, in an email fast copy editor to this day, remembers their initial beneficiary of this generosity. While Tony was a to me in 2008, he wrote: “Our bastard system—con- blue-sky get-together with Tony: “Denis Deneau political reporter in Ottawa—the best of his era, stitutional monarchy and prime ministerial govern- and David Berlin had assembled a bunch of us Stevens notes—he became a mentor to many: “He ment—is in no way republican and cannot become who would put together the magazine, and there and Jeannie kept what amounted to an open house a republic, short of a revolution. In my view, our were all kinds of wild ideas thrown around about for young journalists in their home on Powell system is highly unsatisfactory, but it will take a printing full-colour glossy artwork and fancy writ- Avenue in the Glebe. There was always a hot meal, a change in the voting system to reform it.” ers and grand distribution fantasies, and Tony sat cold beer and helpful advice for any of us whenever If there was one thing Tony hounded me about quietly, rolling his eyes, and then finally putting us we dropped in.” more than any other, it was to try to be “more in our place. He was the only one there with Real And prickly editorial help was only half of Tony’s provoking/engaging/intriguing.” And the best way Magazine Experience.” Madeline recruited Helen contribution to the LRC. He wrote scores of reviews to do that, he thought, was to run controversial Walsh to the publishing team, and they recruited and commentaries for the magazine over the reviews plus responses from outraged authors plus Mark Lovewell, Lewis DeSoto and James Harbeck, years, and because of his newsman’s love of short Solomonic replies from the reviewers, all in the and somehow this plucky band kept the LRC going. deadlines, we could always depend on him to fill same issue. “I love arguing!” he crowed to me one Helen, now the magazine’s sole publisher, a couple of suddenly blank pages with bracing day, and he was convinced that the more intellec- recalls: “Throughout it all, Tony was a tireless and prose. Somewhat rarely for a transplanted Brit, he tual dust-ups in the magazine the better. committed advocate for the LRC. He served as an had dived deeply into Canadian history when he Long after he no longer attended editorial meet- advisor to me and the magazine and he contributed first arrived here and soon found, to his surprise, ings, we still kept in touch by email, and Tony’s many, many articles. Without him, we would not that he knew a great deal more about the country’s sardonic tone never faltered. One of his later notes have survived the last 25 years.” pre-Confederation roots and subsequent political to me said this: “A few months back somebody said More than once, the lean and fiercely independ- development than most Canadian journalists did. I was a legend in journalism. When I looked up ent LRC faced money problems, and Tony stepped Here Mark Lovewell, a former co-publisher of legend in the dictionary, I learned it means a myth!” in; in 2002 he acted as unpaid editor for a year while and loyal contributor to the LRC, picks up the story: Tony Westell was no myth. And for those of us others on the team worked on raising the cash to “Tony became what one might best call a North who had the privilege of working with him at the hire someone who could devote himself or herself American continentalist. He believed that sooner or LRC—and even for those who did not, who sim- to the magazine on a full-time basis. That turned later the United States and Canada would be inexor- ply enjoyed the fruits of his keen and imaginative ably drawn toward each other, possibly in a formal ­editorial vision for the magazine, whether they Bronwyn Drainie was editor-in-chief of the LRC political union. And this was a prospect that he saw knew it or not—his brilliance and his generosity from 2003 to 2015. as being potentially beneficial for Canadians. This will live on.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 3 Haunted The remarkable afterlife of our weirdest PM— and what we want from politicians Charlotte Gray

Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life Christopher Dummitt McGill-Queen’s University Press 320 pages, softcover ISBN 9780773548763

strange man, a strange age, a “ strange country. There is more to Mac­ Akenzie King, and to Canada, than meets the eye.” In the mid 1970s, the writer of those words, pol- itical scientist Reg Whitaker, sat down in the read- ing room of the Public Archives in Ottawa to study the newly released volumes of the King diaries—a massive journal that Prime Minister Mackenzie King began keeping as a student in the 1890s, and in which he was still making entries until three days before his death in 1950. At first, Whitaker told read- ers of Canadian Forum in 1976, he was intrigued, because he found himself in “strange territory, not like other matter-of-fact diaries I have read before.” King appeared to be “an odd gentleman,” who believed that his dead loved ones literally hovered around him, and that the hands on a clock might be a communication from divine providence. But as Whitaker read on, he abandoned his attitude of fond indulgence and hurtled toward the conclusion that Canada’s longest-serving prime Soon every commentator in the country was asking explores what Canadian reactions to the King story minister was “quite crazy … The inner world of the what it said about Canada that the stuffy little man say about our expectations of political leaders. In public man begins in incongruity and ends in hallu- who had adroitly run the country for more than other words, this is not just about King; it is about cination. The stream runs faster and wilder, the light 21 years was now revealed to be a nutcase. us. And although Dummitt is also making a sophis- darkens, and the shore is lost from sight.” Whitaker Most Canadians today are vaguely aware of ticated argument about the importance of narrative connected King’s strangeness with the larger mys- the Weird Willie side of William Lyon Mackenzie history, he has done it with punchy elegance rather teries of Canada, suggesting that the prime minister King, although as I reread some of the details in than impenetrable jargon. (Not that he leaves his reflected the suppressed peculiarities of the land he Christopher Dummitt’s Unbuttoned: A History debts to other scholars unacknowledged. The witty governed. of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life, I found them as and informative endnotes are a joy in themselves.) Whitaker was far from the only writer spelunk- jaw-droppingly hilarious as when I first encoun- He tells parallel stories: the trajectory of King’s ing through King’s psyche after the diary was made tered them. What? The prime minister of Canada posthumous reputation within the larger historical public. The year after that Canadian Forum article, consulted spiritualist mediums? He spoke to his context, as Canada itself evolved from the small- military historian Charles Stacey published A Very dead parents and took advice from the ghosts of Sir minded, stuffy country afflicted with “Victorianitis” Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King. Wilfrid Laurier and William Gladstone? The staid, into today’s self-assured society with a fetish for Revelations about hookers, séances, Ouija boards sexless bachelor had visited prostitutes repeat- “authenticity.” In the 21st century, politicians hide and superstitions surged through the media, and edly as a young man? He studied the patterns in secrets or keep the public at arm’s length at their the “Weird Willie” phenomenon exploded. King’s his shaving cream for their political omens? A peril. We want our leaders to be real people, with posthumous image would never be the same again. 21st-century reader cannot help wondering if King whom we might share a mug of coffee or a yoga isn’t a character out of some bizarro Netflix series class. Charlotte Gray is an adjunct research professor involving aliens. Dummitt also traces the story of the diary itself, at Carleton University, and author of the current But Dummitt, a professor of history at Trent which had its own curious narrative. King often bestseller The Promise of Canada: 150 Years— University, has done more than indulge any voyeur- said he kept his diary so that he could draw on it People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country istic tendencies in this lively book. Instead of asking for his memoirs—but he had neither the time nor (Simon and Schuster, 2016). what light King’s weirdness throws on Canada, he the stamina for the task once he left politics. In his

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada will he dictated that the diary be destroyed, except embarked on the search for an official biographer, resuscitated.” Senior historians including Norman for those passages that he indicated were to be pre- who would produce a solid tome of careful research Hillmer, Jack Granatstein and Michael Bliss began served. However, he never marked any passages, and respectful prose. the game of rating prime ministers, and King kept leaving his four literary executors with a dilemma. The need for such a literary monument was emerging at or close to the top of league tables. How should they fulfill their obligations to King and urgent because King was under attack by less rever- Despite Weird Willie’s stodgy public persona and balance an appreciation for his place in historical ent writers and authorities. Chief among these was bizarre private quirks, he was now recognized as memory with his desire for privacy? the formidably articulate Eugene Forsey, a consti- an exceptionally skillful politician, war leader and While the early handwritten volumes were being tutional expert who damned King not for his private champion of unity. typed up, the executors dealt with one challenge oddities but for his public hypocrisy. In Forsey’s This new appraisal of King, however, came in after another. An employee of the Public Archives view, King had pretended to be a statesman, but a different context. In the 1990s, argues Dummitt, who had been tasked with photographing the diary was in fact nothing more than a grubby politician. the King legacy looked better and better because tried to sell photocopies of some of its pages to the The secrets of his power, wrote Forsey, included Canada was suffering another bout of national press. A pivotal volume of the diary went missing “ruthlessness, callousness, utter lack of principle, disunity. After decades of muscular decisiveness in the middle of the Gouzenko spy scandal, so infinite capacity to wear opponents down by the from prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Brian that the diary was caught up in an investigation sheer weight of irrelevant talk and, of course, sheer Mulroney, the cautious conservatism of King by the RCMP secret service into Soviet spookery. mendacity.” acquired a new glow. What Scott had derided as That volume has never reappeared. Historians This is where Dummitt takes leave of the corpse King’s mediocrity and refusal to take sides now and reporters repeatedly pressed for access. Two and plunges into the larger context: the values of looked like a successful formula for the government of the literary executors died before their job was post-war Canada, in which deference toward public of such a fragile, fractious country. done. The remaining two opted for preservation figures in general, and King in particular, was slowly There was a further dimension to the evolving rather than destruction (although they did burn evaporating. Outwardly so cautious and prissy, King image. The small clubby world of the Ottawa additional material on spiritualism). At first, only King already looked like a relic from a different age press corps that King knew had been replaced by serious scholars were given access. But in 1975, the by 1950. The most pointed criticism came from F.R. “gotcha” journalism. Investigative reporters had volumes up to 1945 were made generally available, Scott, the future dean of the McGill Law School revealed the often flawed private lives of several following the standard 30-year rule for release of who in 1957 published a poem about King’s legacy. politicians—John F. Kennedy’s affairs, Richard archives, and the floodgates opened. By 1980, the King, wrote Scott, “blunted us,” leaving Canada as Nixon’s law breaking, Pierre Trudeau’s marital entire massive oeuvre was in the public realm. an unfinished country: meltdown, Brian Mulroney’s high-spending habits. King’s handwriting is difficult to decipher, so Canadian historians had written about Sir John most researchers today rely on the transcripts. If We had no shape A. Macdonald’s taste for alcohol and Sir Wilfrid you want to troll through their thousands of pages Because he never took sides, Laurier’s mistress. So what if King’s diaries had for yourself, go to http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/ And no sides revealed him as petty, small-minded and odd? By discover/politics-government/prime-ministers/ Because he never allowed them to take shape… the end of the 20th century, Weird Willie had lost william-lyon-mackenzie-king/Pages/search.aspx. Let us raise up a temple his novelty value. And, besides, King at least had I guarantee that you will be bored by the banality of To the cult of mediocrity, done a good job. some passages, awed by the importance of others Do nothing by halves and fascinated by the weird stuff. And you may not Which can be done by quarters. irginia Woolf once observed that the actual be getting the full story. Sometimes the handwrit- Vlength of a person’s life is open to dispute ten originals were so illegible or repetitive that the A cultural revolution was bubbling up, and because lives do not necessarily end on deathbeds. typists skipped paragraphs. An employee of Library the Victorian, Christian self-discipline that had As Dummitt puts it in Unbuttoned, “history is and Archives Canada told me recently, “There are hitherto moulded middle class culture began to never finished with its main characters—it is only probably still secrets in there.” crumble. Sales of alcohol rose; families purchased the questions and passions that change from one “There is a lesson here of a kind,” observes televisions and shiny new cars on installment generation to the next.” The biographer is always Dummitt. “Be careful when you die. And burn your plans; moviegoers flocked into cinemas to see Some part of the picture, shaping the story told, whether diaries.” Like It Hot. Talk of frugality and duty waned, to be or not she or he directly addresses the reader. King replaced by open discussion of desires and truths continues to live on, with a succession of biograph- ummitt embarks on this journey in fairly that an earlier morality had hidden or repressed. ers in hot pursuit, reimagining him from their own Dconventional narrative style—important for The discipline of history was also changing. It perspectives. an author looking for a general audience, since was no longer the preserve of deferential academ- Given that Dummitt acknowledges this, I am I am afraid that many readers will know little about ics who explored the past through the lenses of surprised that he himself does not emerge from King’s story beyond the Netflix details. (Don’t get politics, economics and great men. From the 1960s behind the curtain to voice his insights. Instead, me started about Canada’s wilful disregard for his- onward, some scholars turned toward different he sticks to the magisterial “we” in Unbuttoned— tory…) He describes how, after King’s death in July kinds of history that had hitherto been ignored; except in the preface. Here he gets more personal 1950, the coffin lay in state on Parliament Hill for a they explored the role of class, region, gender, race as he reflects on the role of history. Contemplating day and a half. Nearly 40,000 people lined up for and religion in the Canadian identity. They also an academic discipline now dominated by post- hours in the midsummer heat to pay their respects employed a broader range of tools, including some modern analysis, he writes, “it seems to me that the to the leader who had nudged Canada into nation- of the psychoanalytic terms (Oedipus complex! role of history is to make an earlier era come alive hood since he became prime minister for the first Guilt! Superego!) that were now being flung around. again in the minds of our contemporaries.” Only time in 1921. King had held the country together As revelations about King’s private life appeared, narrative history, he argues, can make it poignant, during the Second World War’s conscription crisis, the former prime minister became a sitting duck for or allow readers to catch glimpses of an earlier and in his final years, he began the process of put- both earnest scrutiny and mocking scorn. People time. No account of the past can be the whole truth, ting in place social programs. He also manoeuvred were fascinated by the secrets that came spilling out but at least narrative history evokes responses that Canada into a new relationship with its traditional of the diaries, and by King’s lack of self-knowledge might range from shock or sympathy. “I’m just not allies in the North Atlantic triangle. Although few as he rationalized his own sometimes devious convinced that a more analytical style of writing … of the mourners who stared into the open casket behaviour. And there were those inevitable ques- gets any closer to the truth or its construction … It displayed much fondness for the old man (let alone tions … did the prime minister take direction from is possible, I hope, to write a story and to still make the kind of adulation shown to more recent lead- the dead when making crucial decisions? Was he a contribution to scholarly knowledge.” ers), they quietly honoured a “great statesman.” guided by his officials or by irrational omens? How It is refreshing to see an academic historian Hints of a secret life circulated almost immedi- weird was Willie? make this argument, and I echo his hope that both ately after King’s death. An article about his visits “By the early 1980s, Mackenzie King lived the general readers and his colleagues will enjoy this to spiritualists was published in an obscure British afterlife of a palimpsest, those ancient documents book. Unbuttoned deserves a broad audience. If it publication called Psychic News. The respected whose original words had been erased so that does not find it, it will not be Dummitt’s fault. journalist Blair Fraser published a column in something new could be rewritten over the top,” It will be because today’s educational institutions Maclean’s magazine in 1951 entitled “The Secret writes Dummitt. have starved Canadians of narrative history for so Life of Mackenzie King, Spiritualist.” But the buzz But then, “a funny thing happened on the way long that most of us do not realize that the past has was muted. Meanwhile, King’s literary executors to the 1990s. Mackenzie King’s reputation was shaped our present.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 5 The Animals Next Door What do we owe our zoological kin? Lisa Bryn Rundle

intertwined with theirs. Searching Personalities on the Plate: out the connections—via the ethics The Lives and Minds of Animals of pet ownership, the host of deci- We Eat sions related to eating animals—has Barbara J. King become a vogue, a new rite of passage University of Chicago Press for urban folk. Herzog artfully docu- 229 pages, hardcover ments the hypocrisy and irrational- ISBN 9780226195186 ity that seem to prevail here. If we see reducing the number of animal Animal Metropolis: deaths for meat as a worthy goal, Histories of Human-Animal he playfully points out, we should Relations in Urban Canada stop eating one-meal chickens and Joanna Dean, Darcy Ingram and start eating whales. Herzog does not Christabelle Sethna, editors judge; instead, he points out that University of Calgary Press moral inconsistency is a lived reality 358 pages, softcover for most human beings. The solu- ISBN 9781552388648 tion might not be to try, fruitlessly, to eradicate it but rather to tolerate it and not let our discomfort obscure dramatic rescue took the complexity of the moral conun- place recently in one of the drums we must navigate. Amost dangerous places on Hoping to turn up the heat on earth, the Iraqi city of Mosul. Hundreds of thou- For Amir Khalil, the veterinarian who headed the the omnivore’s dilemma is anthropologist and sands of Mosul’s residents had fled the war zone, rescue mission, the animals trapped in war zones are author Barbara J. King. In How Animals Grieve, where Iraqi forces have battled ISIS. Among those refugees—among society’s most vulnerable citizens King probed the emotional worlds of elephants, left behind were two residents of the abandoned and deserving of incredible efforts to bring them to baboons, bunnies and birds to discover how other Muntazah al-Nour zoo. With no warden to feed safety. But that word when applied to animals, par- species handle a profoundly universal human or care for them, some of the zoo’s animals had ticularly in an era defined by an epic humanitarian experience. Grounded as she is in scientific objec- escaped; many more had starved to death or been migrant crisis, would unsettle many people, includ- tivity, King has a knack for walking right up to the eaten by cage mates. Improbably, Simba the lion ing those deeply moved by the Mosul zoo rescue. dreaded anthropomorphization line without cross- and Lula the bear survived until they were evacu- Our relationships with animals have perhaps ing it. That book was filled with examples of animals ated in April, flown to safety in Jordan by the rescue always been filled with contradictions. These days dealing with death in animal ways: the dolphin who organization Four Paws International. Confined to they are also tinged with a growing sense of our carries the body of her dead calf for days, tending their tiny cages, Simba and Lula had remained alive own hypocrisies. Never have we known so much to him gently, not eating or caring for herself—just only because of the remarkable kindness of their about the inner lives of animals or projected so grieving, it would seem; the ducks or elephants or human neighbours—people on the brink of extinc- much human emotion onto them, and never have other animals who sit with, groom or guard the tion themselves, who had alerted the rescue organ- we gorged on their flesh in such epic proportions. corpses of animals to whom they were bonded, ization, and brought the animals food and water New discoveries in pig cognition (the animals have in some cases dying themselves, again seemingly despite having little of either themselves. intelligence resembling that of a three-year-old from grief. Our ability to consider death and its Of course, what made the situation extraordin- human) may suddenly spur the more sensitive implications may be uniquely human, but there ary was not just the circumstances, the personal among us to forego bacon at brunch, although is no reason to think our emotional experience of sacrifice in the face of war and tragedy, but that not the eggs produced by battery-caged hens. grief is quite so distinct. the residents of Mosul had done this for animals. Meanwhile, videos of goats, kittens, dogs, squirrels In her new book, Personalities on the Plate: The Theirs was the ultimate humanity precisely because and turtles doing endearing things online connect Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, King broadens their charges were those second-class citizens with us to humans all over the globe—animals con- her scope to look at what we know of the fear, pain, whom we share our cities and countryside, the crea- sumed as entertainment, not just food. pleasure and social connections, as well as the tures we love and save and kill and employ and eat. Our confusion, and the moral calls we make intelligence and personality, of the diverse species within it, has long fascinated anthro-zoologist Hal eaten by humans around the world, ranging from Lisa Bryn Rundle was a producer at CBC Radio’s Herzog. Herzog cogently explored the deep cultural spiders, insects, octopuses and fish to chickens, Q for nine years and is now with Out in the Open. ambivalence in our relationship with animals in goats, cows, pigs and chimpanzees. While she does She co-created and co-produced the show Tooth his 2010 book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some not touch much on grief here, the knowledge that and Claw, about our complicated relationships We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about another being may well be grieving each animal with animals. A former senior editor at the Walrus, Animals. No longer do most of us live cheek by death hangs over the book. she has written for Chatelaine, Reader’s Digest, jowl with animals, and it is easy to hide, forget or King has gathered the most recent scientific Maclean’s and others. ignore the extent to which our lives are still deeply research into what it is like to be, say, a cricket or

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada a blue-head wrasse or a Nigerian dwarf goat, and, sentiocentrism—an informal ranking of animals taken all together, it is more than a little mind-­ by intelligence that ends with taking the brainiest blowing. For example, paper wasps, which King beasts off our plates, or more concisely, “eating ILLUMINATING notes have brains “less than 0.01 percent the size dumb.” But King does not go there; she is passion- Doctors in Denial of our own,” recognize each other’s faces. Fruit flies ate but not prescriptive. She is also aware of how Why Big Pharma and take time to ponder their decisions. And who can fail quickly scientific certainty about the relative dumb- the Canadian medical to be impressed by the great feat of communication ness of animals can be turned on its head. profession are too involved in the waggle dance of the honeybee? The The whole concept of “bird brain” emerged from close for comfort evidence is growing that insects are not the instinct- a scientific belief that an avian cerebral anatomy Joel Lexchin, MD driven automatons we believe them to be. Neither ruled out the possibility of the kind of sentience Foreword by Dr. Brian Goldman are fish. King gives us fish that cooperate with other that now seems evident. One more big mistake Joel Lexchin examines species of fish when hunting, using anticipatory from the big brains. Our earlier understanding of the relationship between the Canadian medical thinking, communication and team work in the these animals was not just wrong; it was extremely profession and the process. She presents the orange-dotted tuskfish, convenient as it allowed us to treat egg- and meat- pharmaceutical industry, which has mastered tool use. (It employs rocks to making chickens in the most economically efficient explaining how doctors open clams.) Fish also like to play, and, it would ways. Many animal welfare experts rank chickens have become dependents of drug companies instead seem from anecdotal evidence, have the capacity as the animals in most urgent need of rescue today; $24.95 paperback of champions of patients’ for empathy toward other fish. King puts forward a we inflict more unnecessary suffering on them in health. strong case that, yet again, long-held assumptions greater numbers than on any other living creature. that fish do not feel fear or pain are wrong. Supporting that reality has been our unwillingness This greatly complicates the reality that fish (and to consider chickens as beings with feelings, per- insects, for those who have the stomach for it) have sonalities and preferences, let alone rights. THOUGHTFUL Honest Politics Now been the animals we find easiest to justify eating. As fascinating and meaningful as “new discov- What ethical conduct In fact, not long ago people in North America who eries” can be, they do not leave us much better means in Canadian called themselves vegetarians would often eat fish; equipped to know what it is like to be any kind of public life it is only recently that the terminology—vegetar- creature other than ourselves. In his 2016 book, Edited by Ian Greene ians, vegans, pescetarians, flexitarians, reducetar- Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, and David P. Shugarman ians—has become specialized enough to invalidate the British writer Charles Foster made this argu- Experts examine high- that elision. ment with incontrovertible force: aware of the lim- profi le political scandals It may make sense that animals with which its of MRIs in showing us how animals experience and controversies that have helped pave the way we do not spend much time—like insects and the world, and tired of nature writers “striding col- to higher expectations and fish—have remained crawling, scaly mysteries, onially around, describing what they see from six tougher rules for Canadian but the same seems to be true of animals like cows feet above the ground,” Foster strove for a beast’s- politicians and public and goats. In fact, goats may embody our bizarre eye-view instead. He lived underground in a badger offi cials. $24.95 paperback contemporary relationship to animals better than sett for weeks, ate earthworms and dove into chilly any other species. Goats have nearly surpassed rivers in Exmoor during his time living like an otter. cats as the internet’s favourite animal, and pygmy He even tried, in the last experiment he details in ENGAGING and dwarf goats are the latest animal to be swept his extraordinary book, to become a swift. faddishly into North American homes as pets. It is a doomed exercise, as Foster tells us at Gunboats on But, King writes, “in an odd pairing with the soar- the very outset, if also a fascinating one. We have the Great Lakes ing goat-as-pet phenomenon, goat consumption trouble getting out of our human-centred per- 1866-68 is catching on in the [United] States, where the spectives. Barbara King recounts a story in which Cheryl MacDonald researchers at a Penn State University Field Day number of goats slaughtered has doubled every ten The little-known story years for the past three decades.” invite children to try out a task that their research of the three British Some of the most remarkable creatures to which pigs have mastered—using a modified joystick to gunboats that helped King introduces us are those who have forged deep move a cursor onto a target. A pig would go first, guarantee Confederation by patrolling the Great connections to human beings—anthropocentric as demonstrating how it is done. When children were Lakes to deter a Fenian it may be to say so. King tells us that cows are good unable to replicate it, parents could be overheard invasion as Canadian at recognizing individual humans—something saying “Come on! A pig can do it.” King finds the politicians negotiated. that makes sense, she says, “when we think of the oft-evoked “pig-child comparison” to be off-base— $24.95 paperback many centuries’ experience they have had with us in part because it posits human intelligence as the just as we have had with them.” But the real stars of “gold standard.” And the link to human children the book are the cross-species emissaries, or mer- seems to have had little effect on the way we treat INFORMATIVE cenaries perhaps, who have realized there can be pigs. King remarks that when it comes to smart-pig great benefit to close attachment to the featherless research, “the dominant agenda remains to under- and furless bipeds that seem to run things. Take stand pigs better so that we can manage them bet- Rivals for Power: Mr. Henry Joy. He was raised by an elderly man ter and thus eat them better.” Ottawa and to whom he was deeply bonded. They watched the Provinces TV together, they did chores together, they were he complexity of our relationships with ani- Ed Whitcomb inseparable. When the man moved into a nursing mals goes beyond animals as meat, of course. T An in-depth account of home, Mr. Henry Joy was adopted by a devoted new Like King, the editors of the scholarly anthology 150 years of the battles human who immediately recognized his special Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal for power between touch with old folk. He became a cherished therapy Relations in Urban Canada, academics Joanna Ottawa and provincial animal, visiting local nursing homes and allowing Dean, Darcy Ingram and Christabelle Sethna, seek leaders. himself to be held and stroked by even their most to make visible some of these other hidden aspects ornery residents. If you are not impressed, consider of our ties to the animal world. $27.95 paperback this: Mr. Henry Joy is a rooster, a bird with a lot of The work is a part of what is referred to in the personality who vocalizes his likes (which include humanities and social sciences as “the animal being carried around in a basket) and dislikes (any- turn,” a move toward including animals as actors thing with wheels). King cautions us against view- in history and other disciplines, and away from www.lorimer.ca ing him as an exceptional chicken. In her view, Mr. “humanocentrism” in academic knowledge pro- Henry Joy does not prove that one chicken can be duction—in other words “prob[ing] the boundaries Independent. Canadian. Since 1970. special; he proves that any chicken can be special. between human and non-human species, [and] Made possible with the support of the In our attempts to relieve our ethical indiges- destabilizing notions of human exceptionalism,” as Ontario Media Development Corporation tion, it is tempting to gravitate toward a kind of Animal Metropolis puts it. The Queen’s University

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 7 philosopher Sue Donaldson, author with Will Canadian roadside attraction masks a Kymlicka of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of colonial journey from a putative state of Animal Rights, explains that the animal turn savagery to civilization to spectacle. This can be viewed as a deepening of an awareness This Catechism journey was punctuated by the violence of that began in the early 1970s with thinkers abduction, captivity, and commodification such as Peter Singer. If animals have moral … Jumbo’s fate was common not just to other status, theorists began asking then, should we of Possession charismatic megafauna transported to zoos stop doing X to them? “In retrospect,” she tells and circuses in cities in Europe and the New Astride me via email, “what is striking about this first World but also to many human animals the bedspread wave debate is that it didn’t question the idea designated slaves and freaks, establishing that society is human, and animals are part of a sensation of flowers spread like butter, how closely racialization and animalization nature.” Now there is a growing acknowledge- the slight velvet glimmer of redemption. are intertwined. ment, Donaldson says, that “we don’t live in exclusively human societies, cultures and Love me, he says, say Sethna sees in this history of colonial cir- polities; we live in multispecies societies, cul- I love you. Always a stranger, cuses a footprint of empire that was larger and tures and polities.” As a result, today, political this is coerced eros deeper than human-centred histories alone philosophers such as Donaldson and Kymlicka and the violence thereof is might betray. Whether or not one is inclined are compelled to consider the political interests in the staying, her pelvis to agree with her argument, her essay offers a and rights of the animals with which we share tilting away, pushing a hand revealing glimpse of what we permit ourselves our societies through “ideas of multispecies deep sideways, his face to do to the Other—however we define that citizenship.” Other in a particular time and place. demanding a profile from the pillow. Dean, Ingram and Sethna point out in their Concision is a virtue. introduction that humans may have left the s individuals, we negotiate the increas- wild but the wild has not left our lives. Coyotes Say I love you, he says, Aingly complex questions of what we owe, encroach, mice get in our kitchens and rac- bending down so his mouth feeds the air and don’t owe, animals in different ways. In her coons get into our garbage, but these are all touching her face, book, King recounts a story of an octopus I find animals adapting to the ways humans have enticement menacing both delightful and oddly clarifying. It stars a altered the landscape. Pet animals have per- hunger lingers in the slight off- female day octopus who “strangled her partner haps adapted the most to the human-shaped rhythm of her heterosexualized hips. at conclusion of the mating act. She then car- world—something that is both to their benefit ried him off to her den, where, marine biolo- and their detriment. The book makes reference Klara du Plessis gists think, she consumed him.” It is a reminder to the “burgeoning ‘pet economy’ fuelled by that octopuses live lives and engage in cultural the commodification of ‘dominance-affection- norms of their own. They pump blue blood love’ relations between humans and their com- Klara du Plessis is a Montreal-based poet through three hearts; their brains reach into panion animals,” an area that merits deeper and critic. Her chapbook Wax Lyrical, short- each of their tentacles; female octopuses tend reflection. listed for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, was carefully to their tens of thousands of eggs for The articles cover subjects as diverse as how released from Anstruther Press in 2015; a months on end, and then expel the hatchlings horses shaped Montreal (ironically perhaps debut collection, Ekke, is forthcoming from from the den and never see the survivors again. creating a much more human-scale urban Palimpsest Press in 2018. Poems have recently The octopus mother will die soon after. How landscape than the cities we’ve built around appeared in Asymptote, Canthius, CV2 and could it ever be possible for a species like ours to cars), orca captivity in Vancouver and the public PRISM international, among others. She cur- come close to a true and deep understanding of perception of animals in medical experiments. ates the monthly, Montreal-based Resonance a species like theirs? This is an idea primatolo- Drawing on a variety of scholarly frameworks, Reading Series. gist Frans de Waal explores in his most recent the essays drive home just how important book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart even the most invisible human-animal rela- Animals Are?, which challenges us to give up a tions are to our own histories in Canada, going beloved hierarchy in which human intelligence far beyond the totemic species (caribou, moose, integrating animal histories into our own are hap- always ranks first, so we may consider the likelier loon) on which we hang our national identity. pening as “developments in areas ranging from scenario that each species is intelligent in its own, Or take the beavers in Stanley Park. Beavers, of medicine to artificial intelligence have challenged very specific ways. course, are totemic animals that have long been what it means to be human, and indeed what it Meanwhile, there seems to be a growing central to Canadian history, in the form of pelts, but means to be an animal of any sort.” consensus that we will look back on this time of how often have beavers been considered as crea- The essay that most directly addresses the line ­confusion and ambivalence with no small amount tures nearly as aggressive in shaping their environ- between human and animal is “The Memory of an of shame. “A hundred years from now we may ment as humans? As Rachel Poliquin recounts in Elephant: Savagery, Civilization and Spectacle,” by well have a much more informed, compassionate her contribution, beavers were deemed undesir- Sethna. In it she writes about the notable pachy- and fair perspective of human-animal relations,” able and evicted by the park managers in the early derm Jumbo, perhaps the first international ani- Donaldson tells me. However, she adds: “I fear that 20th century; all that remained was a beaver-less mal celebrity. An African elephant captured as a it will be clouded by a terrible sense of tragedy, of lake named Beaver Lake. It stayed that way for calf near what is now Sudan, he was displayed in longing for all that has been destroyed, and regret nearly a century until a single beaver showed up England (where he was beloved), until sold to P.T. for what might have been.” Noting the great dev- again in 2008, from parts unknown, to claim its Barnum. Barnum toured him across North America astation humans have already wreaked upon the birthright. Soon, it managed to attract a mate and as a main attraction in his circus. Jumbo was hit by a natural world, she says, “when we add the com- reproduced. Now, the creatures are in an ongoing train and died in St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1885, while ing challenges of climate change to the mix, it’s struggle with rangers over the shape of the pseudo- on tour. (A larger-than-life-size sculpture of the not clear that there will be many animals left to natural world of the park. In the dark of night, the elephant now stands at the western entrance to the benefit from changes in human perspectives and beavers fell trees, build dams and cause flooding; town.) Evoking John Berger, as well as the animal practices.” in the light of day, the rangers work to reverse their rights activist Marjorie Spiegel’s ground-breaking It is possible, though, that the coming environ- efforts. The battle captures something about the book The Dreaded Comparison: Human and mental and inevitable economic, social and pol- way we relate to wild animals in the city, the way Animal Slavery, Sethna makes a strong argument itical changes will be the catalyst for a full-scale we continue to want to curate our wild things, if not that Jumbo’s life and death fit within a broader nar- reorganization of human-animal relations, and in tame them outright. rative that encompasses the slave trade, colonial some cases, perhaps, in who becomes a meal for The book conveys effectively the sense that violence, and the captivity and display of the other whom. As disasters and crises both natural and excising animal protagonists from our histories as a colonizing weapon: otherwise inflict their damage, humans may find gives us a greatly diminished and distorted under- ourselves reminded we too are animals in the eco- standing not only of animals but of ourselves. And Jumbo’s metamorphosis from African captive ­ system—and, in a strange way, there may be some intriguingly, its editors note that the shifts toward to British icon to American celebrity to comfort in that.

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Why Trudeau Abandoned Electoral Reform The case against change Patrice Dutil

the people who addressed the committee and who hot instrument of battle, but the belligerents have Should We Change How We Vote? spoke in favour of reform wished for a proportional all gone home now. It will have to remain safely Evaluating Canada’s Electoral System system, which is used in most countries around sheathed, at least for the moment. Andrew Potter, Daniel Weinstock and the world. This made a number of members of the That does not mean this book is not useful. In Peter Loewen, editors committee quite happy. The New Democrats have fact, it should be read in preparation for future McGill-Queen’s University Press argued in favour of it since the founding of their party battles. Sixteen of the 17 short essays contained in 230 pages, softcover almost 60 years ago; the Greens also supported the this smart collection debunk the notions that pro- ISSBN 9780773548824 idea. Both parties have been less well represented portional representation, or any other scheme, will in the Commons than their harvest of votes would actually deliver better democracy or a better, more indicate, a sign that their support was “inefficient,” representative House of Commons or government. t was incontestably part of the Liberal or too thinly spread across the ridings. With a pro- This collection contains the work of scholars platform in 2015. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau portional system, both parties would surely become who mostly live along Highway 401, from Windsor Isolemnly pledged to change the electoral sys- important partners in governing coalitions, and to Montreal, as well as four British Columbians. tem so that the next election, presumably in 2019, could even hold the balance of power. The first section, “Guiding Principles,” contributes would be decided by a new way to count votes. The proportional-representation lobby has been an overview of past efforts in Canada to reform the The Special Committee on Electoral Reform was working hard for over a generation now, and its electoral system. It provides a handy reminder of created in the spring of 2016, and it delivered its argument is easy to understand. The current system what was attempted in British Columbia, Ontario, report in December. It proposed two Quebec, New Brunswick and Prince things. The first was that Canada Like it or not, national parties are Edward Island. Loewen makes the replace its traditional system of voting point that the Canadian system has (the single-member­ plurality system now among the few things Canadians proven to be remarkably “robust” in known widely as the first-past-the- dealing with various shocks over the post model) with a proportional sys- have in common. past 150 years and warns that advo- tem of representation (where seats in cates for other systems would have to the House of Commons would be allocated accord- allows parties that fail to win a majority of votes to prove in some detail why a system that has worked ing to the proportion of votes each party received). nevertheless form majorities in Parliament. It also effectively should be abandoned. He also observes Second, it recommended that the idea be put to a shuts out of power parties that consistently receive that parties in proportional systems tend to be more referendum. substantial support from the people. The system is static and dogmatic in their views and less willing to Both notions were poisonous to the Liberals, further accused of favouring a system of strategic compromise and change along with popular views. and Trudeau abandoned the commitment. For one, voting that forces individuals to vote for parties that Coalitions of such parties do not last very long either, he had consistently said that he did not want to go do not necessarily reflect their priorities. Some PR and governments change routinely. He notes, like to the people. That position was surprising, since enthusiasts have argued that the current system is many other contributors, that direct accountability British Columbia had done it twice, as had Ontario directly responsible for low participation rates in of members of Parliament to voters has also been and Prince Edward Island. (The United Kingdom, elections. Some people consider that the current highly valued in Canada and he wonders how a pro- New Zealand and the Australian Capital Territory structure brings out the worse in Canadians: it portional system that necessarily features candidates also put their electoral reforms to the people.) makes them argumentative and divisive. drawn from a list could be seen as an improvement. Prince Edward Island even held a second refer- Yet most people do not buy those arguments. The second section focuses on “Evidence and endum in October 2016 while the issue was being Polls and referendums consistently show that, Experience.” The various authors argue that the debated in Ottawa. notwithstanding its flaws, the FPTP system is con- democratic diseases that have affected Canada Just as importantly, the Liberals certainly did not sidered valuable and that only a minority of voters (drops in voter turnout rates, for instance) are com- want a proportional system. It was never clear what want it changed. Various surveys also clearly show mon in other advanced countries—including those Trudeau expected. There were indications that he that Canadians want any proposals to be put to a that use PR. They collectively debunk the idea that was favourable to the idea of ranked ballots—the popular vote. proportional systems lead to more transparent system whereby voters choose their favourites in The parliamentary committee experience governance. They show that “reformed” systems descending order. It took little time for experts to showed, all the same, that the argument to keep the such as in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland still predict, using past results and some imagination, status quo needs to be fleshed out and that those face grave issues of democratic input and regional that under such a system the Liberals would be who favour the current system are unorganized representation. In fact, the Canadian system, they guaranteed a place in government forever. It was a and less compelled to defend their point of view. show, has done a much better job of it. non-starter for the majority of non-Liberals on the Complacency easily settles in: after all, most people The third section examines “Issues and Alter­ committee. are in this camp and need no convincing. natives.” In one notable chapter, Erin Tolley from That the parliamentary committee would lean Should We Change How We Vote? Evaluating the University of Toronto points out that in the 2015 this way would not be surprising to any attentive Canada’s Electoral System aims to fill that void. It election, Canada’s system did very well in ensuring watcher of its hearings (full disclosure: I appeared was conceived by the McGill Institute for the Study that racial minorities and indigenous peoples be before it in July 2016 to argue that a referendum of Canada late last summer, as observers alarm- adequately represented in the House of Commons. was a necessity for constitutional reasons). Most of ingly noted the crescendo of voices in favour of a Her conclusion is that the current system is per- pro-PR reform. Editors Andrew Potter and Daniel fectly adaptable and she dismisses the argument Patrice Dutil is the founder of the Literary Review of Weinstock of McGill University and Peter Loewen that only a move toward proportional representa- Canada. His new book is Prime Ministerial Power at the University of Toronto organized conferences tion could do better. in Canada: Its Origins under Macdonald, Laurier in each city and then collected the papers that The fourth part is entitled “How Should We and Borden (UBC Press, 2017). find form in this book. It was designed as a red- Decide.” It tackles the issue of a referendum on

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 9 the question. All four authors in this section tive character of Canadian democracy” in light of parties, a PR model would encourage it even more. support the idea, albeit for different reasons. what other countries have experienced. He con- The evidence is clear in other jurisdictions that have Keith Archer, the chief electoral officer of British cludes that the FPTP system offers more opportun- adopted it. It makes for great political theatre, but Columbia, maintains that a referendum is neces- ities for genuine political debate than a PR system. makes governance unpredictable and unstable. sary. Hoi Kong, of McGill University’s law school, The reality is that the Canadian electoral system, It just may be that our faulty electoral system notes that there are serious doubts whether at both the federal and provincial levels, readily is the only thing that keeps this country together. Parliament could change the system unilaterally. creates new parties but at the same time spawns Most of the institutions that provided some More importantly, I think, Dominique Leydet of the coping mechanisms. The system that allows a party national cohesion—religion, business and labour Université de Montréal argues that a referendum is to form a government even though a majority voted elites, education, the written press (maybe even the inevitable but that it could only take place follow- against it forces the government to be moder- CBC/SRC!)—have lost their influence. Like it or not, ing a long, mature conversation about the strengths ate and responsive. If a party goes too far, it risks some of the few things Canadians now have in com- and weaknesses of the current system. its political future. The structure basically allows mon are national parties. It is easy to debunk the idea that a PR system a few changed minds to radically alter a parlia- Dozens of presentations to the parliamentary would deliver better governance to Canada. Studies ment. Governments in Canada that grow arrogant committee made arguments like the ones in this by noted scholars (many of whom also presented soon find their members sitting on the opposition book. It turns out they resonated well with the to the parliamentary committee) have demon- bench. No proportional system can deliver that. decision makers in government. As such, this book strated that voters in proportional systems are no Small parties, or parties that represent only regions accidentally yields insight into the real reasons the happier with how they elect their legislatures than or particular world views, do not last much longer tongue-tied Liberal government dropped its com- Canadians are with their FPTP system. People are than three electoral cycles in this country. They mitments and its improvised process of reform in not pleased to see government depend on political may profit from a burst of dissatisfaction, but voters January 2017: it realized it had no support outside coalitions that, in turn, rely on small parties to stay eventually realize that these parties have next to no its tight little circles, and that a move to PR would be in power. They do not like the idea that these coali- chance to form a government in the FPTP system. ruinous. Before any serious reform is pursued, the tions are formed by agreements hatched in the dark. In a PR system, however, these parties could play points raised by this book need to be addressed. What is all the more remarkable is that people who a role and even form part of a coalition, affirming the The Canadian electoral system is far from per- voted for parties that are left out of governing coali- validity of their views. They thus can become a regu- fect, but it has been robust, has served the people tions are even less satisfied. In other words, there lar feature of the political landscape. Many advo- well most of the time and has preserved its legitim- is absolutely no empirical evidence that Canadian cates of PR imagine that the Canadian parliament in acy. It has created a system that is competitive fed- democracy would be improved by the adoption of a system such as this would remain as it is, but with erally, provincially and intergovernmentally. There some system of proportional representation. more seats for the NDP (or the Greens). The reality, is no doubt that many feel as though their votes This book reminds us of how poorly prepared given the history of Canada, is more likely that such a do not count. This can be addressed with some Canadians are in addressing this issue. Each of system would give life to multiple parties of regional creativity without throwing overboard a system these short essays deepens the realization that and sectoral interests, each with valid claims. People that has delivered accountability and a consistent defenders of the current system need to extend have forgotten that over a dozen parties (includ- alternance of power. Governments with majorities their research on the impact of the electoral system ing the big-tent parties) have been represented in know that their support can be liquidated by a fickle on Canada’s political culture. Colin Macleod of the the House of Commons since 1867. Dozens more Canadian public. The Canadian voting system is University of Victoria makes a particularly compel- were also created, but never succeeded. In a system predictably unpredictable, and voters like it that ling point as he examines the sites of the “delibera- where there is already a strong impulse to create way. Turns out the Liberals can live with it, too.

NEW RELEASES Edit E In Ballast to the White Sea is Malcolm Lowry’s most ambitious work of the mid-1930s. Inspired by his life experience, the novel recounts the story of a

d by b IN THE Conversations and Victoria Handford Edited Timothy by Sibbald ARCH Cambridge undergraduate who aspires to be a writer but has come to believe La région d’Ottawa-Gatineau a quelque chose d’unique. CONTACT 176 that both his book and, in a sense, his life have already been “written.” Traversée par la frontière provinciale qui a la plus forte charge symbolique au pays, elle se caractérise par une TH

ruc 16 CENTURY After a fire broke out in Lowry’s squatter’s shack, all that remained of with trotskydynamique particulière. De part et d’autre de la frontière, The Academic In Ballast to the White Sea were a few sheets of paper. Only decades after les populations, les cultures et les pratiques sont diffé- Networks among Fishers, Foragers and Farmers E rentes. D’aucuns investissent la région d’une mission par- N Lowry’s death did it become known that his first wife, Jan Gabrial, still had ticulière : contribuer à limiter les risques de dislocation Travel back in time to the 1500s, when sustained contacts between CONTACT IN THE 16TH CENTuRY E

Gateway Networks among Fishers, Foragers and Farmers earle Birney du Canada en favorisant une territorialité transfrontalière a typescript. This scholarly edition presents, for the first time, the once-lost sbitt des individus et des groupes pour devenir ainsi le creu- Europeans and Natives were taking shape. From the shores of the Gulf of novel. Patrick McCarthy’s critical introduction offers insight in Lowry’s and the radical 1930sset d’une nouvelle identité canadienne. Les populations Understanding the Journey Saint Lawrence to Tadoussac and on to Huronia-Wendaki, this book focuses sense of himself while Chris Ackerley’s extensive annotations provide minoritaires sont plus vulnérables et davantage suscep- on sixteenth-century European goods and Native networks that formed an tibles de mettre en place des stratégies particulières pour to Tenure interplay of place and mobility. Part I is set around the Gulf where Euro- important information about Lowry’s life and art in an edition that will cap- tirer profit des occasions qu’offre la frontière. Cet ouvrage, Native contact was direct and the historical record is strongest. Part II is EditEd by brucE NEsbitt rédigé par quatre géographes de l’Université d’Ottawa, tivate readers and scholars alike. jette un éclairage nouveau sur les effets intrinsèquement set in the Saint Lawrence Valley and shows Tadoussac as a fork in inland ambigus et contradictoires de la frontière dans la région networks. And Part III is set around Lake Ontario, focusing on contact Conversations with de la capitale nationale. AcademicThe Gateway between this region and the Saint Lawrence Valley. This groundbreaking work features scholarly contributions by Saraí Barreiro, Meghan Burchell, Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in northwest England, near Liverpool. Anne Gilbert est professeure titulaire au Département de géographie de l’Université d’Ottawa ; elle est aussi directrice du Centre de recherche en Claude Chapdelaine, Martin S. Cooper, Amanda Crompton, Vincent Delmas, During the 1930s he lived in London, New York, Mexico, and Los Angeles civilisation canadienne-française. En 2013, elle a reçu l’Ordre des franco- Sergio Escribano-Ruiz, William Fox, Sarah Grant, François Guindon, Erik before moving to British Columbia in 1939. This move marked the start of phones d’Amérique en reconnaissance de son dévouement pour le main- tien et l’épanouissement de la langue française en Amérique du Nord. Langevin, Brad Loewen, Jean-François Moreau, Jean-Luc Pilon, Michel a startlingly fertile period in Lowry’s career as a 20th-century writer. His Luisa Veronis est professeure agrégée au Département de géographie. Plourde, Peter Ramsden, Lisa Rankin and Ronald F. Williamson. masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), is one of the last great modernist Elle s’intéresse aux questions touchant les inégalités sociales et spatiales, Edited by Brad Loewen and Claude Chapdelaine les groupes marginalisés et la justice sociale dans les villes. Brad Loewen’s focus on contact societies began with the Metis bison hunters of the novels. Marc Brosseau est professeur titulaire et a été directeur du Département western Plains. In his subsequent work on Basque fisheries and navigation, Loewen saw the de géographie à l’Université d’Ottawa de 2006 à 2012. Il s’intéresse aux mon vieux chalupa (sailing craft) as an influential contact technology whose transfer to Native societies rapports multiples entre la géographie et la littérature. Tu sais, Brian Ray est professeur agrégé au Département de géographie. Ses enabled contact networks to radiate over large areas. Since joining the Anthropology recherches portent sur les façons dont les citadins organisent leur quoti- Department at Université de Montréal, Loewen has studied land and underwater sites in dien dans les villes multiethniques et sur les aspects de l’intégration des Québec, establishing a common framework for maritime and contact themes. immigrants dans les grandes villes. Jean-Pierre Claude Chapdelaine began his work on the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians at the early sixteenth-century Mandeville site. His extensive work has been at the centre of debates on cultural variability among Iroquoian corn growers, and has also contributed to Saint Lawrence Iroquoian maritime adaptations and their puzzling disappearance. His excavations Essays on the Archaeology and History at the late sixteenth-century Royarnois site at Cap-Tourmente and most recently at the t Saint-Anicet cluster consolidated cultural timelines. of New France and Canadian Culture rotsky

ISBN 978-0-7766-2208-8 Mercury Series in Honour of Jean-Pierre Chrestien Archaeology paper 176 Edited by John Willis

ISBN 978-0-7766-2360-3

ISBN 978-2-7603-0822-0 Edited by Timothy Sibbald and Victoria Handford University of Ottawa Press

Conversations with Trotsky The Academic Gateway Tu sais, mon vieux Jean-Pierre Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s Understanding the Journey to Tenure Essays on the Archaeology and History Critical Essays Edited by Bruce Nesbitt Edited by Timothy Sibbald and of New France and Canadian Culture in Edited by Janice Fiamengo and Victoria Handford Honour of Jean-Pierre Chrestien Gerald Lynch This collection presents all of Earle Edited by John Willis Birney’s known published and This collection, written by professors Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art is a collection unpublished writings on Trotsky and experiencing the journey to tenure This series of essays on the archaeology of sixteen original essays on Nobel laureate Trotskyism for the very first time and in education, puts the reader in the and history of New France sets out to Alice Munro’s writings. The volume covers provides a unique insight into Canadian writer’s shoes to provide insight for dispense with old-fashioned and facile the entirety of Munro’s career, from the first Trotskyism during the Radical 1930s. those who are considering this path, generalizations and get down to the stories she published in the early 1950s as well as for policy makers. business of understanding real people as an undergraduate at the University of and their possessions in context. Western Ontario to her final books.

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10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Speaking of Dying Do public rituals of grief ever help us mourn? Sandra Martin

The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy Julia Cooper Coach House Books 117 pages, softcover ISBN 9781552453414

ulia Cooper takes on the eulogy in litera- ture, popular culture and social media in The JLast Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy and, not surprisingly, finds it wanting as an outlet Ours is a death-denying culture. to assuage grief. She argues that “in a culture that “A History of Mourning,” Richard Davey, 1890. Image courtesy of University of Toronto, Robarts Library. sees death every day and yet hides the traces of grief that follow, there aren’t enough words for assessment of a noteworthy person in a newspaper argue that the first example was meant to be loss.” I don’t know if more words would help, but or on a website. At its best, an obituary captures the a send-up of death and funerals and the other was a I do agree that ours is a death-denying culture. As complexity of a human life—failures as well as tri- musical performance, but never mind. Cooper also an obituary writer, I am an avid reader of death umphs, weaknesses as well as strengths—and sets it spends a lot of time writing about Diana because announcements on social media and in traditional within the context of contemporary times. the life and death of the late princess is a link to newspapers, but I am frequently appalled by the Since we’re speaking of obituaries, Cooper’s Cooper’s own mother, who died of cancer in 2004, euphemisms mourners use in writing or speaking only discussion of the form is a bizarre critique of when Cooper was a teenager. Cooper writes that about the deceased. Some examples are “in a bet- “Novelist Shelved,” a self-parody Norman Mailer her mother watched both the wedding and the ter place,” a “new star in the firmament,” “smiling wrote for the September 1979 issue of Boston funeral; dissecting those public ceremonies pro- down on us” (and its variants) and the ubiquitous magazine. “Norman Mailer passed away yesterday vides Cooper with an entrée into her real subject, “passed” to soften the reality that somebody has, after celebrating his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth which is grief. in fact, died. As for condolences, I cringe whenever wedding,” Mailer wrote in his mock obituary. He There is trouble en route, however, because, as I hear a stranger tritely offer sympathy by saying, goes on to say: “When asked, on occasion why he with Cooper’s analysis of Mailer’s satirical obitu- “I am sorry for your loss,” as if the bereaved has married so often, the former Pulitzer Prize winner ary, she misinterprets the famous, or infamous mislaid a car or a handbag. replied, ‘To get divorced. You don’t know anything (depending on your point of view), tribute deliv- Early on, in The Last Word, Cooper argues that about a woman until you meet her in court’.” Satire, ered in Westminster Abbey at Diana’s funeral by the the “eulogy is a particularly vexed art form, partly yes? princess’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer. “Buckling because it’s a necessity, and partly because at Apparently not. Cooper, who does not bother under the pressure of Diana’s thorny kinship to its very heart it is an amateur’s art.” She places it to look at any of the dozens of obituaries that the royal family, and likely under his own grief,” somewhere between the elegy, “a poetic form that appeared after Mailer’s death on November 10, Cooper writes, “the Earl of Spencer gave a eulogy laments its dead in verse, and the obituary [which] 2007, seems to take his 1979 pre-obituary at face so politically correct that it erased the flesh-and- announces the hard fact of loss in the newspaper— value. After quoting extensively from Mailer’s piece, blood woman behind the tiara.” Politically correct? all the deaths that are fit to print.” Terminology is a Cooper complains that “Mailer chose to make Cooper’s reading of Spencer’s tribute is at such vari- problem in this very slim book. A eulogy is a tribute the subject of his own eulogy [sic] not his literary ance with my own memory that I watched it again in speech or written form. However common they achievements but the splintered branches of his on YouTube. are these days, eulogies are a choice, not a neces- immediate family tree, which in turn highlights for Spencer, who is a godson of Elizabeth II and can sity. The homily, a short sermon delivered by a the reader the author’s strapping virility.” Really? trace his lineage back at least to the Stuarts, attacks priest or a minister, has a much stronger tradition, I thought Mailer, rather than boasting about his the media and the upstart royal family—indeed, the especially in religious services for the dead. Cooper (faded) machismo, was spoofing the tendency for eulogy created a froideur between Spencer and also confuses paid classified advertisements placed some journalists to downplay books and concen- the Windsors that has taken nearly 20 years to by friends or family to announce the death of a trate on marital infidelities. If you do not believe thaw, and then only because of the peacekeeping loved one with the long practice of assigning a jour- me, look up the piece. It is a fun read. efforts of Diana’s now grown sons, William and nalist to write a (supposedly objective) biographical Cooper sprinkles her book with fictional and Harry. Watching the tribute again, I remembered actual examples of eulogies gone wrong, from the the shocked hush as mourners absorbed the men- Sandra Martin’s Working the Dead Beat: character played by Liam Neeson introducing a ace and rage underscoring the earl’s tribute as well 50 Lives that Changed Canada was reviewed in recording of “Bye Bye Baby” by the Bay City Rollers as the spontaneous applause that reverberated the November 2012 issue of the LRC. Her latest at his wife’s funeral in the over-the-top Christmas within the walls of Westminster Abbey and among book, A Good Death: Making the Most of Our romantic comedy Love Actually to Sir Elton John’s the crowds gathered outside, as he resumed his Final Choices, recently won the British Columbia rewritten “Candle in the Wind” performed at the seat. This was not the decorous eulogy people were National Prize for Non-fiction and has been short- funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Westminster expecting at a royal funeral, but it certainly played listed for both the Dafoe and the Donner prizes. Abbey on September 6, 1997. I think one could to its worldwide audience.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 11 By saying that his sister (the daughter of an earl, funerals are all part of the public ritual of death. the subject as an academic pursuit—however not a “woman plucked from much humbler begin- Mourning, which is personal, is about grief, an little she may have understood her motivation at nings” to fulfill the Cinderella fairy tale, as Cooper experience so discombobulating that it can crush the time. That deep dive into the literature of grief suggests) “proved in the last year that she needed you, as though a tsunami of emotion has reared makes perfect sense to me, as I, too, undertake no royal title to continue to generate her particular up and walloped you. “Grief comes in waves,” Joan research and writing projects to comprehend the brand of magic,” Spencer was censuring the royal Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, “par- world and my place in it. (When I wrote about end family for stripping Diana of her title of Her Royal oxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the of life and the right to die movement in Canada and Highness as part of the divorce settlement from knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the daili- around the world, I was surprised to find myself Prince Charles. By pointing out the irony of “a girl ness of life.” Not all deaths are equal; nor do they mourning once again my mother’s death 30 years given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting evoke the same amount of grief. Much depends on earlier, as well as contemplating my own.) was, in the end, the most hunted person of the the loss and the circumstances. The passing of your Consequently, I admire the sections of Cooper’s modern age,” he was attacking the media for its aged grandparent and the sudden traumatic death book in which she writes about Cheryl Strayed’s reckless pursuit, a chase that ended with her death of your child or your spouse cannot be balanced on memoir Wild (about her three-month hike through in an automobile crash. By “pledging” as the head the grief scales. the Mojave Desert in the “literalization” of her grief of Diana’s “blood” family to following her mother’s death), protect her sons William and Cooper knows the difference between Roland Barthes’s Mourning Harry from “a similar fate,” he Diary (also about his mother) was throwing down an ances- public ritual and private grief because and Joan Didion’s The Year tral gauntlet. I could go on, but of Magical Thinking and Blue here is my point: research mat- she is still mourning her mother’s death Nights (about the deaths of her ters. An author needs to get her husband and then her daugh- facts correct if she wants read- more than a dozen years later. “You can’t ter, Quintana). ers to accept her thesis. However, I object to Cooper’s I wish an editor could have set a deadline for grief,” she writes. “chafing against the noncha- played devil’s advocate with lance” with which Didion’s Cooper because she does not need her critique of Cooper knows the difference between public “immense wealth comes out in her prose.” Cooper eulogy to make her point that grief can be intrac- ritual and private grief because she is still mourn- criticizes Didion for pointing out that Quintana’s table. “Losing my mom,” she writes, “I became ing her mother’s death more than a dozen years “privileged” upbringing, as the child of affluent and broken—a fact I held with complete certitude. later. “You can’t set a deadline for grief,” she writes, celebrated writers, did not protect her from an early Learning to live with loss has also been learning “because loss has no temporal limit; the clock will and terrible death, or insulate Didion herself from to live with brokenness.” Cooper tries to argue that never run out.” Eulogies did not help her mourn a devastating loss. There is no hierarchy of grief, public rituals fall short in helping the bereaved or bounce back—how could they?—which is why nor does grief lend itself to a critique of class and mourn their loved ones. She asks rhetorically if a I find it puzzling that she tries so hard to link her capital. The very rich may be different from you and eulogy is meant for the living or the dead and then mother’s death with the media hoopla around me, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once explained, but they points out the obvious, that “grief, after all, afflicts Diana’s funeral. still bleed and they still mourn. Death is the great only the living.” Much more interesting is the fact that Cooper’s and final equalizer, and Cooper of all people should Eulogies, obituaries, memorial services and profound and unrelenting grief led her to study know that. Northern Lights

POLARIS: The Chief Scientist’s BAFFIN ISLAND Recollections of the American “For anyone interested in glacial Translated and edited by William Barr North Pole Expedition, 1871-73 geomorphology and glaciology, 9 this volume definitely belongs Emil Bessels; William Barr, ed. on the bookshelf. For anyone interested in Arctic research & trans. in general … the book is a fascinating and informative read, Set sail with the Polaris to beautifully illustrated and highly discover what life was like recommended.” —Arctic

on a nineteenth-century polar 248 pp | $39.95 sc 2 expedition, and to uncover a motive for murder. A HISTORICAL AND LEGAL 672 pp | $44.95 sc The Chief Scientist’s Recollections of the STUDY OF SOVEREIGNTY IN Polaris THE CANADIAN NORTH American North Pole Expedition, 1871–73 In 1871 the Polaris set sail from WINNER: Matthews Award New York with an expedition led (Canadian Nautical Research Society) by Charles Francis Hall on board, WINNER: John Lyman Book Award and with Emil Bessels as the chief Emil Bessels (North American Society for Oceanic History) scientist and medical officer. While those on board hoped to be the "carefully edited, extensively first to reach the North Pole, within embellished with maps and a few months Hall would be buried in illustrations, with a polished text that the permafrost, his death mired only a trained historian of quality can in suspicion, and by 1873 the Polaris produce. Indispensable for anyone would be smashed to pieces in the following Canadian Arctic policies." ice off Greenland, and the rest of — Jus Gentium the bedraggled crew would have 512 pp | $39.95 sc trickled home – some after months of drifting at sea on an ice floe. CHINA'S ARCTIC AMBITIONS In Polaris: The Chief Scientist’s and What They Mean for Canada Recollections of the American North Adam Lajeunesse, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Pole Expedition, 1871–73 William Barr Frédéric Lasserre, and James Manicom provides the first complete English translation of Bessels’ original Forthcoming Fall 2017 German account of the voyage. w press.ucalgary.ca 12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada No Nudes, Please—We’re Canadian Our national artistic fixation on landscapes came at a cost Devon Smither

The nude was a means for Canadians to grap- The Beaver Hall Group and Its Legacy ple with social and cultural anxieties about Evelyn Walters women’s bodies and sexuality, but it also Dundurn Press became the focus for artistic debates about 184 pages, hardcover the place and development of modernity ISBN 9781459737761 and the visual arts in Canada more broadly. Few practitioners were more engaged in these debates—or penalized for it—than ilderness has had a deep and the Beaver Hall Group. Until somewhat abiding effect on this coun- recently, the members of the Beaver Hall Wtry’s ideas of northernness, the Group, a group of artists who came together land, and national and cultural identity. For in Montreal in 1920, the same year the much of the 20th century, this connection Group of Seven formed, were marginalized was exemplified in the work of the Group of in Canadian art history precisely because Seven, who helped cement the relationship its members took up portraiture, the figure between landscape and national identity, and the nude with gusto—not to mention as they aimed to provide Canadians with “a the struggles of its women artists in a male- shared image of their communion,” to quote centric art milieu. Benedict Anderson’s well-known epithet. Named after their shared studio space Viewers found reaffirmation of this collective at 305 Beaver Hall Hill, the Beaver Hall Hill sense of identity in paintings such as Tom Group (as they were initially known) was Thomson’s Jack Pine, F.H. Varley’s Stormy composed of both men and women—in fact, Weather, Georgian Bay and Lawren Harris’s half the members were women—a major Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. In 1916, Saturday distinction from the Group of Seven. It was Night magazine published an article jocu- not the only distinction. The Group of Seven’s larly recounting how the typical Canadian paintings became aligned with a virile, back- artist was a “husky beggar” who pulled on woodsman, coureur-de-bois type frontiers- a pair of Strathcona boots and set off into man who carried his sketch box on his back the woods with a rifle, a paddle and enough into the wilderness. The Beaver Hall Group, baked beans for three months. though, was less concerned with nationalism. We have only recently begun to see that Its members turned brush and palette to the this equation of landscape painting with people around them and asserted the human Canadian identity came at the expense of presence in local landscapes in Quebec. As other subject matter. In the early 20th cen- with the Group of Seven, artworks by the tury, artists who focused on urban themes Beaver Hall Group are characterized by a and on the human figure, and thenude modernist aesthetic that also explored avant- in particular, saw their artworks not just garde techniques using unnatural colour, ignored, but in some instances censured and bold lines and flattened space. The groups suppressed. In 1913, the Montreal painter “Nude in the Studio,” Lilias Torrance Newton, 1933. did overlap: A.Y. Jackson, for a time, was also John Lyman, recently returned from Paris, Collection A.K. Prakash. the Beaver Hall Group’s leader. However, the saw his Post-Impressionist nude paintings Image courtesy of Thomas Moore and Musée des beaux-arts Montréal. Beaver Hall artists’ choice of portraits, still described by a critic as “travesties, abortions, lifes, landscapes and images of Montreal’s sexual and hideous malformations.” And nudes landscape—was described as “the best nude ever urban cityscape set them well apart from their by Toronto-based Bertram Brooker and Lilias painted in Canada,” by Group of Seven member Toronto colleagues. As Jackson put it in an article Torrance Newton, a Montreal painter, were barred Arthur Lismer. How one experimented with the about their 1921 Montreal exhibition, “individual from the Art Gallery of Ontario and a Canadian nude genre clearly mattered. Critics praised Edwin expression, then, is the aim of this group.” Group of Painters exhibition respectively. Not all Holgate’s nudes from the 1930s, perhaps because The Beaver Hall Group was short-lived, last- such works fared as badly. In the same period, they more seamlessly integrate the figures into ing for just two years between 1920 and 1922, but Prudence Heward’s Girl Under a Tree—a large- Group of Seven-esque landscapes. its 25 members included some of Canada’s most scale painting of a recumbent nude, rendered in The argument that Canadians were prudish celebrated artists, including Heward, Holgate brilliant Fauves colour and set in a Cubist-inspired and affronted by the female nude does not quite and Torrance Newton, and produced a large and hold true; the reality is much more complex. John influential body of work. Kathleen Morris, another Devon Smither is a professor of art history and Lyman’s nudes were not criticized, as one might member, had parents who were strong advocates museum studies at the University of Lethbridge. Her think, because of the artist’s choice of subject mat- of women’s rights, and her success as an artist is all doctoral thesis focused on the nude in Canadian ter; rather, many critics were dumbfounded by his the more astounding given that she had cerebral painting and photography prior to 1945. contravention of academic and artistic convention. palsy. Morris executed stunning artworks such as

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 13 Nuns, Quebec and After “Grand and art history continue to Mass,” Berthier-en-Haut, a rich move “beyond wilderness” tableau of congregants and (to borrow the title of John horses as they leave church O’Brian and Peter White’s on a snowy winter morning. 2007 book on the legacy of the Anne Savage was as much an Group of Seven), the progres- art educator as she was an sive vision of the Beaver Hall accomplished artist herself. At Group seems all the more a young age, she moved with relevant. They challenged what her family to a farm in Dorval; Canadian modern art could her love of nature is borne out be and argued for the place of in The Plough, with its sinu- women as important contribu- ous lines, undulating hills and tors to artistic modernity in this rhythmic composition and its country, issues that continue to placement of the farm imple- resonate. ment at its centre with a kind of Walters is right to assert monumentality.­ that the friendships and sup- The group’s significant port fostered by the Beaver female presence and “loud, Hall Group were particularly brilliant, glaring colours,” as important for the careers and they were described by critic successes of the women mem- Albert Laberge at the time, set bers. As she notes, women’s them apart in the art scene. Yet artistic pursuits were still often for more than half a century regarded as a hobby or mere their work was overshadowed pastime rather than a viable by the empty landscape idiom career choice. Women were of their Toronto counterparts. also barred from membership This is changing. In fact, there from many of the import- is no question that the Beaver ant early art clubs, including Hall Group is having some- the Pen and Pencil Club in thing of a moment. Their jazzy Montreal and the Arts and “The Immigrants,” Prudence Heward, 1928. Toronto, private collection. modernist paintings, excep- Letters Club in Toronto, where Image courtesy of Sean Weaver and Musée des beaux-arts Montréal. tional portraits and arresting the Group of Seven often met to scenes of urban Montreal were finally given their tions of these avant-garde women were disregarded discuss their ideas. For this reason the friendships due in the 2015 exhibition 1920s Modernism in for decades, although feminist art historians have among the ten female members were vital to their Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group,which began at worked diligently to ­correct this oversight and, more careers and livelihoods; the artists critiqued and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and headed importantly, to understand their marginalization. pushed each other further in their art practices. To west, making stops in Ontario and Alberta. Few Canadians are aware of the vibrancy of marry often signalled the death knell of a woman’s The revival is happening thanks in part to the their output, but the group’s artists—both male and art career, and Torrance Newton was the only mem- efforts of writers such as Evelyn Walters, whose new female—dazzlingly reinterpreted the rolling hills of ber to have married, and for only a short time. book is another welcome addition to the recent the Laurentians and Eastern Townships, the intim- In the wake of renewed interest in the 1960s literature on the Beaver Hall Group. The Beaver ate urbanscapes of Quebec villages and industrial and the support of feminist art historians from the Hall and Its Legacy is a well-written overview of the Montreal, as well as the people who humanized 1970s onward, the women of Beaver Hall came to Beaver Hall Group’s emergence and subsequent these landscapes. Ethel Seath brings the vitality personify the essence of the group for an informed legacy that includes thoroughly researched biog- of Montreal’s street life, its lively commotion and public, as Jacques Des Rochers has pointed out, raphies of the 25 members of the group. Walters’s smells, to life in Bonsecours Market, a charming even though they constituted only half of the latest effort includes more than 75 high-quality gouache painting executed in shades of acid yellow Beaver Hall’s membership. As art historian Kristina reproductions from public and private collections. and green. Edwin Holgate and Sarah Robertson Huneault has recently noted about the history of Readers and researchers will also appreciate the used the latest European modern painting tech- the Beaver Hall Group, categorical separations reprinting of the major reviews of the Beaver Hall niques to paint traditional rural themes—such as based on gender lines form the kind of oppositional Group’s exhibitions. Robertson’s The Blue Sleigh—and portraits, includ- thinking that does a disservice to Canadian art his- The book builds on Walters’s previous explo- ing Holgate’s series of Canadian “types” like The tory more generally by disregarding the complex ration of the group, The Women of Beaver Hall: Lumberjack and The Fire Ranger. Adrien Hébert’s character of the cultural arena in which both men Canadian Modernist Painters, a groundbreaking more formalized and realist aesthetic gave life to and women were working. The Beaver Hall Group examination of the ten female members of the the sights, sounds and smells of the bustling activ- and Its Legacy does redress some of the unlikely group and one of the first books to give them their ity in Montreal’s port, including the architecture of imbalance that has contributed to the association due as trail­­blazers in modern Canadian art. The the wharf, grain silos and harbour—urban themes of this group only with its female membership; women of Beaver Hall, who had all studied at that West Coast photographer John Vanderpant however, Walters does not acknowledge that this the Art Association of Montreal, winning numer- would try to assert as distinctly Canadian about a association has until recently effectively erased ous awards, persevered after the original group decade later. Meanwhile, Adrien’s brother, Henri the involvement of the male artists, an idea that disbanded. They received continued support from Hébert, turned his talents as a sculptor to the body the curators of 1920s Modernism in Montreal very the likes of A.Y. Jackson and Eric Brown, director of the nude modern dancer in The Flapper and The thoughtfully addressed in their exhibition and of the National Gallery of Canada at the time, who Charleston, true embodiments of Montreal’s jazz accompanying exhibition catalogue. purchased their works and mentored many of the age. Walters’s inclusion of A.Y. Jackson’s Elevators, Nonetheless, The Beaver Hall Group and Its women. But they struggled through two world Pincher Creek, Alberta reminds readers that Jackson Legacy is an accessible and very readable text, wars and the Depression, and against normative travelled from sea to sea, painting a great many presenting a good introduction to the Beaver Hall codes of behaviour for women. Torrance Newton corners of this country we now call Canada; he Group for art lovers or those interested in learn- was the only one to gain real financial success, ventured far beyond the scenery north of Toronto. ing more about modern art during this period of primarily by painting official portraits (she was the The Beaver Hall Group would not win the battle incredible artistic growth in Canada. Although aca- first Canadian artist to paint the Queen and Prince that raged over what kind of art could embody demic scholars will find theory and analysis lack- Philip). Although they were praised during their Canadian nationalism, a debate that played out ing, Walter’s latest is, for students and readers of art lifetimes and had their work purchased, the women in newspapers and magazines such as Canadian history, a welcome introduction to—and valuable of Beaver Hall never did achieve anything like the Forum and Saturday Night throughout the 1920s resource on—a hitherto under-recognized move- recognition of their male peers. Like the writing of and into the ’30s with landscape painting and the ment in Canadian modern art and the people who art history more generally, the exceptional contribu- figure vying for equal stature. As Canadian artists made it happen.

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Outside Man A celebrity memoir from a uniquely talented artist on the edge of fame, and Hollywood itself John Semley

Director’s Cut: My Life in Film Ted Kotcheff ECW Press 448 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781770413610

he tell-all celebrity memoir falls victim to a strange paradox. Generally Tspeaking, readers are drawn to such books by the promise of lascivious and decadent stories of life at the top: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and that whole outlandish Hollywood Babylon trip. The problem is that the more legendarily lewd and unruly the given celebrity, the less his or her actual stories tend to impress. Few would be surprised to discover when reading The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, the collab- orative memoir of the glam-rock dirt bags in Mötley Crüe, that they inhaled an exorbitant quantity of Ted Kotcheff on the set of his cult classic Weekend at Bernie’s. drugs, or that while on tour Ozzy Osbourne, the Image courtesy Ted Kotcheff. perpetually rattled heavy metal icon, once snorted a line of ants. This is precisely what we expect of nificant professional accomplishments,but merely tauter in light of the subsequent Rambo sequels. such cartoonish bad boys, after all. Their antics to suggest that many readers (of this very piece, The 1977 comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, star- are so storied, looming so large in the pop cultural perhaps) have no real idea who Ted Kotcheff is. ring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a struggling imagination, that the actual facts cannot help but They would certainly recognize some of the films couple who begin moonlighting as Robin Hood-ish disappoint. A line of ants? That’s it? he directed, and they may have spotted his name burglars, feels effortlessly fleet and funny when By comparison, a more unassuming memoir in the credits of the wildly popular sex-crimes compared to the despairing 2005 remake by Dean tends to generate the opposite effect. I distinctly procedural Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Parisot (starring Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni). And the remember, as a younger man, reading the comed- where he served as executive producer for ten acclaimed Duddy Kravitz, which took the coveted ian Rodney Dangerfield’s late-life memoir, It’s Not seasons. Indeed, even people familiar with some Golden Bear when it premiered at the 1974 Berlin Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Kotcheff’s work have next to no idea about him Film Festival, seems even better in light of saggier of Sex and Drugs, and being charmed, not by his as a person. (Embarking on his memoir, I certainly adaptations of Richler’s work, like Barney’s Version stories of heroic cocaine consumption (although didn’t, despite counting an obscure Australian flick directed by Richard J. Lewis in 2010. Time and shift- there were plenty of those), but by his account of he made among my favourite films.) For most read- ing contexts of appreciation have greatly benefited scaling the fence of a weight-loss clinic along with ers, Kotcheff is something of a blank slate. Kotcheff’s work. Roseanne Barr, in order to sneak away for pizza. This is a feeling that finds itself reflected in the A case in point is Weekend at Bernie’s. The film It is an unlikely, incongruous image: Rodney and book’s packaging, with its spectacularly generic met with lousy reviews. In his critique, Roger Ebert Roseanne scampering up a chain-link fence. And it title—which could refer, quite literally, to any dir- (showing a failure of imagination) simply refused speaks to the pleasures of memoirs that scrape ector in history—and its un-alluring cover image to indulge the idea that people in the movie would against a subject/writer’s public persona, instead of of one of those canvas director’s chairs. However, not notice the life stage of the title character. “It simply recertifying it. conventional wisdom about books and covers should be immediately obvious to several people Director’s Cut: My Life in Film, by Canadian applies here. More than just some rote, memoir- that Bernie is dead,” he wrote in 1989. “In order for filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, is such a book. And not by-numbers, Director’s Cut proves an impressive, them not to notice, they must be incredibly dense.” because Kotcheff—a filmmaker whose diverse engaging story of a uniquely talented artist orbiting Yet the film earned a cult following precisely for filmography includes such films as the adapta- just on the edges of name recognition, and of this reason, and for the pure, patent, macabre silli- tion of Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Hollywood itself. ness of two aspiring yuppies goofing around with a Duddy Kravitz, the Sly Stallone thriller First Blood corpse. The Weekend at Bernie’s franchise was even and the zany corpse-handling comedy Weekend at arly in Director’s Cut, Kotcheff refers to a immortalized in a 1997 episode of Seinfeld, a mark Bernie’s—is some caricature of a Hollywood bigwig, EWashington Post article in which he is referred of its unlikely indelibility in pop culture. As if that whose life abounds with unbelievable stories from to as “the under-appreciated Ted Kotcheff.” “Hey,” was not enough, in 2011 Bernie’s was screened in its the surreal life lived in “Lipstick City.” Rather, it is Kotcheff writes in response. “I’ll take it.” entirety as part of an exhibit on “high concept” art because, in the grand scheme of global celebrity, This underappreciated status simply means that at New York’s Whitney Museum. Kotcheff is something of a non-entity. many people have come to recognize his work after There is also the example of 1971’s Wake in This is not to diminish his talents, or his sig- the fact. While he had a few hits (most notably First Fright, an Australian film of which I am quite fond. Blood, which has grossed in excess of $125 million And I am not alone. Though little seen upon its John Semley is a books columnist at the Globe and since its release in 1982), Kotcheff’s repute, even in original release in the early 1970s, and believed Mail and the author of This Is a Book about the cinephile circles, is a bit subdued. The secretly sub- lost for decades, the film was restored and resusci- Kids in the Hall (ECW Press, 2016). versive First Blood, for example, looks leaner and tated a few years ago, screening as a “classic”

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 15 ­selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, along- Yabba, the teacher loses all his money indulging in a new one on the fly. The producers were irate, but side such other stone-cold masterpieces as Powell the local gambling pastime, a coin-flipping game Kotcheff was right. America was not ready to see a and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and François called “two-up.” Broke, stranded, lost in a sea of broken-down Vietnam vet blast his own brains out Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Martin Scorsese is a beer, sweat and stinking masculinity, he slumps on screen. longtime admirer of the film, as is the Australian into violence and barbarism. As in Wake in Fright, Kotcheff projected a singer-­songwriter Nick Cave, who hailed it upon Wake in Fright was a success, albeit a com- nation’s most unspeakable collective anxieties the occasion of the 2009 restoration and re-release plicated one. It premiered at the Cannes Film back at them, suggesting not only that Vietnam was as “the best and most terrifying film about Australia Festival in 1971, where Kotcheff was nominated a pointless war, but also that everyone in America in existence.” for the prestigious Palme d’Or. But commercially, knew this and was trying desperately to suppress The sustained interest in, and critical revalua- it flopped. It did not help that it was released in or banish that realization. Like Brian Dennehy’s tion of, so much of Kotcheff’s work makes the man America under the considerably less evocative title mean-spirited sheriff in the film, America kept try- behind it ripe for study. A close examination reveals Outback, which (as Kotcheff notes) makes it sound ing to run the memory of the war to the proverbial a uniquely talented, superlatively Canadian figure, like some kind of National Geographic nature film. edge of town. And like Stallone’s John Rambo, that whose career nimbly traipses along the parallel Still, in a roundabout way, the film helped Kotcheff memory just kept drifting back. As realized by between insider and outsider. realize his ambition of finding success outside Kotcheff, First Blood was a film that scraped against Canada. both Stallone’s triumphalist star persona (this, after orn in Toronto in 1931 on a “rickety, Formica- Director’s Cut’s chapter on the film yields the all, was Rocky, the protagonist of the all-American, Btopped kitchen table” to Bulgarian immigrants book’s strangest insights—specifically, Kotcheff’s working-class success story) and the foundational (his birth name was Velichko Todoroff Tsotcheff), rapport with that unparalleled symbol of Australia: myths of America itself. Kotcheff got his professional start as a stagehand for the kangaroo. “I felt a real kinship with the kan- the CBC. He dreamt of directing Hollywood mov- garoos,” Kotcheff writes. “I hope you won’t think idway through the book, Kotcheff recites an ies, like Canadian expat filmmakers Arthur Hiller that I’m delusional when I say I could communi- M“old jape” about the ever-elusive Canadian (Promise Her Anything, Love Story) and Norman cate with them telepathically.” He then goes on to identity: “What is the distinguishing characteris- Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, Moonstruck). describe how, as if through some bizarre human- tic of a Canadian? That he has no distinguishing An obscure episode in his youth foiled that marsupial magic, he was able to direct the wild characteristics.” It would be too easy to level the dream. As a teenager he had signed on same criticism at Kotcheff and direc- to a communist book-of-the-month If Canadians are not exactly bereft of tors like him: workaday journeymen club, enrolled by the neighbourhood with little in the way of a discernible leftie who, he claims, used to hang distinguishing characteristics, then we style. It would also be unfair, as such around a local diner wearing a beret a criticism ignores Kotcheff’s unusual and cape. Kotcheff unsubscribed are at the very least a breed of wily ability to move effortlessly and seam- after receiving just three books, but lessly between styles, genres and even it was enough for the United States shape-shifters, like Kotcheff. national cinemas. to deny him entry as a young man. Like his idol Norman Jewison That led a restless Kotcheff to London, England, in kangaroos, hopping around deep in the Australian before him, and contemporary workhouse Canuck 1957, where he struck up a serendipitous friendship outback, as if they were any other actor on set. This transplant Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, Sicario, with Mordecai Richler. “We came from the same lengthy digression in Director’s Cut speaks volumes Arrival), Kotcheff could go from directing live tele- slummy world, had the same coarse adolescence,” to the appeal of the book. There is a rare, weird, vision to a staggering variety of feature films. Even Kotcheff writes of his bond with the Montreal-born singular pleasure to be found in learning that the the movies Kotcheff never got to make—like an Richler. “What intrigued both Mordecai and me at director of Weekend at Bernie’s and the firstRambo adaptation of A Clockwork Orange starring Mick that time was something we discussed often later picture believed he could telepathically bond with Jagger, or a biopic about the Bulgarian king who on: from our identical, totally unpropitious back- the mind of a kangaroo. risked his life to shelter Jews during the Second grounds, where in hell did we get our aspirations, he With Wake in Fright, Kotcheff delivered what World War—sound on paper more interesting to be an important novelist, me to be an important wound up being regarded as one of the definitive than the bulk of contemporary multiplex fare. If filmmaker?”­ filmic visions of Australia, ranking right up there Canadians are not exactly bereft of distinguish- Kotcheff’s friendship with Richler proved instru- with A Picture at Hanging Rock and Mad Max. ing characteristics, then we are at the very least a mental in launching his career as a filmmaker. In People—and this is perhaps especially true of breed of wily shape-shifters, like Kotcheff, making London, Kotcheff read a draft of Richler’s then- Canadians—tend to bristle at the skepticism or his way through Canadian, British and Australian latest novel. It was a story that resonated with him, contempt of outsiders. And, at the time of the film’s film industries like some kind of Commonwealth about a restless, borderline-manic young man des- release, many Australians seemed offended by chameleon. perate to make something of himself, be it through Wake in Fright’s unflattering depiction of life in the Ted Kotcheff’s career feels consummately Cana­ hard work, cunning or sheer graft. Its title: The outback as a burly brawl of vicious homo-eroticism. dian in this way, for better or worse. He never Apprenticeship of Daddy Kravitz. Kotcheff recounts a story of an early screening of realized his wacko version of A Clockwork Orange Kotcheff was eager to mount Duddy Kravitz as a the film during which an Australian man stood up (Stanley Kubrick would beat him to the punch), feature film. But there was little interest in Canada in the cinema, bellowing “that’s not us!” If the story or became a household name, or did anything at the time. He would end up getting the chance in is to be believed, there is a certain irony in a man near as galling as insufflate a pile of ants. But he 1974, directing the beloved version starring a very protesting a depiction of belligerent, macho yahoo- collaborated with Richler, Stallone, Gregory Peck, young Richard Dreyfuss in the title role. It wound up ism by screaming at an ambivalent movie screen. Gene Hackman, Billy Wilder, Terry Southern, Jane one of the most successful and acclaimed Canadian But Kotcheff’s perceptive and often caustic out- Fonda and countless other big-ticket stars. As movies of all time; but we all know that. In the sider’s eye would serve him throughout his storied Director’s Cut makes clear, Kotcheff may not be (to meantime, he swallowed his pride and churned career, especially after his U.S. ban was lifted and revise the old idiom) “the guy.” But he is the guy out a made-for-TV version for the British anthol- he was finally able to move into Hollywood film- just to the right of the guy—solid, uncompromising, ogy drama series Armchair Theatre. Ever the risk making, leapfrogging off the critical and commer- quick with a ribald anecdote, weirder than even his taker, in the early 1970s (still barred from the United cial success of Duddy Kravitz with First Blood, the weirdest films suggest and, somehow, telepathic- States) Kotcheff departed the United Kingdom. This first film to cast a peak-surly Sylvester Stallone as ally bonded with kangaroos. time, he’d find himself in the balmy, washed-out emotionally coiled Vietnam vet John Rambo. Before wastes of rural Australia, tackling a project that he was recast in the progressively stupider sequels would end up looming mightily in his filmography. as a ripplingly muscular jingoist killing machine, Ted Kotcheff’s adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is screening this month at the Wake in Fright took its title from a particularly Kotcheff’s Rambo was a tight-lipped, violence- Toronto Jewish Film Festival as part of Richler ominous Australian adage: “You dream of the averse drifter visibly shaken by the experience of on Screen, a special Canada 150 retrospect- Devil and you wake in fright.” It is the story of an war. In the original script, Stallone’s character was ive featuring 16 film and television works arrogant young teacher (Gary Bond) who finds meant to take his own life at the end of his film. written by Mordecai Richler or based on his himself waylaid in a podunk mining town called Ever savvy, and a bit cynical, Kotcheff (correctly) texts. The festival runs May 4 to 14, 2017, in Bundanyabba (known to locals as “the Yabba”) assumed that America was not prepared for such a Toronto. during his Christmas break. On his first night in the despairingly downbeat ending, and wrote and shot

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Post-Scarcity World Capitalism meets its cyber-hippie match in a bountiful future that redefines class, politics and personhood itself Navneet Alang

new, it’s a new kind of civilization.” Walkaway Of course, new kinds of civil- Cory Doctorow ization are exactly the purview of Tor science fiction authors, and Cory 384 pages, hardcover Doctorow’s new novel, Walkaway, ISBN 9780765392763 recalls Gibson’s own speculative literature as it sets up competing visions of the potential future tension he end of history seems between technologized, digitized so quaint now. Put forward versions of right and left. The book is Tby Francis Fukuyama in his set mostly in a near-future southern 1992 book, The End of History and Ontario, and centres on a group of the Last Man, the concept posited new so-called walkaways, people who that with the fall of communism, have left the urban, hyper-capitalist liberal, capitalist democracy became world of “default,” and who have an a kind of end state for the world. It attendant philosophy that eschews was the big-H teleological view of not just ownership, but also competi- History espoused by Hegel—and, tion, surveillance and individualism. later, Marx—and the 21st century was Their nomadic, neo-communist life- supposed to be its apotheosis. It was, style is sustained by a dizzying array of course, an idea soon undone, of technology, the names and func- first by 9/11, then by the disastrous tions of which are thrown at the invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS’s reader at a breathless, Gibsonian Islamofascism, and, more recently, pace: cyborg interfaces linked to by the election of authoritarians such persistent social networks, 3D print- as America’s Donald Trump and ers that pull recycled material from Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, nearly anything to create everything and the rise of populist nationalism from food to buildings, drones and Leaving the urban, hyper-capitalist world of “default” in Europe. History, it seems, still has for a nomadic, neo-communist life. more, all put to the service of a cyber- history to make. Thinkers on both punk hippie lifestyle. This is a fanciful “Postmen of the Wilderness,” Arthur Heming, 1921. the left and right derided Fukuyama’s Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology. world where blueprints for everything idea for years. exist for free online and in which Nonetheless, perhaps recent events also merit the bird’s eye view of history: technology. History genetically engineered yeast can make beer from a rethink. A piece in Aeon magazine this spring has for decades now been seen in terms of right what you’ve just expelled as urine. But although suggested that the understanding of Fukuyama’s and left: of, on one side, the interrelation of mar- the plot hinges on its most fantastical element—the ideas as a merely triumphalist vision of western kets, freedom and the stunning global reduction uploading of human consciousness into the cloud progress is wrong. Rather, writer Paul Sagar argues, in poverty and, on the other, the insistence that in which people become bodiless “sims”—at the Fukuyama suggested that not only would the “end capitalism is not just destructive, but unsustainable core of the novel is a more fundamental question of history” bring us authoritarians like Trump as as well, and that it is a system predicated on both raised by this idea of technology: what does the people were drawn to power and braggadocio, but internal contradictions and the subjugation of an future look like when capital alarmingly coalesces that the triumph of capitalism would also lead to a underclass. in the one percent but it also costs almost nothing kind of degradation of personhood, reducing life Digital technology has a tendency to interrupt to make things and live? to a base mediocrity that would only find relief in these narratives, particularly when one takes the The novel is thus implicitly structured on pitting material goods. long view. If for now companies like Facebook, dystopia versus utopia, and in this sense, it is some- If there is something that rings true in these Uber, Apple or Amazon seem to have merely thing of a political tract. After all, politics is its own assertions—what might be more miserable and intensified the worst of both capitalism and the version of these projections of the future. “Make misanthropic than an era in which burgeoning left- surveillance state, the capacity of digital to rad- America Great Again” is a promise of a world, ist movements are almost immediately co-opted by ically reduce costs, reorganize social relations and depending on your perspective, restored to glory a Pepsi ad?—there is, nonetheless, still something democratize various means of production suggests or broken down at its most base. Fiction adds to missing in both this recuperation of Fukuyama and that, at the very least, the way we understand right this inherent forward-looking dimension by play- and left may not hold. As William Gibson famously ing with notions of the future as either warning or Navneet Alang is a technology and cultural jour- said in 1994, “I sometimes suspect that we’re seeing aspiration—and Walkaway is ultimately a thought nalist based in Toronto. His work has appeared in something in the Internet as significant as the birth experiment that imagines the meeting of the logical the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, New Republic and the of cities. It’s something that profound and with that progression of capitalism and a kind of digital Atlantic. sort of infinite possibilities. It’s really something neo‑communism.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 17 It is no coincidence. Doctorow has for years by the “zottarich,” the one percent of the one arguments is also the novel at its best, presenting been a writer and editor at the blog Boing Boing, a percent. They are embodied by Natalie’s father, the kinds of shifts in logic and the conception of the kind of clearinghouse for pieces on modern tech- Jacob Redwater, who commands both impossible self that would be necessary for whatever comes nology, politics and ideas that most clearly came amounts of wealth and the power—and violent after capitalism. Yes, digital replicators, houses to prominence around the copyright battles of force—that go with it. The clash of these two worlds powered by hydrogen cells and social discourse the 2000s. Doctorow’s ethos also echoes Gibson’s is brought on by walkaway scientists successfully conceived of as wikis are intriguing as concepts, but sense of digital as a historical rupture—but he is learning to “scan” consciousness and identity into also: how do we think our way out of the present deeply invested in disruption as history, rather than the cloud where it can operate as bodiless persons. moment when, despite the dismissal of Fukuyama, merely as a business model. To Doctorow, those Rather than just waving off the idea, the text deals anything else other than technocratic capitalism arguments from the early part of the century about with the implications in an interesting manner, often seems an impossibility? Napster and digital pushing the marginal cost of constructing an idea of digital identity that pos- Alas, it is this same back and forth where the goods down to zero are not about MP3s or Netflix or its the necessity of an unconscious, and even of novel is also at its worst. Characters become even Uber upending public transit, but about creat- repression, rather than a sort of supercomputer ver- mouthpieces for ideologies, talking in vaguely ing a base for new socioeconomic relations. sion of mind. It is at its most interesting when char- absurd prose that, perhaps inevitably, sounds The walkaways of the novel are the fictional mani- acters must confront their own digitized identities like undergraduates arguing on a web forum. The festation of these ideas. For the most part, the focus as a kind of nod to how we live now, extending our trouble with Walkaway is that because it gets so is Natalie, whose transition from ultra rich heiress selves into cyberspace while still tied to our bodies. deeply into the weeds of its own ideological logic, to walkaway is prompted by a death at a “commun- The threat perceived by the rich, however, is how to it sets up an expectation of a similar kind of rigour ist party”—literally a party replete with booze and police people who do not fear either imprisonment in its political imaginings. We can forgive dysto- music that reclaims unused space—that causes or death, and it is ultimately a meta-version of the pian films such as Starship Troopers or The Matrix her friends and her to go on the run. In a stylistic same question the novel asks of its readers. If you precisely because their unrealism turns them into nod to anti-individualism, however, the omniscient can reorganize society so that you no longer need to useful allegory, but Walkaway forecloses such easy narrator bounces between the minds of various work to survive, and nobody has to die, how might forgiveness. Its resolution in particular, which her- characters with some frequency, most interest- you reconceive authority, and humanity itself? alds the end of default and a new post-human age, ingly, Natalie’s love interest, Gretyl, a wizened, zaftig It is thus a novelization of a different end of seems too neat, too pat. Its thin characters do little mother-figure, and Tam, a trans woman who is also history: the end of capital in the form of the end to add to that. the conscience of the group. Walkaway philosophy of death. But if Fukuyama modelled his thinking All the same, the past few years have seen the is to always “walk away” from possession of goods, on the linear dialectic of Hegel—and the end of slow, steady squelching of the techno-utopian and from authority and ego, a kind of Buddhist Marx’s dialectical materialism—perhaps the most dreams of the early web. This is generally to be asceticism, but one softened by technology, includ- unexpectedly interesting dimension of Doctorow’s celebrated—especially the debunking of some of ing the ability to program drones to reconstruct work is his focus on the more simple mechanics the more aggressively naive ideas of simple global the commune you just abandoned that was com- of dialectical movement itself, or, more simply, harmony and a shiny new, Apple-powered future. plete with Japanese onsen-style spa baths. Sex is dialogue. Rather than reflecting the literary theorist But lost, too, has been a more straightforward everywhere and mostly unconcerned with gender Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion that a novel should pres- sense of the new. We are instead plunged into a boundaries. Everything in the rural walkaway world ent competing views in dialogical relation with one new darkness, with the ills of nationalism, ethno- is decentralized, constantly skipping away from another, Walkaway’s approach to the psychological centrism, capitalism and techno-authoritarianism systems of control and surveillance. The common dimensions of discourse is to treat it as a kind of only rising. If Walkaway is a bit too fanciful, there leftist complaint about techno-­utopianism’s lack of athletic skill, each careful defusing of emotion in is nonetheless in its breathless pace and ardent materialist rigour—how talk of the disruptive effect the service of a higher rational argument working proselytizing a reclamation of the “right sort” of of the cloud always somehow forgets the massive to map out what it means to argue for the end of utopia—that, in contrast with either Stalinist bru- data centres or effects on people’s livelihoods—is capitalist individualism. It is not a stretch to see tality or Soviet brutalism, here is a vision of an anti- here answered by more technology that negates Doctorow acting out an ideal of discourse informed capitalism filled with hope. such concerns, if perhaps a bit too conveniently. by years of arguing online. Like the end of history, it is perhaps too The text’s dialectical antithesis to the idyllic This focus on argumentation is by itself a kind quaint. Unlike that now worn concept, however, thesis of walkaways is what the novel wisely labels of throwaway concept—and perhaps also slightly Doctorow’s novel nonetheless feels vital, or rather, “default,” and although it is perhaps a slightly too- cheap biographical criticism. Yet in light of the full of vitality—breathing life into a dormant sense on-the-nose version of techno-capitalism taken to contemporary ubiquity of the idea posed by Slavoj of hope that these flickering screens may simply do its extreme, it serves its purpose. Its home in the Žižek that it is easier to imagine the end of the world more than reflect and endlessly repeat what came novel is (of course) Toronto, an area controlled than the end of capitalism, the focus on the how of before.

ON STAGE MAY 5, 2017 FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF NTOZAKE SHANGE

Through music, poetry and dance, seven women weave their stories of love, heartache, violence, and joy into a powerful mosaic of the experiences of African-American women. This seminal work celebrates the power of reclaiming one’s voice.

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18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Shadow Stories Mother issues 40,000 years ago, and now Anne Marie Todkill

The Last Neanderthal Claire Cameron Doubleday Canada 275 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780385686785

small family, circa 38,000 BCE, sleeps on a shared bed of bison hides and pine Aboughs. The family is “warm,” which in their rudimentary but allusive language connotes family, safety and comfort. “When they slept, they were the body of the family. That is how they thought of themselves together, as one body that lived and breathed.” The daughter in the group, Girl, will have reason to remember and long for that warmth. This earthy closeness, and its disintegra- tion, is reminiscent of Claire Cameron’s previous novel The Bear, which opens with its five-year-old protagonist curled up with her little brother, first in a tent, and then in a Coleman cooler, where they narrowly escape being eaten alive. The Bear is a high-risk plunge into consciousness-construction, the carrying voice being the free-associative but eminently pragmatic interior monologue of a very young and very traumatized child. The Last Neanderthal reprises with equal daring the con- and ethical reasoning in a prehistoric society. There manufactured world are described in close focus sciousness of an unsophisticated but adept girl- is a pack order in this matriarchal culture, along as if this will make them matter more. This is not survivor. There is something here of the current, with wisdom, affection and self-sacrifice. Stories entirely a problem of content: as Italo Calvino compensatory (and thus problematic) vogue for and lessons are conveyed by firelight “with shad- proved, it is possible to write fascinatingly about female superheroes. ows and singsong yowls.” Morality is pragmatic: the taking out the garbage. But although I am on board Running in parallel with Girl’s story is the one taboo, against incest, is empirically justified. with Rose’s indignation about her professional present-day narrative of Rose Gale, an archeologist There is no idol worship, although some hugging of predicament, the prospect of unpaid maternity who, having just made the find of her life, must also trees; no hierarchy of being (the words “body” and leave and aspects of her postnatal care, warming to grapple with the game-changer of being pregnant. “meat” refer to people and animals equally); there her character is another matter. It’s hard to muster “Considered old to be a first-time mother, [but] too is great violence, but no great malice. This is the real empathy for someone whose disclosures are young to have made a significant mark on [her] world before The Fall. unflaggingly procedural (“If I was adamant about field,” Rose is far less pleased by the pregnancy than In one heart-thumping scene Girl finds her- anything in my life, it was that I didn’t travel with she knows her partner, Simon, will be. In her com- self split between a flight or fight response; as if more than I could carry”) and who tends to speak petitive field, stepping aside from her work even standing at an evolutionary juncture, she real- like a droid (“While tears are a natural reaction to temporarily could mean forfeiting it altogether. She izes the danger of overthinking. The immediacy adversity, I believed crying played into negative is no more inclined to abandon her prize than a of Cameron’s third-person delivery enacts Girl’s assumptions about a woman’s ability to cope with Neanderthal huntress would be to give up a freshly determination to focus on the present, bodily, difficult situations”). killed bison. moment in order to survive. She is grateful, after a One of the more believable scenes in Rose’s The technical challenge of Cameron’s split- hunt gone wrong, that her head has not been sep- narrative is a domestic spat in an IKEA parking lot, screen narrative is not only to shift gears smoothly— arated “from the rest of her meat,” for she is keenly when she and Simon are driven to a heated state of Girl’s story leads and is given more pages, which can aware of the two kinds of meat: that which “gets to irritation by what some might call their first-world make Rose’s seem interruptive—but also to keep eat” and that which “gets eaten.” This existential problems. But when Simon curls his lip and emits the emotional stakes even. The story of Girl and her bottom line propels a wonderfully visceral qual- a cry worthy of a cave man, we are reminded of the dwindling clan is an enthralling speculation about ity in the portrayal of Girl as she experiences loss, task apparently assigned to us as readers: to draw the nature of kinship, sexuality, emotional bonds deprivation and childbirth—and, like The Bear’s connections between the halves of this historical protagonist, becomes the resourceful surrogate diptych. But are Rose’s struggles analogous to Anne Marie Todkill is a writer and editor in mother to a young boy. Girl’s? If a sudden urge to purchase nifty storage Ottawa. In 2016 she received the Malahat Review’s Against Girl’s raw tale is Rose’s oddly flat first- solutions is evidence of a nesting instinct, it hardly novella prize. person account, in which banal details of the rates against a pregnant Neanderthal tarping­ a

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 19 hand-dug burrow with animal skins in allel between Girl and Rose is the the nick of time before winter. If irony irreducible aloneness they feel in their is intended, the tone of Rose’s flat- maternal responsibility. With respect to packed narration does not prepare us biological imperatives, each concludes for it. For this reader, the plucky cave upstairs the dogs howl that she is alone. So, too, with regard to girl makes the career woman seem a social support. But while Girl’s solitude the anger wails breathless words at her tad whiny (one dispatches a pair of results from a perfect storm of catastro- leopards; the other survives a confer- fast as slam poetry or dark rap phes beyond her control, Rose’s is partly ence call). This can’t be the intended beat-boxing and pounding her soul self-inflicted: she makes the tactical effect. In the second half of the book, and emotional error of underestimating when the pace of Rose’s story picks up, her anger echoes through the black riff the goodwill of people around her— her situation becomes precarious and resounding across the space between including the colleague who points out a crisis emerges, it is easier to go along widening cracks where once had been love that the human mother-infant dyad for the ride. After a difficult labour, is uniquely vulnerable: “All the other Rose feels like a hero (I will surely not this raw call and response will not end female primates can resume gathering be the only reader to identify), but still echoes across the void between them food just hours after they give birth.” Substitute “go back to work” for “gath- the emotional register is not quite right. while the dogs howl a dark harmony Her acute postpartum difficulties are a ering food” and you have the dilemma textbook case; in a novel, this might not faced by women who want to hold both be a good thing, and we never see very Bob MacKenzie their newborns and their careers close. far into her heart. The hubristic Rose is shocked by her Different readers will bring, for one Bob MacKenzie’s poetry has been published around the world vulnerability; even more, she resents reason or another, different degrees of in publications that include the Dalhousie Review, Windsor being sidelined by it. She is impatient identification or empathy to the read- Review and Ball State University Forum. He has published with, and yet represents, a postmod- ing of a character, and so for others eleven volumes of poetry and prose-fiction and his work has ern society where, despite decades of Rose may ignite a bigger spark. In any been featured in numerous anthologies. His poems have been progress under the banner of femin- case, the uneven pairing of protagon- reproduced by visual artists and sculptors and a public art ism, maternity is denormalized. “I’m ists invites us to reflect on how, since gallery has devoted an entire visual arts exhibition to his pregnant, not sick,” she objects at one time immemorial, the practice of poetry, and versions of his poetry are owned by the Canada point. For me, this novel rekindled a mothering has been shaped by hard Council’s National Art Bank. With the performance ensemble cluster of bitter questions, such as why necessity and difficult, not to mention Poem de Terre, Bob has performed much of his poetry spoken the experience of early motherhood is brutal, trade-offs. The social economy and sung live with original music and has released six albums. like being marooned on an island; why of a Neanderthal family is vastly dif- He is currently reading Some Days Just Noticing by G.W. breastfeeding in public still causes such ferent from ours, but economies these Rasberry and hungree throat by bill bissett. a fuss; why the value of childrearing is both are. (The root sense of this word, so deeply discounted; and how things after all, is “household management.”) would be if human social evolution had But perhaps the most important par- favoured matriarchy more.

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20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Goode for All Infermitys Accounting for tastes in a collection of 17th-century recipes and remedies Eugenia Zuroski

and of the particular kinds of women’s Preserving on Paper: work, knowledge and ability that are Seventeenth-Century sustaining those lives. Englishwomen’s Receipt Books “Receipt books overwhelmingly Kristine Kowalchuk look back, not forward,” Kowalchuk University of Toronto Press observes. They represent the accumu- 387 pages, softcover lation of knowledge over generations ISBN 9781487520038 of domestic work. Rather than offer useful “life hacks” toward a more efficient future, these books gather he curious manuscript the expertise of the past and bring it texts transcribed and anno- into the material life of the present. Ttated in Preserving on Paper: Anyone who reads, makes or eats the Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s results of these receipts becomes a Receipt Books by the Edmonton- living embodiment of what the past based scholar Kristine Kowalchuk are knows. The books are also strikingly bound to raise a lot of questions for collaborative in nature: “Multiple the 21st-century reader. For example: hands, inscriptions, attributions, What are “musarunes,” which one annotations, and other marginalia, as may pickle and “put oyl upon them well as loose recipes tucked between if you think fit”? (Mushrooms, the the pages (obtained, presumably, glossary helpfully informs us.) How during a visit paid to a relative or effective was taking “young Ravens a friend or a neighbour), all show when they are redy to ffly,” bak- that these books were compiled by ing them “with Browne Bread tell many women, and a few men, over they are Powder,” and mixing the generations.” Between Kowalchuk’s powder with honey as a cure for introduction and glossary, the book “the falling Sickness”? Wouldn’t contains three receipt books: one the extremely complex, spicy, floral attributed to Mary Granville and her The recipes offer an occasion to rethink the status of everyday writing. “Palsie Water”—which is meant to be daughter, Anne Granville D’Ewes, “Die Magd in der Küche,” Justus Juncker, c. 1767. Image courtesy of Hempel Auctions. served “in Crumbs of Bread & Sugar” dated 1640–1750; one attributed to as a treatment for tremors and muscle ailments— manuals, mainly written by and for men, from the Constance Hall, dated 1672; and one “cookery and be good mixed with gin? And isn’t it reassuring same historical period. medical receipt book” attributed to Lettice Pudsey, to know how richly one could subsist on a diet of The distinction may be understood best by com- dated circa 1675–1700. All these women appear to cakes, pies, and puddings (with the occasional paring the connotations of the terms “receipt” and have lived in the Midlands or southwest England, “Surrup of Snailes”)? “recipe.” To call these sets of instructions receipts although the Granville book contains a cluster of But perhaps the first question would be what points to their function, like a brine or a jelly, as a recipes in Spanish collected during Mary’s child- is a receipt book. For us, the term is likely to con- method of preservation. They are a way of remem- hood, when her father and grandfather served as jure a record of financial transactions. But in the bering something. In her introduction, Kowalchuk the English consuls in Cadiz. Many of the recipes 17th century, the receipt book was a handwritten shows that the emergence of modern cooking and in both the Granville and Hall books are titled after collection of recipes for foods, drinks and medical medicine as separate spheres of professional exper- the people who presumably provided them, such treatments. (The Oxford English Dictionary shows tise entailed a certain cultural pressure to preserve as “Goodwife Lawrence her Salue” (a salve of deer the term “receipt” giving way to “recipe” around the forms of folk knowledge that came before. The and mutton suets mixed with beeswax, spices and mid 18th century.) According to Kowalchuk’s receipts that make up these books serve as remind- rose oil) and “To pickle Walnutts Mrs Mary Hills introduction, “seventeenth-century Englishwomen ers of pre-existing networks of women’s labour Way” (“at the beginning of July” before the shells developed and dominated the form” of the early and knowledge more than as standardized sets grow hard, in a brine “that will bear an Egg,” with modern receipt book; there are more than 200 sur- of instructions. A recipe informs a reader how to pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mustard and garlic “if you viving examples currently held in library archives, make something the right way; a receipt documents do not dislike the tast”). Receipt books preserve not suggesting “that these manuscripts were com- something that someone has made. only lines of traditional knowledge but also active mon.” Kowalchuk discusses in detail the ways these The distinction is subtle, to be sure, but one networks of knowledge—they are textual artifacts manuscripts—which she identifies as “feminist might say that whereas the recipe gestures toward an of deeply established and busily maintained econ- texts”—are distinct from the printed household abstract ideal of something that can only be created omies of sharing. through precise measurement and standard tech- The manuscripts thus frustrate modern attempts Eugenia Zuroski is a professor of English and cul- niques (which is why, as many of us know, the final to interpret them as a kind of “life writing” or the tural studies at McMaster University. She is editor of product so often fails to live up to what we imagined output of a single author who might be retrieved as the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction and author the recipe would yield), the receipt prioritizes viabil- a historically significant individual. Kowalchuk sug- of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the ity over concept. The receipt does not tell us how we gests the books are important not only because they Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford University Press, should aspire to cook and eat so much as how a cul- tell us something about the past, but also because 2013) as well as several articles on British literature ture already does these things, and has been doing they model communal forms of selfhood over indi- and material culture from 1660 to 1820. for a long time. It is a record of how people are living, vidual ones. They speak in a multivalent, collective

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 21 voice and represent human survival—both animal endless household chores even to learn how to survival by way of eating and nurturing and healing, read and write; our imaginations thus perpetuate and cultural survival by way of textual posterity—as myths about the “backwardness” of the past. But as Donate your a profoundly shared endeavour that has little use receipt books show, running a household and writ- Aeroplan Miles! for isolated bursts of genius. ing things down were not at all mutually exclusive In place of what we might call innovation, activities in 17th-century England. If we broaden The LRC is now able to receipt books call upon improvisation, leaving our understanding of writing to include genres such accept donations of Aeroplan plenty of room for a reader to fill in blanks or make as household receipts, what we find is that a lot of Miles, which are invaluable in substitutions as necessary, given that person’s people we never imagined as “writers” turn out to delivering programming and own material circumstances. Kowalchuk describes have produced a lot of writing. “Consideration of building the LRC and Spur her own experience making some of the recipes: receipt books greatly alters our understanding community across Canada. “I know the cooks who wrote these recipes also of early modern Englishwomen’s literacy rates, depended on seasonality, local availability, and writing abilities, and education, enabling us to look For every Aeroplan Mile you variable harvest, and they improvised and were past traditional, inaccurate research methods,” donate before November 1, economical, so in some sense it was my altering of Kowalchuk insists. 2017, Aeroplan will match the recipes that made them true to the experience This observation has implications for us in the it mile for mile, to a total of the seventeenth-century housewife’s experi- present, as well. For example, how many of us who combined maximum ence.” The books themselves record such improvis- write professionally or to heed a calling—poets, of 500,000. ation and revision in the kitchen, through crossed scholars, students, aspiring novelists—get to the out recipes, marginal annotations and alternative end of a day full of regret that we “didn’t get any options such as the Granvilles’ recipe “To make writing done,” when, if one counted the number Orange flower Cakes” followed immediately by one of words generated in text messages, email, social We thank Aeroplan for its “To make them another way.” They seem to say: media, instructions to house- or babysitters, shop- generous philanthropic leadership. take what we know and figure out what makes it ping lists, to-do lists, bureaucratic paperwork and work in your situation. The aim of a work like this so on, one would have to concede that, in fact, the is not for any one cook to excel over the rest, but entire day was spent writing? While these fleet- for each of us to preserve the viability of what other ing fragments of quotidian life may seem even people have made—to help us reinvent each other’s less valuable than recipes, they are also traces knowledge so we can live well together. of the ongoing work of household management, To give Aeroplan Miles, please visit The receipt books also offer an occasion to caretaking, social networking, and the sharing of reviewcanada.ca/aeroplan rethink the status of everyday writing. Our assump- thoughts, feelings and information among com- then let us know, tions about who, historically, spent time reading munities both close and widespread. We continue so we can be sure to recognize your gift! and writing are based on our culture’s tendency to write things down for ourselves and others just to to limit the kind of writing that “counts” to very get through each day. These remarkable 17th- particular forms, like printed literature. It is only century books invite us to consider which forms of too easy for us to imagine that a 17th-century writing are actually woven into the fabric of how we woman must have been much too burdened with live, and who is producing them.

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22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Who, Us? Debunking the mythical Quebec Martin Patriquin

Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America André Pratte and Jonathan Kay, editors Signal 352 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771072390

Is This Who We Are? 14 Questions about Quebec Alain Dubuc Translated by Nigel Spencer Ronsdale Press 230 pages, softcover ISBN 9781553804673

pite is a beautiful thing. Channelled correctly, it is the ultimate motivator—less Sblinding than revenge, more enduring than anger, as fulfilling as happiness without any of the delirium. The men and women in Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America are a testament to the power and necessity of this maligned senti- ment. The book, edited by the senator and former journalist André Pratte, along with the editor and writer Jonathan Kay, sketches out the lives of maverick French Canadians—a baker’s dozen of them—whose exploits served to steal glory from the conquering English. North America is a far If the English presence in North America was So he compromised. Yes, he traded in infer- more interesting place as a result. a symptom of weaponized pride, manifest destiny ior goods, but he also befriended the indigenous With a few exceptions—notably Jack Kerouac, a well before the term existed, then the French ver- people—mostly Cree and Assiniboine—with whom French Canadian soul whose upbringing in Lowell, sion was a spite-fuelled act of rebellion to ensure he did business. This sensible approach informed Massachusetts, robbed him of the French words he that vision did not come to full fruition. In Philip La Vérendrye’s style. He was less conqueror than so wished to use—there are few true celebrities on Marchand’s portrait of Pierre de La Vérendrye, we freewheeling frontiersman who did not trade in the list. We get Henri Bourassa, not Wilfrid Laurier; find a man seemingly built to tilt at windmills. Born booze or spread smallpox. Even when the Sioux Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas-Louis Tremblay, not well off in Trois-Rivières, La Vérendrye could have tribe stabbed, scalped and disembowelled his son Léo Major, whose blood-and-guts exploits during lived a decent life on the land or in the priesthood. Jean-Baptiste, La Vérendrye convinced his Native the Second World War earned him the moniker Instead, La Vérendrye chose to go to war against allies not to go to war on his behalf. “Quebec’s Rambo.” the English. He fought them in St. John’s, and La Vérendrye died in near poverty in Montreal. This is purposeful, if only to show that the impact in Deerfield, Massachusetts, then nearly died in It is difficult to imagine a similar fate for Sir of French Canadians on North America stretches France, only to return penniless to Canada in 1712. George-Étienne Cartier, whose early spite-driven beyond Quebec, and goes beyond the coterie of He quickly became obsessed with finding the myth- years against the British—he fought in the Lower famous francophone surnames. Maurice Richard ical inland Western Sea. Apart from not existing— Canada Rebellion of 1837—gave way to keen- fomented a cultural movement with an indignant although La Vérendrye could hardly have known eyed pragmatism later on. Either Kay or Pratte glare and ready fists. His teammate Jacques Plante that—the Western Sea was a quixotic pursuit for (or both) must have had a good laugh at siccing did much the same—within the National Hockey another reason: it threatened to pit La Vérendrye former Quebec premier Jean Charest on Cartier. League, anyway—by putting on a mask when other against most of the Native tribes to the west, with Charest, along with his son Antoine, a burgeoning goalies were suffering through broken teeth and whom the English had well-established trading ties. politician, presents the story of the statesman and lacerated faces. Legacy portrays Plante. While he is It is here that spite gives way to common sense. father of Confederation. Although separated by less known, his legacy is arguably just as important. English supplies were cheaper and of better quality about 100 years, the careers of both men echo with than the French equivalents; the English were win- similar themes. Cartier advocated for the radical Martin Patriquin is a Montreal writer and con- ning the war of attrition with the French not only decentralization of what became the federal gov- tributor to the Walrus, the New York Times, through bullets and muskets, but also with manu- ernment; Charest, as Quebec premiers are wont to ­iPolitics and the CBC, among others. facturing chains and mechanization. do, pushed for even more powers.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 23 Cartier was a Patriote who fought Bouchard, Bourassa wavered on the against the British, only to become a Canadian dream. Unlike Bouchard, federal member of Parliament and a who ultimately gave up on it, bona fide Canadian patriot. Charest’s How Love Settles Bourassa died believing the dream early political career was as a “Captain was possible. Canada,” wielding his Canadian pass- The husband is there and not there, Was there spite among the port like some sort of federalist bible, leaving the memory of hot kisses French-Canadian pioneers of the fending off evil Quebec separatist unparalleled, as only the wife’s women’s movement? God, yes. spirits. In his later years, when he previous experience can surmise. The subordination of women was needed a proper scapegoat for his Their union loses more of itself literally written into Quebec’s Civil Code. “It is not difficult to imagine dwindling political fortunes, Charest in a stampede of cirrus clouds, fake took a nationalist Quebec-first turn. how Quebec’s legislature reacted as sea horses, deflated, shoeless. And the careers of both men were to a British verdict that women, The wife, reluctant, pulls back ultimately punctuated by scandal. For though still not eligible to vote Cartier, it was by way of kickbacks for into earth’s blue slake — in Quebec’s own elections, now the building of railways to the West. perfection rested on them like calm on a lake. could sit in the Canadian Senate,” For Charest, it was the financing of writes Samantha Nutt, the execu- the Liberal party through demon- The wife imagines a boundary, tive director of War Child Canada. strably illegal donations from the the illusion that symmetry Thérèse Casgrain changed that, in province’s biggest engineering firms. must always be imposed. The husband 1940. Casgrain, Nutt’s subject, is a Neither men invented the mechanics prefers a king-sized bed so vast, model of first-wave feminism—an of these schemes, but both benefitted the couple are forced to dream establishment figure who, the times mightily from them. Cartier grew rich, in different continents, a border test dictated, should have been busy clutching her pearls or rearing her while Charest’s Liberals became a of pillows between them. The wife was not fundraising dynamo. children. Her husband, Pierre- allowed to touch him when they slept. If Charest is heir to Cartier’s François Casgrain, was speaker Inveterate love settles. At best, brand of pragmatic politics, then of the House of Commons during Parti Québécois premier Lucien pain rested./ Beauty does not rest. Mackenzie King’s long Liberal Bouchard is Henri Bourassa’s equally reign. Her own loyalty to the Liberal indignant successor. Fittingly, it is The wife met the husband Party was not particularly deep, Bouchard who writes the portrait stepping directly out of a painting however. She ran for the rival CCF of this firebrand, whose frequent by Matisse. He gathers following the Second World War clashes with Wilfrid Laurier are simi- uncertainty into himself and eventually led its Quebec wing, lar to Bouchard’s lengthy travails with like the most diaphanous cloud. becoming the country’s first female former friend and then political rival If happiness can be reduced to a simple political leader. Brian Mulroney. equation, one picture or two, Spite even stemmed from the prolific pen of Gabrielle Roy, an Bourassa is spite personified. surely the wife can learn to sip The grandson of Louis-Joseph Papi­ author who, Margaret Atwood tea with Matisse. Shattered, crippled, neau, Bourassa was first elected to recalls in her piece, was one of the the husband touched his wife’s temple. Parliament in 1896, resigned three few female Canadian staples of high years later in protest of Canada’s par- school curriculums in Atwood’s ticipation in the Boer War, and was Every night she fears catching a glimpse own youth. The Tin Flute brought then re-elected a short time later. He of the husband-bird warbling to a new lady cloud. Roy fame and riches. It also held a was perpetually unsatisfied, his rest- The wife takes pictures of storms to avoid mirror up to the plight of women in lessness stoked by the plight of French joining him in an awkward embrace. Quebec. Those women did not like Canadians in the new country. “It is She snaps salmon pink deities the colour what they saw. There is a direct line impossible to relate here the episodes of her once-flushed cheeks. The wife tires between the tragedies depicted in of the many other struggles waged by of uncertainty, misses her sylph-like The Tin Flute and Quebec’s Quiet Bourassa in Ottawa on behalf of the limbs winging up and down the husband’s slim body. Revolution. History, never objective, is often French language,” Bouchard writes. How nebulous his energy, coolly rejecting. The wife swears “Each had a disappointed outcome.” the retelling of myths. Nowhere on and turned/ While it surely did not help his this continent is this truer than in constitution, being constantly frus- and ran/ Quebec, where historians typically trated did wonders for Bourassa’s down/ hew to a well-worn narrative that oratorical skills. When Archbishop the/ is almost biblical in its pacing and Francis Cardinal Bourne waltzed stairs./ narrative. First, there was the para- into Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica dise of New France, then the shame and declared that Catholicism in Carla Hartsfield of the British Conquest of 1759, North America must have an “English then the Rebellions beginning in tongue,” Bourassa took the podium 1837, then the further shame of and delivered a largely unscripted Carla Hartsfield is a classically trained pianist, singer-songwriter, Confederation. The next century retort. “Do not tear from anyone, poet and recording artist. In 2016 her album of original songs titled was a disgrace of corruption, oh you priests of Christ, that which Just Once Forever (www.carlahartsfield.band) was released and oppression and priest-ridden social is dearest to man after the God he her chapbook Little Hearts (Rubicon Press) appeared. Heart Brake austerity. The Quiet Revolution’s adores,” Bourassa said. Many of the is Carla’s fourth major poetry collection. Her books have been nom- shining optimism was blunted by 10,000 people on the streets and inated for the Gerald Lampert prize, Best Canadian Poetry and The the loss of two referendums that inside were brought to tears. British Columbia ReLit Awards. left Quebec a prisoner of Canada. Spite, anger’s more level-headed Legacy is a rebuke of this familiar cousin, can be given to comprom- refrain. Despite centuries of indif- ise if the situation calls for it. And ference or worse from their English- Bourassa was not beyond compromise. Papineau certain cultural assimilation, should Canada join speaking brethren, French Canada have thrived in favoured annexation with the United States, if the United States. At the same time, he was fiercely North America, and left an indelible mark on the only to get out from under the British thumb. His republican, loudly criticizing the Queen at a time continent. grandson was more pragmatic, calculating that a when English Canada could not dream of severing Still, the myths persist, to the point that they largely imagined bilingual country was better than that umbilical cord. (Apparently it still can’t.) Like have congealed into truisms. Rather than the belea-

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada guered, angry Quebecer, we now have the pro- ment of hundreds of commuters on a snowbound gressive, egalitarian, cooler European cousins of highway outside of Montreal with Quebec’s broad Canada. And these ones, according to Alain Dubuc, and corrosive “social malaise” and its “low trust are just as misguided. society.” SPRING 2017 Is This Who We Are? 14 Questions about Quebec Potter cited the very same statistics as Dubuc. is Dubuc’s attempt at an antidote to all this myth Like Dubuc, he either forgot about or ignored making. As a former Trotskyite sovereigntist turned historical precedent. For hundreds of years, the Liberal federalist, Dubuc is a frequent target of Catholic church was the receptacle of choice for Quebec’s intelligentsia, who know a proper sellout French Quebecers’ dollars and time, if not their when they see one. And as a writer for La Presse, entire souls. In return the church controlled every- NEW TITLES the influential perch from which he launches his thing, from education to health care to caring for pensées, Dubuc follows in a long line of columnists society’s less fortunate. This came to an abrupt BAD IDEAS for that paper who tow the editorial line of the end in the late 1950s, with the death of Premier Desmarais family, the paper’s rich, secretive and Maurice Duplessis and the advent of the Quiet Michael V. Smith’s über-federalist owners. (Pratte himself was another Revolution. As Atwood points out in Legacy, the poems are one of these columnists.) Quiet Revolution ushered in a massive shift in hyperbolic yet For some of Dubuc’s critics, it is an eminently societal habits practically overnight. Among them, exploitable caricature. For more than a decade, women became less prolific at having babies, and sincere, battling he has traded barbs with journalist, academic more apt to stay in school past grade six. themes of family, and polemicist Jean-François Lisée, who—as this Obviously, this is a good thing. Yet in throw- loss and love. article went to press—was the leader of the Parti ing off the often oppressive norms of Catholicism, Québécois. (These things change frequently.) The Quebec society also lost its main vehicle for pair have had what you might call a protracted volunteerism and donations. For centuries, the NEXT DOOR egghead battle over everything from language to church was l’état providence. You can hardly blame TO THE sovereignty to doctors’ salaries to whether Quebec Quebecers for lagging a little bit. is richer or poorer than the state of Louisiana. As As for trust in institutions, as Conrad Black and BUTCHER SHOP egghead battles go, it is an interesting show. It is Vincent Geloso have argued in their respective all the more so when one considers how such pro- books, Duplessis’s influence on Quebec society was Rodney DeCroo tracted, mutual fits of pique between the province’s not the stuff of nightmares conjured up by latter- explores memory opposition leader and one of its better known day historians. Yet he was demonstrably corrupt, while combining columnists do not really exist anywhere else in and his removal from office, after a stroke in 1959, the country—or continent, for that matter. In this gave rise to Quebec’s collectively wary eye on gov- lyrical and respect, contrary to what Dubuc writes in Is This ernment. Subsequent governments, Charest’s very visceral imagery. Who We Are?, Quebec is indeed unique. Only here much included, certainly have not helped matters. can a journalist raise the ire of its politicians with Potter’s real crime in that Maclean’s column such reliable alacrity. was in making a series of sweeping and demon- THEN/AGAIN The buttoned-down Dubuc seems to revel in strably incorrect statements about Quebec society, Michelle Elrick his stature, having written extensively in column including the suggestion that restaurants, housing creates a deft and book form on Quebec’s many sacred cows. contractors, garage owners and doctors “insist on “You’re not special. You’re not a beautiful and cash,” if only to cheat the government out of its account of unique snowflake,” Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight rightful share. It is a patently absurd notion, and finding home Club. Dubuc goes even further. By many measures, Potter rightly apologized and retracted. It should in her second he argues, Quebec is worse than humdrum. It’s have ended there, but it did not. Instead, Potter actually inferior. resigned as director of the McGill Institute, not collection of Each chapter of Is This Who We Are? poses a ques- long after facing the ire of Quebec politicians, who poetry. tion. “Are We a Unique Model?” “Are We Educated?” loudly and near unanimously screamed “Quebec “Are We ‘Cultural’?” “Are We Egalitarian?” “Are We bashing.” THE Happy?” “Are We in Solidarity with Each Other?” Here is where Dubuc gets it decidedly right. In And so on. Spoiler alert: the answer to nearly every his chapter on the supposed decline of French in CLOTHESLINE question is no. Quebec, a long-running and demonstrably false SWING We Quebecers are not unique, Dubuc suggests, contention, Dubuc says politicians have cynic- as the Quiet Revolution was but the Québécois ally fashioned themselves the protector not just of Ahmad Danny extension of the 1960s social upheaval. Does our Quebec’s purse strings but of its heart strings as Ramadan tells the vaunted hydroelectricity make us green? Nope. We well. story of two lovers actually consume more oil per capita than Spain, In 2010 I wrote a piece in Maclean’s outlining the Britain and (gasp) France. Dubuc also informs us rot and corruption within the province’s political in the aftermath that we Quebecers work less, are less educated and class. Dozens of Quebec politicians—including, of a dying Syria. less in solidarity with one another than most other without an ounce of irony, Jean Charest—labelled provinces. me a Quebec basher. Canadian parliamentarians SHOULD AULD It is difficult to come away from Is This Who unanimously passed a motion expressing “pro- ACQUAINTANCE We Are? without a nagging desire to move to found sadness” that such a thing would find its Saskatchewan, where the potholes are few and way into print. Although the whole thing was quite Melanie Murray (I’m told) you can get decent enough poutine. Yet amusing, it was disconcerting how quickly polit- provides an although Dubuc has statistics to back up his spiel, icians were willing to wrap themselves in the fleur- he falls short in one notable area. Citing Statistics de-lys at the smallest perceived slight. intimate depiction Canada data, he posits that Quebecers are less For all their chipped shoulders and political of the life of Jean generous than their brethren in Ontario et al. We opportunism, Quebecers are not, as it may seem, a Armour, the wife volunteer less (ten percentage points less than the miserable lot. In fact, as Is This Who We Are? points of Robert Burns. national average) and donate less than half the dol- out, we are happy. Seriously: despite the unedu- lars that the rest of the country does. cated quagmire of gluttony and laziness that is More recently, we have seen this argument from Dubuc’s Quebec, we are actually satisfied with our Available at fine bookstores. Andrew Potter, erstwhile director of the McGill lives. Only the 150,000 residents of Prince Edward www.nightwoodeditions.com Institute for the Study of Canada. Potter wrote a hot Island are happier, according to Statistics Canada. take for Maclean’s magazine, in which the former Dubuc is at pains to explain why, but I have an idea. @nightwooded #readnightwood Ottawa Citizen editor equated the virtual abandon- Maybe you need to laugh to spite the tears.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 25 Alone in a Room An artist’s arresting vision of a life in captivity, and of how power shapes our world and our selves Nicholas Köhler

depictions of menace. “Was I dreaming or Hostage was that guy carrying a kitchen knife?” André Guy Delisle asks himself after one of his jailers slips into Translated by Helge Dascher the room to scold him. “Shit! I hope I won’t Drawn and Quarterly be here too long.” Delisle’s commitment to 436 pages, hardcover monotony begins to drive the narrative to a ISBN 9781770462793 surprising degree. So does André’s detective work as he deciphers the almost existential dilemma of his custody. “With no way for uy Delisle, who grew up in middle me to influence what’s happening, my anger class Quebec City, has come to be has turned into despair,” he says at one point. Gknown for sharply observed graphic- “I feel humiliated.” novel travelogues from very uncomfortable Twenty-five years after Art Spiegelman’s places (Pyongyang, Shenzhen, Rangoon, Holocaust narrative Maus became the first Jerusalem). A few years ago, when his wife (and so far only) graphic novel to win a left her job with Doctors Without Borders, the Pulitzer, practitioners of the form continue international non-governmental organization to receive short shrift in North America. that led to so much of his foreign adventuring, Although Delisle is respected in Canada, Delisle no doubt faced an identity crisis. What he is a star in France, where he lives in to write about? In his latest book he embraces Montpellier, and his sensibility remains more the problem: Hostage, originally published in European than Canadian or Québécois. He French last year, swaps the exotic locales of his is a former animator, and his roots are in the earlier work for the confines of captivity, telling experimental comic art of Paris in the 1990s, the true story of a French aid worker who was One of André’s imaginative diversions from the reality of his captivity. and while his travelogues are better known, kidnapped in 1997 and spent months as a pris- his back catalogue includes more sinister, From Guy Delisle’s Hostage. Images courtesy Drawn and Quarterly. oner of mysterious jailers in Chechnya. avant-garde stuff too. One senses Delisle posing for himself the ultim- would ever need for this austere narrative strategy As a child he devoured the Franco-Belgian ate challenge—of jettisoning all his strengths as a to work. In how many books about Kafka-esque bande-dessinée classics (Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, graphic novelist and wondering if he will make it, imprisonment does the captive, deprived of books, Les Schtroumpfs) before moving on to pulpier a daring high-wire act. Gone is the celebration of daydream of reading, or contemplate which novel artists such as Marcel Gotlib, Philippe Druillet novelty and colour that characterizes his earlier he will pick up first upon liberation? André nick- and Jean Giraud, who under the nom de plume books: of the strange, futuristic and oppressive in names his main jailer Thénardier, after the schem- Moebius published widely influential science fic- Pyongyang, say, or of the grand, decaying and col- ing innkeeper in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, tion. Delisle later became a key figure in la nouvelle onial in Rangoon. In its place is the grind of days and the allusion helps join Hostage to a French bande-dessinée, a “new wave” that did for comics spent handcuffed to a radiator. Gone too, perhaps literary tradition of jailhouse writers and narratives, what Nouvelle Vague pioneers such as Jean-Luc more radically, is Delisle’s comic-book alter ego, the from The Count of Monte Cristo to Papillon. The Godard and François Truffaut had done for cinema delightful, slightly bumbling narrator of the travel Hobbesian realities of the Caucasus in the 1990s, a generation earlier: applied genre sensibilities and memoirs, the guy who would show you around meanwhile, injects into that tradition the alien, des- techniques to such incongruous subject matter as while delivering trenchant commentary (“I swear, perate aspirations of bandits in a troubled corner of autobiography and travel memoir. Delisle’s cohorts when you see the spectacle religion puts on around the world, and their indifference to the intentions include such names as Lewis Trondheim, David here, you don’t feel like being a believer,” he told us of a French humanitarian aid worker. B. and Charles Berberian, although perhaps best in 2012’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. ThatHostage works so beautifully is testament to known in this country is Marjane Satrapi, whose “Thanks, God, for making me an atheist.”). Delisle’s mastery as a storyteller. The overwhelm- book Persepolis, about her youth in Iran around In Hostage, Delisle acts instead as invisible ing sensory abundance of culture shock in which the time of the Islamic revolution, was made into a amanuensis to the hostage, Christophe André, he revelled in his earlier books becomes here the critically acclaimed animated feature. abducted within the book’s first few pages. life-affirming properties of a clove of garlic, secured As a visual artist Delisle only occasionally hints Everything we know is filtered through this pris- by a handcuffed man through heroic exertion at Tintin. Rendered in muted colour, with low- oner, who shares no common language with his and the cunning use of his toes, and in its flavour key yet often arresting compositions, his sketchy, captors, is unsure at first of their motives, and is after months of thin soup. Here is the nitty-gritty impressionistic style eschews flash of any kind. It entirely deprived of outside news. A quirky military- of hiding a bit of bread for later, and as the ten- does not eschew bite, however, and even his more history buff and an avid reader, André retains a zest sion mounts putting the book down increasingly mainstream efforts retain an atmosphere of the for living in the midst of privation and bondage that becomes a chore. It might have been an easy device subversive. Writing from Rangoon under Burma’s makes him as sympathetic a character as Delisle for Delisle to delve into André’s memory and mine oppressive military junta, Delisle takes the oppor- it for pathos. Yet there are no flashbacks here: tunity to note the ubiquity of globalization: he spots Nicholas Köhler is a Toronto-based freelance writer. instead, Delisle dives into the reality of life alone it in the grin of the Laughing Cow cheese on sale at His work has appeared in Maclean’s and Reader’s in a room, and André’s private, imaginative diver- the grocer’s. Here and elsewhere he suggests that, Digest and on newyorker.com. sions, interrupted now and then by matter-of-fact although differences remain between the peoples

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada of the world, they more and more Delisle suggests that here too there exist attached to similarities, not is room for freedom. André does not always of the I’m-OK-you’re-OK allow himself to show his jailer how variety. His dark vision of the city badly he needs to urinate when he in Shenzhen: A Travelogue from is led to the toilet each day: “I didn’t China, published in 2000—of cap- want him to feel like I needed him italism run amok, where the indi- in any way.” His protagonist mirrors vidual is lost in the architecture’s Delisle’s own comic-book persona’s outsized scale—terrifies precisely penchant for gentle self-mockery because it is not entirely unfamiliar, and mild-mannered insight. When even to those of us a world away André catches himself wishing from industrial China. (Toronto and one of his jailors good night at the Vancouver are not quite there yet, end of the day, he observes: “You’re but just wait.) locked to a radiator and listen to His travelogues have all been you! ‘Good night’ … Starting right about the pageantry of conflict, now, I’m done being friendly with set in cities controlled either by any shithead jailers.” It is a celebra- old animosities or by new, harsh, tion of the ordinary and gentle in always slightly ridiculous authori- the face of extreme circumstances tarian regimes. In subtle ways those and dogma, a democratic sensibil- old themes remain in Hostage. If ity, and here as much as anywhere in Shenzhen and in Pyongyang: A Delisle distinguishes himself as a Journey in North Korea he high- humane writer. lighted the ways power shapes our His alter ego—the author-as- identities and our interactions with comic-book-character we know one another, Hostage scrubs away from his travelogues—appears just the veneer. Its depiction of power once in Hostage, below an author’s is brutal, oppressive, ultimately note preceding the narrative: he is unknowable, absurd: a punch in busy setting up a tape recorder in the face, cuffs so tight they make the front of André, his main character. hands numb. The reader begins to “This book recounts his story as he internalize the struggle to find for told it to me,” writes Delisle. It is oneself a comfortable position in also a book that manages to expand bed with one hand attached to a Delisle’s artistic repertoire, turning loop driven into the ground, or the what was once a brilliant talent for joy of sunlight when its warmth is wry observation into something felt on the skin only rarely. And yet more unsettling and profound.

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THE CLAY WE ARE MADE OF: HAUDENOSUANEE LAND TENURE ON THE GRAND RIVER • $27.95 • 978-0-88755-717-0

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 27 Against the Flow Race, radio and Canada’s musical coming of age Donna Bailey Nurse

compelling detail in a new memoir, In the Black: moment he realizes he might live abroad, emotion- In the Black: My Life My Life. The timing for a black station seemed right. ally speaking, he is gone. B. Denham Jolly For one thing, Contrast, the flagship newspaper of It is hard not to feel a little offended by his lack ECW Press Toronto’s black community, had recently folded. of sentimentality for the island I love. At the same 309 pages, hardcover For another, the city’s black population, hundreds time his pragmatism surely accounts for the suc- ISBN 9781770413788 of thousands strong, had to tune into Buffalo’s cess of his career, not to mention the success of this WBLK if they wanted to hear black music with any book, in which he manages, through the events of regularity. Few black Canadian artists received air his life, to coolly deconstruct Canadian racism. Jolly y musical coming of age occurred play. Certainly, the Liberals’ much-vaunted policy attributes his objectivity to his education: “Perhaps during the soulful, psychedelic 1970s, of multiculturalism seemed to support the idea of a because I have a background in science,” he says, Magainst the hypnotic groove of the black radio station. “I try, as much as possible, to see the world as it is, Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, and Earth, Wind Jolly was in for a rude awakening. The CRTC to look for the plain truth, without the decoration of & Fire. Well before that, when I was eleven, I had awarded the license to Rawlco. The­commissioners wishful thinking. split my first allowance between His attitude may also derive Bill Withers (“Lean on Me”) and Jolly’s colleagues had known him a long from the lessons of his father and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes the ethos of the Jamaican village (“If You Don’t Know Me By Now time. In fact, the longer they knew him, where he was born, Industry Cove. [You Will Never Never Never, Jolly came into the world in 1935. Never Never Never Know Me]”). the more they resented him. If ignorance He was named for the British gov- I mostly spent my money on black ernor who happened to pass by music, but I listened to everything: does not cause racism, what does? the house while his mother was in John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, labour. His father, Benjamin, was Van Morrison, Donny and Marie. In the Toronto believed a country-music station would best serve nicknamed Cappy (“short for ‘Capital’”) for his abil- suburb of Pickering we tuned in to 1050 CHUM and Canada’s need for “programming diversity.” It ity to make money. Cappy gave his son two pieces CFTR, top 40 stations that stubbornly characterized would take a bitter twelve-year battle, as well as of advice: “Don’t work for anyone but yourself. And their music as “rock.” The Jackson 5, Roberta Flack millions of dollars, before Canada’s first urban always own property.” His mother, Ina Euphemia, and Rufus dominated the charts, but the posters music station would hit the airwaves. FLOW 93.5 Hanover Parish’s first female justice of the peace, and promotional materials rarely highlighted black went live in February 9, 2001. The station evolved was legendary for her kindness, but she believed in artists. Rather, they affirmed daily that these were overnight into the heart of a community. FLOW education with equal passion. white stations that catered to white audiences. would be the first to bring Drake’s music to Toronto Jolly describes an idyllic childhood outdoors It was not much different behind the scenes. In audiences and to promote the careers of musi- by the sea. His chores included riding his father’s 1990 I took a job writing hourly radio newscasts cians such as Shad, Michie Mee and Jully Black. horses to the ocean to cool them off. At Cornwall at a station in downtown Toronto. This was dur- The station played host to international megastars, College he veered toward science to avoid an ing a period of heightened tension between the including Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Kanye West. oppressively British curriculum. His talent in track, black community and police. Constable Brian Its iconoclastic blend of music—everything from soccer and cricket made him a local star. After Rapson had shot and injured a black teenager hip hop to reggae to spiritual and the blues—and graduation he took a job at the Frome Estate, the named Marlon Neal. Rapson had been charged talk was a startling success. In the Black charts island’s largest sugar plantation. In the 1930s Frome with assault with a deadly weapon and attempted Jolly’s personal journey to that professional apex, had been the scene of violent labour riots. Before murder, but not everyone agreed. One afternoon a from his Jamaican boyhood to his turns as a sci- that, much earlier, it was the site of slave labour. For reporter covering the story entered the newsroom. ence teacher, businessman, community leader and Jolly, however, Frome would be about the future. He sat down at his desk. “Want to hear my new philanthropist.­ As soon as he learned estate managers had studied rap?” he said, to all within earshot. “Rap, rap the Jolly came to Canada in the 1950s to study at the Ontario Agricultural College, he insisted on Rapson rap/ Kill them niggers/ Kill them dead…” science at the Ontario Agricultural College, now applying. Winning admission meant he would be From where I was sitting behind a glass parti- Guelph University. A significant number of West eligible to study in Canada for five years. tion, I called out, “No! Absolutely not!” Everyone Indians attended the school, including my father. Jolly’s first Canadian winter left him in awe. turned around, mortified. They had forgotten I was Indeed, a photo of Jolly in full ’fro confirms him He writes of the “beauty of the wind-driven snow there. as an acquaintance of my late father’s; they across the schoolyard, the clean sweep, the spar- This is the climate into which Brandeis Denham shared a common friend in union activist Bromley kle.” And at the OAC he made friends, participated Jolly, president of Milestone Communications Inc., Armstrong. But, in the book at least, Jolly comes in team sports and earned good grades in the chal- launched his bid to own and operate Canada’s first across as distinct from the majority of Jamaicans lenging science curriculum. black radio station, an experience he recounts in I have known, who possess a passionate attach- He was stung, however, that the school forbade ment to their native land. Jolly seems slightly white women to date black men. He would meet Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An ambivalent about Jamaica. He is not hostile by any worse racism in Truro, Nova Scotia, where he was Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (McClelland means, and speaks of his childhood with fondness. enrolled for the next two years. It was a segregated and Stewart, 2006). Yet it is clear from reading his account that from the city, the young blacks full of despair. One lonely

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada evening he decided to attend a social at the with banks continued,” said Jolly, “but I had Anglican church and was refused admittance. learned not to trust them or rely on them. His school principal, who was watching, turned I began to protect myself against their arbitrary away. Thankfully, his final terms were spent at Autumn power by spreading my business around.” bustling McGill University in Montreal. Then More than ignorance or even intolerance, his student visa expired. Canada’s immigration Naked trees Jolly suggests, racism is a consequence of arro- policy forced him to return to Jamaica. But it are netting the skies above us, gance, entitlement and power. no longer felt like home. touching each other with so many fingers. The menace of Canadian racism lies in its Canadian racism is often described as We used to be like them once. subtlety: naturally, the harder it is to see, the mostly systemic—the largely unintentional harder it is to fight. For Jolly, “it was painful result of policies created for the majority. I think of how much we’ve dressed to watch young people who did not recognize Jolly’s account urges us to question the term. that they were being discriminated against and undressed since then. So many He compares the challenges facing black and instead blamed themselves and attacked clothes. All this terrible effort. immigrants to Canada in the late 19th century themselves.” At the same time, young black with his own. A century ago the government people are vulnerable to overt racism, espe- was desperate for settlers to populate the One decent shedding is really all we need. cially in the form of police violence. Jolly’s spacious country. Yet it was just as adamant activism was fuelled by the 1978 shooting of that the newcomers not be black. The super- Maya Tevet Dayan Buddy Evans. Along with lawyer Charles Roach intendent of immigration ordered his staff to and Jean Augustine, he formed the Committee place black applications at the bottom of the for Due Process, which forced the government Maya Tevet Dayan is an Israeli-Canadian pile. Black candidates were never rejected to hold an inquiry into the teenager’s death. poet and writer, based in Vancouver and born outright, but appeared to be held up by the sys- In one harrowing passage, Jolly lists scores and raised in Israel. Poems from her critically tem. In this case, systemic racism was hardly of black Canadians shot by police. Many of acclaimed poetry collection have appeared unintentional.­ the names, embedded in black memory, trip in English and in Hebrew, been translated When Jolly accepted his student visa, he off the tip of the tongue: Buddy Evans, Albert into English and Russian, have won prizes in agreed to sign a form promising to return to Johnson, Lester Donaldson, Sophia Cook, Israel, and have appeared in various venues. Jamaica upon graduation. He was warned Michael Wade Lawson, Jonathan Howell and Her second collection of poetry is forthcoming that any inquiries about staying in Canada Marlon Neal, shot, as previously mentioned, in Israel by the end of 2017 in the prestigious could get him sent home. In addition, he by Constable Rapson. “Kvar” poetry series. She holds a PhD in Indian was expected to check in regularly with his Racism cannot be expected to bring out philosophy and literature and her translations immigration officer; this made him feel like the best in black people and Jolly’s anger of Sanskrit poetry have appeared in various “a prisoner on parole.” Jolly felt he was being sometimes gets the better of him. After losing venues in Israel, the United States and India. deported: “It seemed completely unacceptable his first radio bid, for example, he describes Recently she has been reading The Best Place to me that at a time when tens of thousands of country music as “the soundtrack to every on Earth by Ayelet Tsabari and Burn Lake by Europeans were still flooding into the coun- redneck life.” As well, he loads down passages Carrie Fountain. try, many with little education or immediate of the book with extraneous excerpts from prospects … I was being shown the door, even black Canadian history, which means what though I was a Commonwealth citizen.” might have been a great book is instead a good After two years in Jamaica, Jolly returned to one, although indisputably so. As this memoir Canada, helped by a friend at the high com- unfolded, I was more and more drawn to the mission. By the mid 1960s he was teaching Coming up in the LRC author, who at first had struck me as detached science at Forest Hill High School in Toronto. from his culture. Jolly proved to be a rich black He loved the work, but he had married (he man who employed his faith and his fortune wed a white woman named Carol Casselman in the service of his people. It is a thrill to see in secret) and required extra income. He dis- The woman him throw his support behind individuals and covered an opportunity in nursing homes. In ideas the establishment loved to hate, includ- short order he was operating two facilities with behind Tolstoy ing the magnificently defiant Dudley Laws a total of 56 beds. At school, however, his suc- Anna Berman of the Black Action Defence Committee. The cess became a problem. book is filled with lively sketches of legend- “I could feel the attitude of my colleagues ary black Canadian activists: organizer Harry changing,” Jolly recalls. “At the time, it con- How we remember Gairey, Garveyite Violet Blackman, track star fused me. But I have since learned to identify Harry Jerome and publisher Al Hamilton. a certain strain of Canadian racism by which Air India When Hamilton could no longer afford to more or less liberal whites will treat Black Bob Rae bring out Contrast, Jolly bought the paper and people well, as long as they perceive the Blacks for two years ran it himself. to be beneath them on the social scale. But if Even before he sold Contrast, Jolly and other a Black person is better off than they are, they The uses of boredom members of the Black Business and Professional can’t handle it.” Mark Kingwell Association were talking about an all-black They say racism is caused by insufficient radio station that would be a strong voice for knowledge of “the other,” but Jolly’s colleagues The great Canadian the community. The station’s mission involved had known him a long time. In fact, the longer much more than music. FLOW trained music they knew him, the more they resented him. If art fraud directors, sales managers, station managers ignorance does not cause racism, what does? and technicians, offered scholarships to broad- Jolly also describes the “taunting racism” of Jon Dellandrea casting students and invested $300,000 a year banks. He tried to get around the problem by into developing artists. As the decade wore on, having his white broker or white lawyer rep- Mortgaging the however, media mergers and the encroach- resent him. Occasionally, however, he would ments of the digital age announced declining deal with the bank directly. In the 1970s, he Great Lakes revenues. In 2010 FLOW 93.5 was sold to Bell was building a state-of-the-art nursing home Heather Menzies Media. Jolly was 75. As usual, he knew when it in Mississauga, Ontario. After his mortgage was time to leave. broker had negotiated a million-plus trans- With the success of FLOW 93.5, urban sta- action on his behalf, Jolly stopped by the bank Vancouver noir tions began popping up across the country, to sign for the bridge loan that was part of Naben Ruthnum although black Canadian musicians must still the deal. The loan officer, upon seeing he was fight to be heard. As aid in their struggle, Jolly black, refused to approve it. “My adventures offers this survival guide.

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 29 Where We Have Been A bumpy, warp-speed view of the ultimate road trip—humanity’s Renée Hetherington

this hypothesis proposes that anatomically modern “the Neanderthals were better adapted physically Road Through Time: humans originated in Africa around 200,000 years for this kind of climate” they went extinct. This sig- The Story of Humanity on the Move ago and subsequently dispersed throughout the nalled the rise and dominance of modern humans Mary Soderstrom world over the last 100,000 years. Soderstrom’s and their capacity to modify their landscape and University of Regina Press assumption is not an unreasonable one. The out- survive. 256 pages, softcover of-Africa theory is generally supported by numer- Soderstrom’s warp-speed human journey, ISBN 9780889774773 ous archeologists as well as geneticists studying unfortunately, does not address a plethora of sci- the human “molecular clock.” Yet new fossil evi- entific data—including, for example, evidence that dence and analytical techniques imply this theory places humans on the coast of Eritrea on the Red hroughout her new book, Road of a one-time migration may be too simplistic. Sea 125,000 years ago, at least 45,000 years before Through Time, Mary Soderstrom draws Instead, early migrants may have evolved in paral- her time frame.2 Regardless, Soderstrom continues Tfrequent comparisons between her own lel in various regions of the world.1 They interbred on a lengthy tour of obsidian trade, the origin of work and Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic novel, On the with previously isolated populations—including ceramics, copper and bronze smelting, horse and Road. According to Soderstrom, Kerouac’s book is Neanderthals—suffered population bottlenecks, wagon use, the building of the first roads, warfare “emblematic of the romance of the road, of invit- and migrated into and out of Africa several times. and communication, the rise and fall of the Roman ing paths taken or not taken … Empire, water routes—the con- [a] sprawling chronicle of a hip- quest of rivers, seas and oceans— ster’s wanderings.” The subtitle of By book’s end she has lost faith in and the settling and destruction Soderstrom’s book—“The Story of the Americas by Europeans, of Humanity on the Move”—of Kerouac, calling On the Road “sexist the impact of super highways and course portends a preoccupa- railways on the modern world, for tion that is startlingly at odds and self-indulgent,” and she seems to a start. with Kerouac’s personal spiritual have missed the capacity for hope in It is not until more than three quest. Perhaps the only similarity quarters of the way through Road between the two books is that they McCarthy’s The Road. Through Time, at the end of chap- both contain road trips—of a sort. ter eight, that we return to that first Road Through Time contains road trip starting in Los Angeles in two. The first begins in the 1950s with ten-year- Be that as it may, Soderstrom’s journey has the mid 1950s to find the trio stranded and wait- old Mary aboard a bus with her mother and sis- H. sapiens leaving Africa in response to a dete- ing for Mary’s grandfather to pick them up and ter, departing Los Angeles. Very soon, however, riorating climate between 80,000 and 50,000 years drive them to their final destination in Pendleton, the reader discovers that, unlike On the Road, ago, when sea levels were lower than today. One Oregon. Readers may find themselves left similarly Soderstrom’s book will not be a continuous, unin- group of adventurous hunter-gatherers crossed stranded by the broken-up narrative. terrupted forward journey. Rather, the reader must the Red Sea floating on log rafts and arrived in the During the final two chapters of the book, travel back in time to follow our early Homo ances- “inviting” coastal plain and well-watered valleys Soderstrom embarks on her second road trip. One tors on their journey out of Africa, into Southeast of the Arabian peninsula, before pressing north suspects that this last section provoked the writ- Asia, Europe and the Americas, making this portion and east into the Levant on the eastern edge of the ing of Road Through Time and, as creative non- of Road Through Time a scholarly discussion about Mediterranean. A subset of this group, she writes, fiction, it is engaging and interestingly presented. the early archeological and geological evidence of continued further east to the shores of the Black Sea The trajectory of the trip spans Cusco and Puerto humans on the move. This section comprises the while others tenaciously crept onward to what is Maldonada in Peru to Rio Branco in Brazil by bus. bulk of the book. now Turkey, Iraq and Iran, while their descendants It takes the reader on a journey about roads that Soderstrom, a novelist and non-fiction writer, reached what would become known as the Middle follow early game, early peoples and cattle-drive delineates the journey of a sometimes mythical Kingdom of China before heading south across the trails and about American, European and Asian Homo sapiens that implicitly assumes modern Southeast Asian peninsula. Another group travelled growth, population densification and ecological humans originated according to the “out-of-Africa” along a “corridor … [that] led along the shoreline destruction. Soderstrom asks Kerouac’s big ques- model. First defined by archaeologist Chris Stringer, of the Gulf of Aden, across to the flood plains of tion, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car the Tigris and Euphrates, and around into India,” in the night?” She means all of us, not just America, Renée Hetherington is co-author with the late a route now at least partially drowned by rising suggesting that “changes have sped up in the last Robert G.B. Reid of The Climate Connection: sea levels after the last ice age. A growing human two centuries like a runaway car with the accelera- Climate Change and Modern Human Evolution population fed this “Great Expansion” as new envi- tor depressed and the brakes out of order.” By way of (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and author of ronments provided ample food and fewer threats highlighting those attempting to release that accel- Living in a Dangerous Climate: Climate Change of disease. Yet, Soderstrom writes, the onset of the erator, she draws on the legendary environmental and Human Evolution (Cambridge University last ice age pushed “humans back from northern activist Chico Mendes, murdered in 1988, and Press, 2012). latitudes about 30,000 years ago,” and although quotes him as saying, “at first I thought I was fight-

30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ing to save the rubber trees; then I thought I was City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs’ sites in Africa. Evidence indicates that 60,000 years fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I real- Streets and Beyond and Green City: People, Nature ago there was an extremely large drop in Earth’s ize I am fighting for humanity.” and Urban Place, including references to the productivity coincident with the depths of the pen- Referencing Kerouac’s hoped-for “transcendent ideas of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman and ultimate glaciation. It is not until after 60,000 years experience,” when he “looked greedily out the Jane Jacobs. Soderstrom has a capacity to explore ago that the number of H. sapiens sites in Africa window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, appealingly the history of urbanization, all the drops. The second event that falls in Soderstrom’s the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, while underscoring the importance of maintaining window of time is marine isotope stage 3, a warmer the fantastic end of America,” Soderstrom sees the natural green spaces. But Road Through Time differs interglacial interval between 60,000 and about massive transportation corridors as metaphors of from this earlier work in that much of it is weighted 30,000 years ago, a time of extremely variable cli- devastation. Yet by book’s end she has lost faith with archeological and scientific evidence. This evi- mate that likely forced early modern humans to in Kerouac, calling On the Road “sexist and self- dence, presented as it is, must adhere to scientific rapidly adjust their behaviour and disperse out of indulgent,” which is odd for all that she quotes him. rigour in both content and interpretation despite Africa. She misses Kerouac’s more spiritual intent—the the risk that in so doing the book becomes more Soderstrom’s numerous errors leave the entire practice of modern-day Buddhism in the West. challenging to read, and write. In this fast-paced book suspect, no matter the plausibility of its intent Instead, Soderstrom prefers Naomi Klein’s book time of widespread internet usage, when “alterna- or conclusions. In closing, Soderstrom reflects on This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, tive facts” and “fake news” are prevalent, if not the end of her journey, of its and her life’s purpose, about climate change and the demise of capitalism. virulent, it is incumbent on scientists, and authors “keeping a grandmotherly vigil … bearing witness Road Through Time traces some of the ecological portraying scientific evidence, to be fastidious in to what was, and what might be.” Laudable indeed. and human costs of our human journey. And Klein the use of facts. My wish, however, is that she had applied that vigi- complements Mendes’s voice in its plea for decent Authors who provide specific scientific data, lance to her usage of facts. working conditions and wages, emphasizing the even ones who are writing for lay audiences—I am idea that real change comes from the bottom— thinking of Soderstrom’s frequent use of the “old- Notes grassroots protest movements. Soderstrom also est” or “earliest” evidence—need to reference their 1 I am here referring to the well-known “multi-regional” refers to Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, a original source. That source must be scientifically hypothesis championed by M.H. Wolpoff, which suggests that humans evolved, more or less, in parallel in various story of a father and son roaming a post-apocalyptic peer-reviewed, as are articles published in the regions of the world over at least the last million years. America, a story she calls “devoid of hope, where all journals Nature or Science, for instance, or books 2 See, for example, “Early Human Occupation of the Red the terrible things that humans have wrought have published by an academic press, thereby allowing Sea Coast of Eritrea during the Last Interglacial,” by Robert C. Walter and colleagues, Nature (2000), issue 405, now settled down over humanity like a killing fog.” readers to validate the methodology and accuracy pages 65–69. And, although the word “road” again appears in of the data. Is the date used that of a bone, stone or 3 See “Fission-Track Ages of Stone Tools and Fossils on the that book’s title, Soderstrom seems to have missed wood artifact? Was the artifact dated? Alternatively East Indonesian Island of Flores,” by M.J. Morwood and the capacity for hope and survival in McCarthy’s was the charcoal in the sediments in which the colleagues, Nature (1998), issue 392, pages 173–76; and also “Hominins on Flores, Indonesia, by One Million Years seminal work. artifact was found dated? Or were scratches on the Ago,” by Adam Brumm and colleagues, Nature (2010), Soderstrom does offer her own ray of hope, surface of the artifact, presumably made by humans issue 464, pages 748–52. however, and that is life itself: that we can yet avert but alternatively possibly by animals or geological 4 See “Further Evidence for Small-Bodied Hominins from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia,” by M.J. the worst—“our dependence on fossil fuels, our processes, dated? Each means something different. Morwood and colleagues, Nature (2005), issue 437, disregard for the landscape, our seeming inability Soderstrom does not need to answer these ques- pages 1,012–17. to … rescue the climate.” She implores us to relo- tions; she simply has to rely on authoritative, peer- 5 See “Thermoluminescence Dates for the Neanderthal cate or cancel road projects, replant multi-species reviewed sources that do. This does limit the field of Burial Site at Kebara in Israel,” by H. Valladas and col- leagues, Nature (1987), issue 330, pages 159–60. forests, change how we live in cities. How we can primary sources, but non-peer reviewed websites change our city lives remains unclear; perhaps it or blogs written by armchair archeologists—which, can be accomplished by reducing our dependence unfortunately, Soderstrom references as sources— on the automobile or establishing more integrated fail to provide the rigour necessary to ensure that rapid bus systems as in Curítiba, a Brazilian city information is correct. Soderstrom visited during her second bus journey. For example, on numerous occasions Soder­ These are changes, Soderstrom suggests, that will strom refers to evidence of the original seafaring be easier to accomplish than reducing human pop- Homo erectus in Crete dating to 800,000 years ago. ulation levels or halting harmful climate change. Regrettably, she does not cite the original scientific She ends the book describing a future made immi- publication for this claim, and the references that nent by her concern of rising sea levels that will she does provide indicate a date of 130,000 years flood her childhood haunts, the Amazon, and the for H. erectus in Crete. Soderstrom further states, St. Lawrence valley, and make an island of Mount “tools made by this prehuman also show up on Royal, flooding “much of the web of roads built in islands on the other side of the world, such as the last fifty years.” She leaves the reader fearful of Flores in the Pacific Ocean.” In fact, according to an waking tomorrow to a drowned world. article by M.J. Morwood and colleagues and pub- Soderstrom’s passion is palpable, although, lished in Nature in 2005, it is on Flores Island that unlike Kerouac’s novel, Road Through Time is the earliest evidence of water crossings has been a non-fiction book, published by University of found and dated to approximately 800,000 years Regina Press, an academic press. Even though this ago.3 Soderstrom further states that “the Flores is classified as a trade title published for a general population … died out only about 50,000 years ago” audience and Soderstrom is not an academic, it when, according to Morwood and others, the date needs to be noted that when presenting scientific is 12,000 years ago.4 evidence an author is constrained to adhere to Elsewhere, Soderstrom suggests anatomically both fact and evidence-based­ scientific interpreta- modern humans left Africa “sometime between tion. Soderstrom cannot be swayed by a desire to 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.” Her time range spans “burst the bounds,” to “be as edgy and adventur- two completely different climatic events. The first ous as [Kerouac] with some facts thrown in.” Good is marine isotope stage 4, between 75,000 and intentions acknowledged, she cannot stray from 60,000 years ago, when the world was in an ice age the truth. She cannot leave the reader unenlight- complete with kilometres-thick ice sheets in the ened about the plausibility or timing of a rapid and northern hemisphere, an expanding polar desert raging sea-level rise. This is where Soderstrom ulti- in central Eurasia and falling sea levels. These dete- mately fails her readers and therefore more broadly riorating conditions likely forced Neanderthals into her cause. south-westernmost Europe and the Middle East; Parts of Road Through Time, particularly the evidence of Neanderthals dates to 60,000 years ago later chapters, are reminiscent of the engaging in Kebara, Israel.5 It is also coincident with not a writing style of Soderstrom’s earlier The Walkable decreasing, but an increasing number of H. sapiens

May 2017 reviewcanada.ca 31 Letters and Responses

Re: “Critical Un-Favourite,” by Andy to add one element to the discussion with regard higher levels of CBD and lower levels of THC may Lamey (March 2017) to medical marijuana. have more medical benefit and fewer side effects. good analysis by Andy Lamey, but there are With respect to the medical issues, I believe Indeed, it is the psychotropic side effects of mari- Aother aspects to John Metcalf’s character we should be guided by only one factor: does the juana that will most limit its use. Although the side besides writer and critic. treatment in question actually work? To that end, effects are usually mild, it is important to remem- As an editor, Metcalf reached out after reading I believe it is worthwhile to review the actual scien- ber that heavy use early in life can increase the risk a short story of mine in the Antigonish Review over tific evidence. of schizophrenia. Clearly, marijuana is not benign; 20 years ago and suggested there might be a book Searching the internet, one can easily find no medical therapy is. The real danger in the in it. Who did that sort of thing when publishing claims that marijuana can be used for a wide range current debate is that the enthusiasm for medical houses were overwhelmed by submissions? of conditions, including cancer, chronic pain, HIV, marijuana will outpace the science. Who else besides the Journey Prize jury and Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, glaucoma, multiple Christopher Labos Coming Attractions editors is scanning the field sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, cystic fibrosis and Toronto, Ontario to see what’s coming up? His devotion to edit- post-traumatic stress disorder. ing in modestly paid jobs for publishers such as However, the scientific evidence doesn’t sup- Re: “The Age of Offence,” by Ira Wells Oberon, Porcupine’s Quill and Biblioasis has been port such a widespread use. In 2015 the Swiss (April 2017) determined and monkish—no wonder he snaps Federal Office for Public Health commissioned ra Wells’s article on campus politics sets up a when someone less deeply in the field makes an a review of the evidence that was published in Isubtle, but false, dichotomy. He writes, “anyone observation. the Journal of the American Medical Association who has attempted to converse with the online As to my experience with him, to have been (“Cannabinoids for Medical Use: A Systematic homophobe or neo-Nazi ... will immediately rec- edited by John Metcalf was exquisite torture, with Review and Meta-analysis,” by P.F. Whiting and ognize the futility of the ‘more speech’ argument. the emphasis on exquisite. When I got over the colleagues, published in the June 23–30 issue that Bigots are not famously receptive to dispassion- shock, I made the prose better. year). In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, ate ratiocination.” Most college campuses in the Metcalf identifies as a resident of a Canadian Engineering and Medicine issued their own United States and Canada lean to the left, and so aesthetic underground. His first allegiance is to report, which came to similar conclusions: that the main conflict is not between neo-Nazis and the sentence—it may not be flabby in any way. there was, in fact, good evidence to support the social justice warriors, but between traditional free As an editor, he demands attention to prose that use of cannabis for chronic pain, with most of the speech liberals and the radical left, between those comes close to the attention paid to poetry. His evidence being for chronic nerve pain, and that who want to dissect racism and those who claim second allegiance is to contemporary Canadian cannabis helps lessen the nausea due to chemo- that speaking about racism is racism—in short, writing—no tying up of the O. Henry knots, therapy. There was also an improvement in muscle between those who believe words can do good and please, no appeals to sentimentality, no well-worn spasticity in patients who had multiple sclerosis. those who fear the words themselves. homilies and, above all, no sacred cows. He loves However, it is worth noting that this benefit was When I started college in 2012, I felt empow- humour, preferably wicked, and doesn’t care who only seen in patient-reported symptoms, not when ered to question every social institution and it hurts. muscle spasticity was objectively measured. identity, no matter how dearly others held them. Metcalf has taken flak for his positions on But for all other conditions, the evidence is less I took courses in anthropology and foreign lan- CanLit, even from me. I once accused him of being than solid. There is limited evidence that it helps guages, and delighted in smashing the hypocrisies a literary mugger in a piece in Books in Canada. with conditions such as PTSD or social anxiety. of Christianity, western values, capitalism and the He is scrappy and impolite and I have met writers Even its benefit to increase appetite and curb heterosexual norm. But by the time I graduated and critics angry with him or wounded by his com- weight loss in patients with HIV or cancer or other last spring, the social justice wave had crashed into ments, some of whom suggested my admiration wasting conditions is doubtful. Many readers will my state university, and people were saying that for his many works was loyalty to the dark side. have heard anecdotes and testimonials about anything a person or group claimed as an “iden- As to his critical positions, he is sometimes marijuana’s ability to treat epilepsy. The evidence tity” was beyond question, analysis or debate. In right. Besides, who else is the great champion of unfortunately is lacking. Also, despite the wide- an earlier age, it would have been impossible for the Canadian short story, whose glory we choose spread belief that marijuana will treat glaucoma, me to publicly criticize the major institutions of to share in the halos of Mavis Gallant and Alice the evidence suggests it will not. the West, and therefore impossible to understand Munro while so many of us vote with our feet to Part of the problem is that the marijuana foreign cultures on their own terms. Soon students buy or write novels? plant, or Cannabis sativa, is only one species in won’t be allowed to question transgenderism, I’d argue we need his blistering comments. the Cannabis genus—although it is the one that racism or anything else that their fellows hold as Those who don’t love him love to hate him. If John garners the most attention. There are hundreds of dear as my classmates held Christianity and cap- Metcalf didn’t exist, we’d need to create someone active substances in the plant, but the two main italism. What then? The victims of chilled speech like him to puncture our sanctimony when that molecules are delta-9-tehydrocannibol and canna- and censorship are not the bigots, who are so is what we are maintaining, or to force us to hold bidiol. THC is the main psychoactive component entrenched as to be intellectually useless, but the our positions more firmly in the knowledge we can and CBD is the main non-psychoactive compon- campus liberals who want to know more about the withstand his attack. ent. Traditionally, Cannabis sativa has had a high world—and maybe even change it. If he were a federal politician, he’d be a terror in THC/CBD ratio, thus explaining its popularity as Mark Lundy question period. a recreational drug, while other species, such as Flagler Beach, Florida Antanas Sileika Cannabis indica, have higher concentrations of Toronto, Ontario CBD relative to THC. Some of the negative results The LRC welcomes letters—and more are avail- when reviewing the scientific evidence may stem able on our website at www.reviewcanada.ca. Re: “End Reefer Madness,” by James from the different pharmacologic actions of these We reserve the right to publish such letters and McIntosh (March 2017) two molecules. edit them for length, clarity and accuracy. E-mail read with interest the recent essay about mari- Because every marijuana plant is obviously ­editor@­reviewcanada.ca. For all other comments Ijuana laws by James McIntosh. I would like genetically and chemically distinct, plants with and queries, contact [email protected].

32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Just Released

The Fabric of Peace in Africa Looking beyond the State Edited by Pamela Aall and Chester A. Crocker Foreword by Kofi Annan May 2017 978-1-928096-35-1 | paper 978-1-928096-41-2 | ebook

Second Thoughts Investor-State Arbitration between Developed Democracies Edited by Armand de Mestral April 2017 978-1-928096-38-2 | cloth 978-1-928096-39-9 | ebook

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