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I 7 _.Far Ballar__.._. or Versn. George Bowermg brings the same attdude 10 wrdmg as to Ule way he plays ball By Alan Twlgg li Onlhsllc lath 01 F.R. ScoN. January 31. 1985. Two poems born work m progress by Al Purdy 12 Many Happy Relumc. Wrapping up Ihe season’s gitl books. By Paul Sluewe 16 Ouasn ti Ihe Apes. Llian Fossey’s pmian lor animals evenlually led to her death. By Timothy Findley 26 Against the Sttim. Reuben Slonim’s only sin was that he 101101 wed his wnscience. By Morns Wolfe 21 a&f Reviews. Short notices on recent Ii&n. non-liclion. and poetry \ 14 llw anai War 01 Words: Grltlsh. Amerlean, and Canadian Propaganda and FIrNon. 1914-1939. by Peler Buitenhuis 17 Post Mgrlem: Why Canada’s Mail Won’t Move. Ly David Stewalt-Patterson an: The Case lor Ihn llelence. by Edward L. Greens~an and George Jonas Ioard. by Jane Rule Alla8 of Canada. Volume 1: From Iha Beginning ID 1800. edited by R. Cole Harm e Mines hu MET K*ll” ‘ir&?E&,-&ti& 01 Plsasum. Poser. and Change. edited by Michael Kaulman Tribe OrearnIng: Apartheid’s BiNer Noc8s. by Marq de Villiers paly Fire: Changing the tileray landscape. edited by Cynl Dabydeen ‘I Gate: Canada’s Immigration Fiasco. by Vlclor Malarek: Doubls Slandard: The Secret Illstory cd Canadian

EPARVGLClEWVS 3 Flsld Notes LBltWS 6 English. Our English. by Bob Blackburn Recommended 66 First Nmrslr. by Janice Kul@ K&r 67 ghlld,c”‘s llnnh hv Yarv Ainrlie With :: RecelvsdCanWil No. 124

B.K Adams Is a Tomnto freelance writer. Howard Adalman is a pmle~~or of philosophy and the lounder of Ihe refugee documentation project at York Unlvetslly. Jack Batty is co-aulhor. with Marjorie Harris. 01 Everyday Law A Swiva/ Guide /or Cmdians (Key Porter). Bob I replady contributes comments cm English usage to Ihe% pages. Tim Chamberlaln teaches English at Ssneca Callege. Anna Ltanoon is a Inslance editor and reviewer. Poet Mary dl Mlchale is writer-in-mssidsnce at the Regina Public Library. Jamao tl. gubro’s King of the Mob: Rocca P&d and Me Women Who Ran his Rails (Penguin) was reviewed in our last issue. Montreal poet Ray FNip is at work on a book for childmn. N&ii Tlmothy Flndley’s latest book is The Telling ol Lies (Penguin). Lt. Frsneh is a writer living in Ottawa. Terry Goldle leaches English at Memorial UniversiIy in Nwfoundland. Montreal writer John Goddard is the first cousin. rn times removed. of Dr. David Liiingslone. Tomnto art&I Dawn Hood’s drawings appear lhmughout the issue. Janice Kulyk Kealar lives in Annapolis Royal. Nova Scotia: her latest book is a sludy of Madtlme Cantian IitsraWm. Under Eastern Eyes (Univemily of Toronto Press). Brent Lodger is a Tomnto freelance writer. hlsrgaret McGraw is a writer llvlng in Kirklield. 01. Albmlo Mangual is a writer. anth0logisI. and critic. Historian llesmand Melon is principal of Erindale College. Tomnto. I.M. Own is a fmquent contributor to Books in Canada. Maursan Padon is a fmelance arlisl and book illustrator. Al Pwdy’s Collected Poem.5 19561986 (McClelland & Slewarl) won the 1986 Governor General’s Award for poetry. Rupert Schiedsr r&v&s British and Commonwealth literature in thm pages. Norman Slgurdron has mviewed extensively for the Winnipeg Free pless. Mary Alnslie SmP. our children’s bwk columnist. lives in St. Matys, Ont. Paul Stuewe is the author of Clearing Um Gram& English Canadian literature alter Sufviv# (Pmpsr Tales Press). Mary D. Tnlner is a freelance writer and puzzlbmaker in Purl Coquklam. B.C. One of Alan Twlgg’s mnst recent book3 is Var~mmw andfis Wrifws (Harbour). Shorbslory writer W.O. Valgard2nn teaches creaive writing at the University of Vida. Alsx Waterbwsu-Hayward is a Vancouver photographer. Gaoqe Woodcock is a Vancouver writer. critic. and translator. Morris Wolfe is co-editor. with Gsrd Sinclair. of The Spice Box An Anthology ol Jewish Canadian Wiling (Lester S Orpen Dennys). Critic Joel Yanohky writes for the Montreal GazeUe.

EDITOR 0 Michael Smith MANAGING EDITOR 0 Doris Cowan GENERAL MANAGER 0 Susan Traer CIRCULATION MANAGER 0 Susan Aihoshi ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER 0 Beth Bruder EDITORIAL ASSISTANT 0 Marc C6tC CONSULTANTS 0 Robert Farrelly 0 Jack Jensen 0 Mary Lu Toms CONTRIBUTING EDITORS 0 Eleanor Wachtel (West Coast) 0 K.G. Probert (Prairies) 0 Shirley Knight Morris 0 Paul Wilson 0 Ray Filip (Quebec) 0 Terry Goldie (East Coast)

-__.-. .-._. “. .-__ __. ____. _._ The popular notion of Canadian culture in Sweden is of a frontier society in which women are virtually the only creators

HE “N,vEERSrrY of Lund, Sweden. Thomas (who is here), alce Munm, w& Canadian books. but to the Swedish began in 1668. Toward the end of A&ha vau Herk. Maria” Engel, Sheila audience they were simply North the 17th century Charles XI V@tson are all know” and highly thought Am&m. There was *o dlstinctlo” made donated the King’s House to the of. Maxgsrer Laurence is revered, but between Canadian and American. university. It is in this turreted. red Margaret Atwood is deified. Only Finally, in 1977, Canadian writers started brick building with its hewn wood Robertson Davies is mentioned as a male to de&be a ge”uI”ely Canadian identity. steps that I regtster for the tiiemllal author whose work is of nmjor impor- On the practical side, the Canada Coun- conference of the Nordic Assocla- tance. A number of times bis name sur- cl1 and the Swedish State Cultural Coun- lion for Canadian Studies. There faca.in connection with the I+~bel Prize, eil’s assistance to translate Canadian wlU be 90 papers given during thms but that high opinion is not u+versal. If books has made a great deal possible. I” days, ranging from “Winter 71 r to fcmpt the Swedtsh evalua- 1985 some 8,750 book titles were pub- Living: Hwmmialug Urban Life in Canadmn culture, it would be that lished in Swede”. About 2.000 were fie- Cold Climates” to “Logging Poetry in not only are women totally in charge of tlo” and 1,250 of these were translations, British Columbia.” There are 30 par- it but that they are virtually the only so the translation market is a big one if ticipants. You c&t miss the organizers. creators of its content. Canadians can break into it. They’re all wearing T-shbts with large. Finally the moment I’ve been waiting Although every titer who gets trans- maple leaves on the ‘front. for arrives. 1 meet Heidi uo” Borne, a lated likes to think there is some rational As I circulate at the reception that flamboyant, ene@icwman whose life’s process behind it, the truth is that a lot evening, shaking hands, trying to mission is making Canadian literature of times what gets translated is a result remember names, it is obvious that known in Swede”. She knows everyone of cha”ce. Nygren told us that SoIveig Canada is of intense interest to Scandiia- by name, knows all the facts, all the Neelinge was talking to Tlllie Olsm about riots but also a great mystery. Canada rumours, understands all the sodal and the problem of ageiw. Olsen told was very popular in Swxlen dtning the political knplicatlcms. She is appalled that Neelinge to read the best novel on the sub- 1920s. ’30s. and ’40s. Swedish immigra- I have not written ‘head so she could ject - The Stone Angel. This was easy tion after the turn of the centuw created arrange for me to meet writers, critics, because Solveig had an unread copy at strong personal Links. Also, there were editors,‘and to attend the two receptions home. About the same time, Svcn external sbnlwtles. After the conference, for Canadian writers being held at the Delblanc wmte a” article about Msrgsxet when I take a seven-hour train ride fmm Cantiian embassy during the coming Laurence that created interest 1” her Lund to Stock&bn, I keep thinking that week. (On my last night in Stockholm, work. I’m in southern Manitoba. Only the signs I’m sitting ln the dining-room of the Lord Several Canadian novels have been in Swedish remind me I’m half a world Nelson whm Greg Gatenby rushes by. I selected for Mauadeus Bok (Book-of-the Month) over the years: Atwood’s Sw- tack London, Robert Service, and place at the hotel desk about someone g facing and The Handmaid’s Tale. Charles O.D. Roberts created a market- portant coming to meet Swedish writers Laurence’s The Stone A@, Munm’s place in Sweden for what was to wune. is about Greg. He is here for one of the The Beggar Maids Timothy Findley’s Hollywood had not yet created the fib receptions.) Famous Last Words, Roberr Rmetsch’s tional Wild West. (How fascbmted the During the formal sessions Hans Bad/an&, and Daviw’s Deptford trilogy. Suedes are by cowboys was clear in the Nygren. editor at Prisma (they publish But being selected cuts two ways. It Seattle airport. where returnlug Swdes vxns wearing mrvboy hats, strl”g ties, and hat the critics automatically assume the cwboy boots. Just outside Stockholm at books are popular trash. Some aitiw the Ytter-Enhoma church, there ls a place have attacked Davies mercilqly. called Fort Apache where Swcdes can go At a round-table discussion billed as to watch daily shoot-outs in a Wild West “Ca”adii writers on csnadia” Litera- town.) While s\vede” was gmwi”g more ture Today,” Heidi van Born, the industrialized, Canada was see” BS a IIOI- moderator. arks what the difference is them frontier. Very popular books wwe between the literature of westem and about hunting, gold diggbtg, and a eastern Canada, why Canadian writers vildemess in which Swedes worked hard travel so much, and where is here. Barry and prospered while Mounties and Mar-1 Alwood), points out that the Cal&hen starts off by ignoring the fmt Indians fought cold. wolves. and bears. Scandinavian publication of Canadian question, saying he frankly doesn’t care This is the image many Swcdes still have books was very spotty until the late 1970s. where “here” is and atcacldng tbe Canada of Canada. I” 1947 Hugh Maclenna”‘s % Solimdes Council for funding travel for titers. He Within half an hour I’m asked why was published; in 1949. Gabrielle Roy’s points out that the League of Canadian Canada’s only important writers arr The Tin Flute; in 1956, Mordecai Poets has ZIO members and that in his wunen. The question is repeated a dozen Richler’s The Acmbats; in 1963, Sheila opinion there aren’t that many real poets times during the next three days. Audrey Watson’s l7teLJoubk Hook. Tq us, these in the whole world. The result is that the rest of tbe panel is put on the defensive. Stephen Smbie II& to red&z% the diias- sion witb some gentle han~our about A ground-breaking canadian writers not spending their time ALAN LORD. Montreal's current Lord of trating but waiting in airports. The Misrule, descrlbsd this y&s Ultimatum and controversial panellists. to their credit, do everythins II at Th&%tre Lc Milieu as a they can not to let the discussion become “smorgasbord.” The festival of “new study from an ineestwus comwsatlon about Canada literatures” featwed poets, performance ckluncil policy that “0 one in the audience artists, and plain bums, leading the clr- a specialist will understand. cuit into the Infonaation Age. in Canadian Supper ls held En Kulturen, an outdoor The nine-day changing of the avant- museum that enmmparacs two blocks and gaKIewassponwrrdbya$30,000Cauada political thought. ’ 36 historic b6ldll. As the light fades, Cc.unciI grant, along with aUl.000 perk a reading by six Cmadiah writers begins from tbe mmmuaity works program of in Bosebo Church. To read in this coun- the Mb&&c da affaires cultaralla da try chwcb. built in 1652 of pine timbers Quebec. An expected g20.000 municipal and shingles, with its painted ceiling, its subsidy did not come through. The Biblical scenes on the walls, and its altar- organizers had to scrap a megapmjea piece enclosed witbln a magaltlcent ban- involving global database hook-ups wtith qua frame, is a privilege. Scobie and individual artists such as U.S. novelist Douglas Barbour perform two sound Willlam S. Burroughs (who intended to poems. The audience is perplexad. This writa a special piece for Ultimatum II), is a Nordic audlame brought up on Saga Roy Asmtt in England, Bob Adrian in and Edda. Kristjana Gumars knows this, Austria. an elcclronic magazine in I and before she reads she explains that Canada called Swifr Current, and buti- what they’ve just heard is taken very rations such as La Mamelle & Artam in seriously by some people. They’re not San Pmaclsm. the Carnegie Mellon Insti- wnvbuxd. It is like trying to sell abstract tute. and the Massachusetts College of paIntings to realists. The audience reacts Ai bast to David Williams’s novel excerpt Opening night unrolled under the and Audrey Thomas’s short story, largely heading: “Salut Les Richeal” (Down because of the strong narrative structure Witb the Rich). Ritzy types showed up. of their ‘fiction; along with the creepy and the curious. At the banquet to celebrata the conclu- Blue, orange, and purplkhaired yaboos sion of the conference, I feel as if I’ve in trenchcoats made “le look dense” stepped into a Hollywood set. The resemble prewar Berlin more than post- Swedes. datermined to be memorable punk Montreal. hosts, have chosen to hold tbe’party in There is no difference between the stage tbe PlIlared Hall, with its portraits of and tbe audience, averred the fmt act, Ls royalty. The tables are lined with .%edisb SocitWde Comrvation ddPrpsCnt. The beer._and the waitresses see that no cUch& set the tone for the remainder of schnapps glass goes empty. After we’ve the festival: fasay. The presentation came drunk our way through n”memus tcasts, across as a micro-mbdmslist composition a Swedish band begins to play. III lecture. enhamxd by slides. syn- On the last day, a group of us go to theaizar, and e0mpate.r. A dull voice cm- Denmark. As the ferry approach= jugated tbe name of the painter Molbwi, Elsinorr, the walls of solid red brick while a blue “Ti-Pop” button appaared emlosbu~,the gmcefid turrets of Kmnbarg on the screen. One member of the trio castle rise out of the mist. Unfortunately, then wiped tbe screen clean of words with the guards have been on strike all summa a squeegee as a symbolic gesture. and we cannot enter Hamlet’s castle. My ClaudaMichel Prhrost’s “L’Archipel plans to stand on the battlements and dea Katmas” ws3 a nonomatopoeic inter- recite “To be or not to be” coma to facing of the suicides of Japanesenwellst nothing. Yukio Misblma with that of punker Sid Bacause the castle is closed, we have Vi&us. Pr&ost was accompanied by five some extra time and our guide, on electric guitarists in modal tuning, while impulse, decides to stop at spectral images of tbe hvo victims collided Rungestcdlund. Together, Stephen on a screen. Scoble.; David Williams, and I walk a Acts with less &/at ware introduced by muddy path papt the Nightingale’s bench the bilingual beau @wkur Jean-Luc 6” x 9y ~256pdga to Ksnn Bllxen’s grave, in a grove at the Boaspiel. The amcee bad changad into bis $24.95 0 In booksrorer now. foot of “Ewklsboj,” where she used to pyjamas on stage. Using wnrds you won’t love to sit. Her grave is marked with a fnd in Spell&e& Alan Lord then joined plain gny slab. We have come tbmagh bba to close the blowout with their “ab- a hectic time crammed with words and surdllt band” bearing the anwanslatable politicc but now; three Cansdlan writers name Vent da Moat Scharr. far from home, we stand in a semi-circle, On the second night Toronto-based silent under a geoue rain. artistc took over. Karl Jirgaas read “Un- - B.D. “Aui-l4 charred Territory” in&e straight okl-

____.,-__l -_-_ _i. -_--. fashioned way. The” Eldo” Garnet did formers. A besotted Denis Vanier was ao expose for solo Macintosh computer mi?e-day wonckr entitled “I Shot Mossolinl.” The “novel” for-all in the men’s room. While the deals wirh a silent five-minute “re- me RULU~ OF the Pulp Press three-day enacunenf of a crime that “ever San&or played with his novel contest are concise and straight- happened.” A” Italian protagonist fails Eng on stage, snarling line.5 such as “man fomwd in a way thaf only crackpoi ideas to assasslnate Mossolini. Snippets of text coeur est un grwude carmine.” Later, ca” be. Entrants b&n writing Friday at are interspersed with plxelized shots of when Paul Chamberland displayed the midnight on Labour Day weekend sod Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley’s brain Statue of Liberty during his computer stop wiring af 1159 p.m. on Monday. compared to those of other schlm- performance, a sawed ex-girlfriend in the In between Lhe key is to persevere aad just phrenics, an allusion to John Lennon, bask seats cried out: ‘Aw, (IW. Pmdl keep numbering the pages. Writers who and amatory pursuits of Jodie Poster Arr& avec ion libertd!” have foolish, old-fashioned notions about coupled with images of II Duce address- There is high brow, low brow, and then revising or rewriting their w&k. or eve” ing the crowds. there Is New York Lower East Side proofreading it, need not apply. Violence & the Sacred, a” elechic cello borromlessly bad. That elment crept out There are probably better ways to player and two other musicians, tinkered on Friday night. Broadway Bob admin- spend the last long weekend of the for half a” hour with dials and switches istered his “‘AIDS test.” kissing women summer, but I don’t seem to be able Lo on the floor and on their instruments, and me” in rhe audience while a photo- think of any. I have bee” entering the !vbile OhanlasmagoriC scenc( of a funeral, grapher took souvenir shots. The sick annual contest since 1985 when, for cltysipes. and ibstract amoebas inter- humour crawled on and on with no- reasons that haven’t been explained to wove oo the screen. The orchestrated n- not worth a “eo”lsr nanosecond of me, my submission was chose” as one of chaos was as exldng as a sound check. space or attention. The Nibelongmbiiro presented “Pro- What do you do for a fir&? Bring in of the event, b&g a r&&-up app&tly ject for a” Opera of the 20th Cenlory.” more New York dorks such as David Rat- means nothing. I wrote to Pulp Press to Christopher Bullerfield burbled some- tray and “Mr. Scum and Slime,” John inquire about consolation prize& but I thing about wvritln8 a novel counler- Giomo. The graying Giomo is idolized still haven’t received a reply. pointed by the programmatic moslc of a for squeaking obscmities you can find in Last year I entered, but didn’t make it bass and three keyboards. any high-school lavatory: “I’ll walk past Saturday night. As luck would have Vancouver got in its screams on the through a mile of shit 10 suck the lasi guy it, there was a Slur Trek festival on televi- third night fmm the varied neuroses of who fucked you.” The packed house sion. Under normal circumstances I am Ken Lester, Mecca Normal, Judy Radol. hollered for an encore, which Giorno not a fan, buf these were not normal and I, Braineater. “Anglomaniacs” delivered without a smile. It’s not circumstancea. This year, like Bock in 2X.e followed the next evening with ranbzrs shocking, or eve” schloclting, or cute. Call of the Wild, I sueeumbed to a such as Rhythm Activism, Mohamud Just sad. primitive, inexplicable urge to try again. Togae, and Nick Toczek fmm England, Ken Decker’s “Cleanina the Tools” Now in its 10th year, the contest (which who has shouted in over 5.000 prisons, was a wipeout too. He l&the audience began as a dare among a small group of schools for the handicapped, and com- in ao absolute zem state of nullity, having bored, drunken writers, musing about munity centres across Europe. lifele.ssly encouraged thnn to participate whether or not Voltaire wrote Ccudide in The fifth and sixth soirk focwed on 85 the “ROM kernel and audio effects three days) has produced, accordll to Films/Videos and the “Ultimatum generator.” They wre to hum along with Pulp’s editors, “the only genuinely Cana- Talkshow.” The videos ranged in taste him on cue from his “sidle bit pro- dian genre in world Literary history.” If from Jean-Paul Cwtay feRalin a cessor”: a flashlight. Not one photon of they were kidding when they first made microphone to Allen Ginsberg intoning lIh”ninatlon was shed. such a gradiose statemenr, ir’s not a joke “Father Death Blues.” Ginsberg’s video That applies LO Ihe whole spectacle. any more. showed photographs of his father merg- The technology is expensive bur the art Last year, the small Vancouver press is with his past and present selves. A is cheap. New Literature is just the same recdved about 1,000 manuscripts from feny in New York Harbour transported old negativity and narclssirm pmpped up across North America as well as from the poet, palms opened, toward the other with artificial musical and visual aids. England and Aus”alla. Last fall, the 1985 shore. Very moving. Instead of a lectern, substitute a music winner, Marc Diamond. was interviewed The “talkshow” bmoght together stand. Mad Dog Vachon mold have been o” Canada A.M. and his novel, Momen- editors of alternative magadnes. Hans- squeezed into the act too. It makes a body III~. was shortlisted for Ihe W.H Herbert Rake1 disc”ssed the soccas of his Smith/Books in Canada Flit Novel L’Oeil Rechargeable, which enjoys a cir- Award and feature-film rights have been culation of 10.000 throughout Quebec, sold. “R’s a vial by deadline.” the editors fhe U.S., and Europe. Rake-l claims that have said, “a test of endurance, imagina- “la nouvei~e culIur.@’ and popolarlty can doi and sheer gall.” be fused by emphasIzi”8 graphics, a text Unlike my experience in the previous that is not too “wide,” and by dropping wo contesls, this year I slarted strong. the notion of marginality. Sylvkre The publishers recommend that entranis Lotringer, founder of Semiotexl(e) and feel relieved to curl up quietly with a good, prepare a” outline beforehand, and for professor of French literature and book, and your clothes on. once I had followed their advice. By philosophy at Columbia University, If Ultimatum II accomplished any- Sarurday morning I had written nearly 25 spol:e of the “explosion de plumlit6.” thing, it succeeded in conveyI” just how pages. My story-about a young urban Culture is not a question of “puritP; the new tools of expression and accom- culture just is. panying vocabulary can be abused, on a chicken bone in a &i”ese restaurant The dislincdo” between audience and and as a result changes hi lifestyle and stage definitely became blurred on the and the world.. founds a club for optlmisls and positive seventh night - because the audience A mouthful of microchips. The hissing thinkers -was funny as well as moving, consisted mainly of drunken or wbxd per- of a blank screen. - RAY P‘LlP gentle as we4 as satirical. (At least I _.~ .--..______~_ ._...___ ~___ _.~ __.- ..--..= . .._ _ i-... _.._ _-..-. ..~- _._.

remember tbinklng so at the time. I is going nowbete. I continued, but my whose idea was this anyway? You might couldn’t be we. beau” I didn’t have heatt was no @age; ia it. For inspiration, think that a person who has commiltcd time to stop and read it.) There was, I read a few chapters of John Gardner’s hioiself to doing in 72 hours what it takes however, one flaw in the plan. I hadn’t On Bem#niag (I iVov&t, but it was no serious titers months, years, sometimes been able to fmish the outlhm. help: “The writer suffetingftom writer’s a lifetime to accomplish wouldn’t have Eventually the realization that I was block caa think of good plots and time to waste on rhetorical questions. But vxlting a novel that had no emill cawht chmacters . . . which is all a healthy the opposite is true: suddenly I had too up with me. By Saturday afternoon I was writer needs, but he can’t persuade much time and not nearly enough ways searching desperately for a subplot, for himself that they’re worth with@ down to kill it. ambmtcharactawhocouIdtakeoverthe or developing. It’s all bcm done before. By Monday afternoon I had written 61 story while I tried to come up with a he tells himself.” pages - as much a$ I had in 1985 -and d~aoacmeat. I evea contemplated a Somewhere between Sunday night and I stopped rather than ended my narrative. change of genre, bat the thought of ttaos- Monday morning my plot began to thin Them was, as it tamed out, plenty of time forming my Cheevercsque story into a to the point of aaorexla, and my to watch Star Trek, liiten to the baseball mystery or science tietion was more than chatac&rs - major and minor - refased game on the radio, rearrange my sock I could bear. to deve@p or take on a Ilfe of theb own. drawer, and wait, in vain, forinspimlicm. Nothing stops deader than a story that The question I kept asking myself was: - JOEL YANOFSKY

When reporters qliote anonymous ‘sowoes. are they protecting useful informants or simply showing their contempt for the public? By BOB, Eilaclrfxtm owxthtg~oo I mentioned the in- public. but, in turn, it may be con- describe someone as belng notorious for sidious use of the word so*rca9 as uibutlag to ml btcmasbtg public contempt his philanthropy, it might be inadvisable a jomnallstlc cop-oat. It has spread for the news media. Occasionally, you to do so today: however, a notorious Q explosively. There is nothing new will mu across sach phraKs as it has been philanderer is not quite the same thing as about the use of the word in cer- coqflrmed that . . . and may not notice an infamous one. There is still a distinc- tabtcontexts.1thaslongbecnused that there’s 110 mention of who did the tion worth preserving here. by respouslhlc nporte~~ to hide the contimdng. There are “any such tricks, Another reader objezts to the use of identity of useful informants, and but they aren’t tried too often. Somehow. characterize for describe, and suggests I have no quarrel with car&d use though, practically everyone in the that it gained cattcacy during the Water- of the dodge. If a reputable jour- bushmss seems to feel confident of geuing gate hearings and has become beloved of nalist tells me that a source in the away v$th sources soy. inqulsltorlal legislators. Soarc.% say (bell. prime minister’s office, who has why should I go on typing in the aamcs asked not to be identified. has coafmed BOOKS OP s(NoNyMs sell well, SO”rc.% of reference hooks when I can just say, the opposition leadc?s statement that a say. They have thelt uses, hut they mz ao L’soarces say”?) that cbonzcterize, in one 6cabbtet shuffle is lmmbtmt, I’ll pay some substitute for a good dictionary. A reader of its senses, means to describe ot attention. delineate the character or peculiar Some scholarly rexarcher, I hope, will ““I tQ i”ii”Se f#OtOhtS in qualltica of a petson or thlw. I think that trace the degeneration of thls practice to famous. A casual look at a book of to ask someone to chatacterlze someone what it hao become today. In a very few synonyms, evea the revered Roget’s is to ask for somethbtg mote than a mere years, it has become commonplace in Tbesawus, might lead one to helmvc that dcsctiption, and that the context will electronic, and even print journalism, to the two words are intercbangcablc, and indicate whether the word is being used hear or read that sourcawj+ls or that, evidently a lot of writers do believe that. appropriately or pretentiously. with ao explanation at all of who thme Many such distinctions are becoming sources might be. The word is almost increasingly blurred. or lost outright - always used in the plural, as if to saggest if they evet existed at eIl. I have always that there has beea conflation by a valued the distinction between imply and second unnamedsource of some&lag said i&r. Should you choose to disagtee with by a fast unnamed soaxe, and possibly me, you can find ampIe support ia the even more. The witers are assumiag. OED, however. my own favoutlte die perhaps correctly, that the word has tionaty. the second edition of Webster’s aquircd some magic coonotation of unabridged, offers thls under it&: reliability in the public mind. Were they to consult a good dlctloaary, “5. Loosely aad erroneously, to imply.” This tetmbtology, which I fxst noticed they would learn that @famous is in- The implication here - or such is my in the sleazier media, can now be found variably depreciatory, while notorious is lnferencc - is that some Icxicogmphers in major aewpapetv and newsmagaziam, not naessarily so. Notorious basically felt this distinction to be useful and and heard a dozen times an hoar on net- means well-known, according to the attempted to acomage it. I’m with the”. worl: televisloa nnvscasts. I haven’t seen OED, which also detines itimous as any evidence of anyone objecting toit. meaning notorious for badness of any LATEBUUETINI Sources say the world is I think it shows a great contempt for the kind. While it would be wrtect to flat. Better believe it! q

.._.--i. i.: s-7-._.,.. _- . . . ___,..__. ~-.- ‘I’m an elitis!,’ says George Bowering, who brings the same altitude to his writing as to the way he plays ball: if everybody likes it, it, can’t be much good

H~IJLDTHECBC~WT ask CanLit to Caprice, P fmclful “western” sel in B.C.3 Okanagan Valley. mount its own version of Having agreed 1o allow his new publisher (Penguin) to put Q Holi)wood Squares, George quotation marks into the text, Bowering has since watched, nol Bmvering lvould be perfect for without amusement, the !lood of warm reviews. centre square. Highly competitive, “Mosrly they say it’s wonderful,” says Bower@. “‘He’s well-read, and quick-witted, smartened up and decided to quit all that bullshit and write a Bowwring is B knowledgeable and book.“’ serious gamester when it comes to Viewed striclly from the perspective of experimental writing wridng, histmy, and sports. in Canada, George Bowwring is B venerable all-star. This par- “I always wished that the Fool ticular profti of Bowerbg. however, extends to tbe perspeo 1”~s my card,” Bowering told rive of someone watchI% him fmm the shortstop’s position on I Prank Davey in 1975. After 40 a softball diamond in Vancouver. titles, he mnv finds himself the Edison of Over there in the first-base coaching box is the 51-year-old Canadian posbmodemism. a writer who Simon Fraser University professor sometimes referred to a is celebmred and dismissed with the dupli- George Boring. @owe&g’s squad. called ihe Badbacks, keep city of the Fool. A poet, tide, teacher, track of their batting averages throughout the season.) As one humorist, theorist, novelist, and winner of the world’s best/worst kibbitzers, Bowering broadcasts his of ho Govemor General’s awards (for often hostile remarks illning after inning after inning. His loud- poetry and for tictlon) Bowvering has most mouth presence is ruinous to the continuity of any cmnmunal recently bridged the gap between bis self- atmosphere. But nobody tells him 10 shut up. It is difficult to conscious bmnd of avant-garde historical know if he is unaware, uncaring, or pleased with his impact. ficdon yld mainstream story-telling with An overweight female member of the Badbacks steps into the Gsl batter’s box and Bowering pmceeds to taunt her. After each pitch - as everyone sees the discomfort of his teammate at the plate-the ever-so-witty Bowting can’t resist addressing ha as “Pirbull ” Thii is the less savoury George Bowezing. Here is a voice of contempt that yearns to con1101 the game even from the sidelines. Is this life imitating art? Readers who can’t stomach Bowerlng’s intrusive, know-it4 post-modernist narration might conclude that it’s not just a literary device.. “George is an unhappy person.” says Tom Wayman, “and he often behaves in a bad way. Yet mc6t people tolerate it. Same writers and artists think they can behave like assholes simply because they’re writers and artists. They discover people will t&rate a&x&l behavlour from them. What that does is sug- gest or perpemate the myth that anists are a special class of people. Writers Iike Bowering altempt to make artists an elite, or suggest that art is the preserve of an elite.” “I’m an elitist,” says Bowting. “And I don’t feel bad about the pejorative colaration of that term.” Mere mention of his impressive name (KinglGmrge BowerbwTowerlng?) Is enough to get s rise out of some writers. They complain of his dot- trinaire arrogance. his hip academiclsm, the fact that he has always been “a university writer.” Bow&g dismisses mosi of his deLraCU)rs 8s non-serious \vvriters. It’s batting averages that eounl and he’s keeping score.. Like Dante., he believes, “poetry will deteriorate if the poetry wars aren’t on.” Consequenlly we find him making declarations such as “There is B mystique among certain minor po*s about stmighr talk. St&ht talk &ES not work in Poe&y because there are no straight lines in the universe.” When the Kootenay School of Writing held B collo- quium on “work poetry,” Bowering muldn’t resist playfully sending a letter suggesting that everyone who attended should wear hard hats. Boweriw has mevu reepomie& an uxomplimentary review. left the orchard-laden South Okanagan region to live in Green- but the disdain for others remains. “I talk to bo Micholl and wood, B.C. (coincidental with the intemmeot of Japanese Cana- Frank pavey] and Fred Wah and various p&pie,” he bays, dians there), but returned to settle next to the U.S. border at “and we’re dl feeling a kind of disaovointmmt that you work Oliver. (Think of Sandy Wilson’s fdm, ~,4mrieon Corrrin, for years and years &I years and y&s to make peo& aware and you’ve got the landscape.) that poetry is not just an easy anecdotal expression of your life, Boweriw can recall seeing a man on a horse near neigh- to get people to expect it’s an art. . . and then you tind all these bating Osoyoos and being told he wes looking at the fmt white child born in the Okanagan. The relative newness of B.C. con- tinuer tn make a strong and import&u impnssion 011 him. “It Whereas most kids liked Joe DiMaggio, has always meant a lot to me that when I lived in a town as Eowering liked Ted Williams. Whereas a kid, the town didn’t have any street names. There was a rumour tbat there were street names, but nobody knew what most of his friends liked Roy Rogers, they were. In some plan down at the village office the streets he liked Gene Autry. ‘I would always actually had names, but there were no signs on street comers.” Bowcringls father, a high-school science teacher, “was ared deliberately do that. I still do that’ quiet guy, a super athlete. He was really smart, and he settled for less then he should have got. He could do aayt*. hundreds of ‘PO-ets’ in alI those Toronto magazines that are ming that needed doing, he knew how to do it.” Not par- writing these one-page anecdotal poems about what my ticularly athletic as a boy (“That’s why I’m playing ball now childhood with grandma was like. It’s just so disappointing. at age 63, rightl”). George, like his father, became an avid It’s awful. scorekeeper. Like his Dad, he was hard on the hitters. In one “So give us a nice topic and we will write you a whole pile of his early poems he refers to baseball day in Oliver BI his day of onqage, anecdotal, self-expressive poems about it. You of worship. “I was in love with Ted Williams,” he wrote in want wife abuse? We’ll give you wife abuse. We’ll give you a all0thher. whole anthology of that. You want urban pollution? Piles of Whereas most kids liked Joe DiMaggio, Bowting liked Ted urban oollution. You want the l&ii exoerience? You can see Williams. Whereas most of his friends liked Roy Rogers, Bower- alI the-anthologies coming out. The No&m experience. The ing liked Gene Autry. “I would alwars deliberately do that. Prairie experience. The Atlantic experience. There ere all these I still do that.” This instinctive favouring of less-celebrated high-school anthologies. You can just see it. The wifebeating “alternatives” eventually led him to read the likes of Gertrude experience.” He laughs. “Dreadful. Dreadful.” Stdn and to aspire to become one of those known but “alter- native” writers himself. If everybody likes something, it can’t OEOROB aowmtmo was born in Peatictoa; B.C. in 1935. Home be much good. After the reception given to Cap&e this year, vm the nearby town of Peachland. The Bowe+ng family briefIy Bowering immediately sat down and wrote what he csQs “a really weird one.” Boating’s first of many important literary friendships was with the North Okanagsn’s Red Lane (the poet Patrick Lane’s now deceased brother). They met in Manitoba over an RCAF poker game where Boweriag lost two weeks’ pay in one sitting. Bowering, at 20, was a loser. He’d joined the RCAP (he first wanted to enliit in the U.S. amwd forces) when a love affair soured and he had “flunked out of a college c&se in viaoria.” The “un-Fryed end raw” writing of Lane, in addition to an introduction to happy pills to overcome his shyness, helped Bowering through his 10 months in uniform. In a memoir/essay on Lane. Bowering wrote that he is still trying to get two sides of his life together - “Red the Real, and the sophistication of Projective Verse.” Bowering began to appear in his old air-force duds around the University of British Columbia in the fall of 1937, hating already read “all the ZOth-cenhuy American novels.” The s&se- quent rise of Bowting as a protege of Warren Tdbnau In the so-cdled Black Mountain-inspired TISH movxmeat. with Frank Davey and many others, has been welldocumented. His M.A. thesis adviser was Robert Credey, who tirote a preface to Bowerbxg’s first little Tishbook in 1963. The Poetry Wars with the likea of nationalist Robin Mathews and surrealist J. Micbael Yates at Sono Nis Press were on. As Bowedng spoofugly wmte NowfhaUyanalteme~toanimatedctioon of,tbe “Brown Mountain Poets” from the Gkanaga who A human fzelfng of warmth from musk cant started it all. “What started in 1961 as a small regional poetry felt through this collection of live performant movement is now a seemingly unstoppable raid 011 the Cana- dian poetry sensibility. . . . Ineverywaywecaatrytomould videotapes.Chikkencanbeexposedtosome~ the poetic minds of young wri@rs.” the fmest performers tn Canada today. Bower@ taught at University of Calgary, studied at Uniwr- rbztzL%ag for maei+ $15.OQ sity of Westem Ontario, taught at Sir George Williams, and thee settled at Simon Fraser University. Today he is married, Contaot Whitman Golden, with one daughter, living in the semi-posh Kerr&dale district, Cambridge, Ontad% NlR 5X2 still moulding young minds. Jeff De&en, a forms m&at and . (519) 623-35go or (416) 4580535 coordinator of the Kootenay School of Writing, happily recalls Bowering’s classes with guests such ar Earle Bimey and bill bissett as “like a big Tonighf show.” Another ex-student, Calvin Bowring’s belief that writers should use language as an act Wharton, now poetry reviewer for the Vancouver tin, recalls, of discovery rather than an imposition of .order is timly “He has a really aggressive approach. That turns a lot of people established. But as decades go by and Bowring’s fascination off who are timid about their writing. He’ll take somebody’s with history increases (“I’S never get away from history now. poem and rewrite it on the spot. He has a range of tolerance, Almost evuythlng I write is history”). it is conceivable that his but it’s not as wide as some writers I know.” Dennis Co&y greatest contribution to writing will be his explorations as a puts it well in The O.qford Companion to Canadian Litemhwe founding father of B.C. Lit. Critically he has already identifd “a question of home” as the most often encountered theme in British Columbia writing. Audrey Thomas, a friend for 26 years, The “turnaround” book, ac’cording to Bowering, was suggests his outrageous behaviour is ,4utob1&g_v, written by hand in 1972. “I decided to write prose that was not chasing down forms of prose fiction that I had symptomatic of his upbringing. ‘Males ingested,” hesays. With the succession of his brilliantA Short in small towns,’ she’says, ‘reassert Sod Book in 1977 (“It’s an emetic for Canadian literature”), Burning Water in 1980. and this year’s Caprice, Bowring is their masculinity by making noise’ increasingly voicing his analytical insights into West Coast history. He has a new theory: Albertan like his friend Robert when he writes. “Hi c&icism, though not always fair or I&xtsch reject bistcry and make myth. Quebec&s writers reject judicious, is often shrewd. As Bowring chooses up sides he history and then make their own. But in B.C., whae a boy could tends ta overrate authors who share his views and to under- grow up not knowing the street names, history is fair game to value those who work from other assumptions.” be explored and reinvented. Of the many on Bowring’s side is Audrey Thomas, a friend “At one time history wac an art.” says Bowring. “Iilstorlam I for 26 years. She suggests his sometimes outrageous behaviour got deflected into thinking of history as a science, probably is symptomatic of his small-town upbringing: “Males in small around I50 years ago. I think it was a lot more interesting when towns reassert their masculinity by making noise.” She fondly history was an art. The artist’s main attention is to the strut- recalls thell first meeting, back when Bowerlng and Thomas wring of the text. The text does not have to illustrate a line were tea&bag assistants at UBC. In those days the cliqwrldden of Inquiry. The text creates the direction that a line of inquiry university literary community tended to dismiss Thomas as a is going to go. So your job is to see how alluring you can make non-v.&lng housewife hitch-hiking to school with her fmt baby. it.” But Bowring was always friendly. “I heard George before I “So many are devoted to form as rest,” Robin Blaser sum- ever sav: him,” she says, .“One day I beard this beautiful voice marized in his dense but worthwhile introduction to Bowerlug’s in a stairwell, a bushy voice, and I thought to myself, ‘Now Selected Poems: Particular AccidenB “Bowring’s work is that’s what a West Coast voice should sound like.‘” restless.” 0

Whether describing a Canadian writers’ tour of China or the meaning of old-style market8 to the immigrant communities that made them, Adele Wiseman’s essays stress the impor- tance of personal connections in a world of uncertain, shifting values. CaMlaaniam wrL%ers 176 pages Paper $13.95 alt Work Geoff Hancock Pahick Lane Features interviews between This collection traces the Geoff Hancock, Editor-in- evolution of Lane’s work and Chief of Canadian Fiction includes poetry from books Magazine and Atwood, published over the last twen- Blaise. Gallant, Hodgins, ty years, as well as a number Kroetsch, Mukherjee, of new poems. Munro, Rooke, Rule and 200 page8 Paper $14.95 Skvorecky. 384 pages Paper $19.95 By Al Purcfy .

The new yeaI continues withold him At least a dm Swtts exist the Ides of March will pass him by - each a pro~ecuring attorney somewhere (no Caesar here important enough for murder) f=htiog intoIemnce anti-Sanitism such Easter and its calendar Christ blood sports of racists crucified again 011 the living-mom wall by which we mark ourselves and aJl the loog hot dog days as inescapably human of summer with screaming small boys - each a defeoce witness as welk tomlenting thrilled small girls include mention of that mysterious pretending boredom phrase “Whak% right” - he wilI be-absent then all ambiguous crap removed what’s fair and equitable for everyone. (No\v What’s right7 I hear the customary adogles . I Frank Scott knew “invaluable mao” - “outstandii accomplishments” “citizen of the mind’s republic” - but 1 invented that last one and feel impatient with myself because I’m cbanglng from a Scott tribute thd way it started out and become another way of saying to myself “I miss that man”) But the country goes on content with incompetent ‘leaders the bland sleepwalkers and glib sellouts of Ottawa - a man of warm feeling and nobility dies no flags half-mast on public buildings citizens remain calm in non-emergencies for we exist in 8 special geography of isolation from each other and fear of emotion prefer to keep a reasonable distance from one of our number betraylug any signs of inteJIigence - but it will not be forgiven us if a man like tbll is entirely wasted wImtshallwesaytoDeath another leaf f&o in a maple forest youand become humus on the forest floor when time is short and breath and somethiog may grow there scant for you and I? All obsequies are really personal HowcanIanswerYe.%orNo good taste precludes sackcloth and asha mydearmydear but elevators skip the 13tb floor when we’re far away f&n the cold therefore understate the power and glory but near to each other here? delete the Roncarelli case omit the CCP Manifesto and the like But what shall we say to Death remember ScoJt at midoight in North Iiatley when it’comes night comes when I needed him and his rare there is no cheating it unless common gift of a simple kindness we’re blind and deaf and dumb7 Yes What shall we say to Death It will be obvious of course that with Yes defeated by No I waver between ado& and the personal there’s only the winter of loving left and cannot escape either only the sno\v7 and think of Peter Dale Scott who cammt escape either either I have no answer to give you (the father like a hanging judge mydearmydear the father like a child’s idol only that I ww always titb you - and such bitterness for both) andIamstiIlhere P

: __ .._~ _... . _... -..-.,._ ..__., i_.,: _._._.. __._.._ ~,_ ..__ _ _ I -.-. .:_ .-‘y: >. _-y-.y__.-r- Wrap ing up this fall’s gift books: a few thoughts to he Pp alleviate our annual orgy of giving, receiving, and sneaking hack to the exchange, department

IS ‘IHE SEASON to be wary, espe- ciaUy when choosing a book for you w&‘t go too fa; wrong with Gao1.6~ the appropriate ~&i&al or historical tbal special or au too often “ot-so- Swinton’s Scdplure of the Eskimo associations. One of Ontatio’s most special someone. Publishers who @4cCHand & Stewart, $24.95 paper). have recklessly commissioned un- The text proffers an intriguing discussion Rosemary Keough’s The Ottawa Valley wieldy tomes on great moments in of the sociological faaors involved in the Portfolio @toddart, $65 cloth), which tiddlywinks or the illustrated pmduction of Eskimo artifacts, and also features some gorgeous mlour photo- history of subway tokens know allows the artists to explain theii aesthetic that this is the time of year to trot principles in their own words. But the . them out, since in the weeks heart of the hook is its more than 800 precedii Christmas many book photographs of representative artworks, doned and &l&ted iand as buyersaresmittenbythatracuning many ip colour and all diiplayine laud- well as the beauties of nature, and as a plague known as the Thoughtless Present able care in their composition and consequence their book impresses as an Syndrome. This short-run but totally reproduction. The expressive natural unusually honest portrait of a &XI debilitating affliction short-circuits the forms and imaginative USC of materials 0ftm stereoryped +s either an Arcadian intelligence and loosens tbepwse-strings characteristic of Bskimo sculpture are parad@e or a rural slum. Their judiciobs of its countless viaims, leading them to beautifully caphued in a volume that will “se of period paintin6s and dra\vings and purchase Srapbically detailed vobmtes of be heavily thumbed on coffee tables a narrative that makes up in enthusiasm erotic art for staid elderly relatives and rather than heavily discounted on what it lacks in polish are us&d additions expensive limited editions of representa- remainder tables. to a most engaging volume. tional wildlife studies for punk-oriented An attractive pictorial treatment of an nephews and niew. As a partial antidote tbe right category in which to sear& fpr equally noteworthy part of the country is for the sco”rga of Thoughtless Present . that individually tailored title, you can on display in Mel Bascbert and Robert IV. Syn&ome, these tbc.ughts on the seawn’s Sandford’s Panorama 01 the Canadian gift books may help to alleviate some of Rockies ISummarthouaht. 921.95 cloth). the worst excesses 0ccasi0ne.d by our TheirvadtagepQintis~u&pau~, annual orgy of giving, receiving, and ,. ‘- featuring three- and four-oaae fold-outs sneaking hack to the rehuns department. ., . . . of lake&d mountain vi%, and in a One fairly safe way of getting around same it’s all too pretty for words: as the problem is to selea presents you ‘:’ .5 tmvelle.rs through the ar+ have ofian wouldn’t mind receiving yourself. The O.xford Illustrated Llt&ary Guide to :, beside natu&.‘s mar&, and here & text __&i ‘, Canada, by Albert and Theresa Moritz seems similarly cwerwhdmed by the size (O.xford, $45 cloth), is a goldmine of and baauty of the adjacent photographic useful, useless. and just plain fascinating images. As an evocative souveair of a trip ‘. information about the associations ha ’ ;. tbrowh the Rockies. homer. the book’s twen literature and &raphy, and it’s 3: und&able visual g&dew s&Id fA going right onto the readily-at-hand sm i niany appreciative viewers. tion of my reference shelves. Oiven the Given the numba of books bawd on peripatetic careers of many Canadian writers. this must have bean an extra- :; . most of thk English ofticers stationed-%I ordinarily difficult hook to orgsniza, but 19th-centwy Canada spent all their free the Moritzes have solved the problem et% time sketching and etching. As noted in ciently by pmviding,an extensive grid of Posted to Caaada: the Watarcolours of cross-references. They offer clear, Gaorge Rnssell Dartnell 183HIl44, by comprehensive, and pleasantly written Honor de Pen&r (Duadum Press, $14.95 accounts of who did what where, m- paper), the era’s interest in watenxdour hanced by numerous photographs of the painting as a desirable gcntlemanly skill authors and places in quastion. Its high standards of accuracy and ample provi- military o&r~ combined to-pm&e a sion for both hmrvsing and burrowing great many competent amateur artists. make The Oqford Iiluw&d Litem~ The small number of colour plater - Guide to Cattada an essential acquisition perfectly r?asonahle given the book’s low for anyone with a more than cursory in- $ce --doesn’t off&moagb evidence for terest in the subject. an assessment of DanneU’s skills as a Shouldyourpotendalrecipient bemom m Sculpture of ths wlimo. by Gemgm SMnto painter, but the numamus black-aud-

-:... . -.c- i. ---.---- _--- white ilI”strations “nd de Penciw’s we& will presumably warm to them. An Amerlmn Vision: Three Genera- this * wotthwhik contribution to our tions of Wyeth Art &ink, BrLwn. s59.95 sense of B national past. cloth) is a collection of copiously lIlus- There are also a number of titles aitned trated essays about and by the triumvirate at readers with spedal interests, of which of N.C., Andrew, and James Wyeth, and John de Bandt’s They Don’t Make ‘Em it offers a wider and somewhat more Like That Any More: A Piclure Alstory interesting range of material. Although of C”a;ldixt Can 193247 (Oberon, 335 Andrew’s son James hasn’t yet escaped dotb) should do for any automobll buffs from his father’s inlluence, .4ndrew’s on your list. Its careful reproductions of father N.C. was a superior illustrator the period’s &ivertlsemettts axen? grratly whose work still graces reprlqts of cIassia enhanced by the rather skimpy aann- such as Treawre Island and 7% Lust ctf panying essay, but in purrly visual terms the M&cams. The book will be a this is a striking and emlnentlv .&able necessary acquisition for anyone keen on OPUS. filling in the perspectiwx of Andrew If ties and tracks turn you on, West of Wyeth’s career, although those of us the Grc”t Divide: An Illusbaled Hlstow bpmune to such enthusiasms may prefer of the canndku PncIl% Ra8w”y Q Blillsil t” treat “Wyeth art” as a qu&ion Columbin 18804986 (Sono Nis, $39.95 meriting the answer “No, ith not.” cloth) Impresses with bath words and Some more specialized rekases on images. Robert D. Turner chugs abead in Fmm West of the Gre~Divlda. byRobaTD. Turner aspects of Canadian art also deserve to cleat if somewhat plodding prose that is be noticed, and of those, Tow Works nicely supported by lots of photographs cti.tmaa wouldn’t be chrismap with- on Paper 19524987 (Canadian High and illustrations. and his work should out an Andrew Wyeth title in hook-store Commission/Dundurn Press, 89.95 particularly interest tb0se who found windows. and this year there are two paper), is perhaps the best value. David Pierre Berton’s CPR books excessively handsome additions io his extensive Burnett introduces them with .a meIodranlatic. bibliography. The ptumotkmal drums are lmowkdgeable essay that disappoints Those aspiring to cordon bku :tatus being beaten most loudly for John only in its mangling of Nathalie should be pleased with The Natucll Wtierding-‘s Andm ‘#ye& Tke He@ Ssrraute’s name, and the reproduction of Cuisine of Georges Blnttc (Stoddmt, $60 ‘Picturea (Prentice-Hall, $60 doth), Harold Town’s work are both numerous cloth), in wldch the rent”& French chef wherein a series previously exhibited only and m”nim~&. presents some of his most successful piecemeal is for the first time displayed Two entries in the Univetsity of Ildtish recipes in abundantly illustrated fashion. in full. Speaking as a non-convert to Columbia Press’s “Muscum Notes” AIthough not for the novice, cooks with Wyeth-mania, I must confess that these series provide new. and to some extent lots of time, plenty of patience. and a au-too-reaIistic portmits Of one of the inter-r&ted, exa&ations of the inter- SO”LJ~O~ of dfan will find many artist’s neighbours evoked only astrong play between Indii and European tradi- stit&ating challenges in Blanc’s desire to look at almost anything else. but tions: Marjorie M. Halpin’s Jack Shed- idiomatic versions of the nouvelle cuivine. fans of his earnest.Iy elegiac Americana bolt and theCoastal Indlnnlmage(315.95 i hand book store any time after Boxi@ bfiniim motifs in 115 recent p&ings. Day: bibliophiles unlucky enough to and Karen Doffek!s Bill Reid: Bsyond the receive gifts fmm victims of Thoughtless Essential Form ($12.95 paper) is a Presmt Syndrome know just what to do ground-breaking artistic biigraphy of a with books that convey only a season’s notable Haida creator. Both a& exten- greetings. Cl BRUCE ALLEN POWE sively illustrated and supported by the By the author of TheAberharrSummer relevant scholarly appamt!ls. Scholars will be the primary market for This startling novel about contern- European and American Painling, pmary North America brigs into Sculpture., and Decorallve Arts conflict two radically different 1300-1000. edited by Myron La&in Jr. wcrl& the mystical spaciousness and Ml&ad Pantazzl (National Gallery of the Yukon and the unrelenting of Canada, $130 cloth), a two-volume d comoetitlve business. boxed set that cataIogues the National Gallery’s holdings in the indicated areas. By Desmond Morton . , Bach work is exha~stive~ document& artists receive brief biographies, and eight The Great War of Words: British, separate indexes provide ready access to American, and Canadian Propaganda, this massive compilation of information. and Fiction, 1914-1933, by Peter A concluding potpourri of photo- Boitenhuis, University of British Colum- graphy books offers something foi just bia Press, illustrated, 218 pages. $27.00 about wxyone. Eve Amold’s Marilyn cloth (ISBN 0 7’148 0270 7). Monroe: An Appreciation (Pen&, $40 cloth) contains an intermittently in- ON SEPTEMBER 2. 1914, C.P.G. Master- terestiog essay on Monroe’s turbulent man summoned 25 of Britain’s leading career, but the candid images of Monroe literary figurer ta his oftices io well&ton at work and play axe what will keep it oil House and enrolled them in onb of the b&sellerlists.rdfe:llleFirstFiftyYrPrs most successfld operations of the First l936l986, edited by Philip B. Kunhardt World War. At a time when famous Jr. &%I&, Brown, $3.5 paper), wll also wrlters eqjoyed enormous stati as stir the memory of anyone who opinion leaders, enlisting H.G. Wellr, Sir remembers its original appearances, Arthor Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, although the small size of most of the O.K. Chesterton. and a host of photographic reproductions and some lomkladq including the expatriate Calm- unimaginative layout serioosly detract dian, Sir Gilbert Parker, w= a coop that from what should have been a much made up for the weakness of the British better book. Army and the deficiencies of British Preferen of foreign climes will get off generals. the beaten track with Kevin Sinclair’s The With meagre exceptioos - Bertrand Fogotten Tribea of Chiia (Cupress. Russell throughout the war and George $23.95 cloth), an exploration of China’s Bernard Shaw until an inspirea staff ethnic diiy that depicts exotic and officer included him in a tour of the largely onfamlllar milieus titll an ex- trenches - Britain’s intellectuals and a paienced photo-journalist’s finesse. surprising number of their American Juhan Kuos’s photographs of South countemarts threw their tshts and their Africn in Black and Wtdte (Cupress, intelleG into the war effort, embracing 324.95 papa) conwy a powerful impres- an unexamined doctrine of German IIuilt sion of a nation fractured by constant and savagery, suppressing doubts about violence, and might be exactly the right British militaryand political competence, - if not necessarily welcome - gift for and achieving, at whatever damage to anyone who still thinks that sooth Aliica their literary reputations and peace of is just your normal ewyday country mind, both of the objectives of Master- undergoing a few healthy growing pains. man’s propaganda operation. American Those requiring a more plctwe- opinion was unquestionably swayed to postcard viw of things,, however, had the Allled side, and British public opinion bat receive s&xthlng like The British Isles, edited by Philip Clucias Msiad st&labIe defeatism; - - ‘(Feogoin, $35.00 cloth), where several Beyond a glimpse at the war novels of hundred largdle gloss& add up to an Charles Gordon (%alph COnnOr”), extraordinarily tedious book. Whether it Peter Buitenlnds has almost nothing to be charminsly sleepy villages or the stately say about Canadian wartime writing, but homes of the nobility, The British Isles two Canadians play major roles in hls leaves no hoaly diehe unrepresented, while blithely ignow the s&ring . to York, who &i&v the brilliant ditics of oncmploymenf depleted how British propaganda operation in the ing, and dedl@ standaxb of both living United States. Working so diietly that and general civility. If you simply must even in 1917 Washington was unaware of have a copy, check out your local second- his role, Parker created a contact lisSof

.--- _.-__l.__. _- ..- 13.000 in!luetttial Americans and targeted “Allegiance to country has swept away them for books, letters, and pamphlets allegiance to truth.” promoting the British cause. The Ger- Boitenhuis’s problem, common among mans undoubtedly helped by sinking the literary people and their critics, is to Lmtanirr and shooting Edith Cavell. So assume that writers have some special sen- did a host of eager Anglophiles, fmm sibility and some clearer vision of the Teddy Roosevelt and Henry James to truth. Indeed that was precisely the ilht- Booth Tarkington and Edith Wharton. sion Masterman’s organization exploited The other Canadian was Max Aitken, when it discreetly mobilized its famous ILLUSTRATEDBY the self-made millionaire and newspaper authors and the respected publishing LASZLO GAL publisher whose Totyism combined with houses that printed their propaganda. Yet - _.-.-- contempt for the British establishment. one might also argue that the authors EIQWB)’ Unlike the British authors who dutifully gave British people what they wanted to MARGMETCRtWFORDtdAUNEY v:orshipped at the shrine of General believe. If Arnold Bennett or Hilaire Headquarters and suppressed what little Bellooor Ian Hay said nothing about the they knew of the horror of the trenches, horror and human degradation of the Aitken used his states as oft?cial Cana- Western Front. what about the message dian Eyewitness to collect information carried to Bngland daily by the thoosands that might undermine thegenerals, even of soldiers going home on leave? The if its distribution was largely limited to evidence of their letters and memoirs is London salons. In the end. frostrated by that sotits found no itttermt io their ttoe censors and undermined by the removal experienca. In return, they seldom chose of his patron. Sir Sam Hughes, Aitken to share their nightmares with civilians. turned to bigger game, helping to topple Buitenhois makes the point when he the decent, drunken Asquith and pto- tells of Arthur Machen, accidental inven- mothtg his fellow patvetm, Lloyd George, . tor of the “Angel of Mans” myth. as the Welsh wizard who would win the Machen’s lictional hero remembers a war. motto fmm a vegetarian restaurant, uses The new regime destroyed the Master- it to summon St. George at an hour of man organization by yielding to the peril and is saved when arrows from clamour that Britain was neglecting the ghostly bowmen strike 10,000 Germans tieId of propaganda. The invisibility that dead. Dehtged with appeals, mainly from was the secret of Masterman’s s-s was parish magazines, to reprint the story, his downfall but, fortunately for Britain, Machen insisted that it was an invention, only after American entry in lhe WBT had but his protests were denounced as become inevitable. On both sides of the callous. In a pamphlet, Harold Begbie Atlantic, a crude, brash. journalistic style maintained he had heard the story from took over, headed by the aggressive a Red Cross ladv who had it from a nurse George Creel in Washington and by Max who had it from a wounded lance cot- A dramatic story Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook, who noral.. ~~ Another nurse. Phvllis Camobell. created a new Ministry of Information in had heard .it fmm .hvd soldiers’ whd of a young 1915 as headquarters for British ophdon- recognized St. George: his face was “on moulding at home and abroad. every quid they’d aver had.” Buitenhtds king’s courage Bttitenhuis describes these events and is shocked that A.J.P. Taylor, the the literary wrks that accompanied them historian, could tegard this fiition as and fidelity. with admirable clarity and unconcealed bdng “more or less reliably” observed. A delightful dismay. He can tmdetstand why Rudyard Taylor’s characteristic irony has Kipling. H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett. sometimes posed a problem for the read for and Ford Mados Hueffer would lend literal-minded. their pens to patriotism, but he has no Propagandists gave people what they all ages. doubt that the work debased their talent wanted. Writers, great or small. became and their character. Posterity having propagandists because they had enlisted in a cause. whether with the big battalions or, likeBertrand Russeti, with thesmall. W.B. Yeats showed more then poetic wisdom when Edith Wharton co&alled him and other luminaries in a collection of largely dubious gems entitled 77te 8%” x 1OW 0 32 pages Book of Rcfugeer: $14.95 0 In boohcms now decided that Belgian atrocities did not really exist, how could great Iiterary minds accept and amplify them? Even worse, why did British writers protect the “paper curtain” that denied the British people any understanding of the horror of the Western Front? His answer was provided at the time by Bertrand Russell: Rejected by humans, Dian Fossey turned her affections to an imoassioned attachment to animals, which led eventualiy to her death

By Timothy ?indley Viruoge: The Passion of Din” Fossey, reader is repeatedly struck by the at her side. As time progresses. she loves by Farley Mowat. McClelland 8 Stewart, loneliness of Dll’s world and B strong lessoRenandhatesmore-adthesame illustrated, 380 pages, $24.95 cloth (ISBN impression that B” artist, an actor, or a is true when it comes to how she is per- 0 7710 6677 5). writer will surely emerge when this child- ceived by others. Fossey could never be hood ends. ignoti or shrugged off. Her name, once THERE ARE THREE good reasons to buy Drive” away by people and laclring the known, could not be forgotten. She was this book. One, you have “ever heard of presence of the father she loved, Dla” loved or she was hated. Dii Fossey -and more’s the pity. Two, turned her affections to a” impassioned The whole question of Possey’s black- you k”ow who she was and you want to auacbolent to animals and a” almost fatal and-white rekxionships with others was pay your respects. Three, Virungu: The attmctlon to older men. Leakey was ia his predicated on the prindples for which she Passion of Dim Fossey is the most grlp- 70s. for instance. when their affair was stood. There were IIO grey areap in any ping biography written this season, bar at its height. while Dian was in her early aspect of her life - physical, spltitu~, none. 30s. And Leakey. though perhaps the best or intellectual. Her enemies were bureau- The passion of the title - which here known, was by no “I- the only fsthw crats, politicians, soldiers, policemen, means mtiyrdom - is the passlo” of B tigure low l” Fossey’a life. game wardens, and poachers. Sometimes controversial woman who was as mocb Late in her teens, Dian decided she her enemies were other scientists. Often hated openly as shenrar secretly loved. 0” would become a veterinarian. This did they were just the gentle herders whose the one hand, Louis Leakey. the not, however, work out. Nor did heready cattle competed for the highland renowned palaeontologist, declared his attempts at being a zoologist. Her meadows where Fossey’s beloved gorillas love for Dia” Fossey with rubles, kisses, graduate degrees, both M.A. and Ph.D., ranged. One thing WBS clear: the gorilla and intellectual devotion: on the other, came long after she had begun her field population was in decline and only Possey someone-not yet identified-declared work in Africa. could save them. Ultimately the k!im of his hatred for her by cleaving her head Fossey v&s plagued with allergies. On a killer, she had been, in her time, per- with a” axe. her initial foray into the Congo she car- fectly willing to become a kUla herself in Fossey uws a” ethologist; she studied ried 40 pounds of prescribed and over- defence of her apes. Her tenderness was the bebaviour at fust of humans and later the-counter medications for everytblng tenacious and beguiling. but ha anger of the larger apes. In 1966 she went into from asthma to hives. She also had incl- was sensational. the Rwanda District of the Congo. where plent tuberculosis. Worse, she was While in the Virungas Fossey fell - she devoted all that remained of her life awldent-pmne; she broke more bones in perhaps for the only time in her life - to the study of a small band of gorillas the course of her adult life than B human utterly in love. This was the 10% she held living in the region of the Virungas, B body giver the appearance of contalni”g. for the creatures who shared her life and range of dead volcanoes rising above the She could not get out of a” automobile, to whom all her waning, often broke” rain forest. This, how.ver, is rather like climb B stairease, or cross 8 courtyard energ& were devoted. Her aoxptance of sayins - in a nutshell - that Hamlet without ending up fact down on bleediog these gorillu as bet equals pmnlpted their went into mourning for his murdered hands and knees. Knives on the far sides acceptance of her. father and devoted all that remained of of kitchens reached out to cut her; Fossey believed with a passlo” only his life to the study of a small band of saints can muster in the rightness of her cowtiers living in tbe Elsinore region of her fingers. Often (and thank God for it) vision. Above all else. she believed in life’s Denmark. If Hamlet merits ampllfica- these incidents are funny in the telling, sanctity, whether it be housed in doa or tion, so indeed does Dian Fossey. even wildly so. But a” aura of disaster humans, insects or gorilkts. The horrors Fossey’s Life was remarkable from surrounds Dian Fossey; you see it perpetrated by the human race o” other beginolog to end. It started with her hovering over all the chapters of thii forms of Life have never received more parents’ divorce and ended with her own book. graphic evidence than Far~Mowst lays murder. Her father was a” alcoholic, but If Fossey had bee” the leadll fuure before us through the eyes of Dian from the evidence on hand he had more in a work of fiction, the writer would Fossey. It ls terrible. It terrifies. it than a few endearing qualltles. and his automatlcallv have to be credited with saddens, it enrages. daoghter remained loyal to him and genius. She ib both a” open wound and Here, in closing, I most commit an loving until his death. Her mother, oo the a sealed enigma. She has a” inteapifzd unpardonable sin; I most mention a book other hand. ws a cool, fastidious lady sense of sexual aggression, and yet she of my ow”. But I do so trosting that who took as her second husband B cool, walks away from the men with whom she everyone - including Wrley Mowat - fvtidious ‘&.“tlenlan” with all the atta- falls in love. as if they had suddenly burst will understand the motive. It is dant pretensions. Dian spent B good deal into flame at her approach. Not often, uwoldable. of her younger life being told how but once or twice, she veers away from In Nor Wantedon the Voyage, a novel av~kwud, graceless, and unpresentable her love of older men toward the sexual about the sailing of the great Ark and she w%. As B consequence, she spent the attraction of the very young me” who those who fall to get on board, Noah’s larger part of her childhood alone. The come fmm England and the U.S. to work wife attempts to save the Life., during the flood, of a chimpanzee -.an ape child andthatthelrgoalsarebynomeanscom- named Lotte. she falls, of course, to save patible. “For the past two decades,” he Lotte because Noah, being a man of God, writes, “the post office has been a make- will have aone of this “ape nonsense” shift raft on a stormy sea of politics, perpnrafed aboard the Ark. But the per- blown this way and that by blasts of hot tinent point - in the light of Dii Fossey air from the House of Commons.” - is not what happens to totte but the Meanwhile, “workers and managers an Au;i$rphy, perception of Lotte’s charactet i” the eye-3 eamestly try to paddle the raft where they of countless readers. I camtot bsgln to say waot to go, &ding it spinning in circles how many letters, how many confronta- within circles.” by George Woodcock tions I have had from and with people The biifmt culmits. in the author’s who would not acknowledge - who eyes, are & polltl&s~who should keep refused to accept - Lotte’s being an ape. their hands off the post office. For years They all insisted Lotte was “retarded” or Parliament kept postal rates dellbe&ely “mongoloid”: “Apelike, yes. But not an low to please voters, resulting in chronic apel” You see. Lotte had human parents. deficits, and when the post oftice was Not wanted on the voyage. made a crown corporation in 1981 the Neither w% Dian Fossey. But there are some who will never &d con!li%ing dkections. Then too, fotget Fossey’s pi-esence among us. Fatley there is patronage, The post office is, to Mowat has done her great honour. I be sure, a veritable otcbard of patronage thank him for that. In my view, you could plums ripe for the picking, sod polltidans do no better than to read this book and cannot resist the temptation. bonour Dian Fossev too. 0 The utions do not come off well in Stewart-Patterson’s analysis either. The 1965 strike was predpitated, the unions contend, by “years of intolerable work- ing conditions set within an environment rampant with patronage and nepotism.” Stewart-Patterson says that it drove the moderates out of the unlo” leadership, and that the militants now in control cau- By hJortnan Sigttro%on not see “ast their own narrow self-hue&. Post Mortem: Why Canada’s Mail Stewart-Pattetson sees little hope for Won’t Move. by David Stewart- eompromlse fmm any of the three sides Patterson, Macmillan. 367 pages, $24.95 of Canada Post’s eternal triangle. In a cloth (ISBN 0 7715 9564 2). concluding chapter he reviews some of the suggestions for solving the postal mess v!txr wn~ ROGERS once said about the put forward by a myriad of royal cotn- weather now probably holds ttue about missions, consultants, and task forces Canada Post as welk everyone complains overtheyears.andventuresafewofhls about the post office but nobody does own as well. anything about it. That, at least, seems To begio with. he says. the post office An elegant attd wocative memoir of to be the message contained in this must decide whether it is to be a business life in the oost war Canadian chmnide of the postal system’s woes over or a service. This bolls down to the queo- the past two decades. David Stewart- tion of whether or not Canada Post Patterson, a reporter for the Globe and should operateat a deficit. In Britain. the on Dr. wbodmck% temote cabin life IlfaCPs Report on Bushtess, describes post oftice bectune efficient and proiit- in the British Columbia bush, his “Canada’s love-haterelatlonship with its able by “requiring customa~ to dig a close, long-standing relationship post office” and ln the process delineates good deal deeper into theii podrets.” But, with the Dottkhoboors. his the reasons. why Canada.Post appears es a former postmaster-general, Jeao- destined to remain mired in confusion. Pierre C&t& points out, the post office’s involvement in the founding of Stewart-Patterson tells the postal biggf& costomexs are businesses; if the Canadian titemtum, and his system’s sorry tale through anecdotal pot- post office runs at a loss business and exteaded and bemifolly described traits of some of the key players in the Industry are b&g subsidized by the tours of ladii and the South Seas. drama.. Among them are Michael ordinary taxpayer. Wttmtt. the fust president of the new Obviously, these basic de&ion% are crovm corporati Jii Corkery. the man bound to change as new governments 6 x 9,300 pa@-% $24.95 cloth he replaced; and Jean-Claude Parrot, the with differing pollcles come and go. “As inside postal workers’ union boss who long as politidans have dll aczess to declares, “I will aever trust manage- postal decision-making,” he u&es, ment.” “there can be no consistent path for the Stewart-Patterson divides his story into post office.” But he does not see four sections, dealiug with the msnagers. privatlaation as a solution. No private the workers. the politicians, and the car- _~_~ poration. It soon becomes clear that the Post’s enormous joi, and selling the pcwt fmt three groups are in direct competi- tion over the future of the fourth category ment monopoly for a p&ate one.%eak- . . 1_...“._ .._.., _L _..i I ing up the monopoly and opening up lawyer to practise at the bar of Canada. competition would only mea” the end of Or note that at Greenspan’s age the beat service on unprofitable mutes, which the all-round Canadian litigation lawyer. government would the” have to serve John Robbwte. had just began to aquira without the protitable mutes to subsidize a reputation outside the legal pmfasia”. them. and that his reputation arose from a case In the end, it does not seem likely that - the steamy Evelyn Dick trial -that Canada Post will be able to pull itself oat was a” anomaly for a counsel who found of the quagmire of patronage, low criminal law a tad dull. morale, and unio” strife without a major So how come a” Eddie Greenspan ’ cathartic upheaval. Stnvart-Patterson book? Why, of all lawyers, bls life stmy? 1 leaves the reader with the ominous What are the reasons, justifications. and musings of a former se&r official at the appeals of Greensprm: The Case/or the post offEe whose stock a”swer to anyone D&m? who asks him what is needed to sort out For starters, Greenspan is not the Canada’s mail service is “six months of shrinking violet in public that all earlier civil war.‘* 0 and most current trial lawyers have show” themselves to be. John Robinette, BS I learned in writing the biogmphy of that ml and wonderful man. looks w public discussion of his casea as too much like blowing his own horn. NM Gramspan. He regards it almost as part of his duty as a munsel to wise up the public to what hss gone on in the crlminal courts where By Jack Batten he’s sxgued eases. In the book, he doesn’t mind taking a whack at such things as the Grse”spn”: The Case for the Defenca, effect of fetism on the trial process by Edward L. Greenspa” and George (negative) and the police use of an Jonas, Macmillan, 465 pages, $26.95 infomxx’s testimony against accused per- cloth (ISBN 0 7715 9495 X). sons (also negative). And to underline hip points, he spins engrossing little tales READlNti EDDtEOagENsPAw.5 memoir of from his own courtroom experience. his legal life beats studyins the criminal Then there’s the Grernspan wit. Most law course in first year at law school. I criminal lawyers are funny guys who should know. I’ve done both. Green- make hilarious stories out of their adven- span’s book is far livelier than Criminal tures in court. But Greenspan’s the Law I and just about ss thorough and in- master. His one-liners are the stuff of formative. He draws on two sources for Johnny Carson and, as he denmmtrates his authority. One is his own experience: in the book, he knows how to c”“struct as a criminal lawyer, he’s participated in a story in ways that combine laughs and dozens of cases that have offered sansa- instruction in about equal degrees. tional drama or trail-blazing pieces of law And fmally there is Grrenspan’s under- or both. The second is his sch”lambip: for standI of language. In court, his cmss- years. Greenspan has edited Canadian examinations and his final addresses to case raports for his profession and judges and juries are models of brevity delivered papen and s”eechss on fine and clarity. He talks the way all court- legal p&s.* _ room lawyers are. supposed to but few All of which - vial exuerience and a actually do. And the same style-sharp, brain for the law - hoesr?t make suednct - comes through on the printed Greenspan unique. But there’s another page. To be sure., it’s George Jonas who quality that he boasts, and it’s this extra deserves a tip of the hat in this depart- that gives bis book its liveliness. In’fact, mmt. It was undoubtedly Jonas, Green- if Gremspan lacked the quality I’m talk- span’s collaborator. who orga”ized the ing about - let’s call it celebrity - no book and put the words on paper. And publisher would have given him a hefty it’s a tribute to the excellence of his llilents advance to write his menmirs. that the voice that echoes out of the book Consider that Greenspan is just 43 is pure Greenspa”. years old. Consider that he’s the first The voics is at its nmst compelling in Jonas-Greenspan’s last chapter, which ’ a” autobiography. And consider that he tells the tale of the Horde” Allen case. No is far fmm being the only Canadian frills, no lessons, no instruction. Just criminal lawyer, past or pnsent, whose straight cmutmom thrills. A lawyer career has bee” decorated with thrilling named Loreaz is murdered in a Toronto trlals and brilliant legal arguments. By subway parking lot. His wife and her way of comparison, hardly a word, autc+ lover, Allen, are charged. Grae”spa” biographical or otherwise. has bee” defends Allen. The crown has a reason- written about Arthur Martin, who was ably strong circumstantial case. At the last minute, Allen’s c”-accased. the

.,. _...... _ . . . ..,.. .,_.. -.--. .-..,-.._____-~. _ - _ . - . .- _. _. ______-- _ .._- -.._ .~~____.

widow of Lorenz and the lover of Allen, In the middle of the conflict are uyingtopi”poblttheva@“glociofCo”- becomes a crow” witness and testifies David’s children and grandchildren, liv- stance’s mind. Before, Diana had against Greenspa”‘s client. It’s a stmy ing various versions of the bourgeois resolutely auowed Co”.%ta”ce the wide right out of Perry Mason with Greenspao dream and accepting the revelation of sexual freedom she desired. Now sbe must in the h4ason ,mle right down to the their Aunt Diana in various ways. Mary, lock Constance in the house for her “WV” dynandte finale. It’s terrific coortroom her mother’s daughter, sees Diana as a pmteaio”. C”“sta”c& name ls ironic yet th&trics. Terrific reading. Terrific lesbian. Laura, her father’s daughter, not, always yet never there.. Greenspa”. q tries to see Diana a0 her father’s dosest Memory Bond at times wears its pur- friend. pose somewhat heavily. Diana’s les- The nuances of all this are constantly bianlsm and David’s pacifism am political hei- worked out. David’s occupathm of issues but individual and human. By con- radio atmounar, reading someone else’s trast, when it develops that a minor wuds, underscores his life in a role writ- character has AIDS, the novel becomes ten by Patricia. Even his own sexuality too much a statement of rather thhao seems decided elsewhere. He might have oboui something: Yet this is also an bear homosexual had Patricia not come example of the novel’s fearless assertion By Tarry Gofdie along. Diana was Iesbian by her own of contemporaneity. There is no quedtio” choice. of period when a text refers to suitcase Memoq Bonrd, by Jane Rule, Mao David has lost his Patricia, but Diana bombs to Japan and to a” Ontario millan. 336 pages, $14.95 paper (ISBN 0 still has her lifelong lover Constance. Yet Liberal government f.ght& with federal 7715 9529 8). while Constance is very much alive, her Tories. This novel searches not for time- memory has died. The title of the novel less immortality but for immediate T”E’SERmLlg” contemporary novel often refers to a slate on which Diana lists the connection. seems obsessed wilh the game. A book by day’s activities, to be cmssed off as she Yet it might he sufficiently successfol Sabnao Rushdie swarms in metafiction, accomdishes Ihem. Otherwise Constance in the “ow to last long after David Peta- as narrator/author/character buzz@) i” is like& ta return to bed abler breakfast. so” or Brla” Muhuney. Rule’s explora- various directions, fiyins off whenever a David’s quests are internal and even in- tion of the Crow” twins’ muncny hoards reader gets too dose. Yet there are times dulgent: he is looking for some lost core is always enhanced by the realism of the when this glorious play might also of self. Diana’s ti external and absolute- dialogue and by the stylized and, yet become a denial of the humanity most ly practical: she feels no need to find appropriately apharlstic way she presets readers seek in a “ovd. The fictive herself, but her life is devoted to Knding her characters’ psychological reflections. reverberations of Margaret Laurence’s Co”sta”ce, either at themost literal kvel, When Constaace cries, Diana remgnires T/E Diviners are cranky and mechaoicd, when tXmstanm wanders off, or simply the impossibility of fmdiing the stbmdus: perhaps eve” irritating, but Moray Gmm is a character who draws empathetic responses from the least responsive reader. Jane Rule’s Memory Board creates similar anotions. although in very dif- ferent ways. David Crown and his twin sister Dians were devoted to each other until David got married. David’s wife P&da was so offended by Diana’s les- bianism that she cut off all contact. For 40 yws David saw Diia once a year, on their birthday. Now Patricia is dead and David is maldng tentative attempts to regain his closeness with Diana. The novel is presented very simply, all in the immediate past, with the exception of brief reflections on earlier events. The narration is similarly stmightforward. a third-person representation of the points of view of Diana and David. This might seem awfully old-f&km%% but the very traditional fmm seaus perfect for the “on-traditional subject. Rule’s concern is the human response to the complexities of the world, as show” in the split between two who on the SW- face seem the perfect complement. The accepting liberal wishes for all people to get along, but when the tines are drawn he succumbs to reactionary press”re. The i”di\idual radical should see the liberal as her support, but her co”sta”t opposi- tion to the reactionary world has led her to create barriers to pmtea herself fmm enemies and friends. ----

“Whatcvc~ sorrow this was. its name was “read this book.” but I am breaking it locked out of retch somewhere in the in the best interests of all concerned. For confused by his/her owv~~cmbiv&nt storehouse of Constance’s memory, act this novel avoids the sophistry that often sexuality or that of others. for anyone of which only emotions could sometimes lurks behind sophistication. It is c IIIely confused by the presence or absence of escape. . . .” tuned exploration of humankind in the There is a basic rule among sophisti- bourgeois Canadian world in which we As&amateur biblioihwcpist cated book reviewers not to advise to live. This is a novel for anyone who has I prescribe for you this book. q

Reuben Slonim’s only sin was that he followed the dictates of his fierce conscience instead of the ‘neatness and order’ of Orthodox Judaism Morris ttJo/fe To IClll a Rabbi, by Reuben Slonim. longed to believe in the “warm c0dnes.s” separatba Arab and Jewish children. ECW Press. 354 pages, 522.00 cloth and personal God of Orthodox Judaism, “Why,” he asked, “are Arab children (ISBN 0 920763 99 3). but couldn’t. It seemed to him that the required to study Hebrew but Jewish passion of the Orthodox “for neatness children free from the mmpulsion to IF Itmmei-4 sLoNtn4 were * controversial, and order” far exceed& their capacity for study Arabic?” literate politician, his memoirs would “reason and pity.” He came to abhor &dm stressed that Jews and Pclestl- have been much sought after. Publishers orthodoxy of all kinds. “Nobody nian Arabs have similar aspirations: would have competed tc get him into possessg the truth,” he writes. “We arr In the pcdcd of struggle before 1948 Jma print. Unfortunately, Skmim is not a all seeking it.” insisti cc four basic premi.w that thae politician; he’s a rabbi -a controversial, Prom the beginning. he opposed the wss * lcwish people; that it had a right tc self-determination. political io- literate rabbi. Tweflly publishers, made segregation of women in his congrega- dcpendencc and evectuclly statehood; nervcus, one has to cssume, by his tion. He wanted women to be counted in that its repmszctadve wss the World aiticisms of Canada’s Jewish com- the m&an (quorum of 10) and tc be per- Zionist Ccugress; and that the interna- munity, rejected this important and mitted to read from the Torah. When his tional comwmlty must rccogctze thess courcgecus document. Can cayone congregcnts bw d about the width of clsims. The Pslutinism stand on parallel imagine a pubhher turning down a politi- Slonim’s prayer shawl (too narrow) and demands: that they constitute an ideo- cian’s memoir on the grounds that it’s his choice of places to eat (too broad), he rifiabte pwple; that they sre entitled tc “highly subjective”? Yet that’s precisely preached that gossip is the “uglitication” ;;;=dd~cw~vdpe$d~ of othcrs. When he conducted Passover what Lester % Orpen Dennys told Slmdm. Palcstlne Liberation Or&z&cc; and Slonim’s original intent was to tiction- sewi= for Jewish airmen during the that lhae claims can become effective cllze his story. Certainly there’s no doubt Sceond World War. he told them that only in an intemational ccmcxt. The as one reads To Kill a Rabbi (a title that when Hitler was defeated. they would similitude of the two sets of claims is mckes the book sound llkc a mystery) that have to find compassion for the C&mum cncanny.Thelccgcageinwklchtheyare hehssboththeeyeandmindofasatidcal people. The mllkcry forbade Slonim fm muched in official statemects is almcst novellit. Moose Clarfield’s mouth, he visiting the base again. When the wsr was identical. Yet many Jews eccnct l%d it lells us, “was shaped in a permanent over, he agreed with survivors of tie in thdr hearts 10 grant tc Palcdticlacs pucher because of all the bccksldes he had Holocaust that Jews must never forget what they have claimed for themselves. kissed to get ahead.” Yiddd Axler what had happened, but went cm to argue Jews responded to Slonim with catcalls “excelled in one respect. He could not that - to forgive could only lead to and death threats. talk for two minutes without going off B hardening of Jewish hwts. Forgive- We cre all the heroes of our own life into smut.” But Slonlni wuldn’r make ness, he believes, is central tc Jewish storla and, cs this memoir reveals. the book work &p an autobiogrcphiccl ethics. “If one believes in the redeem- Reuben Slonim is no exception. Still, he novel, and decided to turn it into a ability of human beings, no one may be Is able to poke fun at hlelf - at his memoir instead. At fmst I assumed that excluded.” love of the theatrical, for instance. More the acmes he uses were pseudonyms, but Ceclral to Slonim’s philosophy is the important, he tells with shame of his the photc section revealed othcwise. importance of fully grantina others their Libel lawyers wilI undoubtedly receive a otl&ness, as mu&t-by M&in Buber in the of the lot of inquiries about thii book. I and Thou. For example., Slonim never and University Avenue synagogues. “I Reuben Slonim was born in Winnipeg doubted that Israel’s D&&ion of wanted c large mngregation,” he writes, in 1914 and ws ordained by the Jewish Independence, which speaks of “develop- “perhaps the largest in Cscada. so that Theological Sembmty in New York in ine the land for the nood of all its I -&&hi have p&r . . . to stand up ro 1937. That year he became Canada’s fmt inhabitants” and of mamtaining7~~~~ ~~ 6‘ cmn- my adversaries who had plagued me for Canadian-born rabbi when he wcs hired pk.te equality of social and political rights yeBrs.” by Toronto’s McCaul Street Synagogue. for all its citizens, without diitinctlon of When I asked Slonlm in an interview Almost frcm the beginning, the dictated creed, race or sex,” referred to Jews and where he found the courage for his many of his fierce conscience led him intc Arabs alike. Ova the years, as Middle unpopular stands, he said it had nothing battles with his congregation. The Bible, East ccrrespondent for the Toronto to do with courage. If he hadn’t spoke he thought, ws not a divine text but one Telwmm and from his pulpit, Slonim out, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep written over many years by inen trying to hammered away at this point. He casti- at night. To those who argue that it’s understand the meaning of life. Slordm gated Israel’s ~cducatlc&l system for wrong for him to wash Jewry’s “dirty Line”” in public, end that he mereIy pro- Alarandrian geographer Ptolemy. with vides anti-Semites with more emmuni- cotwztions and a commentary, and only such well-l&v” historia”.& W.J. tion, he replies: “History tells me that afterwards did he issue his modern maps and Conrad Heidenrrich mingle, for eontrwmy did not undermioe either of Europe, embodying the lrnowledge of example, with J.H. MeAndrew. en Judaism or the Jewish people; only his own age of explorations and expaod- expert on spdent pollen deposits. fanaticism and indifference did.” ing knowledge. The volume is dedicated to the munory If Slonim were an American or an The fmt volume of the Hisrorhrl Allap of Harold Adenu Innis and Andrew HsU Israeli, he x&Id have had little difficulty of Gmada is very much in this greet Clark. It extends both Clark’s pioneer fmdi a publisher and a” audience for humanist tradition, which saw the earth work in Canadian historical geography his book. Jews in the U.S. and Israel are as the home of mankind and related (which was directed particularly toward “lore open to controversy than are Jew geography to the development of human the Atlantic region) and the peculiarly in Canada. ECW is to be congratulated societies. Covering the period from appropriate combination of econoti for fmdiog the courage to publish this prehistoric time.5 to 1800. it is the excel- and &mmudcatio”s by which Innis doci- remarkable book. It deserws whle reader- lent beginning of a” smbitioos work in dated Canada’s special mixture of brief shlo. 0 three volcmep; the second will cover the historical time and what Mackenzie Kiog 19th century, and ti third will address described as “too much geography” - the 243th. a superabundance of slowly inhabited This is not the first Historical Atlas cf space. Canada. The same title WBO used for an The book is divided into six broad atlas published by the Geographica sections dealing with prehistory. the Branch of the Depamnent of Mines and AUaoticreabn. inland exp+?km. the St. Technical Surveys in 1927. Another, A Lawrence settlements, the Northw~, end Iiislorical Ath cf Gmada, was spon- Canada in 1800. These me introduced by soredbytheCa”adia”HistoricalAssocia- leogthyhistorical essays, which constitlue tion, put together by D.G.G. Kerr, and a v@ good basic gee-history of Canada Illistoricd Atlas ef Caaads, Volume I: published by Thomas.Nelson in 1960. before the arrival of Bwopeans and dur- From the Eeginning lo 1000, edited by R. Having the ki”d of mind that rrachea con- ing their fust phase of penetration. Cole Harris, Unitily of Tomoto Press, cepts through visoalizatio”, I have beeo Within the sections maps and charts with Ulustrated, 216 pages. S95.00 cloth (ISBN potting it to constant use over the past mdaoatow notes end incide”tal dmwi”gs 0 so20 2495 5). quarter of a ce”h”y. But Kerr’s atlas is a modest affair in movements of peoples, the availab%y of HISTORY uws in the interval between comparison with the present volume, resourfes. the patterns of trading. time and space, which is why from the which merits wnsideratio” in the corn- I have no idea what the editors inrend beginning it has bee” Linked to the mak- pa”y of such nmjor ventures as the to do when they reach the age of photo- i”g of “laps., The first of all the great Dicfiormy of Gmdian Biography, the graphy, but in this volume they seen~ to historians, Hecataern Of Miletos. wrote Canadian hkyclopedia, sod what we acknowledge that, in dealing at least in. in the sixth century B.C. his Periege& a must see - now that it is virtually com- part with an era of good draftsmanship histOriCO-geOgIephic desCtipti0” Of the plete - as the remarkable xhievement and fm eng_raving, it is appropriate to be known world from which hi successor of the 19-volume cumulative history of content with the techniques of the time. Herodotus took much of the content of Canada, the Canadian Centenary series. There are reproductions of drawings by his Hb&.v. But Hecataeus wa not con- “In 120 pages of modest format Kerr’s early topographers like Thomas Davies, tent only to v&e a pioneer work in the atlas encapsulated the whole history of fragments of early maps, end line draw- new art of prose. He also made a great Canada. The fust volume of the new ings of stone implements and pioneer map to illustrate his discoveries to his H&torical Atlas of Canada contains 200 dwllings. but there are no such jarring friends and fellow citizens. He recog”ized pages of large format (too big for most the i,“pOW Of eOn&X&ati”g historic=, bookshelves). and its successors will old buildings in the settings of today.- events and geographical data into easily obviously be no less lavish in size or History is an equivocal discipline, for assimilable visual symbols. content. ‘Clio - its muse - has her feet in the At&es, those s”thok& of maps, had The His~orlcvl Atlas of Cmada is the sa”x kind of origin. The fmt of them, admirably inter-disciplinary. with S-he depends for her survival on a co”- which gave its name to the whole socm- stant diet of data, hardly factual if possi- sion, was the great colleztion Gerardus ble and softly cofiectural if not; but she nka0r put t0g.k h the kite 16th M- flowers through the historical myths that my; it was published in London under the Gibbons or-in Canadian terms - the title Allm or a Geogr@klWcr&- tbOCICigil~~tOgiVStbOdSla~ tion ofthe FWdd. Mercator saw the Titaa struct”r~ of ,,M”ing. Books like the Atlas, represmted as bearing the heavens Hisloriml Atlas oj Gmada stand at a on his shoulders to prevent them from kbxl of creative middle point, armposting erUSh& the euth. as B symbol Of the the blossoms. They justify themselves by study of evu~ts in the cosmos and o” pmcessing facts into evocative visual earth. images through which even dull statistica Like Hecataeus, Mercator mixed beconie the material for lmagioative con- history with geography, recognizing that hiptorians. geographers, historical jecture and generslization.nd in this the earth is mast intemti”g as a stage for geographers, archaeo~ogiats, and palam- sense they serve not only as basic events in human history. The fmt section to1ogists working together to coordinare reference works for the stodmts of of his atlas was a chronology of evmts the lime of history and the space of history, hut also as inspirational sowce from the creation up to 1568 (the year geography. Its editor, R. Cole Harris, a books for those who, as historie”s or before publication). Mercator then professor of geOsaphy. has crossed the jounmJiits, or eve” novelists or poets, repmduced the maps of the lurcient frontier into history in his book The take the past as their domsin. q BESTSELLERS1

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fantastic, bristling with saggestions and ent reconclliatlon, bat Ross puIls back purzles oflea left partially or wholly un- and rev&s the greater oppression of Prlvatc and Fictionalized Words: solved. Why did Bailey give his central unaasweraple forgiveness. Czmndian Qhmen Novelists of the 1970s character the name of the-Blizabetban Less successful is “God’s Blessings.” and 1930% by Coral Ann HowUs, Ctabriel Harvey, the assodate of Edmund where Jacob is.uaempIoyed and Nancy Methum, ti9 &es. $18.95 paper (ISBI’i Spensw? What is the relation betwen Marie learns the illusions and frustrations 0 ‘l16 37650 9). Oswald Harvey. Gabriel’s father, and of paid work. The cbaracters.rare~ rise Oswald Balky, Paul’s father? Is the I&- above what they mean, aad some lines CORAL&W HOWUL~. an Australian who tion between this lamenting Oabriel and oaur exactly where expect& “‘Slut, he teaches Canadian literature at the Uolver- the Biblical Gabriel, “the brlilger of good said.” When they discover their shared sky of Reading, England, brings aunique hope,” mereIy ironic? How far can he dream of owning land is less powerful perspective to the work of II writers, continue the stated ralation between than the reality of their children, the including Magaret Laurence. Margaret Gabriel and John Keats? (I pass over the reader feels dismissed. Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munm, refereoce to Peter Pan) .’ “The Last Day of the C&us” suggests and hlarie_CIaire Blais. These women. At the centre as narrator is Gabriel, melodrama after the opening, “There is she argues. have won recognition abmad “trying to make sense of his life,” a owmmt for choices and actions.” Lisa because their use of laaauaae and nar- masochistically dwelling on and yet mug- ai li (with “a secret lipstick and padded rative form h& prod&d a distinctive gliw to free himself fmm his two obses- bra”) p&s to run away to Mlsslssippi literature. As in all femioioe llterarv tradi- sions, that. for his father, inescapably. with Fernando, a clrcas performer. The tions. they must write their way-our of often loathsomely present, and that for focws shifts and tightens, bowever. and silence and a marglnalized perspective, his mother, his “Mummy,” physically the conclusion is a deeply felt distrust of and this sewh for visibility and identity, absent. Like so many of Bailey’s the complidty in families. Howells says, parallels the Canadian characters, Gabriel lingers on the “The Byes of the whore” be&s as a search for a cultural self-image. Their periphery of existence.. is&ted. Never- history of Clifford and Ardith told in a stories “could provide models for the’ theless, cmwdii in on him in different dead-pan style that approaches parody story of Canada’s national identity.” parts of London, where he liver and when Clifford sets himself loose in Howells is sensitive to the historical aqd Toronto. Clifford seems predl#able aad comemporary position of wnnen writers dental success if his book on itinerant contemptible until Ross bums him, and both in Canadaand abroad, and feminist preachers and its Hollywood filming. la the reader, with the corrosive nature of and nationalist ideology figure the weird academic outpost of sorg, fin- infidelity. signiflcaotly in her analysis, but she doesn’t dllcuss these issues at length. Her tria. &se varied, bftm sordid materials an earnest use of language, with lyrical main focus ls the writers and their works. are so deftly moipreased that the reader. She establishes no fuced definitions of gripped by Bailey’s inteoslty. comes to their effects, g; unnoticed. The-&ecf.s- either Canadimoess or women’s wrltlng, share bis concern and compassion for his saly narrative voice in “Images” slows celebrating i&ad these writers’ diver- characters. He is made to see and, above the developing tone, but the story sity. It’s nice to hear that from a non- all. to hear them; for Bailey’s sensitive ear recovers admirably --.FK?NCH Canadian. - MARGAaET MCORAW catches and his dialogue records the distinctive shades of voices in different localities and different generations. Gabriel’s Lament, ah& compassionate, Le polsot~ daas I’eau, by Cbrystlne ‘I Lament. : ev. is * strange, often puzeling mixture of Brouillet. DenoeVLacombe. 207 pages Jonathan Cape(Ha&&t Brace Jovan& realistic fact, fantasy, and comic irony. (ISBN 2 89085 017 X). vich). 331 pages, $29.50 cloth (ISBN 0 Its mnslderatioo for the Booker award is 224403823 5). quite understandable. SUE(IRS ~iwm6s is probably the most - R”PF,RT scntaDEI( highly regarded cc.lIectlon of detective fie SHORT-LISTED. ALONG with Margaret tion in French. To be chosen by its editor, Atwood and Robertson Davies. for the Michel Bernard, ls similar to winlag the 1986 Booker Prize. the English wlter Iiomeeomlag. by Veronica Ross, genre’s most important award. Cbrys!ine Paul Bailey had ah&y won the So-t Oberon Press, 93 pages, $11.95 pap- BmuiUet, a Quebec titer whose work Maugham Award. the EM. Forster (ISBN 0 88750 655 0). has not yet been translated into English, Travel Award, and the George Orwell has had her third novel published lo Ber- Memorial Prize. The inclusion of ST. oENE”tEVE. the settitl8 fO1 the-s.5 Se”.?” nard’s series. Brouifiet is the first Catia- Gabriel’s Lament. Bailey’s fifth ficti&, stories, is a Nova Scotia tovm bound by dian writer to be granted this distbxtJon, on the Booker list is not surprising, for “rules that shaped not only behaviour but and it is well-deserved. the judges have frequently sbovm a thought as well.” The title is a play oo words: P&son predeliction for the unusual. The 1984 In “HOmso~ Jay retants from is “fsh”;poison & “poison.” Theliteral selection of Anita Bmoker’s 8rey little Toronto twhls father’s death-bed, His translation is therefore “Poison~ln the Hotel du Lac w less typical than ibat sister’s small rebellion consists of smok- Water.” In spite of the title, there Is no of 1985, Keri Hulme’s TheBonePeople, ing, although pregoant, five cigarettes a certainty as to whetha Julie-Anna, . a choice that just may have been in- day. As the story unfokls. Jay cataIogues dmvmcd in a pond on a Quebec& sum- fluenced by her Maori blood. childhood oppression, ending with&s mer, has been poisoned. Two people Gabriel’s Lament is certainly unusual, flight, 12 years earlier. The story claim to have committed the murder. a mlxtture of the solidly realistic and the acting alone: Julie-Anne’s husband

__ .- -. ... -..- .~...-.T-i~i7-n .A - _..w,-.-.~.y- .~._ -:y,-._.--7 ..i-z..z-e...> - .--_..- ._ - .-.. _.a..._ . ._--- _ Mathieo and hi sister Emma, each plained, pethaps, by the availability of boasting of the mime in en incestuous two diffetent audio cassettes of excerpts correspondence that echoes Laclos’s Les From the book. Images loom large of but- LiakomDatwre~. But was it murder? tons marked Fast Fonverd and Erase. Julie-Am&s-sister Plore believes it was. The cassettes, however, may lack the and takes her suspicions (and the in- dedication page of the book, with its 91 crlminatlng letters) to inspector Maud citations including: Dick Clark, old Pepsi Graham. Graham ten find no proof of bottles, Wll (just back From Califor- either MatbIeo or.Emma’s guilt. and “la), end every player on the Toronto begins to suspect Flare’s motives. Maple Leafs, old and nnv. Through a whole school of red herrings, Jane Butler ls not mentioned. Inspector Graham at last snares the troth. The book is lllusttated. Drawings-in- The .story is both ingenious and wll- cluding ones captioned “The American written, though at times the author’s girls actually F&ted” and “I’ve seen Fondness For pans distracts From the Paul’s balls” - are by John Boyle. tightness of the plot. Curiously, in spite Dennis Tourbi” was born in 1946. of the blurb at the beck of the book (“A -o.pRENCH rarely used setting: Canada”). the world of Julie-Anne and her Family is un- Familiar. It has en almost deliberate Telling the Tele, by Robin Skelton, enlvetsallty, a lack of local mlour, which Porcupine’s QulIl. 166 page% 39.95 paper readers seldom miss, but which in this (ISBN 0 88984 100 4). case wooId have edded to a more intimate The Pattot Who Could, by Robin lnowledce of the characters. Nothlne. Skelton, Sono Nis Ptess. I64 pages. $9.95 not even-the Food Brooillet’s chara& paper (ISBN 0 919203 73 8). eat (and certainly not the wine they drink -but who can blame them) is Canadian, ROB,N SKELTON. the Irish-Canadian poet, and an~iorrcl. any Ouebecoip expressions anthologist, and essaykt, has two new one v&Id &cith-em to “se, have bee” books of short stories on offer this meticuloosly avoided. season. Or, mote precisely, he has one But this is a minor quibble. Lepoimn new one and one nearly new one. The new dam I’eau stands on its own merits as e one is 77~ Pcrrror Who Could. his second “I have w&en this book thomughly good thtillet. and the device collection, and the “early “ew one is because I w&h to speak d@ectiy the plot hbtges on is worthy of any OF the Tang Ihe T&,x collection of24 stories, to PEOPLE. . . to address the best writers in the Field. one-third of which ate taken Fmm The - ALBERM MANO”Et. Man Who Sang In His Skep, Skelton’s citizens &the world direct&. . . first book of s.tories, published in 1984 about matt2rs that concern us but now out of print. all. . . They know, as I know, The Port Dolhowde Stories, by Dennis Sk&on has long had an interest in the thatfirst and&emost we all Toutbin, Coach House Press, I76 pages, occolt. end all of the stories in Telling the $12.50 papa QSBN 0 88910 313 5). Tale deal in one way or another with the share the&te oJthe planet, We supernatural. They ate not exactly ghost MiXTcummunicate, we mast THE BACK OF The Fvrt Dalhousie Slorier stories, although ghosts do figure in one face our problems in a spin2 OJ has a” illustration of two young men or two OF them; rather they are stories of sitting at a table. One, head down, is ordinary people who suddenly come up cooperation rather than apparently passed out. The other is against strange occortences For which host&y. . . a dialogue must be vomiting copiously. Call this Truth in there is no rational explanation. started, and this book is my Advertising. Doppelgsnser~. possession, telekinesis The Port Daihowie Stories is not. in - these are some of the unaccustomed conb&&on-my thozgh& my fact, a collection of stories. This reversal happenings that plague thecharacters in hopes. my plans. ” OF expectations is the most amusing Telling the Tale. A house-sitter finds that Feature of the book, which is also not a the owner’s stuffed dog has animate pro- novel. This is a collection of ill-shaped perties, * newlywed me” si”g3 opeta solos anecdotes delivered in a relentlessly self- in his sleep, a man has “his Funny bone * indulgent style, to wit: ‘YHuey Forest] knocked out of true” so that he laughs eventoldntethat.laoeButlerhadhalron at the tragic and cries over the comic io ‘an international her chest and that she Fatted when Larry Life. *publication Forgo wes about to !& het good night Some OF the tales are quite chilling, 6% x 944.256 pages. $27.95 after walldng her home From a dance!! others are hilariously absurd, with a hint Can you imagine that??? Jane Butler of of Italo Calvin0 about them. They all all people!1 FARTINGII I !” Follow the same genetal pattern though, The jacket blurb refers to “the row- so a certain sameness begins to creep in. ing sensibilities of a teenaged boy.” All are frst-person narratives and all end Early on. the narrator informs us. “I with a wry twist that reveals the story in reeUy like [port Dalhoosie] and I’m going a new light. to tell you why.” The next paragraph, The stories in The Parm Who Could without noticeable interruption, b&s, follow this patter” as well, but osoally “As I was saying. . . .” The suggestion without the para”ormal paraphenelia and that time might not be contlnoow is ex- with more mixed results. Again. they ate all first-person narratives - usually Sinclair spun a good many yams over his self-image is destroyed wvhm he “fad someone describing a strange incident the years, and Young putsmany of these well into the mbmr/where my face goes from his life over a glass of beer in a bar straight, dispels others, and reveals the up in smoke.” - and qol” each has a” 0. Henry-style darker sides of his subject. Irascible but Considering that Bnelish is his second ending. There are some truly wonderful lovable to a vast and loyal audience, in language, Tru

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sequel is instructive too: the word from from this pre-dclugc opulence, through Britain is that under the privately owned the defiant, clandestine high jll of her and phenomenally profitable Britlsb set in the revolution’s early days, to the Telecom the telephone system is worse nerverack& games of hidbandseek she than ever. as well as costlier to the user. was eventually forced to play with the The two bllert corporations in new regime’s morality squads and theii Canada, other than baoks and trust com- ubiquitous informers. prudes, are Ontario Hydm and Hydm- Widowed, and at odds with her ho.+ Qu&ec; in fact, of the 15 biggest, eight band’s fundamentalist family over his wi8 are crown corporations. four provincial and the custody of her young son, she and four federal. It’s often said that the managed to bluff and wheedle her way enormous part played by publicentupdse out of a medieval prison for wyward in our economy is a long-standing and women, where one of ha peawnt cell- basic element of Canadian m&y, one of mates was destined to be executed, after those characteristics that distinguish us givhtg birth, for the crime of having been from the Amuicans and are therefore to raped. Finally, Azadi underwent “Shields’ characters are so be cherished. Walter Stewut shows that appalling hardship, physical and psycho- tbis isn’t so: the great proliferation of exquisitely crafted and her plot crown corporadons is relatively recent. son so artfully conceived that it He also shows that the really enduring Turkey. keeps the reader rivetted until the tradition, set by MaEdonald and the CPR, Despite the book’s often pedestrian final page . . . joyful proof that style, and its ultimately rather unsym- CanLit needn’t be dull to be prise with money a;ld the &trepr&eurs pathetic heroine, it is impossible not to edifying.” - Globe d: Mall make off with it. The famous names of be caught up in the sheer drama of Cl&tone, Bricklln. and Corn&y-Chance Azadi’s tale and impressed by her “More than her vmy with bear witness to this. tmnsfonnation from an impulsive Persian structure or her mastery of Stewart’s book ls a valuable record of deb to the steely, rexwmful. and daring literary forms . . . it’s Shields’ a few moderate -ses and many hair- woman she had to become to ensure her portrayal of her characters that raising horror stories. At the end he pro- own, and her son’s, survival. makes the book.” - Books In poses a series of sensible steps toward a - ANNE DENcloN Canada solution - which do not include Thatcherite wholuale privatization. 1 stoddalt wish he or an editor had curbed his in- Maple Leaf I@: Travels Across 0 Eessant facetiousness; the storks he tells Csnada. by Stephen Brook, Collins. 310 are quite fmmy enough without it. If I pages. $24.95 cloth (ISBN 0 00 217887 7). may conclude with the one obvious joke he fails to make, they show that we have “HOW DO PE0Pt.a ruppolt themselws a wry mixed economy indeed. here?” asks Stephen Bmok. British - I.M. 0wBly author of Maple L&Rag. The local pub owner answers: “WelI, everyone’s a carp&te.r. And the rest are either rcdred or unemployed - those are the two Out of Iran: A Womao’s Escape from major occupations on Gabriola.” the Ayatollahs, by Sousan Azadi with Anyone who has spent time on Thfs intensely personal accolmt of Angela Ferrante, Irwin. 327 pages, 824.95 Gabriola Island, B.C., will reco.@e the Gabrielle Roy’s first 30 years is a cloth (ISBN 0 7725 1667 7). inherent troth of this exchange. Brook deeply moving portrait of a young exhibits a keen eye for detail throughout woman’s search for a purpose... SOUSAN AZ&XI is the pseudonym of a his travels in Canada, and his observa- and a voice. former member of the westernized Ira- tioos are cogent and accurate. But the “No French-Canadian writer has nian elite. and this is the story of her life most delightful aspect of Maple LeqfRag ever touched the hearts of so many before, during, and after the fundamen- is that Bmok is willing to rl& well-argued people across Canada.” Moclearl k talist Islamic revolution there. Anyone opinions on many Canadii issues, such looti for elucidation of the political as free trade, native self-govemmen~ and and religious roots of that cataclysm will Quebec’s language laws. In the cultural probably be disappointed, but, as the domain, he ykcc a stab at an artistic book’s subtide indicates, this is merely atsoclation that many consider sacredz “I one individual’s story, and it does pro- vide interesting glimp.w of the vanished vases-of the and world of traditional privilege into which most rewed painters, the Group of Azadi was born, as well as the enhb Seven. I did not like what I saw.” Yikesl prenewial ostentation into which she Brook displays the eonlidence of an @ricfly) married. imno&t, and doesn’t pull his punches Since she claims descent from the pm even at the cost of sIlghtIy bruising the Pahlevi dynasty, she had no exaggerated national ego: “There is a bovine quality respect for the late Shah and his en- to Canada that at times I found acutely tourage, althougb her fmt husband’s new depressing. Cosy, acqoicxcnt, quick to wealth as a construction magnate appar- complain but slow’to act, Canada can ently came, *t least indirectly, from royal scemsomnolent,arrhoughsedatedbythe patmnage. Her account leads inexorably awesomeness of its landscape.” Yet he

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does show an appreciation of Canada, tions on the I-MI’S Angds. good looking pussy. They always find sometimes at tie most surprising times. But this book is nol the deftitiw book another hole to till the gap.” While visiting Winnipeg, he vennres on on the bikers. It is, unfortunately, a book Lavigae’s deliberately outrageous, ba- a riverboar cruise: ‘I. . . the cupolas of where style often overwhdms substance. pressioaistic, pseudo-beat style may draw Ihe Greek Orthodox church rose behind In fact. it is written in a vulgsr, prelea- a cult following from certain dements of the trees. and the sky was subtitled by the tious style full of gratuitous and strained the counter-culture crowd, but it will not red and blue “eon of another local land- sexual metaphors that fmquemly berome succeed on its journalistic merits. To “se mark, the Carlblg O’Keefe brewery. This the content. For example, here is how the author’s word. if all the shit could be Caribbea” cruise through the cold waters Yvea Lavigne., a GlobandMailreporler, edited auf, this book might become a of Manitoba was anomalous but nol describes attempts u) fEht the growing useful and informative mpod on the absurd. : . .” Perhaps this, a Caribbean power of the bikers: “Fiihiing the Hell’s Hell’s Angels. their allies, and the threat theme cruise on the Red River, best illus- Angels is like trying to rid yourself of a they pose to society. As it stands, Hell’s trates the Canadian mosaic as en- dose of the dap -you can use copious Angels: Taking Care of Bmimss raises countered by Brook on his cioss-coun~ry amoiu~ts of peaicillin but you won? shake more questions rhan it answers. journey. - TIM cxA&mEaLAIN it unless you also stop fucking the bitch who gives If fo you.” The shock value here outweiabs the effectiveness of the analogy. Hell’s Angels: Taking Care of In a dmota frivolouslv entided “P”ssY The DIscoverv of the TItanlc. bv Dr. Business, by Yves Lavigae, Dmeau, illus- Galore,” &igae adopt; tbe bikers’ v& Robert D. Ball&l, Penguin, ill&t&d, trated, 344 pages, $2295 cloth (ISBN 0 of women: “Women take up with the 230 pages, $39.95 cloth (ISBN 0 670 88879 162 3). Hell’s Angels for the same reason flies are 81917 4). - THIS ACCOUNT OF rhe aclivides of the need a warm place to smy, others fed safe THE JACYET~OF this book sports a Hell’s Angels across North America, in the crowd. . . . Horny bitches want painting of the l%mic’s majestic bow, complete with grisly pictures and shock- endless cock every way it comes. . . .‘I eerily washed by the light of a robor ing anecdotes. should have been the long Throughout this chapter, Lavigne ap- submersible.. This mixmre of mystery and awaited journalistic book. on criminal parently tries to shock, but only succeeds high-tech wizardry is rhe perfect bikers in North America. Hitherto. we in enraging. Women are treated as mere metaphor for The D&covey of the have had only Cecil Kirby’s account of sex objects by the bikers and the reporter. limdc, Robert Ballard’s record of his his years with the Satao’s Choice (in his The chapter ends with an authorid obser- 198.5 expedition to the doomed Iii’s icy 1986 book, witlen with veteran U.S. vation all too typical of Lavigne’s insen- grave. journalist. Tom Renner, Mu& Assassin) sitivity: “The Hell’s Angels, though they Most accounts of rhe 7ilmi& fatal and Hunter Thompson’s various rumiaa- voyage indulge our ghoulish fascination

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FW3licEnterptieinCanada JEANNE KIRK LAUX and MAUREEN APPEL MOLOT Canada serves as the case study in Laux and Molot’s fascinating study into the entry ofwestern democracies into commercial state enterprises. Instead of m&ely ensuring conditions for private investment by regulation, Canada became both an investor and producer of goods and services. Since global competition’increas- ingly affects production, financing, and vulnerability to changes in the world economy, the government seeks to balance policy objectives and fiscal restmint. The authors look upon recent “privatization” of industry not as a dismantling of state enterprise but as a fine-tuning of state capitalism. Must reading for every Canadian interested in his government. O-8014-20%2 cloth $37.50 272 pages 0-5OW9469-9 paper $11.95 with disaster and tragedy. While no ex- The essential statemenr of the book is ception, Ballard’s is no armchair ramble. about tbe liberal concerns of the jour- Inslead, we’re thrown into a world of nalisl and rhe violence of Arthur, The high adventure and marine geology. journalisr consrautly recites the past Happy schoolboys, Ballard and his ml- iniquities by whites throughout the leagues revel in the rechnological glm- Americas Lo see if justification can be mickry and make no apologies for the found for the apparenrly psychopathlie edited by scientific showmanshio of their revenge inflicted by Arthur. expedition. It seems like a worthy considemtion, Marshall Lee The D&COWY of the Timnic is a of rhe sort posed by Che Guevara when crowded and v& b&y book. The text is he said. “There are no *innocent detailed but crjsp. Above a$ this is a rich bystanders in a war of revolution.” Bul and varied pliotographic extravaganza. in the process of exploring the unanswer- There are lots of ghostly black-and-white ableness of the problem, Kelly fells into stills of the Titanic, gliimpsa into the life Ihe same traps that seem (0 ensnare all c < of the rich and famous on that ill-fated narratives about Indians. voyage. There is stunning photography of The basic pattern of the “Indian the dives to the ocwn floor and of the novel” follows a white in starch of per- 7itanic’s broken skeleton. Wonderfully sonal or national identity who turns to detailed, and imaginative diagrams and native peoples for assistance, whether artwork further buuress the text. A final because of some holistic mysticism Umt . section neatly juxtaposes the 7itanic as it is aurlbuted to them or because they are wss in 1912 and as it rest6 now. rhe truly indigenous peoples. Hi/her II is an unbeatable story. There is interaction with them takes the form of ’ -- plenty to grab the most casual browser, a journey into the wilderness, OR& with and more than enough fo satiate those a subplot that emphasizes Indian sssocia- 1 otherwise normal souls obsessed by the tion with and white alienation from the Tklmic’s VOYWS. - B.K. ADAMS land. In this process. certain qualities and abilities are shown to be buriuslc pahs of native peoples. Sexuality and violence are often in Ihe foreground, as is mysticism, The imp0 which usually is presenred in connection with a deep understanding galned through dream oral tradition, acclaimed BI far superior to the superficialities provided bywriting. By Terry Goldie Most comemporary works are very positive about these elements of Indian- ERTE at NINETY FIVE A Dream Like Mine, by M.T. Kelly. ness, unlike many 19th~century texts. 163 works represent the magnificenl Stoddart. 160 pages. $19.95 dolh (ISBN which considered them to reveal the hallmarks of Erie’s style. 0 7737 2161 4). inferiority of such primitive peoples. In- ION x 13Y& 192 pages chrono@J’, stead, the coniemporary shows them to index $111.00 cloth SOMS TME AGO. M.T. Kelly’s name be an ideal vision, that “dream like began to appear on reviews of various mine.” books about Indians. His persona was Kelly’s Dream might be reed as a eon+ ERTE at NINETY quite consislent: someone of liberal sym- ment on how the inadequacy of rhe uar- 208 full colour reproductions of the path& concerned winith accuracy. Often rator’s nativist desires leads hi into a elegantly unforgettdble works of tlu the review was accompanied by the corn- nightmare, but the verdia can’t be so master. IOlh x 13% 223 pages. meuf that Kelly was working on a novel simple. The journalist reflects on the ab- chronology, index $136.50 cloth about native people. A Dream Like Mine surdity of many of these romantic con- cepts and Lhen the novel uses them, ERIE SCULPTURE happens when B white author obsessed apparenily unself-consciously. On en- 41 spectacular bronze sculptures with “getting it right” tries M write right countering Wilf, an old Ojibway, the himself. Can it be done? narrator laments the stereotype of the explored in full wlour. multiple Judging from this work, il can’t, but wise old man of the tribe, fount of oral views. Includes studies of 21 work not for want of trying. A Dream Like tradition. Guess whaf Wilf uuns out to in progress models. 10% x 13%. .Mine exhibits signs of being the most be? 199 pages, bibliography ardent attempt ever in white Canadian $107.95 cloth fiuztion at defeating both the racist and the romantic, those tendencies thar cloud all of us when we try to come to terms with native peoples. The plol of the novel is very simple.. A journalist with a long-standing inlerest in natives goes north to participate in B sweat ceremony. He is kidnapped by Arthur, a visiting Metis, and taken on B journey with the real focus of Arthur’s attack, Bud, a polluling indusuialisr. The novel avoids the sexual stereotype a&biography. Not that Kelly shares the -no Indian maidens floathe thrcwh - experiences of his narrator, but that he but Arthur’s violence is BI f&M, ff not shares hi confusion at how to recognize as graphic, as that in Thomas Kenealiy’s the evils of white history and yet not turn Australian novel, The Chant of Jimmie to absurd mmanticism. At how to sup- Bluc,ksmith. Lilre Kenedly. Kelly shows port native daims for redress and yet not native violence to be a res&nse io white accept the possible comllary of violent i9y M7a y di Mlohala genocide. attacks on individual whites. At how to Another element the Canadian novel create a story in which the characters shares with the Australian is the represen- represent Indimness and yet reject the Ple.&re, Pow?, an-d Chbnnge, &iited by tation of the native as remnant of the usual representations of Indians. Michael Kaufman, Oxford. 322 pages, past. Wilf seems M be a “true” Indian, A worthy fight, which Kelly fails to $17.95 paper (ISBN 0 19 540534 Xl. but even he decries the inadequacy of his win, though I suspect victory will dude life in comparison with that of his father. other battlers as well. Keneally’s novel is IN THE lNTRoD”cll0N to this cdection Arthur. a former alcoholic, sees himself no doubt a much deeper version of the of essaysMcbadKaufrnanmaksanim- struggle, but Kelly’s compares well with portal distinction between sex. which is be a psych>& mutant of miscegenation, most other works, such as Philip genetic-that is, male and female-and not an examsion of the heroic Indian of Kreiner’s A Peopk Like Us In o Place gender, which is socially constructed - past wapatbs but an example of the deca- Like This, and is far superior Lo many, that is. masculine and feminine. Too such a.9 Susan Murgrave’s The Charcod often we equate sex and gender. We too rdleits on this, however-unlike Jimmie Burners. But the final word is still very often assume that gender, like sex, is a Blacksmith, who believes that the evil that far away. biological imperative.. drives him might be his white blood. The title of The Chant 4f Jimmie Perhaps the kind of person who best In any case, the narrator. having Blacksmith lays claims to a novel that iuusuates the results of the confMon of entered the wilderness of the native and recreaies oral tradition. The title of A sexual identity with gender identity is the communed wvitb his violence. eventually Dream Like Mine seenis to hope for a transsmual. The O.&d American Dic- reLums to civilization. Like the similarly mystical ihpight, like Wilf’s dreams in the . unnamed narramr of Margaret Atwood’s novel. Perhaps such claims need to recall son emotionally fed&h&elf or Surfacing, who laps the essence through some bistmy. Our ancestors thought they herself to be a member of the opposite rhe aura of Indian rock paintings. he is had taken over the Indian land, and now sex;(Z)apemon\vhohasbaiisweryand by no means completely whole but is we find they didn’t quite make it. Our much closer than the blindly unreceptive novelists show that a friendly expropria- sexuals seem to me to be-victbus of a hunters encnunlmd in both novels. ~,ogf 0”” Indian spirit isn’t that easy culrure that polarizeJ gender differella A Dream Like Mine has the feeling of to such an extent that nobody, no man, no woman, is allowed the ruu range of suffocatingly dull, but de ViUiers says he human ~otential.The.~arelivin~ pmof that personality and sex a& not that “outsiders . . . will always do~yo; equivalent. Yet because transsexuals are harm,” and that “ti&t solidarity” is required of Afrikaners in response. tion b&we& sex and gender. they are De Villiers. an eighth-geuwation forced thmu& its lo&to the absurd con- Afrikaner, attempts to break with that solldmity in White T&e Dreaming. He is editor now of Tomnto LR, an accom- We’d rather believe that we evolved pUshed journalist who takes ah unflinch- from different species than that we are ing look at the Afrikaner people and glws persons whose secondary and sexual the world plenty of mason to hold them organs are either nude or female. Me” in low regard, apart fmm their oppms- sion of South Africa’s black majority. which has been desiialed as fen∈ He traces the origiis of the Afriksnez tbm”&out our i”teUcstusl traditions. As spirit to early Dutch and French settlers, if m& existed outside of nature. As if who began to move inland fmm the coast they did’ not al& live in a body. The in the mid-17008 to become illiterate, patriarch is a Darth Vader who has inbred, and cmtankerow. A German replaced his vuluerable parts through travelkr among them in the 1790s tc&ology.Yetmenarrlnilu~wdbythe reported they had no taverns, played no physic&y they deny. Men too often sports, and held “o’festivals; their chief govern by their getdtds. A good exam- amusement was to congregate around a pleofthisiscitedintheessay‘wleC”It table and sing pralms. Most believed the of MawuUiiw by Michael S Kkmn& world to be flat. Their constant push for who quotes Lyndon Johnson after the isolation came not out of a dream for a bombings of Nti Vietnsm: “I didn’t jmt new society, but out of a hatred of scmwHoChiMinh.Ic”thispeckaofr stmngers and an insistence, even after AU the men writing in this book seem Abolition. on ensasing slaves to do all the to agree that eve masculinity i! a work. The laager, or circling of the problem for our species and our world. These essays point out how often the b&an a practical necessity fo; languaBe of militarism is couched in migrating settlers; it evolved into a cob sexual terms. Herman Kahn of the U.S. lective state of mind. Strategic Air Command coined a word, De Villiers’s book is mainly a history uwg”.vn, for all-out ““clear war. that of South Africa aimed at revealing the “org&ic spasm of destruction,” which origbx of apartheid. It is a timely sludy. Brian B&en bi “Patriarchy, Scientists, providing valuable baxkground to today’s and Nuclear Warriors” calls the most newcasts. but it suffers from Ids inabiity obscene word in the BngUsh language. to create a sense of place. or breathe Life And this is a probable end for us all, into characters. or bring out drama in wargosm. if we continue to deny that events. De Villiers adds a pasonal dimeu- nature and the feminine am an essential sion by working his ancestors into the “altof”saU. 0 story, but they don’t come alive either, . and sometimes only interrupt the flow. . The closest brush the family had with great makers of history seems to be the time his grandfather gave bully beef and Mscuits to Winston Church& when ChurchiU was a war corrwondent taken prisoner by the Boas. The “white tribe” of the title ref&to By John Qoddard an argument de ViUias pouts forward that anyonew&ing:ounderstandAf?ikanexs White Tribe Dremuing: Apsrlheid’s should no Iom?er think of them as Eum- Bitter Roots, by Marq de VUUers, Mac- pean colonists-but as indigenous Africans millan, 420 pages, $26.95 cloth (ISBN 0 behaving tribally in an ageold competi- 7715 9530 1). tion for land and rcsourcc(. The argu- ment is more a catchy idea than an ON A IUSB outside Bloemfontin, South anthropological thesis, and it’s one that Africa, stands a simple stone obelisk is bound to offeud Afrikaners, for the know” as the Women’s Monument. It is suggestion that they have descended into dedicated to the more than 27,000 tribalism, and black tribes, for the sug- Afrikmw women and children said to gcrtion that all tribes are parauoid, have died in British concentration camps xenophobic, and imperialistic. The during the Boer War of 1899-1902, and “&earning” of the title appears to be a Maq de ViUias remembers standing whimsical afterthought, for in the text de before it as a schoolboy once a year to Villiers argues that Afrikaners are not pay tribute. The memorial service was dmauurs, but brutes. 0 tioned: Canada Is Us Now (NC Press. 1576) and Other Voices (Williams- Wallace. 1986). A Shape&Fir% howev&, .surpasses both in the quality of its selections. Dabydeen points out that “writing, of course. is a significant part of Caribbean heritage; since the 1950s the re8ion’s 5y AIb0ffo Mmguel authors have steadily been makin8 a name for themselves in the United Kingdom A Shapely Fire: Chaaging the Literary and jpewhae; the imaginative vigour has Landscape, edited by Cyril Dabydeen, since 8mw” by leaps and bounds, and Mosaic Press, 175 pages, $24.95 cloth authors like the Naipaols, Dazk Walcott, (ISBN 0 88962 345 7) and $12.95 paper and B.R. Braithwaite are now respected (ISBN 0 88962 344 9). worki-wide.” Dabydeen does not attempt to deft this writing, a task that would u~~tunnta. NOT OVX~AP”Y. deter- seem impossible. The diversity of voice, mines a country’s landscape. Geography theme, and world view eaemplified by the may insist that the landscape of Canade . ubiquitous V.S. Naipaul and his laser- consists of mountains, lakes, \;ast empty read brother, the far better writer, Shiva frozen spaces, and a string of cities Naipatd, would invalidate any attempt to huddled up near the U.S. border, but blanket their work. And that in Trinlda- literature places these props a8ainst a ‘&an writin8 alone. Once we begin to ex- historical backdrop that ranges from plore the literatures of the other islands, THE FUN HOUSE Presbyterian 8IaVeya& to fogBy Czech the futility of the attempt becomes dear. bii hearted cartoons acknowledge streets. Literature revise the cliches of Curiously enough, Dabydeen’s book - that gmwing up is a time of hiih geography, the poStcm’d truth of Canada, consis@80fstories,Poems~andoneplay an&y. and constantly enriches the land with new - proves that a certain sunilarity does 6 x 9.128 pages. $10.95 paper and foreign memories. After Timothy become apparent when these writers come Findley, the First World War is a Cana- to share a common ground. Perhaps it is dian war; aftez George Faludy, Josef Canada’s histotical barrenness, its fairly EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD Skvorecky, and Brian Moore’s most tedious history of treaties and acerbic commentaries on love, sex recent novel, the fate of Eastern Europe agreements. that provokes in the and romance. is also the fate of Canada; after Bharati newcomer a sense of daring, a wish to 6 x 9.96 pages, $11.95 paper Mukherjee and Rohinton Mistry. It$ia is speak out, to break “the silence of these also a Canadian setting. wide open spaces” that, in a vastw con- BIG FUNKY YBAR CALENDAR Either as the playground of northerners text, frightened Blatse Pascal. 1988 (witness Susan &v&n’s early stories and The short-story section in A Shapely Put 1988 into proper and funky plays such as Theatre Parse Muraille’s Fire is irreproachable, combining well- nersoective with Barry’s hllatious O.D. on Paradise) or. more powerfolly, known names with undeservedly as the remembered country in the work negkctcd ones. CleaMt and most oritial &&ts and helpful &a. of writers who have emigrated here, the among these voices are two: Austin 12 x.12.26 pages. $13.95 vast conglomerate of islands, with dif- Clarke (“his place in Canadian ferent languages. histories. and futures. literature.” says Dabydeen, “is wdl- that we call the Caribbean is today as established and needs no tXWUUtiin8”) much a part of Canada’s literary and Gerard Etienne. geoflaphy as the Yukon. In faa, there Clarke, born in Barbados in 1932, iS has probably been more written in npresented by “Give It a Shot,” a story Canada, in the past few years, about fmm When Women Rule. As are most of the stories in A Shapely Fire, “Give It a Shot” is the ticription of a conflict, in this case between a bureaucrat of Scot- tish descent and a Jamaican immiSraut. But their bloodlines are almost aleatory: what matters is the kind of characters they are, and how they try to fmd in those bloodlines reasons for theii petty and intimate tragedies. B&me, who aoigated from Haiti and noiv lives in Moncton, N.B.. writes in French. From his novel Une femme muettg (“A Dumb Woman”) Dabydeen Jamaica (for instance) than about has s&ted the fti chapter, in which a Whitehorse. woman goes fmm voodoo rites to the rites Cyril Dabydeen’s anthology, A Shape/y of a modem hospital. The conflict is Fire, is strong evidence of this. As Daby- described with iot&cnce and demce, deen says in his introduction, there have shifting easily from one mythology to been several such anthologies in the past another. Some of the merit of [hi text decade, two of which deserve to be men- must surely be due to the translator. ..-.. _. _ ._~.___.._ __ .,.. -- --_-..~.I-~.--_ .._ ..____ _ . _

i whose name, alas, is not acknowledged. as iU-moddered. poorly drafted, unwork- S~ltatsbewaIl WriteM/Meb7 The poetry section is less unanimously able, Draconian, end probably in breach cohk Inrlivihd Retreats sucaxsN. The selected poems vary enor-. of our Charter of Rights. The Senate now e mously, from the very accompliihed to is holding up passage of that bill just as 19iwxl the jingles. Claire K. Harris, Ab@r- the government is pressing partage of Bii e held in three serene. picturesque Rahman Slade Hop&insoa, Anthony C-55, legislation reforming the refixgee locations where you can WorK Phelps (the latter in a superb translation determination process, which also has NIlIIOUI: distraction. $40 per week by Colette Pratt) are extraordinqry. The been denounced by the non-govemment covers the cost of meals and quality of an anthology can be measured organizations concerned with r&p. accomodation. by what it reveals; if that is the case, my These two timely hooks thmw light on - enjiiyment of A Shapely Fim owes much the issues and document the darkness St. P&s Abbey to the revelation of these three underlying them. Victor Malarek’s jour- Eelmy June 4 -July 30 distinguished poets. nalistic indictment provides accessible and Individual retrests throughout the yssr The stories, poems, and Roderick neededbackground to the government’s deadline ler application April 1. 1986 Walcott’s short and powerful play, Cui- bungling on immigration and refugee Fort %n, E&o V&q d&a, included in this volume prove policy. Reg Whitaker’s scholarly book is colony FebruarylW7 beyond doubt (if pmof was still necec a detailed account. going back to the appllcallgn deadlina December 1. 1997 sary) that w Cariibean literary contribu- Second World War, of the bias and in- tion to Canada has been both slroag and competence of the seanity setvim as they EEo3l.h fruitful. The subtitle Dabydeea has affect immigration. mlDnyJuly90-Augustl4 chosen for his anthology. changing rhe For Malarck, a central concern is’ applicaion deadline April1.1988 Lirem~Lcmdsnrpc, is continned by the racism. For Whit&w. the mntimdng texts themselves. To the eclectic back- theme is the bogey of antispmmuaism. grounds that have appeared in whatever In both accounts, a bumbling bureau- it is we call “Canadian literature,” the cracy and poor political leadership create Caribbean witers have added a world of a disastrous combination. For more information write: islands, immigrant seasibSities, racial There is nothing more fundameatal Saskatchewan Writers/Artists questions, and colonial politics that has than a society’s prindples sad policies to Colony already left its mark on the Canadian detexmlne who can and who cannot imagination and. we hope, has succeeded become its members. In Canada. those c/o Box 3986 in making Canada more universal. 0 policies have, for much of our history. Re;i;gSaskatchewan been dominated by -w self-interest, exploitation. and racism; less .ofFn. (30s) 7!5-6910 fairness, genemsity, end humenitanamsm have been the dominant elements guiding our decision-makers. With the country’s birth rate declining, now is the time when the need to main- tain and expand our population should By Howard Addman combine with humanitarianism to deter- mine our immigratioa and refugee policy. Haven’s Gate: Canada’s Immigration But Malarek cbnteads that political in- DOCUl’&NTARY Fiasco, by Victor Malarek, Macmillan. competeace, widespread public ractsm, THEATRE 256 pages, $24.95 doth (ISBN 0 7715 and the determination of civil servants to IN BNGLISH 949l 6). control the levers of decision making have CANADA Double Standard: The Secret HIstory turned immigration policy tntn a public of Canadian Immigration. by Reg farce for Canadians and a personal Alan Filnvod Wbitaker, Lester & Orpea Denny, 320 tragedy for would-be immigrants and pages, SZZ.95 cloth (ISBN 0 88619 172 6). refugees. ~&caUyinspiredby a Malank draws attention to the report distinctive community or CANADA H_W PROVUIED a haven for a of en audit team that found the depart- a politicA issue, coUactiva half-million refugees since the Second ment of immigration lackingin controls, plays are created through World War as well as for millions of direction, and common standards. It a process that begins immtgrants. But for many, the process of reveals unsatisfactory service, obsolete with a group of actors re- getting here, or of obtaining Iaaded- technology, and a disttibution of per- seardring a specific issue immiint status once they have arrived, sonnel bearing no relation to the geo- or community, and ends has been hell. Those are the lucky ones. graphieal areas from which immigrants with a performance aimed For them, hell was a transition period and and refugees come. Behind the chaos are at a specitic audience. not a pemmpent state. politicians ivho dither and pontificate, some of the works thus This summer fhe House of Commons promise and fail to produce. They intro- was recalled to deal with the “emer- duce legislation ostensibly to prevent created represent the gency” of refugee arrivals following the “queue jumping,” while in reality they most popular plays ever landing of 174 Sikhs on the shores of reward the queue-jumpers and place staged in Canada; among Nova Scotia Bill c-S& legislation 10 deter obstacles in the way of legitimate them are the six studied the spontaneous arrivals of refugee refugees. Afghans, for instance, who in this volume. claimants into Canada, was rammed make up almost half the world’s refugee a0ths30.00, pk3pers14.95 through Parliament arter a committee population, get virtually no awes.6 to the heard expert witnesses and concerned system, while people who claim to be groups denounce the proposed legislation entrepreneurs and investors get preferen-

_ .-...*_ .,._ . ,_ _,.. i.. . __. _. ~__, _-.-_.-.. ._ tial treatment, st much greater adndnik same tragic tale. He uses it to set off his found its fullest e.xpn%sion in its a&ides tratirr cost, without any check on major theme, implybtg that the tragic in immigration and citizenship, where whether they carty oat their promises. delay was not just B matter of bureau- entire groups of people could be walled Molarek reveals confidential docu- cratic incompetence, as Malarek soggests, off from the benefits of the normal ments that make it apparent that but has much deeper, more sinister roots: restraints that liberal democracy exercises administmtive measures were introduced Canadian links with other, right-wing to deter Guatemalans and Salvadorcans security seivices. His thoroughly jistice and procedural -fairness were from making refogee claims while the documented account gives support to mocked by arbitrary power, and where govemment allowed illegitimate Por- speculation that it was the delay for the state could’pursoe its discretionary tuguese claimants to clog the system. He security checks and documentation that course in dark and silent corridors unlit recounts the story of Be&z Barrios Mar- tipped off the right-wing death squads by publicity and unchecked by criticism.” mquin. a Myear-old Guatemalan law that mutilated and murdered Marmqoi”. This is the common theme of both student and motba of two boys, who was By contrast, one of Harold Ballard’s one of the lucky ones selected to come to hockey players was speedily snatched racism, not political inmmp&ne~, but Canado. she wes abducted, disfigured, from Czechoslovakis. clearly an oppres- the proliferation of rules and guidelines and killed before she received her exit sive regime, but not one riddled with that prevent accountability and institu- documents. death squads. tionalize arbitrary power. Refugees. Reg Whitaker’s introduction to his For Whit&r, “the national socority book, Double Standard. begins with the state, as it enwrged in Cold Wet Cpmada,

In two new novels the setting makes up for the shortcomings of the plot, but a third is best left to connoisseurs of cliche By Jan/cc Kdylt Kaeier

UssELL miwt Is not a writer; ss sex&, mindlas, guderr. and virmally and Eirr, with Charles and heir targeted Going to the Dogs (Viking/ pointtcrs - the quintusmtial ssshok.. for assassination by a combination of D Pengui”,252pages, $19.95clotb). Not just the mind but the ear boggles. Prows, IRA t”r”co*ts, and B couple of is not anovel, norevm anarrativit, In comparison with Going to t&Dogs, Brits for good measure. but rather slabs of earnest but un- David Thompson’s thriller, Broke” Thompson is less skilful et creating n inspired expository prose relieved English (Fitzbenry & Whiteside, 256 characters - his hem Martin Burke and by unconviacing dialogue. This prlges. S19.95 cloth), seems mistitled. the requisite love interest, Meagan. are book has all the intellectual and Thompson ls no Le Carrt, it’s true, but wooden indead. We ca” believe neither formal qualities of a pot of par- the man es” string bis sentences together, Burke’s transfomtation fmfn gung-ho to ridge: the stoty of brainy. super- has en astute ear for dialect as well as burnt-out terrorist “or his sodden emo- stud Billy Mackeozie’s rebellion dialogue., and is able to construct B com- tional expenditure on Meagan, simply i against and eventual escape from petent narrative. More important, he coo- because Thompson hasn’t bothered to Nugget. thedreariest of northernmining veys to the reader the hell that is Belfast make either part of his narrative - they towns, plays scratchy second fiddle to are simply don&s thrown to us in the McRae’s ranting against the North same way Belfast slang and military American educational system and his ~cronynu are pitched into the text. One celebrating of the joys of dope. can remedy the reader’s ignorance about But worse. by far. are the atrocities he gits. geas. and gos with B glossary. but co”mtits with the language. Connoisseurs one can’t do quite the same thing with of cliche and collectors of dead metaphor underdeveloped and thus unconvincing will be enraptored by passages such 8s the characters. Yet despite these shott- followbtg: comings, Bmken Et&h proves engross- under the hypnotic spdl of his mc4her’r ing reading, if not * satisfying novel.. vitriolic tongue, Billy had bee” imuxently K.G.B. Konkel’s The Glorious Bast comcrtpted into her sour and angry Wind (Randann House, 320 w. $21.95 v.wId. and in Lhat world Alex Ma&n- cloth) is also B thriller. As with Broken zie wa lix archcriminal and the favowite Eng&h, many of its merits derive from target. . . Never was she more rancidly the uue with which e convincing setting cnlertai~ or mm irresistibly hilarious is developed: the real hero of the novel tbm in benmrdmurlysccurateti~ is Hong Kong itself, which Konkel ofAleshlackemie.Sberclisbedclirhedaboveall -the routine brutality and uttdiminish- ‘&raphieaUy shows to be the best and wotst else dcrcdbi”g what a hopeless rap. what o gullible flunky, what J. bori”s drip her able suffering that daily life in Northern of *tie%. h~buldv,~.T~jobrhedidonhimwar Ireland entails. His success in creating a Konkel’s prose is often hackneyed, and beyond mere esllous mimicry. It wss an persuasive mntest for his novel makes up his plot suffers from 8” excess of corn- act of titisectio”, pornographic in the plications and characters, yet one of the clinicd purity of its espoBure* from that the entirr famdy of the Prince of compensations of this novel is the per- vzhich BiUy Mackenzie’s father emerged Wales make a tour of Northern Ireland sistence and skill with which it frustrates

,.__ ,..._ -.._ ~ . ._-,. -,.. ,.- _. - _...... z... --_--..~~-..~_-.:~ .,: ~i-;~..;::: ..y-y.. .-. . . -.. I The notion of “academic freedom” is challenged in this intriguing account of one professor’s fight against political disorimi- i nation at one of Canada’s foremost universities.

U~g-y&~ . . _ -. _ _. 79 Gmlen Skeet ISSN : O-Q20057-97-7 $14.95 Cambridge, MA 02l38 laUccr RosE aooxs(-

bool?s for lively minds Russell C. Shelton FBOMHUDSONBAY TO BOTAlVY BAY The Lost Rigates of Eaperouse A fascinating adventure in history ana QJ underwater archeulogy in the south q seas. A wonderfully entwtairiing wad. $24.95 Cloth ISBNO.919S91-23-X m Sept. 9699. 39.9:

The Blackbh-d?s Song

and relatives. Tumtcpage43 for more information. our expectations. The reader is given no letting its hem get almost everythlng he The Glorfow Bast Windis by no means one white knight or deep-dyed villain to wants at the end, The Gltiouseml Wind a marvel, and yet several of Konkel’s deal with; instead we have a host of (despite a cast of corpses that makes Act characters - most notablv the decent. variously flawed or only partially effee- V of Hamlet look like Rebecq of Stump doomed police ~o~&&s~one.r, Job; tlve heroes and an entire cast of villains bmok Farm) shows how it is the way of Cleve. and the imueccablv evil Lee Shiu ranging from the egregiously brutish to the world for the cormpt to prosper and Shing~- make it &thw& to thread the the intricately civilized. And whereas the virtuous to lose their illusions, if not novel’s labyriathine plot. No doubt it will Broken En@11 strains credibility by their very lives. make a crackerjack movie. 0

Supposedly a celebration of ‘the wisdom of J.M. Barrle,’ a new book turns the jo ous freedom of the Neverland into agrim metaphor &r death

NLIMBER OF titles in the children’s of the play, closer to Banie’s original. death, about the Neverland as a child’s Tundra launched The Btemal pelcr Pan idea of heaven. For “flying” read A %?a;;~:%?~:t~~ at the play’s opening night at the Shaw. “dying.” In The E~emai Peter Pan, this The book contalns 20 mloured line tone is set by Ebbitt Cutler’s interesting chlhiren will not find them even drawinns and etchinas bv Hudson. a but somewhat overblown intmductlon: P slightly interesting. But because Mont&l artist, a&pa&l by b;ief “Peler plrn is the Hamier of childron’s they are packaged to look like chlklren’s gift books and because for h& inspiration. The illustr&ons axe Both de&.** But it seems there isn’t any other category to intriauina and multi-lamed. Outlines of simplistic to reduce the story of Peter Pan place them in. they will be in the fa& and fores are in the foregrourid to one conceit. children’s section. And because while the contents of minds, memories, The story still has great appeal, dated 1 they have been designed to catch and dreams crowd the rest of the page. as much of its language and many of its the eye of adult bmnsers. they will likely A long time can be spent over each concepts certainly are. If has this appeal enjoy successful sales. illustration studylw and deciphering the surely because it is a stoty not just about Perhaps theshangest example this year symbolism, relating each part of each pi* dying but also about freedom, glorious of an adult book rm a popular luretothePeterPanstory.ButHudson’s freedom and independence from any children’s vehicle is The Ktemal Peter Pan colours are sombre and overall her posslbllity of adult control and restrio (Tundra. 45 pages, $29.95 cloth), which illustrations seem grim and analytical lion. But the children, although they is. the cover informs us, “the wisdom of rather than joyous and creative. exape for a little while to the Neverland, J.M. Barrie illustrated by Susan Many of the accompanying excerpts must return to the world of adults. Hudson.” It is SO years since the death fmm Barrie’s text strike the modem Ultimately they choose to return. Only of Bartie, the strange., mother-ridden little reader not as “wkdom” but as shallow Peter does not. He remains a wonderful. Scot who, to entertain some young sentiment or preciousness. “To die will romantic fllre because only he, payi- friends, created stories of Peter Pan, the be an awfully big adventure.” “No one the price of loneliness, stays free f-. magic boy \vho Lived in Kensington Hudson, although probing aad pWsentlng Gardens with the fairies. all thawmplex layers that form the free At the time. Banie was making a name wvorl&?and~ the &sttictive world. has for himself lo London as a popular writer missed the sense of joyous freedom that and dramatist. A stage version of Peter pervades the Peter Pan story and has Pan was first performed in 1904, and allowed it to live on. although some aitlcr were scornful of it, Also featuring contemporary ilbtstm- notably Max Beerbohm and G.B. Shaw, Lions of a clsssic is Quebec artist Glles it was immediately and immensely Tibo’s interpretation of Bdgsr Allao popular vvitb young audiences. Barrie Poe’s short Gothic ballad, Annabel Lee reworked and revised his play until a (Tlmdra, 24 pages, $19.95 cloth). what- printed version was finally published in evet one may think of Poe’s macabre 1923. I-Es story-book, P&r Pan in Ken- tastes, thll poem of love, death. and sington Gordcns. was published in 1906, desolate loneliness provides a wonderful followed in 1911 by P&r and Wendy. subject for Tlbo’r art. This book, in various editions, illus- He has chosen the Gas& to reDresent trated by such artists as Edmund BIam- Poe’s “kingdom by the iea.” Tite nar- pied, has always been a British,classlc. rator is a YOUDB boy fmm a fisti vlllaae enjting the same popularity as the play. ever gets over the first unfalmess.” “He who sh&s tie j-&s of explo&g 6e In North America, the story tends to be wasnevermoresbdsterthanwhenhewas seashore with a girl, Annabel Lee. who equated with Mary Martin and the stage most polite, which ls probably the truest may or may not be an imaginary mmpan- muskal or, ultimate lndlgolty, with Walt teat of breeding.” ion. They pick wildflowers, dig dams, Dii’s animated film. This season, the On this anniversary of Bartie’s death scamper through tidal pook, until their Sha\v Festival presented to North much is being made, it seems, of the ln- happiness becomes too great and heaven American audiences an “adult” version caues a wind to blow out of a cloud “killing and chilling” Annabel Lea. The Gordon Roache, explores and interprets rock and tile first “floating jube &be.” last three pictures show the boy alone, his home territory. He takes us through In the last picture. Murphy observes “that mourtting and remembering, while the Halifax from A (anchor) to Z (mom) in the iamb of the unknown dog” - agiant night sky ilhmdnates a wild and lonely a series of vibrant, energetic pabttings. fn hydrant - “is in questi”nable tasta.” sea. The skyline, the parks, the harbour, the These observations will probably mean Tibo uses airbrush technique to great nelghbourhoods of the city areexplore.d, little to the literal-minded. effect. creating a combination of smootb- but m”st important are the people who An art book that does manage to ness that seer& to glow with inner lilt fill these paintings, partiC”larly the balance a good sttory with beautiful and surreal grainy textures. In ““a children, eating fries from a chip wagon, illustrations - a book that many children lll”stratlon, the softly col”ured fgures of tobogganing &wvn Citadel Hill, cmwdbtg will like very much -is The Enchantad the boy and girl are in the foreground a boat for a harbour tmu or comparing Tapestry, a Chinese folktale retold by while behind them rises a grey, awtuious the results of a fishing expedition. Robert D. San Soucl, illustrated by Laszl” village war a harbour fdled with small Murphy the Wonder Dog (Mosaic, 36 Gal (Groundwood, 30 pages, $14.95 boats moored on shining water. In pages, $9.95 cloth) is a piece of whimsy cloth). The story has many elements of another, the “ghostly galleon” that created by artist Harold Town. Murphy universal folktales: three brothers (the cotnes to claim the body of Annabel Lee sits, small, brown, outlined in black, olda two selfish and lazy, the youngest tOwen in stark whiteness over tbe famous usually in a lower eontar in this s&s of one faithful and brave.), a perilous Per& rock, an image that fixes itself in pictures. observing the phenomenain the journey, a beautiful lady, a happy ending. the mind. These combine with an exotic setting, In A Halifax ABC (-i-undra, 30 pages, Murphy the wonder dog 06&w the fisirsi ancietu China. to give a good mixture of $14.95 cloth) another Canadian artist, walking mushmom, the fit swimming the familiar and the mysterious.

The Newfoundland Character: An Anthology of Newfoundland and Labrador Writings I A true classic of natural history. The Silent World is fdled with beauty, danger, and the advetthrre of diicovely. Jacques Cousteau is the world’s most famous underwater explorer. Through his boolrs and telwlsion shows he has bmught to everyone his undersea world.

Eaglrs of North Americs ccmbbm the best in eagle phot”gmphy throughout iUorth America with the entertaining and informative text by well-bw-ll author -esili- Candaca Savage and MARY JANE bf.ULER amtides readers a rare The first book to explore the content of Canadian television drama, Turn Up the a~~“aint&witb the two Contrast dtsctisses such shows at The species of eagles native to Beachcombers, A Gift to Last, and Seeing Things. A WC Preas/CBC Enter- ph.es Co-Publication. December/S8P.95

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88 amkl I” tanada. Hw.nmk. 1967

.,__?.j_._ i . , ..,...., _ - _,. . .._._ .,...... ~._._,~s___. : .._ ._,- T-e,.-*-_ irr: a * i . ..-y..A -. -_T.I.i . . . .. 2. -+-.s,.; Gal’s technique seems particularly circles, sliding strips, and pull-tabs to be and the Vasaloppet. Black-and-white appropriate to this story. His artwork. a used to make co~&te pop-up books. illustrations and sidebars contahdng sug- combimtio” of watercolour washes, With clear, stralghtfonvard instructions gestions For activities and extra hits of gourche. and coloured pencil. unfolds and helpful illustrations, this book should lnfonnatlon (how to make snowsnake like a” intricate and delicately textured provide Fun for childrn eager to try out tracks, a recipe For wassail punch) add to tapestry. It seems fitting that at the end some new, creative ideas. the book’s interest. of the story the enchanted tapestry Let’s Celebrate! by Caroline Parry The Polka Dot Door Activity Book, by enlarges until it becomes a real world ,(Kids Can. 256 pages, $24.95 cloth, Catherine Ripley (Stoddart. 96 pages, itself. a world that reweds good and e%- 814.95 paper) collects mom than 250 98.95 paper). is meant to be used in con- eluder evil. special days celebrated across Canada by junction with the popular TV Ontario Another kind of book will be Found ln people of different ethnic and religious series For pre-school and early primary the children’s section this season, those backgrounds. Parry takes us through the children. Some of the suggested activities that will be bought a”d mad by adults For seasons, giving information about such would probably be Fun - making music use with children. One is How to Malte Familiar holhlays as Christnw and Hall* with water-ffled bottles, For example, and Pop-ups, by Joan Irvine, illustrated by wee” and also intmduclng many not so experimenting with colours. But the Barbara Reid (IClds Can, 93 pages, 89.95 well-known celebrations, such as the de&u OF this book is so unattractive, with. paper), vzhich starts with simple pop-up Japanese Sprig Festival. Sri Lankan lines and dots (polka dots?) crowded all cards using Folded paper strips and New Year, Arbour Day, the Iroquois over the pages and smudgy, unpleasant triangles and progresses to the co~trw Strawberry Festival, the Canadian colouts, that adults and chiin will both tion of much more complicated changing National Fmg Jumping Championships, likely be put right off. q

If this were Europe, there would be 10 countries xtween Ontario and Alberta. That’s a long way to go, 2nd it’s a big gap in a cultural way’

ATHER~NB GGVER’S first book of woman raped and murdered in 1889. other countries there’s a lot mom cmss- short stories, Fables ofBrunswick Born in Edmonton in 1948 and a graduate over between journalism and what you’d Awnue (T%uguin, l985), estab- OF the University of Alberta and York call serious fiction. In the States there’s lished her as a chmnida of co”- University, Govier recmtly returned to Joan Didiou. In England virtually all temporary mores in Toronto’s Toronto aFter a year in London, En8lattd. writers appear in the daily newspapers artsy Annex district. But in her fit- She was interviewed by Brent Ledger: and magazines. But here you’re tainted tion Govier also repeatedly returns by journalism. to the West, in her 1979 novel. Books lo Cmada: Recently there was a BiC: You’ve done P tot of freelance Random Dercpnt (Macmillan), and parody of your work In The Bumper journalblI. most recently iu Be&w” Me” Book. What did you think o/it? Govier: I Found it a very convenient way (Penguin). Set in Calgary, it tells Ktihenise Gavkr: 1 was completely to finance my fiction withig, and I also the parallel storks of Sueanne Vail, mystified. I could see what the parody think I learned a lot doing it. I learned a university professor caught between two was parodying. It was a kind of writing how to Listen to voices and really get me”. and Rosalie New Grass. au Indian that is concerned with labels. I call it a dialogue down. I learned how to Fhdsh kind of American writing. where pieces off, and how something changes everybody is not just wearing shoes, when it appears in print. You need that they’re wearing Guccls. But I don’t write experience of seeing it in print to see how that way. you would revise. ItiC: The parody labeliedyou as o ‘rife- BiC: The two main female chwactem in style journalis& “and in fhe Oxford Book your new book, Suzanne and Gemma . of Canadian Short Stories your work is ah appear in one of your stories Was described (IS being mostly about “young the book inspired by the characters? urban rwofesdonals. ” Thenseems to be Goviv: No. I wouldn’t say it wasinspkul 0 current of critic&m that says you’re (I by those characters, but I’ve had those “yuppte” wri1er. characters with me for a while. I wrote Goviee I wrote all those stories beFore the story “Going to Eumpe” - Suzanne there even were such things as yuppies. and Gemma went to Europe together - I consider my characters, especially in and I think almost simultaneously with Brunswick Avenue, to be Fairly writing that story I started the novel. I downmarket Wasps. Brunswick Avmue started this novel a long, long time ago. is a yuppie place now, but it wasn’t when BiC: Where did the book come from? I wrote those stmies. Govlec About six years ago, on one of I think Canada is maybe unique in that my many trips back to Calgary, I went if you have done other kinds of writing into the city library, as is my habit, and there is a desire to belittle you. We’ve had I found this Rosalie New Grass story. I’d a more acadmdc stream in our writers been looking For a way to “reinvent the than we’ve had a journalistic stream. In west,” as Suzanne calls ha cmrse., and which all literary culture must pass. holdaome kind of &botic umhreIla over ‘yaakiika a &gee in &wo. you Surely “quality control.” if this is the that city. That’s partly where the book feel you%e mnxe??d~? eacuse, can be adwuatelv handled bv came from, and at the same time it came Govlerz Somume asked me the other day, astute ~ohservations -with& the rev& fmm this desire to look at certain kinds “Where are you from now?” I lived for itself, without gratuitous slaughter beina of choices that women make and why 22 years in Alberta, and I’ve lived here w&d in time captions. ?hhe cd they make them. for 16 years. Four of those years I’ve lived blanket condenmation of four first Blc: In fhat mase the book seam rather outside the country. Where am I fmm? novelists and their publishers by the cap- pessimistic, because the litle n&s to I don’t think I’m from anywh&. You tion of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s cob”“” is Suzanne. who’s in betwen men in an know, if this were Europe there would be emotionalsense bat also somehow under 10 countries betwee” here and Alberta. ?cw its n&ad& impact on future Literary rhe coolrot of men - even thb liberated That’s a long way to go, and it’s a big gap publication in Canada. woman who teachev at universities. in a cultural way. So I suppose it’s in- Surely a” apology is in order. Covkx I don’t !mcw whether I’d call that evitable that I would he constantly Annette Gordon pessimistic or realiitic. I think the title reaching back to those days. Last year, Editorial Ccnmdttee works two ways. one ls simply what for instance, when I was slttl”g in Clarity PRss Murphy [the journalist who narrates the England, I kept wanting to write stories story of the murder] says: “Why should about Edmonton in 1970. I don’t think this story concern you? This is something that mediation is ever going to be WIN SOME, LOSE SOME MORE that happened betwee” me”.” It’s about completed. LX. WRIGHT was not the first Canadia” how the responsibility beuune a sort of BE: You’ve got a fascination with the to get a” Edgar and “either was L.A. clubby thing: We c&t punish any ma” past. Morse (letter AugustSeptember). Before for this, for no one is truly guilty of this Govier: I do. I’m a frustrated historian. Barbara Amiel gets to you, I’d better - it is a thing that happened behvaen It’s like a travel bug. I think the past is point out that she and George Jonas won men. That’s to a large eatmu the way very much in everything we do, because a” Edgar in 1977 for the brilliant By Calgary runs, or probably Toronto runs. I see it as a layer beneath the surface. 1 Persons Unknown. I realize it was for The title is about that, and it’s also about find it impossible to look at a person right “on-tictlon; however, non-fictlo” is often the casual, sort of imnlc statement that now and think that’s all there is and not stranaer than fiction1 awomancan~“Whataz.youdoing start searching back through the detritus Now of course if we include ex- now?” “I’m between me”.” Like to fiid out what went before. 0 Canadians. Mamaret Miller was the fit between jobs. to win an l&r& 1956 for Best in View. BiC: What abou: Gemma and her band Morse may still be shaking his head. ofgold-diggers? Isuppose it ‘so comment Jack Jensen on some of the aberrant dir&ions the Toronto women’s movamaat has taken. Govier: I’m always being called post- PHIL HALL writes, in your October Ftid feminist. She’s a bit of a post-feminist. Notes, of Trinity College School: She’s funny, and she’s not shlpid, and she “Private. Catholic. Boys. Archibald takes the edge off the others. It’s a bit dif- AS PUBUSHBRS of Diana 0. Collier’s The Lampnmn went there.” ficult to argue with her brand of Invisibte Woman of Washington, we are Lampman. Son of am Anglican clergy- pragmatism. I think that’s one of the naturally disappointed to see a man. Trinity. Anglican too. thi%s that happens to movements as predominantly negative view of a work Victoria B&o” we believe to be of strong artistic and Clandeboye, Ont. k-them to iheir own idvantage. There social merit appear in Books ia Canada used to be a thing in the late ’70s where (August-September). We do recognize., me” would become avowed feminists however, that persons give” the position because they thought they could get inta of critjc have a right to express their view- bed with \vo&” tkt way;It’s not-tibly point _ whatever might be the extant of THE ~LLOWINO Canadian books were different - the Gemnms of this world. their background or depth of their reviewed in the previous issue of Books BE: Was the opening chapter, which judgment. in Cimada. Our recommendations don’t describes lhe rape and murder of Rosalia What we cannot accept is the caption necessarily reflect the rwiews: New Grass, hard to w&e? It ‘spair@it to on the column, “Why do manifestly bad read. writers feel compelled to toss off a book FICTION Govler: No, that was easy to write. That as if it were a swearer on a hot day? Swahn: A Mystery, by Cam1 Shields. stod- dart.Shl+stifthaawtislarawbadutit was the first bit I wrote, and I wrote it Worse, why do publlshcxs print them?” thaaasearchfor thesoludontothe”wswy almost exactly the way it is. I could see While this was excerpted from the review of art, its mtraculous blnh aad fmgite it very clearly-these things reverberate of a book other than our own. when used existence. l-la acswers are as elusive 8s for me. I do have a kind of awful fascina- as a caption for the column. it smeared buttertllu. but her wicked, lightly satirical tion with this sort of violent murder, all four books under review equally. restatement of the qugtton mbkes for especially of women. I hate grwsome As you are undoubtedly aware, the fascinating readtag. movies, I hate blood, and I hate the publication of a first novel ls a very sen- ea&dtation of murders, especially sex- sitive issue for the snmll publisher. who NON-FICTION linked murders. But I think we have a is at risk financially and otherwise, as well No Ktdding: l&de the World of Teenage as for the fledgling author, who may well Gtrls. by Myma Kostash. McCMlaad & very false idea that those things happen stewrt. Based on her personal 0bseivatiM way over tiehere and we live our safe and have devoted years of serious effort to the of 50 &s in Edmonton, Vauauwr. aad respectable life way over here. “People work. While criticism of the authors was Tomnto. Kostash’s lively, insightfcl book we know don’t do those things.” requested, unsolicited criticism of the is long on the rubrtaaa of her nrbjects’ liws BlCt You said a coupte ofyews ago that and short (thank heavens) on soclologlcal you were writbxg a novat that mediatrcs be- . First novels areThe necessary~mute by pontifmtlag.

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