CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Journals @ The Mount Bear Marian Engel. Toronto: McClelland to affection and, finally, to love for and Stewart, 1976. Pp. 141. the an i ma 1. Surrounding this framework is a nimbus of suggestion and meaning. The novel's central theme is certainly that of iso• Nothing I had read by Marian Engel pre• lation. Lou is an urban creature who pared me for this book. Her previous has had an unhappy emotional life up novels, notably Sarah Bastard's Note• until the time the novel opens. She is books and The Honeyman Festival, are intelligent, cosmopolitan and quite obviously written by the author of Bear: out of touch with her intuitive self. the introspection of sensitive, educa• Her encounter with the bear instigates ted females is the subject matter of all emotions in her which a"re, in turn, three. In Bear, however, her prose wonderful and terrifying. The novel reaches a level of craftsmanship that opens quietly and ends in the same way, makes her other novels appear garrulous Lou in the intervening pages having ex• by comparison. To paraphrase the story perienced a sort of redemption. Clear• of Bear is to invite ridicule, for few ly, some of her new emotions shock and potential readers are apt to take ser• frighten her: her former attempts to iously an invitation to read about a love between a bear and a womaYi. Few recent novels have required the sus• pension of as much disbelief as this one, but few have been, in return, as rev/arding. The narrative possesses the apparent simplicity of a folk-story with disturbing echoes one cannot easily put from mind. The story, in outline, is of a woman, Lou, who comes to an island north of Toronto in the course of her work as an archivist. Her job on the island is to appraise the worth of the estate of a Colonel Cary. Lou discovers, upon arrival, that the estate includes a bear, kept as a sort of pet in a kennel behind the house. She and the bear are the sole occupants of the island for the summer. From this contact, initially distaste• ful to her, she moves from toleration nature or to what is. (It is worth manipulate the bear now seem mean and remarking here that while Atwood's petty. Like D.H. Lawrence in his poem narrator's adjustment to nature comes "The Snake," Lou has had a chance with through an experience of madness, a creature from an unknown world and Engel's story is remarkable for its has acted in a contemptible way. The homliness. There is nothing at all closing pages of Bear are deeply moving implausible in the story and this in describing the separation of Lou and ordinariness is one of the most effec• the bear. One closes the book with the tive features of the telling.) In feeling that, certainly, Lou is a wiser both Surfaci ng and Bear a major charac• woman for this experience, that she ter is left unnamed: in Surfaci ng it is will never again accept her joyless the heroine and in Bear the animal. In life in the city, and that she has both cases the power conferred through grown emotionally. name-giving is suggested--in Bear this power is made explicit for no contrived Closely related to the theme of isola• name seems to Lou adequate for the ani• tion in the novel is the emergence of mal. Surely, however, the most dis• Lou's identity as a sexual being. On quieting element in both books is the one level, Bear is an erotic fantasy. implied question of what constitute It deals with Blake's question, "What desirable qualities in males at this is it women of men require" and the point in time and especially at this reply, "lineaments of gratified desire." particular point in Canadian history. The novel, in treating sexuality in a It is as if both Atwood and Engel feel manner verging on the mythic, tells us they must get to the source of life for more about female sexuality than, say, an image of a male--man, friend, lover. Erica Jong's much-publicized Fear of It was suggested in Surfac i ng that Joe Flying wh i ch by comparison is crass and could potentially become something, that sensational. There is not a false note he was in an unformed condition, and in Bear and, because of the sustained that his definition would come from mood of the book, one instinctively events in the future by means of inter• feels the truth of the tale. action with a female. In Bear, quali• ties definable as "masculine" are com• In discussing Bear, comparisons with pletely depersonalized. The great Margaret Atwood's Surfaci ng are temp• strength of the bear is emphasized: ting. In both is the theme of Canadian with one shocking exception, this wilderness, its effect on visitors and strength is kept in reserve, a tantali- its preservation from encroaching zingly threatening factor in the crea• "Americans." Also common to both is ture's power to attract. (One recalls the female who goes to the wilderness Sylvia Plath's claim that "every woman and, in so doing, becomes attuned to loves a Fascist.") The ambivalent feel• of contact with a formidable environment. ings the bear arouses in Lou and which Bear is, in some ways, a continuation eventually subvert her rational self are of such writing. But it is also some• typical of the experience of "falling" thing else, much harder to define, in• in love. The sensuous relationship be• corporating and transcending this sort tween the two is celebrated, yet under• of writing. At once concise, lyric lying it all is the great unknown animal and elegaic, it gives to the reader a quality in both bear and woman. These new awareness of the mystery at the elements all hint at what might be heart of things. Lou's final reverence called "masculinity," or a combination for the unknowable life of an inarticu• of qualities to which something basic in late creature is powerfully and beauti• the heroine responds. fully conveyed. And Marian Engel's com• munication of compassion and tenderness, Many aspects of this book recall other, her ability to make the reader experi• specifically Canadian, writing. It is ence the love she so bravely presents-- hardly gratuitous, for example, that the these are the most remarkable features main item of value in the Cary estate of this extraordinary book. should be a first edition of John Richardson's historical romance Wacousta, a melodramatic account of settlers and Janet Baker Indians. Throughout Bear are instances Saint Mary's University of the counterpointing of fact and fic• tion, reality and romance in order to explore the question of the Canadian wi lderness--what is it? The backdrop of Louky Bersianik. Montreal: Charles G.D. Roberts' animal stories? L'Euguelionne Editions La Presse, Pp. The colourful forest peopled with the 1976. 399-. treacherous Indians of Wacousta? The place where one becomes "bushed"? The Louky Bersianik is a novelist born in habitat of Frye's "garrison mentality"? Montreal in educated in Montreal, This emphasis on a highly ambiguous 1930, Paris and Prague. In February La_ wilderness brings into relief what it 1976, Presse published L' Eugu61ionne, a novel means, in turn, to be human and what, dealing with the plight of women in the particularly, it means to be female. modern world. This novel is presently Canadian literature is well stocked being translated into English. It is with wilderness women. From the somewhat unusual to write a review in Strickland sisters to the heroines of English of a novel written in French. Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel and Margaret However, the outstanding literary and Atwood's Surfaci ng, female Canadian intellectual qualities of L ' Eugue"! ionne identity has often been defined in terms place it among the important works not .