I have always been a big reader, and although I don't always have as much time as I'd like to dedicate to reading, I mostly do okay and manage to fit my reading into the time I have alloted to it. When I was a kid, though, when a book would grab me I pretty much could not put it down. I would read for hours and hour, and when that wasn't enough, I'd sneak the book places and read places I shouldn't. I have several distinct memories of reading during class, with the book under my desk, in Grades 8 and 9 and St. Joseph's Convent, where, let me say, novels were prohibited in the first place. Strangely, I don't remember if I ever got caught, but I doubt I was so subtle that none of the teachers knew what was up. Anyway, it has been a while since I felt so compelled to read a book, but Lynn Coady's The Antagonist had me almost missing transit stops, reading with a booklight at night, and wishing desperately that I could pull it out of my bag when work got slow.
The Antagonist is a one-sided epistolary novel. That is, e-mails are sent, but we only get one side of the story. The novel opens with Rank (nickname for Gordon Rankin, Jr.) writing an angry, and thus a little all over the place, e-mail to Adam, a guy he used to be friends with who, it seems, has written a book about Rank and something that happened to them when they were in university together. Rank is angry that Adam used him. Rank is angry that Adam told lies about him. Rank is angry that Adam boiled down huge parts of Rank's life to one-off throw-away sentences. So, Rank decides he's going to set the record straight and tell Adam his life story, to show him how much he got wrong in his book.
Peter Behrens' new novel – a follow-up to his Governor General Award-winning The Law of Dreams – came out this week and he's working the blog circuit. House of Anansi got in touch with me last month about participating, so I'm reviewing the book today, and tomorrow I'll post a Q&A I did with him.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a fan of layered perspectives in a novel. When it's done well, it's one of my favourite devices because it allows you so much insight into what's happening. Rather than having to infer what other characters feel and think you get the chance to understand their perspective, which generally enriches the story. Peter Behrens' The O'Briens is a novel about that titular family, starting when Joe O'Brien (our main man) was a teenager in the forest of the Ottawa Valley during the 1890s and leading us through his life until the 1960s.
The novel starts out from Joe's perspective. His father died in the Boer War and it's just his mother, himself, his brothers, Grattan and Tom, and their two sisters left in the wilderness. Then Joe's mother remarries a drunken fiddler, who beats her and molests the two sisters. Joe, only 16, has already started a relatively profitable lumber business when he decides to deal with his stepfather. Joe takes the man to the barn and beats him (with his brothers' help) to within an inch of his life. Shortly thereafter Joe's mother dies and he packs up his brothers and sisters and moves them out of the wilderness, which is the only thing they've ever known. Joe is driven. From the get-go he knows he wants success in business and to marry a woman who is better than he is, with whom he'll have children. After seeing his brothers and sisters safely entered into various religious schools – his sisters go on to be nuns and his brother Tom becomes a priest – Joe heads west to seek his fortune with a railway contract.
In the following section, which is also quite long, we're introduced to Iseult – Joe's future wife. She grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., but after her father's suicide she and her mother moved to Pasadena. When Iseult is in her early 20s, her mother dies, so she decides to move to California and leaves for Venice. She has money from her inheritance and her plan is to buy a little house where she can be alone and feel the air and the sun and just breathe. Iseult has a kind of crippling asthma, so light and airy spaces are what she dreams of. In the first real estate office she enters, who should be behind the desk but Grattan, Joe's brother. Grattan sells Iseult a little cottage and through him she meets Joe who's in town for the winter because the railway is too frozen to continue working on. They have a very brief courtship and then they get married.
The rest of the novel's sections are somewhat shorter than the first two, and they follow Joe and Iseult up into the Rockies where Joe is working on his railroad contract and where Iseult loses their first child. The marriage never really recovers from that, but they do eventually have three more children – Mike, Margo, and Frankie (short for Frances). Although Mike is born out west, by the time the girls have come along Iseult and Joe have moved east to Montreal, where Joe sets up a construction company and starts building houses and bridges and roads. The family seems to travel constantly, and very little of this half of the book is told from Joe's perspective; rather, Behrens focuses on Iseult and the kids, especially Mike, to tell us what Joe is like.
This is a family story, both about the family Joe built around him and his brothers and sisters, but it is not an entirely happy one. Joe's sisters die during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, Iseult takes the kids and leaves for a while, and Grattan is a pilot in WWI and comes home a completely different person, among other things. There are several different plots going in the second half of the novel (which happens when you have several narrators) and the sections start to feel a little choppy as they jump through years without really explaining what happened in between. Nonetheless, at this point I was pretty involved with the novel, so I forgave the missing pieces in favour of what was there, which is a lot.
It's ambitious to take on this kind of multi-generational family saga, especially during an era when so many things of historic significance happened. The family touched by almost every major event of the early 20th century, which makes this novel a kind of alternative way to learn history, especially where war is concerned. Usually a big novel like The O'Briens would be released in the winter, but a thick and interesting book is perfect for taking on vacation, and although this isn't always a cheerful story, it won't entirely take the wind out of your sails either. It's a summer novel that asks you to think and engage, and in return gives you something to sink into.
The O'Briens by Peter Behrens First published 2011 (cover image shown from House of Anansi Press edition)
I really like alphabet posters. I don't actually own any, but I love the idea of celebrating letters in their individual form and I'm also a fan of typography. Children's alphabet books take this idea one step further, and the letter-inspired illustrations are usually incredible. The very basic idea of letters driving a narrative is wonderfully obvious, and it becomes a great teaching tool for children and people learning languages. For adults, though, the world of alphabet-inspired literature is pretty thin, but James King's Étienne's Alphabet fills that void with its dictionary-style story.
Étienne's Alphabet is the story of Étienne Morneau, a man who was orphaned shortly after he was born and subsequently brought up by nuns. His early life was spent entirely in Montreal, but then the orphanage closed and he was moved to Toronto, which is where he is when the story begins. In the present day of the novel (1967) Étienne has been out of the orphanage for several years and is working as a bank teller at Royal Bank. He rents out an upstairs room from the Beaulieu family, other Montreal transplants. And that is essentially his life. Étienne moves between work and his home life – he becomes quite close with the family – and everything goes along as usual.
And then he's sent to Shanghai by his boss. Étienne has never traveled and all he knows about China is based on Tin Tin comics, so it is rather skewed. Nonetheless, he boldly buys a camera and sets off for foreign lands. He's there for several weeks (working on wheat imports or something) and he and his guide Chang spend off-work hours visiting different parts of the city, where Étienne takes photos. Sadly, but the end of the trip, his camera is smashed and his work is all destroyed, but he returns to Canada with a newly-discovered creativity and a friend in Chang, someone who Étienne worries about constantly.
At home, Étienne starts to draw. He keeps his hobby secret, but little by little, it becomes a passion that takes over his every spare moment. Étienne ties each painting to a letter of the alphabet, and after his death (which is announced at the very beginning of the story) Madame Beaulieu is so overwhelmed by the work that she calls the Art Gallery of Ontario. Étienne is declared an undiscovered genius, which gets the ball rolling for the publication of his autobiography (which makes up the bulk of the novel). It seems that not only was Étienne holed up in his room drawing and painting, but he was also writing his life story. And, because of his obsession with letters and the alphabet, his autobiography took the shape of a dictionary, with pieces of his life scattered through each of the different letters.
This is really my favourite part of the book. At the beginning of each new section, Étienne describes the personality of the letter he's about to embark on, and each one becomes its own sort of character, colouring all the vignettes and anecdotes that follow. It's strange to read a novel with a structure that isn't primarily chronological, but it works because the dictionary format is so familiar. Not that this is a straightforward dictionary; rather, it's an alphabetical breakdown of Étienne's life, with key words used to introduce important moments and memories that he feels are defining. In that way, it isn't definitions of individual words, but definitions of him.
Étienne's Alphabet is a strange book to read because it is just so very different than most novels you come across. But King has a background in biography and knows just what sorts of snapshots will make a life compelling, which smoothes over the choppy form so that you don't even notice it after a few sections. Really though, it's the descriptions of the individual letters that tell Étienne's story because they offer so much insight into his character. I'm not sure I ever quite buy him as an artistic genius, but he is nonetheless someone worth spending time with because of his ideas about the emotional life of letters – those little characters we use so frequently we cease to think about them. Étienne forces us to pay attention, colouring our reading of his life and then giving us something to think about when we put pen to page (or finger to keys).
Étienne's Alphabet by James King First published in 2010 (cover image shown from Cormorant Books edition)
There is something so strange and wonderful about reading a novel (or seeing a movie) that is set somewhere you know well. Whether it's your home town, somewhere you spent your summers, or just a town or area you've been driving through for years, it's almost jarring to see it become the focal point of a work of fiction. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, and I rather like novels set in Nova Scotia, where I grew up. It makes me wonder about the author and want to drive the retrace the characters' steps, and in Howard Norman's What is Left the Daughter, set in the Parrsboro area and Halifax, I think I almost could.
The novel is essentially one long letter from a father to his estranged daughter. Wyatt Hillyer has not been in touch with his daughter Marlais, now grown-up, since she was a baby, although he has been putting away money for her and collecting snippets of news through old friends. Things have come to a head, though, and Wyatt now feels compelled to get in touch with her. So, he sits down at the kitchen table in his parents' old house on Robie Street in Halifax to write her his life story.
Wyatt's story begins in the 1941 when he is 17 and his parents both commit suicide in the same day by jumping off different Halifax bridges. The were both in love with the next door neighbour and after they both kill themselves, Wyatt is an orphan. He drops out of high school and moves to Middle Economy, on the north shore of the Minas Basin, to live with his aunt and uncle and become an apprentice in his uncle's sled and toboggan business. Once there, though, he falls in love with Tilda, his aunt and uncle's adopted daughter and Marlais' mother.
The Second World War is an ever-present current running through the novel, and the presence of German U-boats just off the coast of Nova Scotia is a source of constant tension and pressure for Wyatt's uncle, who becomes increasingly obsessed. Soon the workshop walls are covered with newspaper clippings about the war and lurking U-boats and eventually he becomes so consumed he is unable to work and spends all his time listening to the radio reports about the war. With this going on at home, it was perhaps naive of Tilda to bring a German student to the community and then fall in love with him. They decide, very quickly, to get married – despite the increasing danger he is in simply for being German. But after a U-boat sinks the Caribou a passenger ferry that ran between Newfoundland and Cape Breton, all hell breaks loose.
Tilda's mother had been on the ferry and was lost in the attack, and that sends Wyatt's uncle over the edge. He lures Hans, now Tilda's husband, to his house and then kills him in cold blood. Wyatt, too stunned to really understand what has happened, helps his uncle dispose of Hans' body. They both get prison terms: Wyatt's is only a few years, just long enough to keep him out of the war, essentially, but his uncle gets life in Dorchester prison.
Hans' murder becomes the pivot-point in Wyatt's life. That and the birth of Marlais, which comes nine months after his reconciliation with Tilda. Essentially, the role he played in the murder of Hans has haunted Wyatt ever since, making him feel unworthy of his daughter and unable to contact Tilda. Wyatt, for all intents and purposes, seems like a nice man and although he is by no means wealthy, his job as detritus gaffer for the Halifax Harbour is steady and respectable. But he isolates himself out of grief and guilt, and as the novel progresses you realize just what an extraordinary thing it is for him to reach out to Marlais this way. His language is old-fashioned and distanced and a little awkward, but the intention of his letter is so compelling and honest that he wins you over, despite being sort of a regular guy in a lot of respects.
What is Left the Daughter hooked me in first because it was set in my home province, and I am a sucker for that. But, the novel held my interest because of how Norman layers personal details over established history. He never overdoes the war details, but they build on each other until an old U-boat bobs to the surface of Halifax Harbour years after the war has ended. As a detail, it's merely interesting, but in the context of the novel, the realization that the threat was that close is horrifying. Norman's version of Nova Scotia during the 1940s (and the 1960s, when the later part of the novel is set) is a new one for me, and it's one I want to get to know better.
What is Left the Daughter by Howard Norman First published in 2010 (cover image shown from Vintage Canada edition)
Maybe it's because I didn't grow up going to church, but religion in books fascinates me. I especially like the retelling of Bible stories, but again, I'm not sure why. It may be that I enjoy the subversiveness of taking something that is so well known, and hold so much meaning for so many people, and changing the context. Messing with those stories that are a not insubstantial part of our society's foundation seems almost dangerous in a strange way. Dangerous and brave – and important. In A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes starts with Noah's Arc and then tries to move forward, but is almost inevitably sucked back into that defining motif of danger, death, and large passenger ships.
It's hard to know quite how to classify A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. On the one hand, it works quite well as a short story cycle, with stories that work independently of one another, but when read together have an added oomph. It's also sort of like a book of essays, filled with philosophy, literary criticism and discussions of art. I'm not sure it's even uniformly fictional. There are, however, 10 and a half chapters – the "half chapter" is inserted between Chapters 8 and 9 – as the title suggests, so if you read chapter by chapter, maybe it doesn't really matter how you define it.
The book opens up with "The Stowaway" a story about an impostor to Noah's Ark. The cheeky little narrator is quite critical of the choices Noah makes with regards to which animals will be saved. Rather like a primitive form a eugenics, Noah simply decides not to allow any undesirable or pesky creature aboard. And he's rather a brute about it. But he doesn't check quite carefully enough, and a family of woodworms – of which the narrator is proudly a part – manage to sneak on board to ride out the deluge in relative peace. The woodworm actually manages to make its way into most of the chapters, bringing with it a suggestion of hidden decay.
Barnes then moves on to a chapter about terrorists who take over a cruise ship. He is an author unafraid to shock his audience, and the tension he builds in this chapter is unreal. The stakes become so high, so quickly, that you don't even notice you've been placed on a modern-day ark. Here, though, everything is inverted. The stowaway is not a quiet, unassuming insect, but an imminently threatening and truly undesirably presence. Similarly, the person in charge is not the tyrannical Noah of the previous story, but a cruise director who is just as unsure as the passengers. History is doomed to repeat itself, Barnes seems to be saying, but see how it changes things up just slightly?
This sort of wink to the absurdity of things gives the book a kind of strange humour, or at least throws you off kilter just enough to appreciate that Barnes is arming you with perspectives that will help you later, when you reach New Heaven, or wherever else. But absurdity and irony, as fun as they are, are useless tools unless you can escape them. Enter the half chapter. Just when Barnes has you so completely confused as to his purpose, he interrupts his own history to tell you about love, about his sleeping wife. And it doesn't even matter, really, whether it's the real Julian Barnes or the fictional one talking, because what he is saying is that there's a reason all the rest of it matters. There's a reason we should examine past events and find the woodworms before their damage is irreparable, and that reason is love. Oh, it sounds ridiculous and cliché here, but that half chapter is perfectly timed for maximum effect, and it is stunning.
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is strange and unexpected and the chronology of events it presents – it is "a history," after all – is very unlikely, but it is also a book that asks you to think about things. It doesn't force you to, though; if you want to simply read each chapter and not delve more deeply into what is going on, you can do that. But, if you want to think about it, Barnes has offered up a book that will reward you for it. Because as weird and, sometimes, disorienting as this book is, it has something really interesting to say. And, best of all, it has an interesting way to say it.
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes First published in 1989 (cover image shown from Vintage International edition)
I really like letters. This might make me sounds old-fashioned, but writing and receiving letters is one of life's little joys, as far as I'm concerned. They require time and care and thought, and then a trip to a post office or mailbox, and then the anticipation of a response – really, there is no question that they are rather romantic and it doesn't seem that strange to think that many a love story has bloomed by post. So, with all of that bias out of the way, saying that I'm never quite sure about an epistolary novel might sound strange. My big complaint, usually, is that all the letters (back and forth) tend to sound the same since the same person is writing them (the novel's author). In a novel with two authors, though, it's a whole other story (pun, intended).
In The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows seem to have split up the characters, which means that the letters do often read as responses to one another, and that the voices in them sound distinct.
On the surface, the story sounds like a simple one. Juliet is a writer in England. She's just finished a book about her experiences as a reporter during the Second World War, and she's living in London, which is still largely ruined from all the bombings. She's hunting around for a topic for her next book when she gets a letter (all this previous information is also gleaned from letter between Juliet and her publisher, Sidney Scott, and her best friend Sophie). The new letter is from a man named Dawsey Adams, who lives on the island Guernsey in the English Channel. He writes to Juliet because he has a book, his favourite book, that used to belong to her (her name is written in the front) and he wants to know if the author happened to write anything else.
Naturally, a correspondence starts up between the two of them – how could it not between book lovers. In the course of a few letters, Dawsey tells Juliet of the titular literary society and she is intrigued. This lets loose the history of Guernsey's war days, during which time they were occupied by the Nazis and absolutely destitute (which is true). After writing back and forth, Juliet thinks that this literary society might make a great subject for her next book, so she asks Dawsey to get the other members to write to her and letters start to fly back and forth between Juliet and the readers on Guernsey. As someone who loves books and letters, the very premise of people writing back and forth about books was quite wonderful.
But, they write about more than just books and eventually, Juliet comes to feel that she has good friends on Guernsey. So, naturally, she travels to visit them. Of course, she just falls in love with the island and her new friends are just as lovely in person as they are on paper. Naturally, she wants to stay there forever and never return to London, which is what she eventually does.
It's not a long book (I read it in a weekend), so I won't ruin the end. But I will say there's a little mystery involved, a lot of WWII details, a romance and a bizarre tie-in to Oscar Wilde. Really, just when you think you have the story figured out, there's a mid-plot spice-up. That's another reason to love an epistolary novel: non-sequiters and plot changes work really well, and tone set by who's sending letter to whom adds subtle meaning to the action being described.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society also has a great pace, which makes it perfect for an Autumn weekend. Reading in lots of little snippets makes the story fly along as you glean new character details and plot points in every letter. Also, because of the WWII context, what could have been an overly light story feels more grounded. The characters have real concerns and objects in their way, and the historical detail adds another dimension to the plot, especially since it's about a place many people don't know anything about. And that is exactly the kind of thing I like to read in the fall, when I'm running around the weather is changing – something that reminds me of summer, but takes me somewhere different by the end.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows First published in 2009 (cover image shown from Dial Press Trade Paperback edition)
