In a decision I and the rest of the Shadow Jury wholeheartedly agree with, the 2009 Giller Prize winner is Linden MacIntyre for The Bishop’s Man.
Congratulations!
Alright, the Shadow Giller Jury deliberated and we have come up with our winner. It was a unanimous choice, though all of us enjoyed the shortlist. Please click here to be transported to KevinfromCanada’s blog where the winner is announced. It also contains details about when the real Giller winner will be selected, as well as an announcement that Alison Gzowski, fellow Shadow Giller Jury member will cameo on Canadian national television to announce our pick during Bravo TV’s Giller coverage.
And so this reader comes to the end of the Giller shortlist, a journey I much enjoyed, even if some of the stops were not as pleasing as others. After venturing to Egypt, Cambodia, and ancient Macedon for the previous three Giller shortlisted titles, The Bishop’s Man (2009) brings us back to Canada, which is a fitting way to end one of Canada’s great literary prizes.
Copy courtesy of KevinfromCanada.
Though this book brings me back to Canada, the locale is no more familiar to me than, say, Egypt. (I hope I don’t muddle it up by my lack of familiarity). It takes place in Creignish, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, by the descriptions and tone of the book, a stunning and sobering isolated area. Our narrator is a priest, Father Duncan MacAskill. He is the Bishop’s man. In other words, in the last twenty years, whenever there has been a problem with a fellow priest, the Bishop sends Father MacAskill to handle the problem with speed and discretion. Father MacAskill’s voice is a nice mixture of hope and melancholy, and I enjoyed that combination as MacAskill himself leaned one way or the other throughout the book. Here is the mixture shown in the first paragraph of the novel:
The night before things started to become unstuck, I actually spent a good hour taking stock of my general situation and concluded that, all things considered, I was in pretty good shape. I was approaching the age of fifty, a psychological threshold only slightly less daunting than death, and found myself not much changed from forty or even thirty. If anything, I was healthier. The last decade of the century, and of the millennium, was shaping up to be less stressful than the eighth — which had been defined by certain events in Central America — and the ninth, burdened as it was by scandals at home.
As the book starts, Father MacAskill has been called in to see the Bishop. Unsure what is to come, he is surprised when he is assigned to preside at a small parish near where he grew up in Creignish. It’s disorienting but also a relief to settle into some work other than calling on lapsed priests. It is especially comforting at this time in the Church’s history, when scandals of the priesthood have broken out, particularly in Boston. However, though this parish job means Father MacAskill can rest for a bit, he suspects correctly that the Bishop’s motives are more complex. The Bishop mentions vicarious liability, and Father MacAskill realizes he’s being put away in a secret place to protect the Church. If his role of discreetly sending lapsed priests to rehabilitation and then back to some parish were found, in this day and age when the priesthood is not respected, it could be another disaster for the Church.
All of this leads to a nicely set-up personal crisis. On the surface, the primary issue is sexual abuse among the priesthood. Father MacAskill’s first encounter with this — he actually walks in on a venerate priest, one of his mentors – got him exiled to South America because no one believed him, especially not the Bishop. No one appreciated his allegations. They were just looking for a pen under the desk, they said. A strong current in the novel, then, is the sexual abuse that seemed to be popping up everywhere in the nineties. Father MacAskill, since his return from Central America, has spent the last twenty years helping the Bishop discreetly clean up any other “lapses.” These scandals, however, are used to analyze other issues, subtly:
I sat in the car for a long time before leaving. What is it that attracts the Bells? Priest of old were father figures. What happened?
Bell once told me with confidence: “People will see whatever they need a priest to be. Father, saviour, coach, ombudsman, shrink. Lover, even. Now that people don’t really need priests, they don’t see us at all.”
“You’re saying we’re obsolete,” I said.
“More like invisible.”
“So why did you become a priest?”
He shrugged. “Limited career options. Infantile piety. Need to please. Who knows?”
“Or invisibility?”
I thought the jibe would bring him down.
“That too,” he said, and smiled.
That’s one of the great strengths of this novel: MacIntyre, instead of writing a novel to showcase the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, uses those scandals as a springboard to analyse other, perhaps deeper issues. Furthermore, though the sexual abuse is a central theme, it is not the center of the story — thankfully, Father MacAskill is. It’s his life we’re looking at, his struggles, his character. His struggles with an abusive father, with loneliness, with his own vicarious liability, with alcoholism (“They say drinking alone is a bad sign. But what if you’re always alone? What if solitude is the norm?”). This is entirely a character driven novel, my favorite type. The other issues are there, and dealt with with care, but this is not MacIntyre building a prop character in order to sermonize, which I felt was the case, unfortunately, in Kim Echlin’s still thought-provoking The Disappeared. Father MacAskill, with all of his hope and melancholy, remains ambiguous to us as well as to himself, allowing us to delve into the issues ourselves.
This book assumes its weight through time. It’s hard to pull out key quotes. Here is one, however, which speaks to just that point:
Viewing everything in hindsight, the next five months acquire their meaning through a series of banal events. March 25, 1996, was the day my life began assuming what I expect will be its final shape.
To me these banal events are never treated as such by MacIntyre. As the book builds, each event is burdened more and more by the past as we come to know it. I didn’t expect much from this book. I thought it would be a diatribe about sexual abuse among Catholic priests, one where the main character was saddled with guilt and nostalgia for a more innocent but nonexistent time. What I find, instead, is an incredibly well structured, beleivable character study where each discrete issue could be incidental though in their totality they bring this priest to brink.
I was definitely wary before beginning The Golden Mean (2009). It is a historical fiction told from the first person narrator Aristotle. But that also made me very excited. Obviously such an ambitious book could be a major flop, but if done well . . .
Incidentally, I am surprised at the indiscreet Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement on the cover, but let’s get into the book.
This book picks up in about 343 B.C., when Aristotle is travelling to Pella, the capital of Macedon, with his very young wife Pythias. They have just left Atarneus, where Aristotle had founded his first philosophical school under the patronage of Hermias (Pythias’s father, probably). Lyon does an exceptional job subtly introducing some of the region’s impending doom. Aristotle is couriering a treaty from Hermias to Philip of Macedon, who is just beginning his campaign to take over the known world. Atarneus lies frighteningly close to Persia, so Hermias was hoping to get Philip’s protection in return for Hermias’s loyalty.
When the narrative begins, Aristotle has already stopped by Stageira, his birthplace (in Macedonia), to witness for himself the destruction brought about when Philip destroyed the town. We get a great sense of the time when we meet Philip and Aristotle humbly submits himself to him. In The Golden Mean Philip and Aristotle were friends in youth — at least as close to friends as one can become with the future king. This is possible since Aristotle’s father was Philip’s father’s chief physician. Consequently, they have an interesting relationship in The Golden Mean now that both have grown up, Aristotle in Athens building his mind, Philip in Macedon building for war.
The Golden Mean’s central story line is the relationship between Aristotle and the young Alexander the Great, who is at the time first in the precarious line for the crown. Alexander is a genius, though a bit unruly, a bit extreme. Thus the title of the book, Aristotle’s famous theory of balance. The narrative tension builds when it becomes clear that Philip’s army will have to war with Athens, Aristotle’s ideal city. Despite being a Macedonian by birth, not to mention the prince’s tutor, Aristotle is not trusted. Indeed, mocking him becomes a way of mocking the enemy. But when Aristotle attempts to become the leader of the Academy in Athens, he is rejected: ”I’m Macedonian to the Athenians and Athenian to the Macedonians.” Seeing the tension and the politics and the personal relationships played out in narrative form is a great experience.
Now, let me explain where I’m coming from as a reader of this book. I love classical studies, and, as a student, I took as many of them as I could while not being a classical studies major. I am enough a lover of this time period to have gaped in envy when Aristotle sees the original Tiresius’s mask for the original production of Oedipus Rex. However, though I’ve studied this era as well as the works of Aristotle, I’m not versed enough to say how well Lyon hits the mark here. So, as a layman with a nurtured love for this time period, I was very pleased with this book.
I didn’t think I would be. All too often I feel like authors just mess things up when they try to fictionalize history, particularly a historical person like Aristotle. There’s just too much to get wrong. And even if they don’t get it wrong, they are often unbearably pedantic, slamming the reader over the head with historical fact that has no place in the narrative other than to show off. They mistake this kind of pedantry with making the book accurate. Why not leave the task to the historians? Just as happened in The Disappeared, our author shows just how self-conscious she is of the potential pitfalls with this narrative — here is Aristotle:
I’ve been working on a little treatise on literature, the literary arts. Tragedy, comedy, epic. Because I’ve been wondering what’s the point? What is the point of it all? Why not simply relate such history as it has come down to us in a sober manner, not pretending to fill in the gaps?
Lyon answers the question in the book on the next page; however, much more resonant is her answer wit this book as a whole. Though I’ve studied this time period several times, I’m all too often satisfied with factual statements, like this: Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor. I think, wow, that’s neat! But I fail to feel out what that means. But in The Golden Mean Lyon gives these familiar facts a most wonderful texture, something we can really rub our fingers across, something that in recreating the history solidifies it. Obviously, this is problematic, because there’s simply no way she got it all right. But neither did Shakespeare. And neither will any historian today since we are too far removed to know what really happened.
I’m not saying that Lyon is Shakespeare, but this is a solidly written narrative, filled with moments of insight.
The palace is quieter now with the army gone. In the Macedonian tradition, the king must be present at battle to win the favour of the gods. Tiring for Philip, no doubt, and eerie for those of us left behind. It’s hard not to feel like a child left alone when his parents have gone to an important dinner and will be away all night. The familiar rooms echo differently, somehow, and time turns to honey.
All that said, I’m wondering how well this book would travel with a lover of literature uninterested in Aristotle or Alexander the Great. Though Lyon isn’t being pedantic, there are plenty of inside references that might not hit home with most people who aren’t at least minimally versed in this the brink of the Hellenistic Age. Unlike Shakespeare’s Histories, this is much less a study in human nature and much more a straight historical narrative. The characters are wonderfully realized, the prose is strong — indeed, of the four Giller Prize shortlisted novels I’ve read so far, this is the most solid in terms of consistent narrative technique and balance. Lyon has excellent judgment. However, to me it didn’t seem to strive to be much more than a well written story. The reader is left with a wonderful rendering of a fantastic time period, but there’s not much else to wonder about in the end. I would have liked some more analysis of the characters and not just masterful characterization. Still, to me this is an accomplishment we can all take pride in. It’s not surprising to me that Lyon has made her way as a finalist in all three of Canada’s major literary awards this year.
The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, have been covered before, particularly by the courageous Dith Pran, who died last year. I knew going in to The Disappeared (2009) that the book could not be as affecting as the journalistic accounts. Yet, there’s something haunting and reverent about the cover that compelled me and gave me hope. I hoped like mad that the book could be as haunting and, knowing the topic, especially as reverent. In the end, despite a few flaws, the book greatly exceeded my expectations.
Our narrator is Anne Greves, a Canadian who, in her youth (she was only sixteen), fell in undying love with the passionate musician Serey, a Cambodian exile to Montreal. With only minor clunkiness that we get over soon enough, we come to know that Anne is writing this book to Serey as an attempt to take account of their past:
Bones work their way to the surface. Thirty years have passed since that day in the market in Phnom Penh. I still hear your voice. I first met you [. . .]
We don’t know what happened in the market in Phnom Penh until well into the book. Instead, we go back to the late 1970s to witness the budding of Anne and Serey’s relationship. Serey’s father had sent him away from Cambodia, and while away, the Khmer Rouge came into power, shutting down all borders and all communication. Right before the borders closed, Serey received a last telegram: “APRIL 16TH, 1975, BORDERS MAY CLOSE. DO NOT COME BACK UNTIL I CALL. FATHER.” Since then, Serey has had no means of communicating with his family or with anyone in Cambodia. He only knows from accounts on the news or in books that what is happening at his home is worse than any nightmare.
We read Year Zero by a French priest called Ponchaud. He described people pushing hospital beds, women giving birth in ditches, a cripple with neither hands nor feet writhing along the ground like a severed worm to get out of Phnom Penh. You threw up in the toilet and then you opened the book at the beginning again and read all night, looking for clues about your family. In the morning you said, What if my family is dead? What if I can never go back?
Trying to understand the love that Anne and Serey have is a bit difficult and actually made the first part of the book more interesting to me. Its a tribute to Kim Echlin that the relationship felt real even though vague and immature. Perhaps it was the vagueness and immaturity that made it feel real. After all, here is a sixteen year old girl who as of yet has no idea about pain. Her mother is dead, but Anne doesn’t remember her. Her father is distant, and Anne seems to wish they did more together, but on the whole Anne’s biggest concern is that her father doesn’t take her to listen to music. She has to wait until some older friends are willing to take her, and it is then that she meets Serey. So is Anne attracted to Serey’s music, to his foreignness, to his pain, or is it more fundamental? We get a sense that it is at least a selfish sort of love when, after the Vietnamese invade Cambodia, the borders open up again and Sereys says he must got back to find his family. When he tells her this, Anne admits to her conflicting and selfish feelings:
I wanted the borders to close again, so I could have you back. I wanted you to die so I would not have to think of you without me. I wanted money. I wanted to be older. I wanted you to find your whole family alive so I could be with you. I wanted you to find your family dead so you would be mine.
We even remember how young she is when, at his exit, Serey says, “Little tiger, don’t be stubborn. Let’s not leave each other without a kiss.” She simply responds, “I am not the one leaving.”
Years later, Anne has heard nothing from Serey. Attempting to bring back at least his feel, she has rented out his old apartment – very different now after several other tenants have come and gone — and she paints the bedroom the color it was before. One day while watching a television program, she is certain she has spotted her lover. One of the flaws in the book is the inexplicable irrationality of Anne’s decision to go to Cambodia to search for Serey. Echlin relies on the irrationality of love to explain this, but I would have liked more analysis here. Up to this point I wasn’t convinced of their relationship and viewed their story more as Echlin’s way to take her readers from Canada to the Killing Fields. It felt a little contrived. Making things worse, Echlin has Anne and Serey reunited fairly quickly. However, the book had been going strong until that point, and the very strong last half makes up for the convenient devices here.
As I just mentioned, while reading the book I was worried that Echlin was using the narrative to report on Cambodia. I’m fine when authors have major, broad events in their books. If they’re capable of doing the reporting justice through nuance and imagery and analysis. I’m not a fan, however, when it looks like the author is trying to be a journalist without having journalistic standards. In other words, if a book looks like an author’s attempt to reduce to sentiment an immensely complex and important event in history, I want to look the other way. I don’t like self-serving and undisciplined pathos. Thankfully, Echlin appears to be aware of this and even introduces a complex counterstrain in her narrative when she writes,
I think of Tuol Sleng and I hear Bach’s passion and I hear the thumping rhythms of Todesfuge and the chanting of a horrified chorus in Antigone. I hear a voice cry out in anguish, If this is a man? Human cruelty turned into a note of music, the rhythm of a sentence. Men have invented a word for this. They call it sublime.
She recognizes the importance of art as well as its potential pitfalls and falsehoods. The sublime is enlightening. But attempts to reach the sublime can be exploitative and ham-fisted. Hopefully, then, this account, this artistic use of Cambodia, must be something more than mere hack reportage.
So I was intrigued but not convinced by the first quarter of the novel. And once Anne got to Cambodia I was worried that the story could become that hack job of reportage. But, taking me off-guard, the complexities and that haunting reverence I hoped would be there came forth. Yes, this is a story about Cambodia. Hopefully many will read this and remember what happened there. Hopefully others will read this and come to know for the first time what happened there. However, there is a more universal theme to the novel as it moves from the specifics of Anne and Serey and even Cambodia’s disappeared to humanity’s disappeared. We can feel it touch us personally, brining the specifics of Cambodia closer to us. Hopefully we feel a genuine connection and not just a connection by artifice.
Again, the Giller Prize shortlist includes an entry that, both in its structure and explicitly in its text, concerns compelling issues in aesthetic theory. But thankfully this one carried through with subtlety. What remains when we go?
I held the bone and felt its curves under my palms and I looked at the pocked surface. All the joys of life left no mark at all. What is the value of a single human life?
After an intriguing, if ultimately disappointing, experience with Fall, my first read on the Giller Prize shortlist, I decided to read Anne Micheals’ The Winter Vault (2009). I remembered that when KevinfromCanada reviewed this book, he was disappointed, yet his review still made me want to read the book. The setting and topics sounded very interesting to me, so I was secretly pleased that it made the shortlist.
After reading it, I’m still fascinated by the topics and setting (oh! and the astute reader picks up on the limiting language I use in that sentence!). I’ll describe the setting first, as a kind of introduction to the plot. We start in southern Egypt, near the temple of Abu Simbel, in the mid-1960s when Abu Simbel was being removed from its original site where it had set for millenia, much of that time burried under sand. Because of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the original site would flood causing Abu Simbel to be under water. Letting such a wonderous site die under water seemed wrong, so the Temple was cut up and relocated to higher ground. I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to be the one who wielded the saw that made the first cut. Michaels does an excellent job presenting the tragic irony that was unfolding.
The dam would make a gash so deep and long that the land would never recover. The water would pool, a blood blister of a lake. The wound would become infected — bilharzia, malaria — and in the new towns, modern loneliness and decay of every sort.
I had never heard about the moving of Abu Simbel, though I had heard about the Aswan Dam, so the reportage here was excellent. At this point, I even appreciated Michaels’ overtly poetic language. I was also invigorated by Michael’s foray into some of the deeper aesthetic thory issues at play: “If one could be fooled into believing he stood in the original site, by then subsumed by the waters of the dam, then everything about the temple would have become deceit.” Indeed, Michael’s poetic introduction to the book ushers in such themes:
Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. In any case, forty thousand years ago, we left painted handprints on the cave walls of Lascaux, Ardennes, Chauvet.
The black pigment used to pain the animals at Lascaux was made of manganese dioxide and ground quartz; and almost half the mixture was calcium phosphate. Calcium phosphate is produced by heating bone four hundred degrees celsius, then grinding it.
We made our paints from the bones of the animals we painted.
No image forgets this origin.
Avery Escher is an engineer assisting in the deconstruction and relocation of Abu Simbel. His wife Jean is by his side as they experience the dread of attempting to save an object by dismantling it and relocating it, passing it off as just as good as the original. Avery and Jean met in Canada under similar circumstances in the late 1950s when the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway required the flooding in 1958 of ten villages, now known as “The Lost Villages“: “In the flooding of the shoreline, Aultsville, Farran’s Point, Milles Roches, Maple Grove, Wales, Moulinette, Dickinson’s Landing, Santa Cruz, and Woodlands would become ‘lost.’ This was a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated, for the sting of its unintentional truth; thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence.” The inhabitants of the Lost Villages, as would happen to Abu Simbel and the Nubians, had to pack up and be relocated to replicas, numbered cities built quickly and unrooted. Not only is Michaels discussing the tragedy of being forced to move away from ones home, but she is also discussing how location, architecture, objects, flora, etc., can never be sufficiently replicated. I’m a big fan of aesthetic theory, so Michaels completely had me here:
Simulation is the perfect disguise. The replica, which is meant to commemorate, achieves the opposite effect: it allows the original to be forgotten.
Even if this sentence has become typical, it is still profound, and it fit nicely into this book.
My problems with this book, sadly, are numerous. For me, the book goes down hill quickly when Michaels expands her already ambitious scope, chasing tangential themes ad infinitum. It was working out great when we examined the themes in terms of Avery being an engineer or in terms of Jean being an amateur botanist. But it starts to become jumbled when we look at jazz players, painters, sculptors, architects, and so on. It’s not that they don’t connect to the theme; it’s that they ultimately don’t connect to each other. In other words, in order to maintain order in this book, the complexities all must be boiled down to a highly abstract and general theme: our relationships with place and with inanimate objects and how those relationships can affect or even mirror our relationships to each other or to the dead. This is a great theme. It’s been done wonderfully, particularly by the esteemed W.G. Sebald (my recent reading of The Emigrants might be one reason I was so so disappointed here). In The Winter Vault the ellaborations spread out to make the book too thin, really straining the increasingly weak narrative.
It’s impressive how Michael’s attempts to tie these themes together in the narrative involving Jean and Avery, and eventually a man named Lucjan, whose past takes us to Poland and the Nazis. But in Part II it really doesn’t hold together — at least, it didn’t for me. The narrative became a prop Michaels decorates with language that become less poetic and more flowery. The characters stop talking to each other and start speaking to the reader for Michaels.
It’s really sad, too, because this was a fine book, and some of it still resonates with me, but I became very frustrated with the meandering threads that drifted further and further from the solid foundation established in Part I. This book needs a Part II, that’s for sure. Part I cannot stand along. Sadly, Part I stands much as it would if it were alone, because Part II is a weak structure – it would be better to relocate Part II somewhere else.
I am very excited to be part of the Giller Prize Shadow Jury this year. While only one of KevinfromCanada’s top picks made it to the shortlist, I have to say that the actual shortlist ranges a number of attractive topics. Look at this range: (1) The Golden Mean takes us to Aristotle’s tutelage of Philip of Macedon’s son Alexander; (2) The Winter Vault starts in Egypt during the construction of the Aswan High Dam, moves back to the Lost Villages during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and then to Toronto with a look at Nazi occupied Warsaw; (3) The Disappearedgoes to Cambodia under the Kmer Rouge; and then we spend time in Canada proper with (4) Fall taking place in a private school in Ottawa and (5) The Bishop’s Man going to a priest’s parish on Cape Breton Island. I’m not saying KFC is wrong that other books on the longlist were better (he read them — I did not), but I’m certainly compelled to read these titles for more reasons than for their inclusion on the shortlist.
I started with Colin McAdam’s Fall (2009) because it was KFC’s least favorite on the shortlist. I thought, let’s get this one out of the way. One of the benefits of having low expectations is that the book has a great chance of meeting them, and that was certainly the case here — too an extent.
First, the basic setting. Fall (like the last book I reviewed) is set in an exclusive private school. This one places us in Ottawa’s St. Ebury. The principal characters are Noel, the son of Canada’s Consul General to Australia; Julius, the son of the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, and Noel’s roommate; and Fallon, the Fall of the title, Julius’s girlfriend, and Noel’s obsession. Here’s an early passage from Noel about Fall:
One face could be my guide and salvation. It could be my comfort and the goal of superstition. It seems incredible that I can no longer picture her.
When I achieved a perfect mark on an essay, it presaged Fall’s eventual love for me. When I scored a shot from the line in basketball, which I rarely did, it was because I would kiss Fall that week, that term, that year.
Most of the book is told either in the first person by Noel, who is looking back, or in a stream of consciousness by Julius, who is very much in the moment. Julius is well liked at school. Noel is bookish and insular and, we’ll find out soon enough, downright creepy. To make things worse for Noel, he has a twitch in one of his eyes, earning him the nickname Wink. The only reason Noel and Julius are roommates is because everyone thought Julius would already have a roommate, so they got someone else. Noel was who was left over when it turned out Julius didn’t have a roommate. For almost a year Julius has been dating the beautiful Fall, and they seem to be developing a genuine loving relationship for a couple as young as they are. In the meantime, Julius and Noel have come to confide in one another. A friendship might even be budding. Noel is thrilled when he and Julius together pull a prank on another student. Only Julius is caught, and he doesn’t implicate Noel. In the ensuing punishment, Julius asks Noel if he’ll relay notes to Fall for him.
Up to this point the novel has been fairly uneventful. As far as events go, it’s fairly typical of most “school” novels. This is how Noel’s first section, the first main section of the book, starts:
The days that made me, that were supposed to change me, that didn’t actually make me, are showing me now what I was. My days in the room with Julius. Years have provided some safety.
We see the older narrator looking back through the years on some formative experience that happened while at school. What is unique is the style. Our narrator, as you can see from the pulled quote above, is not straightforward (though I’m willing to blame McAdam for the confusing abstraction of that first sentence, and not Noel). Noel is evasive even as he pretends to be honest: “Certainly, I never wanted to hurt her.”
The really unique style is found in the sections from Julius. They are told in a sort of frenetic stream of consciousness. The problem is that they are very simplistic and make Julius out to be a fairly shallow character concerned only with what is physically going on right in front of him. That might be exactly what McAdam intended, and this might be exactly who Julius is — it just doesn’t make for great reading, even when McAdam finds a unique way to show how Julius is feeling. Furthermore, the clipping style without quotation marks, without question marks, well, without a lot of punctuation, can get annoying very quickly:
My hair looks good.
I ate too much salami.
I’m humming.
I’m humming a song I don’t know.
No one knows this song I’m humming.
I’m gonna choose a song I know and I’ll hum it.
I’ll whistle it.
Why am I humming and whistling.
My hair looks good.
My teeth look good.
Scar on my lip.
From a zit.
Many of these runs go on for pages and involve Fall’s dialogue too, but not her thoughts. Though it is annoying and, I thought, ineffective at building character, it does bring the reader to the immediate presence of Julius. Still, it’s not a very satisfying presence to feel. The only time I felt like I was getting something was when Julius was amazed by Fall and by his love for Fall. Others might enjoy the raging hormones, but that was gratuitous to me — and the problem was that there was a lot of gratuitous material, rendering the pages from Julius’s head almost pointless in the grand scheme of the novel. Indeed, even the passage where we really sense the nature of Julius’s and Fall’s relationship come from Noel:
Julius told me that when he and Fall first got together she wouldn’t let him kiss her. They pressed foreheads together and whenever their lips came near she made a quick mhn mhn sound . . . no . . . no . . . and he said it drove him crazy. But they held on to each other, kept their foreheads together and looked in each other’s eyes, so close that Fall’s two eyes looked like one. And Julius said that you’d think it was a tease, you’d think a girl who wouldn’t kiss would take a lifetime to go further once you kissed her. But it wasn’t a tease. Kisses were important to her. He said it never annoyed him. They walked around school grounds and stopped, got close, walked again, and stopped. He said he had never paid much attention to kisses before, just to where they were heading. But when he kissed Fall that night it wasn’t just a signal or a relief, it was a loss of bones and a jump that wouldn’t land.
Noel has the best lines in the book. Here’s another one where he’s wishing he had the opportunity to talk to Fall:
This is the sort of thing I had wanted to say to her. I understand you, Fall. I knew that you were so much more than a beautiful, popular girl; that a beautiful, popular girl could still possess an aching, solitary soul.
These lines, for better or for worse, are the best we get about Fall too. She remains basically speechless throughout. From such passages, we get the sense that Noel is sensitive, but his narrative is as self-serving as it is confessional. In fact, we sense his pride, that, as was the case in his youth, he doesn’t fully accept responsibility for what went wrong. This is where the book is so intriguing (though it is also frustrating because it makes the book a bit lopsided and incongruent). Noel’s menace, which I’ve only alluded to here, is compelling and confusing:
I couldn’t sleep so I wandered the halls. Everyone was in his own bed, in his own box, with no idea that I was outside. The EXIT signs hummed in the halls. Edward was in his room alone that weekend. I held my hand an inch from his door. I could have done anything. I stared at my arm and realized how much it had grown.
It seems that McAdams has attempted to write a book that juxtaposes a rational world governed by rules with an irrational world governed by the “animal choices.” And while we get a sense of each of these worlds — that’s where the book succeeds — they never really come together in the book, making the book feel unbalanced and self-contradictory in a bad way.
So, why did I say this book succeeded for me and then proceed to say many negative things about it? Well, first off I said that the book met my low expecatations. But it did that easily, because within the jumble is some real intrigue. It’s a dark book, and even if all of the elements don’t quite fit, several discreet units are done so well that in the end I was left with a positive impression. McAdam is obviously a talented writer. But to me this is a book whose whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Kim Echlin: The Disappeared
Colin McAdam: Fall
Linden McIntyre: The Bishop’s Man
Annabel Lyon: The Golden Mean
Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
KevinfromCanada is currently celebrating that he does not have to read The Year of the Flood; however, his top four books did not make the short list. Go to his site to read his reviews of several of these books. More reviews will be coming on this site and on his site as we gear up for the announcement of the winner on November 10.
Here is my first review as a member of this year’s Giller Prize Shadow Jury: The Year of the Flood (2009) (long listed for 2009 Giller Prize). I’m excited to discuss this book! However, because I don’t want that sentiment to mislead any Atwood lovers into reading a highly irreverent review you’d rather avoid, I must forego witholding my opinion of this book and forewarn you: my basic response to The Year of the Flood was (1) giddiness because the first half, to me, was ”So Bad It’s Great!”; (2) indifference as the book became nothing more than a faux-literary thriller, with all of the conventions and lack of depth so that it read more like Stephen King than Margaret Atwood; and (3) indignation at the author’s pretensions, particularly in the self-promoting build-up to this novel’s release and as showcased on the “Acknowledgements” page. In brief, this is not a glowing review. In fact this might be my most negative review yet, and I usually avoid such negativity. However, it’s worth discussing this book, negativity and all (well, negativity is about all that’s here), and not just because of the Shadow Jury. There are a lot of books out there that don’t pretend to be literature; they have their place and meet their expectations. Then there is an ugly class of books that pretend to be more than they are. I don’t like it when an author who knows better presents that faux literature as something profound. And it’s almost offensive when that author’s methods for promoting that faux literature are beyond pretentious.
Let me get one thing straight, though, before I call down your ire, or at least before I call down more of your ire: I do respect some of Atwood’s contributions to genuine literature. She has exceptional talent. You’ll find nothing but my deepest praise for The Handmaid’s Tale; it is one of my favorite books, truly a highlight not just of Atwood’s career, but also a highlight of speculative fiction. Alias Grace (which won the Giller and was one of the first books I reviewed on this site) had me intrigued throughout until the disappointing ending. And The Blind Assassin was as clever and enjoyable a book-that-should-not-have-won-the-Booker as you’ll find. Furthermore, after reading The Year of the Flood, I am actually more likely to read Oryx and Crake (The Year of the Flood takes place at the same time and even involves some of the same characters), as the references to it towards the end seemed more substantial and interesting than the melodrama I was reading. So, hopefully you see that while I do not hold myself out to be Atwood’s greatest fan, I am attracted to her books. She is a terrific writer, sometimes, but I’m afraid what we have here is a prime example of talent gutted by ego.
The plot itself is engaging only because its structure keeps the mysteries alive. This is a structure we’ve seen in other Atwood novels, so though it is effective and well executed here, it must now be Atwood’s go-to formula. The Year of the Flood is divided into several large sections with chapter titles. Each section begins with a short speech from Adam One, the founder of God’s Gardeners, to his fellow Gardeners. The speeches, besides letting us know which time period the bulk of the events of the upcoming section cover, give Atwood a chance to express blunt philosophy with no nuance or depth, but with many aphorisms, because Adam One is seen as a bit of an eccentric:
By covering such barren rooftops with greenery we are doing our small part in the redemption of God’s Creation from the decay and sterility that lies all around us, and feeding ourselves with unpolluted food into the bargain. Some would term our efforts futile, but if all were to follow our example, what a change would be wrought on our beloved Planet! Much hard work still lies before us, but fear not, my Friends: for we shall move forward undaunted.
I am glad we have all remembered our sunhats.
Each speech ends with “Let Us Sing” (or its equivalent), and we then have the dubious pleasure of reading the hymn the congregation is singing. After the hymn, the section moves to a brief segment about one of the two main characters, Toby or Ren, in Year Twenty-Five, the Year of the Flood. Year Twenty-Five is the book’s present time. Some pandemic, a “waterless flood” (a wonderfully apt name, showing that Atwood still has a gift for new perspective as she ties together culture, the present, and its future — there’s something positive!), is about to spread or has spread over the earth, wiping out humanity, but these two women are survivors (as, we find out, are several other characters, all fortuitously and conveniently — it’s beyond a stretch that they all survive and come together).
After that brief glimpse into what Toby and Ren are doing in the Year Twenty-Five, the section moves into the past (to the year Adam One’s speech indicated) for several smaller chapters within the larger section. Either Toby or Ren tell how they became part of God’s Gardeners, introducing us to the people in their lives, their doubts, their tragedies, eventually leading us up to the causes and effects of the Flood, eventually filling in the gap in the narrative.
That gap between the past and the bleak present is the heart of the novel. But this is where Atwood’s structure becomes formulaic, a low-grade authorial trick. In the Year Twenty-Five, Toby and Ren speak of the past in vague but suggestive ways, and most of the time we can tell that it’s actually Atwood teasing the reader and that the prevaricating is not based in the characters themselves; or, in other words, the prevaricating does nothing to deepen the characters, to make their minds come alive. Some of my favorite books use a similar technique, but for more purpose than to snag the reader: for example, in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day Stevens is vague about his past because he himself doesn’t want to acknowledge it; it’s an effective way to show his own evasiveness. Perhaps Atwood is emphasizing the stark contrast between the Ren and Toby of the past and present, though that in itself isn’t particularly important. Also, with Atwood we’re getting junk like this: “He was an older guy, bald on top, with a ponytail at the back, and a lot of arm tattoos. There was something familiar about him — maybe he was a repeat — but I didn’t get a very good look.” Such plotting is artificial. It’s an author’s evasiveness shoved onto her characters, meant to drag readers on to a promised climax that is often much less interesting than the one we imagined. Atwood is a master at this structure and has used it more effectively before, and on a sentence-by-sentence level this is still a well written book. So – as was the case in Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin – I found myself reading because the pages flowed on smoothly and I wanted to know what happened between the past and present. Many more author’s shenanigans, I’m afraid.
I’m sure there are many readers who will disagree with this next proposition, but I also didn’t find Toby and Ren to be particularly interesting characters. Atwood has given them a past that is compelling reading; the problem is that again it is familiar territory Atwood has plodded before: abandonment, sexual warfare, wandering hands of otherwise innocuous men, outright brutal sexual abuse of not-so-innocuous men, psychological warfare between the affected women as their identities fade away, the way our culture infects us with these tendencies. Because the background was so familiar, Toby and Ren become stock characters; the things that happened to them lost their impact when it felt they were meant to quickly and conveniently trigger our sympathy for otherwise empty characters. In the end, Ren and Toby offer nothing new, so, really, they offer nothing.
What’s different in The Year of the Flood is the environment. We stand in the future, and North America has become an exaggerated version of its current worst traits (again, from the acknowledgments page: “The Year of the Flood is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact.”). While these worst traits deserve critical literary treatment, we don’t get it here. Instead, in this book Atwood’s clever lexicon that melds the future world with our current world is downright cutesy, reducing all potential depth to mere cleverness for the sake of cleverness.
Government as we know it is nonexistent. Instead, massive corporations have conglomerated and privatized everything. The brand name is “Corporations.” They run the world, careful to keep the profit margin as large as possible. They have a private security force called the Corporation Security Corp, or, as Atwood calls it with her ham-fist: CorpSeCorps. The world is a very materialistic place, and the corporations like that. Keep the pleeblanders (that’s what Atwood calls Orwell’s proles) happy with cosmetics from AnooYoo, with toys from SeksMart, with food from an omnipresent fast-food chain called SecretBurger, “Because Everyone Loves a Secret!” Right up front Atwood explains that the secret is that “no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them.” However, within this awful (if comical) future, there is a subversive group called God’s Gardeners that has melded traditional elements of Judeo-Christian religious doctrine with environmentalism and vegetarianism. They call themselves “bioneers.” They take their “Vegivows.” And then there are the hymns. In her “Acknowledgments” page Atwood claims, “The clearest influence on Gardener hymn lyrics is William Blake, with an assist from John Bunyan and also from The Hymn Book of the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada.” As much as I love the subtlety of Blake’s poetry or the nuance and perspective of Bunyan’s allegories, I certainly couldn’t take the hymns seriously. Here’s an example from the first hymn:
Who is it tends the Garden,
The Garden oh so green?‘Twas once the finest Garden
That ever has been seen.
It goes on. Here’s a bit of the second:
When Adam first had breath of life
All in that golden place,
He dwelt in peace with Bird and Beast,
And knew God face to face.Man’s Spirit first went forth in speech
To name each Creature dear;
God called to all in Fellowship,
They came without a fear.. . . . .
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation’s mighty seed –
For Man has broke the fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed.
I don’t care if you believe in the sentiments expressed in these hymns or not, they are not poetry. They don’t do justice to the sentiments expressed. For many of the hymns I wondered if Atwood did her research in contemporary megachurches to come up with the appropriate amount of bathos. If that is the case — brilliant! But she’s serious. Besides comparing her work to Blake and Bunyan, she has made the hymns available online if anyone would like to use them for “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” It takes a certain amount of pride to set oneself up as a de facto poet for some movement, but she’s apparently got it. Which might also explain the large cathedral gatherings, promoting the release of this book, where the hymns are sang by a choir.
And now for my real problem with the book: if Atwood had offered something worthy of the cause it pretends to promote, then go to! However, The Year of the Flood is nothing more than a slight thriller mascarading as serious literature. It is unfortunately just as full of stock images and techniques as it is of cutesy futuristic lingo. In its exaggerated portrayal, it does not analyze our current culture. Its only critique is made in blunt and obvious references. Again, the shallow treatment makes it seem as though Atwood is throwing these references in the text not to critique, not to discuss, but rather to come across as important. Here’s one reference topical for us in America. It’s just thrown into the narrative to further show how bad this future is:
Nobody could get public wellness coverage unless they had no money of their own whatsoever.
That’s it. It’s done its job. It’s created the illusion of depth, and, perhaps more importantly, the illusion of commeradery as many readers will think that Atwood so gets it! Here’s a particularly offensive one that exploits Hurricane Katrina to introduce a history for Amanda, who lived in Texas before it was destroyed:
The shelter was a football stadium with tents in it. There was a lot of trading going on: people would do anything for twenty dollars, Amanda said. Then her mother got sick from the drinking water, but Amanda didn’t because she traded for sodas. And there was no medicine, so her mother died. “A lot of people shat to death,” said Amanda. “You should have smelled that place.”
Again, it’s not whether I agree or disagree with Atwood’s underlying claims about our current times; it’s how poorly she deals with them and the sense that they are there as a shortcut to build her ethos.
Where the book settles into a narrative without worrying about throwing in any of these familiar but poorly used motifs, it becomes nothing at all, just a few characters trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. To me, the best speculative fiction is fiction with a real human story, where the environment is merely incidental, where the environment merely allows the author to explore themes more deeply (I’m thinking of McCarthy’s The Road, or even Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). But here we have an author hung up on her own creativity – the creative future environment is the subject of this book, the characters are secondary, any discussion about how to make the world a better place is tertiary. Were it not for the fact that Atwood’s covenant of silence with Canadian book reviewers who received advance copies, for her cathedral promotional show, for her self-appointment as poet laureate for environmentalism, I would have simply dismissed this book as a poor addition to Atwood’s late period. But if ever there were a book written in bad faith, where a talented author makes a mockery of serious writing while actively promoting it as something profound, it’s this book.
Today the 2009 Giller Prize longlist was announced! I’ll pass you on to KevinfromCanada, who has written up a bit about the prize, a bit about this longlist, and a bit about the Shadow Jury, of which I’m a part.
But, here is the list itself:
- Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood
- Martha Bailie: The Incident Report
- Kim Echlin: The Disappeared
- Claire Holden: The Heart Specialist
- Paulette Jiles: The Colour of Lightning
- Jeanette Lynes: The Factory Voice
- Annabel Lyon: The Golden Mean
- Linden MacIntyre: The Bishop’s Man
- Colin McAdam: Fall
- Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
- Shani Mootoo: Valmiki’s Daughter
- Kate Pullinger: The Mistress of Nothing
The shortlist will be announced on October 6 (soon!).
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