Let's not be Americans, Tender said. Let's be outlaws. Except for Henry -- he's our minister without portfolio.
What the hell is that.
You're not committed to anything but you got a hand in everywhere.
Henry accepted this.
From the first page of Minister Without Portfolio, I had to wonder if Michael Winter is in a writer's group with fellow Newfies Lisa Moore and Jessica Grant (and I have no reason yet to believe he isn't) since they seem to share some literary quirks -- lack of quotation marks, question marks, and in Winter's case, apostrophes in words like arent and couldnt. For example: How would he do this. Who was she to him. What did he need and what did she need. Do we need people. Parents, offspring, census reports. Marry her. That's a lovely stream of consciousness, and since I don't punctuate my own thoughts, and since Moore and Grant each wrote one of the favourite books I've read so far this year, the comparison is a favourable one.
As the book begins, Henry Hayward, the young-and-selfish/hard-working-hard-partying protagonist, loses his girlfriend and his home in one conversation:
She told him there wasn't another person. Henry watched her stand up from her kitchen table and push things around on a counter. She peeled up the foam placemats that made that satisfying sound. She was busying herself and of course he was in her house, he was the one who would have to physically leave. For three hours they talked it over and she told him how it was and he fled through the spectrum of emotions and they were both cleansed but she returned to what was not an ultimatum. I'm leaving you now can you please leave.
But I love you, he said.
Ah, peeling up foam placemats from a laminate countertop does make the most satisfying of sounds; I knew that Winter was talking my language. And then these images, beautiful and thought-provoking:
The alert daylight made him stagger to the house of his best friend, feeling small and without a shell. He felt himself evaporating and it scared him. He let the sun warm his shoulders and kidneys and fill him up, the sun pushed him to John and Silvia's.
He spoke of Henry as if he were an old shed built with found wood. Which he was. Which we all are.
Henry is convinced to snap out of his funk by going to Kandahar on a civilian contract, where he and his best friend John will be able to spend time with another old friend, Tender Morris, who is an army reservist who volunteered to join the Afghanistan campaign. I really enjoyed the description of the Canadian presence in Afghanistan -- the shoestring budgets and serious soldiers being supported by the profiteers from back home (from the little "fixers" to SNC-Lavalin) and creating photo-ops for the Defense Minister -- this section felt true and honest. And I was intrigued by this pontification by the drunken Tender Morris:
Let's turn our voices into marches, Tender said. Let us pass by the injured and those that throw stones (he motioned to the Americans) and alter a law through a circuitous route. Come on guys.
Henry and John had no idea what Tender was talking about. Obviously, he had time to read, like a fisheries observer…
Hurt those you mean to help, Tender said. We'll take your ride and be a member of the steering committee for the marketplace of ideas that fights against the very same structure put in place by your bilderberg group!
That's not my usual image of the screech-fuelled Newfie and the scene serves to underscore the tragedy that soon follows: Just as I got to know and admire Tender Morris, he is killed by a suicide bomber; an event for which Henry feels responsible.
When Henry returns to Newfoundland (after a disastrous return to work in Fort McMurray), he decides to repair a falling down house in a community of a couple hundred people -- roughly the responsibility figuratively assigned to him as a "minister without portfolio" -- and the home renovation serves as a metaphor for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Henry's own life: No longer adrift and selfish, Henry is determined to create a home and salvage a legacy. At this point, where Henry has pushed through his pain, the book started to lose me a bit; it turned into a string of vignettes instead of the introspective study I thought it had started as. The passage about Henry falling into an incinerator was interesting, but I had actually read that story in the newspaper when it happened to the author in real life -- I'm sure that all authors use events from their own lives in their fiction, but recognising this story made me wonder about each scene that followed: Did Winter have a brush fire burn out of control? Has he tried to row a dory across a cove in the fog? These musings took me out of the narrative. And the pronouncements from this point felt less profound:
Being driven to a place is much different than driving there yourself. The world involved in its own copulation.
We are living in a time where it is easier to know more about a stranger's family by researching online than it is to know one's own. History is the constant upheaval of peregrination.
And even though this image would probably have delighted me if it was in Come, Thou Tortoise, it seemed out of place in this book, as though the character had been indulging in the psychotropic ayahuasca that her ex-husband had smuggled into Canada:
His mother kept grudges , but limited them, so she got over much grief by drying out the grievances on a clothesline then stacking them in a little drawer behind her ear.
In the end, I think the disconnect is entirely my own : I was expecting another Come, Thou Tortoise or February and Minister Without Portfolio was something entirely different. This might be the difference between fiction written by men and women; a difference that doesn't reflect on quality. My brother recently showed me this video, telling me it's hilarious:
It's Not About the Nail
After I watched it, I said, "You can tell that was written and produced by a man. I know that men and women approach problems differently, but nothing makes me crazier than when I tell Dave a story, and instead of just listening to me, he tells me what I've got to do." That is rarely what I'm looking for: I can solve problems, honestly. In the three books I'm thinking about here, each of which deals with loss and grief, the two written by women explore the emotions and inner reactions of female protagonists -- and those books had a profound effect on me. In Minister Without Portfolio, we are shown Henry's reaction through the responsibilities he's willing to take on, the roots he puts down, and the literal rebuilding of a house -- and I couldn't connect to this on a deep level, though I do appreciate the artistry of the work.
Books about Newfoundland are a genre unto themselves and I have great affection for the place and its people. Michael Winter obviously shares this affection and writes strikingly when it's of his home:
Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, though, he pictured an acre of land in his head that was his land. The picture has no location, it's a floating acre with a perforated edge like a postage stamp that hovers slightly above the land, though there is, of course, a view of the Atlantic.
And even the characters are overwhelmed by the beauty of their surroundings:
Just because an experience is an old one -- being affected by nature -- doesn't mean it shouldn't affect the heart…Let yourself be humbled by the experiences people have been having for thousands of years. And speak of it.
In Minister Without Portfolio Michael Winter fulfills this duty of speaking, crafting an entertaining and intriguing story -- not only set in the starkly beautiful province of Newfoundland, but so Canadian that beavers make intermittent appearances. It only misses the mark where it doesn't conform to my expectations, but that is hardly a complaint.
My friend, Delight, married a Newfoundlander and I don't know if she would like this book or not. They met in Edmonton, while he was working the oil fields in Fort McMurray (not the mining operation Henry is involved in, but it does have similarities in that it shows the why and how of Newfies heading out to Alberta) and he now works in an oil field in Yemen, spending weeks away at a time (again like Fort Mac, but also like when the boys headed out to Kandahar). She has a university degree in Environmental Science, but because she lived in a small and remote outpost (smaller and remoter than the tiny Renews described in this book), not only could she not work in her field, but she was forced to not live in a very environmentally friendly manner -- there was no recycling, it was a 7 hour drive to the nearest big town to see an Optometrist, trips by plane were an absolute necessity to escape the cabin fever in winter, etc. Growing weary of being left in this village for weeks at a time (for ten years, no less), she convinced her husband to move to a larger community in Nova Scotia about a year ago.
As much as she would relate to details in Minister Without Portfolio, I fear Delight would cringe at the image of the big incinerator at the dump, the garbage spread out on a field for fill, the waste and the diregard displayed by everyone -- this is exactly what she fought to escape. Interesting (to me, anyway) is the dispute Henry finds himself involved in over the title and land connected with the house he renovates: Nearly the exact same thing happened to Delight when she fixed up an old home to operate as a cafe and B &B. I do believe she's still bitter that after several years of operation, when she was ready to sell and move away, nearly all her profits were gobbled up by paying off the old man who had never had use for the property until he saw it might get him a few bucks.
I don't think I'll send her this book for Christmas...
