Mind Picker: The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

We were all descended from orphans in Quebec. Before I'd dropped out of high school, I remembered reading about how ships full of girls were sent from Paris to New France to marry the inhabitants. They stepped off the boat with puke on their dresses and stood on the docks, waiting to be chosen.

They were pregnant before they even had a chance to unpack their bags. They didn't want this. They didn't want to populate this horrible land that was snow and rocks and skinny wolves. They spoke to their children through gritted teeth. This is where the Quebec accent came from. The nation crawled out from between their legs.

The province of Quebec hardly needed the federal government to recognise it as a distinct nation within Canada in 2006: their minority population makes outsized contributions in arts, culture, sports and whatever category Just For Laughs Gags falls under. In so many areas, the Québécois are simply better than us in the ROC (Rest Of Canada), all while resisting the forces that would try to assimilate them into the dominant (North) American culture that encircles them.

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Even so, despite kowtowing from the feds and an outlandish annual sum of transfer payments from the national coffers, Quebec is still threatening to separate, and as they held their provincial election this year, for the first time, the ROC was grumbling that it might be time to let them go (and fortunately, the separatist party was defeated at the polls). The last time that Quebec held a referendum on sovereignty, in 1995, Anglos from all over Canada descended on La Belle Province and waved their "My Canada Includes Quebec" placards and danced in the streets as separation was turned down in a 51% to 49% vote. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is set in this time frame -- the months leading up to and after the 1995 vote -- and told from the point of view of diehard separatists who were decidedly not dancing in the streets at the results.

As the book begins, we meet Noushcka and Nicolas, the 19-year-old twin children of a folk singer, Étienne Tremblay, who had been the voice of an earlier failed referendum in 1980. As a legend in Quebec, Étienne soaked up the limelight, even trotting out his young children to shout separatist slogans or read patriotic poetry during televised variety shows. Focussed on his own celebrity, Étienne left the twins to be raised in a squalid Montreal apartment by his aged father, Loulou. Still recognised on the street as the famous kids with the more famous Dad, and saddled with the psychological stress of having been abandoned by their mother and rejected by their father (except when opportune for his career), Noushcka and Nicolas are hard-partying, emotionally stunted, high school dropouts who still sleep together in the same twin bed and are casual in front of each other with sex and nudity. As the referendum approaches and Étienne pops back into their lives, Noushcka takes steps to separate from her brother, determined to not fall into the traps that seem fated for the whole Tremblay family. Along the way, there are many cultural touchstones that place the story firmly in Quebec -- including motorcycle gangs controlling the drug trade, poutine made with St-Hubert gravy mix, non-ironic male figure skating, and the Anglo-Franco/urban-rural divides -- and it was all very interesting, but none of this is what The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is really about: it's about the language (according to this article ), and that's an interesting concept for a book written by an Anglo Montrealer, from the point of view of a French Montrealer, presumably presented in English as the tacitly acknowledged translation of (most of) her French thoughts (and other than some unfamiliar curses, the French wasn't beyond me).

In an interview, O'Neill said:

I started out as a poet and that impulse sort of moved into prose. Now I don’t know if I could go back. But I think of my novels as poems. I see each sentence as a kind of haiku.

And that statement makes a lot of sense of this book: The language is extremely poetic and there are so many similes, often more than one per paragraph, that I suppose it will have the power to either annoy or charm a reader. Want to read a novel composed of haikus? Some examples:

Pigeons sat on the sign, crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench. The noise they made sounded like a marble rolling across the floor all day, every day.

There were always these beautiful moments at the end of a relationship. Like the thick juice at the bottom of a pitcher of concentrated mix. Like the sky at sunset. They made parting so painful.

The stars in the sky were like candles on the birthday cake of a thousand-year-old man. Somewhere in the night there were bears and raccoons with jars stuck on their heads. Like astronauts lost in space.

And the book is filled with innumerable scenes involving roses (which might foreshadow a later funeral where the casket is covered with roses?) and feral cats who slink in and out of the action:

A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar.

A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.

And in many cases, the metaphorical tips over into the surreal:

We sped down the highway. Someone out there had opened a pie and blackbirds had flown out and filled the air.

The trees on the wallpaper had grown taller and many, many more blossoms had opened up on their branches. The drummer boy on the sheets had grown up. He was a tall, handsome teenager with a bayonet in his hand. The birds in the painting had migrated. They were now in the bathroom on the windowsill.

Overall, the plot worked for me but the language tricks went a little far -- and I am certainly capable of being charmed by language tricks in books like The Enchanted, Come, Thou Tortoise and O'Neill's own Lullabies for Little Criminals (that wowed me and broke my heart in equal measure). I would be fascinated to know how this book is received by people outside of Canada or anyone who didn't live through the 1995 referendum; how important will it be to have breathed that sigh of relief?

And another quote that I liked that didn't have a place in the review about La Grande Noirceur or the Great Darkness -- a time when Quebec was firmly under control of the Catholic Church and the province was famous for its high birthrate:

There were babies in baskets in all the doorways. Once, a woman came home with a baby wrapped in newspaper, sure that it was a little piece of ham that she had bought. Babies were always crying. Mothers could do nothing to make them hush, because all the lullabies were written in English.

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