The Best Laid Plans

The Best Laid Plans is the first novel written by Engineer/PR firm President Terry Fallis. As the author couldn't find a publisher, he released this book chapter by chapter via podcast, found an audience, eventually won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and it was named the 2011 Canada Reads title. That's a lot to recommend this book -- it's funny, set behind the scenes in Ottawa, and everyone in Canada should be reading it (according to our cultural overlords at the CBC) -- but this seems like the kind of book a reader will either love or hate. And I didn't love it.

There's a long stretch in the Prologue that uses Parliamentary double-entendres to describe the narrator's horror at discovering his girlfriend and her politician boss getting it on in his Centre Block office. This part was truly clever and funny and I thought I'd be in for a fun ride (and I was delighted by just how wonderfully Canadian it all was), but nearly immediately, the funny dried up -- unless one finds (numerous) fart jokes to be the zenith of humour:

An Oppenheimer blast of flatulence literally blew me out of my poetic reverie. Just as no two snowflakes were identical, each McLintock fart, among millions, was unique.

Most of the characters (with the exception of the interesting Angus McLintock) are one-dimensional, don't speak or act like real people, and have unclear motivations (and, no, I don't forgive a stupid scene with a blusteringly evil American businessman because the narrator thinks, "This guy was nothing but a caricature"). As an English professor, the narrator has some of the most stilted thoughts ever (and the following is him falling in love with a conveniently gorgeous, smart, and available young woman who happens to agree with him that a Triple-E Senate would be a bad idea):

I didn't really care what we talked about, but our discussion seemed to migrate to semiserious subjects that required the coordinated firing of synapses in the brain to sustain the kind of positive impression for which I was aiming.

And if one English professor's thoughts are annoying, imagine the fun when two get together and start talking:

"Not there are none. There is none. None literally means not one, so the verb is singular. A common mistake."

With that, he winked, turned, and disappeared into the chamber. I hustled up the white stone stairs to the Members' gallery, flaying myself for a grammar error I was forever correcting in others.

And he's not kidding about forever correcting grammatical errors -- both of these characters do it constantly throughout the book, which is just as annoying as hanging out with people who do it in real life. Oh Professor McLintock, you say that "to boldly go" is one of the most famous split infinitives in modern culture? How faaaaascinating. Happily, I enjoyed some schadenfreude at this: I had picked up a used copy of The Best Laid Plans and the reader before me had circled and crossed out and amended the spelling/grammar/usage errors that had slipped past the publisher (and while I did snicker at each pen mark, this really does underscore how rushed to market this book was once it began to gain an audience -- editing couldn't have hurt).

I did love how unabashedly Canadian The Best Laid Plans is and wish more fiction was set in the halls of Parliament -- if nothing else, this book proves that people are interested in the subject -- and while I can appreciate that a narrator who works for the Liberal Party is going to have some partisan ideas, an author risks turning off half his potential readership with comments like these:

Historically, Tory Throne Speeches and budgets have rewarded the rich by cutting taxes, liberated big business by eviscerating regulatory oversight, despoiled the environment by gutting legislated standards and enforcement, and shredded the social contract with those living in poverty. At least that's my detached and disinterested analysis.

And just factually this book had me scratching my head: characters keep referring to the federal Tories as the "Progressive Conservative Party" (which ceased to be an entity with a 2003 merger); my sister-in-law, who is from the book's setting of Cumberland, confirmed that there is no campus of the University of Ottawa in her hometown (and the town isn't situated quite where the author puts it); and most unforgivably, I couldn't believe the downfall of the beloved Finance Minister -- after having more than one character say there's something fishy about him (which, with a Finance Minister, I assumed meant skimming and kickbacks at a Senatorial level), am I supposed to believe that he was brought down by a sex scandal? That a very powerful, unmarried, formerly squeaky-clean politician would flee the country because he was caught leaving his love nest? Even if it was an S & M dungeon? If anything, here in Canada, if the media chose to go full-tabloid with the story, I think the public's reaction would be positive -- happy to see the man was human after all (*see Rob Ford).

I'm not surprised that the CBC chose The Best Laid Plans as a Canada Reads winner -- it's about as funny as the TV shows that the national broadcaster tries to present as comedies (Royal Canadian Air Farce, The Ron James Show, InSecurity, etc.) And I'm not surprised that the author has a degree in Engineering -- although there are quite a few self-aware jokes in this book about how Engineers aren't artists, Fallis isn't truly an artist himself: this book is overly-ambitious and overly-constructed and underly-funny. 

I did laugh at the double-entendres from the Prologue, so I'll keep it here:

Rachel, my Rachel, was on her knees in front of the Opposition House Leader. Let's just say she was rather enthusiastically lobbying his caucus. Stunned and devastated, I turned away -- to get a better view in the lee of a well-endowed rubber plant. Rachel jumped into her advance work with both hands before moving to what seemed to be his favourite part of the proceedings -- Oral Questions. Eventually, he pulled her up off the floor and onto the desk where he begged leave to introduce his private Member's bill. Clearly, there was unanimous consent and the cut and thrust of debate started immediately -- well, mostly thrust. By the look on her face, second reading was proceeding satisfactorily with just a few indecipherable heckles thrown in for good measure. The House Leader occasionally shouted "hear, hear" and slapped her backbench in support. At one point, she amended her position on his bill, and the debate continued.

They were hurtling towards royal assent when I regained my faculties. I considered rising on a point of privilege, but, abhorring confrontation of any kind, I simply threw up on the rubber plant and stumbled back out into Centre Block's arched and awe-inspiring main corridor. Portraits of former prime ministers mocked me as I hurried by, searching for answers and some industrial-strength breath mints. At the moment, I was sure that Rachel and the Honourable "Dickhead" had no idea I was their vomiting vestibule voyeur. Damn my weakness for alliteration.

And, to be snarky, I excerpted right to "vomiting vestibule voyeur" to end on the kind of writing that I didn't like in this book.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a fascinating historical novel in its details -- I haven't thought much about footbinding before, and certainly never thought it was as widespread as it evidently was, lasting a thousand years throughout all but one province of China. I never knew how excruciating the process was, with the young girls forced to walk circles in their bloody bindings until the bones cracked beneath them. I never considered how binding a daughter's foot was seen as an act of mother love since a girl with unbound feet would have been considered unmarriageable. I never knew how erotic a woman's bound feet were for her husband (and according to wikipedia, "Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet"). In so many ways, Chinese footbinding seems like a cultural cousin to female genital mutilation (and especially in the ways that both barbaric practises are designed to entrench a man's power over his wife), but as little as I knew of the actual details of footbinding, that's not all that this book is about.

If footbinding symbolises the ways in which Chinese men exerted their control, nu shu writing was a way for women to subtly rebel: although forbidden to learn the writing of men, the women of Hunan county developed their own system of writing, which they wove into cloth, embroidered onto handkerchiefs, and embellished into the folds of fans. Most of the women, expected to spend their days toiling in their own chamber, would have had "sworn sisters" to socialise with, but if a woman was very lucky, she would have been matched with a laotong or "old same" -- a sisterly relationship with a love and bond stronger than that between a wife and her husband. These friendships seemed to be the only consolation for women -- despised as daughters for being "useless branches" on the family tree, married out young to other families (often far from the natal home), put into service to highly critical and demanding mothers-in-law, used for "bed business" by their husbands to produce the desired sons (and woe betide the woman who dares produce daughters) -- at least the women had the emotional support of other women in their situation.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is told as the memoir of Lily, an eighty-year-old matriarch who, although born as the second daughter of a lowly farmer, had been fortunate to have had perfect "golden lilies" (feet of the ideal 7 cm size) and who had been matched as the laotong of Snow Flower, a girl of higher social standing. Because of these advantages, Lily was able to marry into a very good family, eventually taking the title of Lady Lu when her mother-in-law passed. Through Lily's memories of a long life, the reader is immersed in the world of the women's chamber (with much interesting information on everything from story singing and dowry making to funeral rites) and the historical facts of the era (with the menace of a typhoid epidemic and a heart-pounding escape into the mountains during the Taiping Rebellion -- imagine all those women climbing a rocky mountain path on their deformed feet).

And as interesting as all of the historical information was, the centerpiece of this book is the laotong relationship between Lily and Snow Flower, and unfortunately, this was the weakest part. Supposedly matched in their "eight characters", the two girls are recognised as more or less soul mates -- a relationship that is rare and prestigious -- but right from the beginning, when the girls meet as seven-year-olds with freshly bound feet, they are like night and day. Snow Flower speaks poetically and Lily hopes that one day she'll feel the way that her friend speaks. As they get older, there seems to always be a gap between the way the relationship is supposed to work and the way that Lily is feeling, and when it is revealed that maybe Snow Flower isn't everything she's pretending to be, I couldn't see why this one-on-one relationship is supposed to be superior to having a group of sworn sisters to socialise with. For two women who grew up with this idealised female friendship, it was frustrating for me when neither was able to fully reveal herself to the other or fully offer support when the other needed it. I also would have liked more on how Lily behaved as the mother of a daughter and as a mother-in-law herself -- was she properly cold and demanding while regretting that was the role she was expected to play? This book may as well be written in nu shu for the amount of appeal I think it would have for men, so I would have liked for Lisa See to have gone even deeper into the feminine interior of what could have been a more fully human main character.

For the historical aspects, which See really did bring to life, I would give five stars. For the imperfect storyline, only three. Averaging out, four stars seem a little high (did I love this book?) so I'm rounding down this time -- and especially because I listened to this book and the narrator had a breathless, melodramatic voice, perpetually on the verge of tears of giggles.

The Light Between Oceans

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory.

Watching Judge Judy is a guilty pleasure of mine: mostly because I tend to agree with her and like it when she unleashes on the people who have no idea that they're behaving stupidly. However, I have been having a problem lately with how she deals with cases about dogs, and one case, in particular, was shocking to me: A little boy's grandmother had bought him a puppy shortly before she died, and within a few months, the puppy went missing. Within a year, the animal had been tracked to a street not far away from home, now being taken care of by a couple who admitted to having seen and ignored the lost dog posters -- and they refuse to give the dog back. Judge Judy explained to the little boy that although there was no doubt in her mind that this was the same dog he had lost, she didn't think it would be fair to rip it away from its new family. She even brought out her own newest little puppy and asked the boy if he wouldn't like to have the money to buy himself such a sweet little dog. Crying, he said no, he wanted the dog his dead grandmother had bought for him. Judge Judy tutted sympathetically, restated that the defendants had acted horribly and would have to pay, but she just couldn't take the dog away from the family that it had so clearly bonded with. I was really stunned by that decision because, as much as I love my own doggy and can anthropomorphise her reactions into "feelings" and love for me, I wouldn't expect her to have a legal definition beyond that of  my "property" and I can't imagine any other "property" that Judge Judy would have treated in the same way. After reading The Light Between Oceans and mentally replacing "dog" with "baby" (a little girl; definitely not "property"), I was left asking myself, "What would Judge Judy do here?"

Some *spoilers* beyond: The Light Between Oceans is set right after WWI in Australia, described as a "swiss cheese" world by the narrator -- the community is full of holes as a generation of young men went away and never came back, and those who did return all had something missing, from limbs to pieces of their minds and souls. Tom Sherbourne is one of the "lucky" returning soldiers who, after a rift with his family and bearing witness to the horrors of war, decides on a solitary life as a lighthouse keeper and is satisfied to receive a posting to the most remote station of all: Janus Rock; a half day's boat ride from the mainland; the last piece of Australia he had seen as a soldier on his way to war. What Tom had not counted on was meeting the love of his life, Isabel, in the few short days he spent in the small community of Point Partageuse prior to taking his posting. As remote as Janus Rock is, a supply boat is sent out every three months and the lighthouse keeper is given shore leave every three years -- and this is sufficient for Tom and Isabel to correspond and decide to marry. As happy as they are together, three miscarriages devastate the couple, and when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby in it, it is impossible for Isabel not to see it as the merciful hand of God uniting a needy infant (surely her parents must be dead?) with a woman desperate for motherhood. Since she had lost her last baby just two weeks earlier and the foundling was a newborn, Isabel was able to convince Tom that they should pretend she was their own baby -- and despite Tom's misgivings, he signaled the mainland news of the happy birth and buried the dead man on the island. After two blissful years of family bonding on Janus Rock, Tom and Isabel take their daughter on her first shore leave and are stunned to discover that the baby's mother was indeed still alive, living in Point Partageuse, wasting away for want of word of her missing husband and child. 

What would Judge Judy do? If the baby, Lucy, was a dog, she would surely make the case that the loving care provided by the Sherbournes -- along with Lucy's obvious bonding with those she believes to be her parents -- is enough to justify not breaking apart the family, even to restore the real mother's sanity. This is the case that Isabel makes, but Tom, having lost his own mother as a boy and still seeking ways to redeem himself after the war that yet haunts him, takes time to convince. In the end, he decides to keep the secret, but to soothe his guilty conscience, Tom leaves Hannah, the baby's real mother, a secret note explaining that while her husband was dead, her daughter was alive and healthy and being well cared for. When they have shore leave for an official function two years later and they can see that Hannah is even worse off, Tom leaves the baby's silver rattle in her mailbox as proof of her rescue. This act leads to the ruse unravelling and Tom is arrested for kidnapping and the possible murder of the baby's father.

The center point of this plot is very interesting -- the author had presented Tom and Isabel as so likeable and deserving of happiness that the reader can nearly be convinced that they are doing the right thing when they take the infant as their own. Not only had the miscarriages been mentally devastating to the couple on the island, but Lucy was also important for the healing of Isabel's own parents, who had lost both of their sons in WWI -- it's important to always remember that this story is taking place in the "swiss cheese" world where everyone had lost family members. So what is justice when every conceivable outcome has devastating results? Who has the real moral claim to the little girl who had no role in where she ended up, but who, by the time she is found, has a clear preference for where she would rather be? Judge Judy is no King Solomon, is rarely called upon to make Solomonic decisions, but each of the mothers offer Solomonic solutions: first Hannah and then Isabel offer to give up their claim to Lucy/Grace for the little girl's sake. The following may be ultimately platitudinous, but there were quite a few interesting ideas explored:

You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things. 

Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.

But, as interesting as the central conflict and some of the writing was, I just wish this book had been better written overall. M. L. Stedman did a beautiful job describing Janus Rock -- the wind and the water and the sky and the stars -- and the preparation for burial that Isabel performed for their stillborn son was truly touching, but many of the other scenes were a bit mawkish and perfunctory. And there were many situations that I just didn't buy: how easy it was to convince Tom to keep the baby; Gwen bringing the little girl to the park (and even trying to convince Hannah to give up her claim!); Isabel's desire to punish the husband who had given her everything. And the worst worst part: early in their courtship, Isabel told Tom of the time she had visited an orphanage and how her heart broke at the sight of all those motherless babies -- why have that scene if you don't want the reader remembering how easy it would have been for this couple to have as many children as they wanted, with official permission? I really didn't love this book but can understand why they're making a movie out of it -- the setting is gorgeous and there will be war flashbacks and period costumes and true joy and melodrama: I do believe with the right direction, this story can be cleaned up into something very special.

A barely related tale: I was playing around with creating a family tree on mundia.com and Ma brought me some photocopies that Dad had hanging around from someone once doing work on his family's genealogy. As I flipped through the pages, the most interesting note I saw was:

Allan Glode (b. 24 May 1794) was adopted as a small child by John and Dorcas Foster of Port Medway. He was lost in the woods when found and would not return home. Later, he used his adoptive surname of Foster. 

I wish I had more information on that! If they knew his original surname, did they also know his family? How awful was it at home for a "small child" to run away and refuse to return? Did his parents know that he wanted to live with a new family and said, "Good riddance"? I've said it before and I'll say it again: being related by blood doesn't necessarily make you a family. 

Ken was maybe six the first time he packed his hockey bag and regretfully informed me and Kyler that he just couldn't live with our family any more (I wish I could remember how that played out -- did he say goodbye to our parents? Did they lock him in his room or would they have called his bluff? I wonder if he would remember?) I can't help but wonder what his fate would have been if he had been born 200 years earlier -- would he have walked off into the woods and refuse to return home? In the 1700s, and as a son, would that have been a devastating loss of labour or simply, thankfully, one less mouth to feed? So many questions, no answers, so I'll end with some pictures of me and Rudy at the Big Tub lighthouse (to, you know, tie it all together):

                          

The Hours

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep -- it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.

Something about The Hours seems so simple and obvious that anyone could have written it. There are three storylines, told from the points of view of three women over the course of three different days: We follow Virginia Woolfe on the day she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway in her English country home; we follow Clarissa in late 20th century NYC as she prepares for a party (her name and actions echoing those of the fictional Mrs. Dalloway); and we follow Laura, a 1950s LA housewife, as she attempts to find meaning in her domestic duties and steals a few hours to read Mrs. Dalloway. For source material, Michael Cunningham could rely on biographies and journals for the Virginia sections, on Mrs. Dalloway for the Clarissa sections, and apparently, the Laura sections are based on Cunningham's own mother. It all seems so simple and obvious, but of course it can't be or this kind of alchemy would happen all the time.

The Hours is total metafiction: Mrs. Dalloway is written and read and acted out in three different streams while characters muse on the insubstantiality of real life and the permanence of art -- and as each agrees that it's great literature that will survive the ages, I could never forget the fact that I was reading literature (and an attempt at greatness?). While the following was said by the doomed poet, Richard, it felt to me like both a mission statement and false modesty from the author himself:

What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.

And if that isn't all meta enough, we have Clarissa trying to catch a glimpse of Meryl Streep -- an actress she believes to have created immortal art -- and although I haven't seen the movie adaptation of this book, I can deduce that it was Streep who played Clarissa in the film (and obviously I can't lay this at Cunningham's feet, but the modern reader can't help but be reminded of the movie made of the book at this point -- and I wonder who Streep tries to catch a glimpse of?). 

All of the characters are depressed to some extent (and Cunningham has said that he's a depressive) and nearly all of the characters are gay to some extent (and Cunningham is gay, but resents being called a "gay writer"), so was this an easy book for him to write? And if it was easy for this particular author, does that necessarily make it lightweight? I'm having such an ambivalent reaction to The Hours -- there are many lovely bits of prose but even I (no expert, though I have read the original) can recognise that Cunningham is echoing Virginia Woolfe's thesis and voice from Mrs. Dalloway -- but yet, that doesn't mean this book isn't also well written: and since it won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner awards, I feel the need to defer to their expertise as to the lasting value of The Hours.

As for my own reading experience (over which I do claim expertise), I didn't love this book (the goodreads criteria for four stars) but think it should rate higher than most of the books I've merely liked (three stars), so this rating should be considered a rounding up and not necessarily a glowing recommendation. *

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

*And nothing but laziness is stopping me from implementing my own 10 point system of rating here to be able to make more subtle distinctions but I can't imagine going back and reevaluating what I've done so far: You do one and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

Red Harvest

(Poisonville) was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

The Continental Op's first impression of Personville (known as Poisonville, even by those mugs who don't pronounce "shirt" as "shoit") may have been depressing to him but it was music to my ears -- here was a promise of the kind of gritty noir language that I've been enjoying so much in the books of Raymond Chandler. But, too soon, I realised that although Dashiell Hammett came first -- and despite Red Harvest being considered a bona fide classic of American literature -- this book wasn't nearly as much fun as those Chandler gems.

The plot of Red Harvest is complicated, with dozens of characters (thugs and mobsters and corrupt cops) who drop in and retreat and misdirect the detective. Having promised to clean up the town, in the end, all the Continental Op can do is set the rival gangs on each other and wait for them to take each other out. That may not sound complicated, but along the way, there are countless murders that the detective tries to solve, and the longer he spends in the corrupt town, the dirtier his own soul becomes: "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives."

Originally serialized in four parts in the pulp magazine Black Mask from 1927 to 28, the whole was assembled as Hammond's first novel and released in 1929 -- and this may explain why it seemed unnecessarily bloated, with false solutions along the way and new characters added so late in the plot. The Continental Op was based on Hammond's own experiences with the Pinkerton Detective Agency and Red Harvest is said to contain scenes from his time working as a detective in the mining town of Butte, Montana during labor strife there -- but if Hammond was as morally unscrupulous as the character he created, it's probably a good thing he left the agency. As an early effort in the genre -- as the pioneering effort -- I'm not exactly disappointed, but although not blown away this time, I'll definitely read some more Hammett in the future for more scenes like this:

"Don Willsson's gone to sit on the right hand of God, if God don't mind looking at bullet holes."
"Who shot him?" I asked.
The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said:
"Somebody with a gun."

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

According to wikipedia, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children "has been a New York Times best seller. It reached the #1 spot on the Children's Chapter Books list on 29 April 2012 after being on the list for 45 weeks". Yet, I had no idea that this was a YA book -- I've seen its creepy cover at the book stores forever without ever noting that it was shelved alongside other YA fiction -- so if I found it lightweight and kind of a familiar story, that's likely due to my expectations (based on my own ignorance).

This book started off auspiciously: Jacob is a bit of a loner and loves listening to his grandfather's outlandish stories about the enchanted island where he spent time as a child; a happy place populated with strange children and overseen by a benevolent, pipe-smoking bird. Grandpa Abe even has a cigar box filled with black and white photos of these characters and he gravely explains how the enchanted island is necessary to protect these kids from the monsters that would hunt them down. 

                                                      

When Jacob starts school and is bullied by his peers for repeating these tales, his father explains where the old man's stories come from and Jacob is no longer charmed by his grandfather, just saddened:

My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around -- they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.

To this point, I found the whole concept so intriguing: First there's this magical world with peculiar children and frightening monsters, but it turns out to just be an old man's way of dealing with tragedy. But then, when Jacob is on the cusp of turning sixteen and believes that his Grandpa is just a delusional old man, it turns out there may be otherworldly monsters after all. (I'm still on board at this point.) Jacob convinces his father to take him on a trip to the fogbound island of Cairnholm off the coast of Wales, and as Jacob begins testing his grandfather's tales, the book takes a turn into fairly typical YA fantasy territory: plucky kids need to band together to defeat the incredibly powerful forces that overwhelm the adults around them. (And this is where I mentally checked out.)

That's the plot, but the main charm of this book is the photographs, so I'll talk about them, too. At first, I found them pretty creepy, and in the beginning, where Grandpa Abe is showing them to Jacob and talking about who each child was and what made them peculiar, they were organic to the story and enhanced my enjoyment. At some point, however, it felt like photos were just stuck in because the author, Ransom Riggs, liked them. The story would say, "I remember a picture of my grandfather sleeping with a gun in his hand" and there would be that photograph on the next page -- it wasn't important to the story and enhanced nothing. I think the photos would have worked better if they had been grouped together in the middle of the book -- like in a conventional biography -- and the reader could study them all at once. The way this book is structured, the plot needs to serve the pictures instead of the other way around. Annoying.

Something I liked and something I hated that might be spoilerish: I really liked that the gunner on the U-Boat was a wight -- to have that circle back was so clever (there are monsters, there are only monstrous men, oh there are monsters, oh there are monstrous men). And what I hated: That Jacob would have a romantic relationship with his Grandpa's old girlfriend; even if she still looked 16 and was "hot", I could not believe that either one of them would have gotten over the ick factor.

This is a very quick read, with the photographs taking up a lot of the room in this nearly 400 page book. If Miss Peregrine had been intended for an adult audience I would probably give it 2 stars, but since it wasn't, I won't judge it too harshly (but stop short of actually recommending it for more than a time waster in the sunshine like I enjoyed today). I see that there's already a sequel to this book and I don't find myself excited about that fact…

I'm only just a bit of a snob when it comes to reading, but with so many wonderful books out there that promise to speak to me of serious themes, I don't seek out YA fiction on purpose (but will happily always read any book that one of my girls recommends to me). So I was really disappointed when I realised that I had mistaken Miss Peregrine for serious (or at least adult-themed) literature -- I was expecting more Night Film than Percy Jackson. Interesting, then, that I read this book right after a debate in the newspaper this week over whether or not adults should waste their time reading YA books.

Ruth Graham of Slate states that "Adults should feel embarrassed reading literature written for children", and makes her case here.

The National Posts's book editor, Mark Medley, made a satirical response the next day, here.

As always, I love it when my reading life mirrors what's happening out in the world.

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. 


             


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. 

***** 

The longlist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize (with my personal ranking):

·  Sean Michaels for his novel  Us Conductors  *

·  Miriam Toews for her novel All My Puny Sorrows *

·  Claire Holden Rothman for her book My October 

·  David Bezmozgis for his novel The Betrayers  *

·  Heather O’Neill for her novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night *

·  Frances Itani for her book Tell  *

·  Kathy Page for her short story collection Paradise and Elsewhere 

·  Rivka Galchen for her short story collection American Innovations 

·  Padma Viswanathan for her book The Ever After of Ashwin Rao *

·  Shani Mootoo for her novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab 

·  Jennifer LoveGrove for her novel Watch How We Walk 

·  Arjun Basu for his novel Waiting for the Man

* also on the shortlist

The 2014 Giller Prize winner is Us Conductors

Herzog

Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

Poor Herzog -- even when this book was first written fifty years ago, it must have been pretty hard to feel sorry for the successful white man with his successful white man problems. His second marriage over and fresh back from a European self-pity tour, the professor's biggest problem is trying to figure out how not to marry the sex goddess who is throwing herself at him. It would all seem like the most foolish premise ever if the plot of Herzog didn't mirror the facts of Saul Bellow himself (whose second wife had indeed just left the author for his best friend), and once you place all of this mental anguish into the brain of an actual person, it is possible to sympathise. It must have been hard for the successful white man as feminism took root and divorce became normalised and birth control became more foolproof: the paternalism of a Father Knows Best world deserved to crumble, but it took victims along with it, and Bellow encapsulated this time and place in history through the eyes of poor Herzog.

Trying to straighten out his thoughts and work through the pain of losing another wife and child, Herzog's mind pings between reliving moments from his life and writing (mostly) angry letters that he'll never mail. As unstable as his mind is, so too are his actions: Herzog is forever jumping on a plane or a train and following the impulse to visit someone who might finally clarify everything for him. Every page of this book contains nuggets of wisdom and extraordinary insights, and more than anything, I wonder if his thoughts would have been shared more freely if he lived in our modern times -- what would have happened if Herzog had had a Twitter account?









Would Herzog have regretted his tweets on later reflection? Would a psychiatrist have been suggested sooner? Would he have straightened out his thoughts sooner if he had had some feedback from loving friends and family? The world has certainly changed since the early sixties, and Herzog is very much a book of its time, and as such, not quite my cuppa tea. Along with the pithy tweety bits, since Herzog is a professor, there are also many long philosophical (and imaginary) arguments that he has with the great thinkers, alive and dead, that I just found dull:

No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those of the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are.

Yours, under the veil of Maya,

M.E.H.

In the end, I can recognise what makes Herzog a classic without having loved it, and although I may not have completely worked out how I feel about it, I'll end with his own final thoughts:

At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.