H is for Hawk

Author Helen Macdonald is a poet, historian, life-long naturalist and avid falconer. When her father died suddenly on a London street, her reactions and the subsequent literary working through of her grief resulted in the unique and remarkable book, H is for Hawk. Her writing – poetic, literary, intelligent – moved me so much, that this review will mostly be in her own words. On learning of her father's death:

I was about to leave the house when the phone rang. Hop-skippety, doorkeys in my hand. 'Hello?' A pause. My mother. She only had to say one sentence. It was this: 'I had a phone call from St. Thomas' Hospital.' Then I knew. I knew that my father had died. I knew he was dead because that was the sentence she said after the pause and she used a voice I'd never heard before to say it. Dead. I was on the floor. My legs broke, buckled, and I was sitting on the carpet, phone pressed against my right ear, listening to my mother and staring at that little ball of reindeer moss on the bookshelf, impossibly light, a buoyant tangle of hard grey stems with sharp, dusty tips and quiet spaces that were air in between them and Mum was saying there was nothing they could do at the hospital, it was his heart, I think, nothing could be done, you don't have to come back tonight, don't come back, it's a long way, and it's late, and it's such a long drive and you don't need to come back – and of course this was nonsense; neither of us knew what the hell could or should be done or what this was except both of us and my brother, too, all of us were clinging to a world already gone.

As a visiting lecturer at Cambridge, Macdonald was apparently able to free up her schedule, and her first reaction to the absence of her beloved father was to find a baby Goshawk and train it – which is essentially a 24 hour a day job for the first few weeks. Goshawks are notoriously challenging to train, and as she began her research and sourcing of her hawk, she remembered (and quotes at length from) the books she has read about them. In particular, Macdonald remembers a book – The Goshawk – by T. H. White, an author better known for The Once and Future King, the Arthurian legend which also contained Goshawks and Merlin the Magician who could shapeshift into a hawk. On meeting her baby Goshawk, Mabel, for the first time:

Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers.

As Macdonald works through her grief by having a relatively easy time of training Mabel, she shares White's tortuous experience training his Goshawk, as well as his tormented biography: as a terrified and neglected child; a restless schoolmaster; a repressed homosexual and sadist; and as an ultimately unsuccessful tamer of Goshawks. Everything that Macdonald learns about White not only helps her to better understand the imagery he later put into his Arthurian books, but she can relate it to her own situation as well; to the way in which she was retreating from the human world into that of her Goshawk.

'Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own conscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

H is for Hawk is a new slant on the introspective grief memoir – it includes elements of both the literary allusions of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and the back-to-nature vibe of Cheryl Strayed's Wild – and as a poet, Macdonald included some truly incredible imagery, which I savoured even when I didn't completely understand it (as when she said My heart is salt or The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Aren't those lovely if obscure?) And in the end, Macdonald made her peace with loss:

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

I enjoyed H is for Hawk on so many levels – the hawk training in particular is totally fascinating – and I imagine it might speak most intimately to those who don't have the words of a poet to describe their own grief.

Macdonald and Mabel

Everything I Never Told You

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.

As an opening line, could anything be sadder than a dead sixteen-year-old? Pretty and popular, brilliant and with a bright future all but guaranteed, Lydia Lee will soon be pulled, half-decomposed, from the bottom of the town's lake and her Dad will cry, “Her friends must know what happened to her!” And her Mom will insist, “She must have been abducted – Lydia would never go near the lake at night!” And Lydia's brother and sister, each harbouring secret information, will understand that the truth may never be revealed. Dun dun.

Everything I Never Told You is like a literary mystery novel, jumping around in time from when Lydia's parents first met in the 50s to the few months after her death (set in 1977), and there's a nice tension as the reader waits to see if the facts of her death will be revealed. Throughout it all, there is much made of the fact that the Dad, James, is a Chinese-American (born in California of immigrant parents) and Marilyn, the Mom, is the product of a single mother household, with a Southern white-gloved Mom who never had contact with her daughter again after meeting James at their wedding. We will also learn that James, ostracized his entire life, burdened Lydia with his own hopes that she have many friends, and that Marilyn, who gave up her dream to become a doctor when she realised she was pregnant, pushed Lydia to fulfill her own academic goals (the whole time ironically vowing that she would never force her daughter to conform to anyone else's expectations like her mother had done.)

Author Celeste Ng writes some very lovely scenes – I especially enjoyed James and Marilyn's early love story – but overall, this book didn't really work for me. It was incredibly heavy handed with the family pressures – every interaction between James and Lydia involved him trying to encourage her to make more friends and every interaction between Marilyn and Lydia involved homework and test results – and I just wanted to reach through the pages to Ng herself and say, “Yes. I got it the first time.” Meanwhile, with an omniscient point of view that gets into everyone's head, we learn that Lydia's much younger sister Hannah is neglected but satisfied in her role as family observer (creepily always present and watchful) and their older brother Nath understands that Lydia doesn't want her place in the center of the family's orbit. After her death, Nath conjures a conveniently parallel memory of a time when he had pushed Lydia into the lake in a fit of jealousy:

(T)he second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.

This reluctance on Lydia's part and understanding on Nath's is also repeatedly spelled out for us. It culminates in a phone call between them while Nath is on a student visit to Harvard, the weekend before Lydia's death:

Nath sighed. “What happened? Did Mom nag you about your homework?” He tipped the bottle to his lips and found the beer had gone warm, and the stale liquid shriveled his tongue. “Wait, let me guess. Mom bought you a special present but it was just a book. Dad bought you a new dress – no, a diamond necklace – and he expects you to wear it. Last night at dinner you had to talk and talk and talk and all of their attention was on you. Am I getting warmer?”

All their lives Nath had understood, better than anyone, the lexicon of their family, the things they could never truly explain to outsiders: that a book or a dress meant more than something to read or something to wear; that attention came with expectations that – like snow – drifted and settled and crushed you with their weight. All the words were right, but in this new Nath’s voice, they sounded trivial and brittle and hollow. The way anyone else might have heard them. Already her brother had become a stranger.

Even so, Ng did maintain narrative tension – just what happened to Lydia? Maybe she was under enough pressure to consider suicide (especially when she realised that Nath was serious about going away to Harvard and she would be losing her only ally)? Maybe she was rebelling against expectations and just got mixed up with the wrong crowd? Maybe the answer lies with that shady Jack character who lives down the street? As more and more of Lydia is revealed, the reader learns that she isn't who anyone in her family thinks she is and maybe even our own expectations of her are flawed. The eventual solution both did and didn't satisfy me, but I did enjoy the overall mystery vibe of this book.

But one last comment: much is made of the racism James and his half-Chinese children endure, and if Ng is trying to say that this is representative of what she herself has lived with, it's a truly shocking level. I lived in small town Ontario in 1977, and although I must admit I didn't know any Asians there, if I had seen a Chinese family driving down the street I would never have pulled back the corners of my eyelids and started chanting, “Ching chong ching chong”. Again, maybe this is a true story for Ng, and I might be naive about the racism around me, but as a persistent theme, I felt knocked over the head with it.

In the final analysis: Some lovely writing and a nice mysterious atmosphere, but heavy repetitions of themes reduced this book's potential. A lightweight read despite the hype.

I'm still thinking about the racism angle: at one point, James is annoyed that someone asked him what the difference was between an egg roll and a spring roll; as though that was an example of racism. Is it? Is it racist for me to ask an Italian what the difference is between rigatoni and penne? I can only conclude that this was something that happened to Celeste Ng and she found it racist (and while I totally support her right to define what she finds offensive, the intent just may have been benign).

When Mallory was in junior kindergarten, a new girl, Sarah, joined her class. Plopped in near the end of the school year, Sarah had come straight from China -- where she had spent her first five years with her grandparents, despite having been born in Canada -- and she didn't have a word of English. By the end of the first week that she was here, Sarah's Mom, Min, approached me as I was waiting for Mal to come out.

"I saw you walking with a little Asian girl yesterday," Min said.

I thought back and remembered that Kennedy's friend, a girl of Philippine heritage, had walked home with us after school the day before. "Yes, " I said. "That's right."

"Do you babysit her?" Min asked.

"Oh no," I said. "She's just a friend of my daughter's."

Min looked distressed and said, "Oh, because I'm supposed to find a babysitter for Sarah before I go back to work on Monday. I don't know who to ask and I was hoping you watched children after school."

I hesitated. Ever since Kennedy had started school, people had asked me to watch their kids, and even though I did get a diploma in Early Childhood Development, I was happy to have had no extra kids at that time. On the other hand, if this desperate Mom was going to be asking random strangers to babysit for her, who better than me? I decided it would be both the right thing to do and an interesting challenge if I agreed, so I did.

Kindergarten back then was a half day affair, so "after school" meant that I would have Sarah for 5 or 6 hours a day. Mallory and Sarah got along really well right from the start, and while they played in Mal's room most of the time, Sarah was the only kid I babysat for whom I really tried to do lots of art and crafts. By the end of the school year, Sarah had a bit of English, but after a summer of camps, when we saw her again in September, Sarah was speaking very well.

Sarah totally fit in with her classmates, and while some of the kids may have had questions about China and what it was like to live there, I couldn't see any racism. (And I'm sure it helps that even Catholic schools are more culturally diverse now.) I babysat Sarah until she turned 10 (the legal age at which children can be home alone here), and while she and Mal drifted apart, they always remained friendly and I'd be certain to get a hug from Sarah whenever I saw her. Happily, the girls have become close again this year and I can see that Sarah is bright and popular and athletic and a real Canadian girl.

And yet...all of a sudden this year, Mal has been making Chinese jokes about Sarah, and while she plays along and puts on an accent (so solly), I have no idea where it came from or if Sarah is actually offended. I know she was offended when she told me about the English Literacy Test they all had to take in grade 10 last year, and about how she had been put into a small classroom of ESL students and given an extra hour to write the test, and about how the teacher/supervisor had spoken slooowly, enunnnciating all of the instructions for them. What kind of stupid decision what that? Is it racist or just oblivious to who Sarah is beyond her biography?

And speaking of that biography -- I always thought it was kind of sad that Sarah was sent to China for five years after she was born. But then my brother told me a similar story: In his engineering firm, he had hired a husband and wife pair, and as they were preparing for the birth of their first child, Kyler asked about maternity leave and the mother-to-be said, "Oh, I won't need mat leave. I'll be sending the baby back to China for its first five years." Kye explained that EI covered a year of mat leave, and if it was a question of money, maybe he could figure something out...but the woman explained that she wanted to have her baby experience those first few years in China; that it was a cultural expectation. And isn't that interesting?

I should ask Sarah if she would find it racist to be asked the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll. I should ask her if she finds Mal's recent Chinese jokes offensive. As a final thought, I'll say that I'm not offended to learn that when Sarah's family has pasta for dinner they call it "White Night". 

Update: Okay, I asked Sarah about racism and she said that while she wouldn't be offended by anyone asking her the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll, she does get comments every single day that make her want to say, "Geez, okay, I look different, whatever." For example, Sarah's on an elite soccer team, and whenever the other girls kick the ball hard, they make gibberish grunting noises. Once, some of the girls turned to Sarah -- after someone had grunted their gibberish -- and said, "That sounds like Manadrin, doesn't it? What does it mean?" Sarah said that kind of thing -- which is fairly nonstop -- does hurt her feelings, and okay, I'm a naive idiot for thinking that because I don't see racis, it doesn't exist.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

A reader should almost turn to the afterword of Behind the Beautiful Forevers before plunging into the main text. In this afterword, author Katherine Boo explains the four year long process of research – in which she got to know and gained the trust of the residents of the Mumbai slum known as Annawadi – that this book is based upon. Since the book itself includes a murder trial, you might think that Boo entered the slum in order to research this event, but no, the trial and the corruption that it reveals simply happened while she was there; another day in the life of Annawadi.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is narrative non-fiction done right. We follow the interconnected stories of a variety of people, focussing on two contrasting families: Asha is a middle-aged woman who had come to the slum from absolute poverty, but through hard work, manipulation, and prostitution, is poised to become a rare female slumlord; Manju is her teenaged daughter – smart, beautiful, kind, the “most everything girl” of the slum – who is attending college, doing most of the housework, and teaching the small children of the neighbourhood (even though her mother gripes that she only really needs to hold classes when an inspector comes by); not far away lives Abdul – a garbage sorter who has been working to support his family since he was six; his father (either a malingerer or actually too sick to work); his mother (a sharp-tongued baby machine); and his countless siblings. As poor as Abdul's family appears, their relative prosperity provokes jealousy and bitterness in their neighbours; even in those to whom his family has been especially kind. Below them in the hierarchy are garbage pickers like Sunil (who was kicked out of the orphanage by its limo-riding Nun Director when he became too big to attract appropriate charity – at 11-years-old), and Kalu, a fearless homeless teenaged thief that the other boys admire. Everyone in Annawadi dreams of getting enough money to escape the slum, but as corruption and acts of God take away what little they have, too many residents turn to rat poison or self-immolation for the ultimate escape.

I have read quite a few novels set in middle class India, and as helpless as those fictional characters felt in the face of a corrupt society, it's nothing compared to the effects this system has on its very poorest citizens. The police demand bribes to allow people to operate their businesses (or point out good places to steal from for a cut of the haul), and when there's a crime, these same officers beat suspects, demand bribes to set the innocent free, and refuse to investigate actual murders; preferring to ascribe every death to natural causes and proudly point out their solve rates. Anyone lucky enough to be brought to a hospital will be told that there is no food and no medicine (the goods having been stolen and sold right off the charity or government trucks), and what services are offered, often come with an under-the-table payment to the doctors. Prisons are bedlam, courts are more interested in completion rates than justice, and at every turn, some person with a slight advantage over you has their hand out for a bribe that might or might not lead to help. It was horrifying to be constantly reminded that this is nonfiction; this is simply the every day lives of a huge number of people. 

And what's most disheartening is the notion that nothing can really be done for the residents of Anniwadi. If education is the key to leaving the slum, no one is actually educating the children. More than once, a school was set up and closed immediately after foreign donors were pleased with what they saw. By the end of the book, even Manju has been persuaded by her mother to suspend her little “bridge school” in order to focus more fully on one of Asha's scams. But since the scam netted Manju a laptop and her brother a motorcycle, can she be blamed for going along? What could Manju possibly think of this book and the way it portrays her family?

Even foreign charity doesn't trickle down to the people who actually need it:

The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

Hidden behind billboards beside the sprawling Mumbai airport and its nearby luxury hotels, the Anniwadi slum is an eyesore and embarrassment to the Indian government, and under constant threat of demolition. But then where will its 3,000 residents go? It's a heart-wrenching image to think of all these children spending their days scavenging for garbage, but what happens to them when that meager living is taken away? And although we feel outrage for the little girls doing piece work for manufacturing companies out of their huts, would they be better off picking garbage? Or offered for sale, like one 11-year-old in the book? You might think that if only the Annawadians, and other slum dwellers, could get together and refuse to participate in the corruption and refuse to be treated as inferiors, they might have a chance – like Gandhi himself – of peacefully changing their conditions, but back to the afterword, as Boo says:

In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of a mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a horrifying and true story that left me feeling broken-hearted and impotent. It's an important read even so.

Tunesday : Schoolhouse Rocks!

Sufferin' Till Suffrage

(Dorough, Bob / Yohe, Tom) Performed by Essra Mohawk

(Yeah! Hurray!)
Now you have heard of Women's Rights,
And how we've tried to reach new heights.
If we're "all created equal"...
That's us too!

(Yeah!)

But you will proba ... bly not recall
That it's not been too ... too long at all,
Since we even had the right to
Cast a vote.

(Well!)

Well, sure, some men bowed down and called us "Mrs." (Yeah!)
Let us hang the wash out and wash the dishes, (Huh!)
But when the time rolled around to elect a president...

What did they say, Sister, (What did they say?)

They said, uh, "See ya later, alligator,
And don't forget my ... my mashed potatoes,
'Cause I'm going downtown to cast my vote for president."

Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule. (Oh yeah!)

And now we pull down on the lever,
Cast our ballots and we endeavor
To improve our country, state, county, town, and school.

(Tell 'em 'bout it!)

Those pilgrim women who ...
Who braved the boat
Could cook the turkey, but they ...
They could not vote.
Even Betsy Ross who sewed the flag was left behind that first election day.

(What a shame, Sisters!)

Then Susan B. Anthony (Yeah!) and Julia Howe,
(Lucretia!) Lucretia Mott, (and others!) they showed us how;
They carried signs and marched in lines
Until at long last the law was passed.

Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule. (Oh yeah!)

And now we pull down on the lever,
Cast our ballots and we endeavor
To improve our country, state, county, town, and school. (Right On! Right On!)

Yes the 19th Amendment
Struck down that restrictive rule. (Right On! Right On!)

Yes the 19th Amendment
Struck down that restrictive rule.
(Yeah, yeah!
Yeah, yeah!
Right on!
We got it now!)

Since 1920...
Sisters, unite!
Vote on!

Back when I was a kid, there was no Disney Channel, no Teletoon, no DVDs or PVRs: if a kid wanted to watch cartoons, that kid needed to be sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday morning. And, no matter that sociologists say we were all being indoctrinated by sugar cereal ads, there was nothing my brothers and I liked better than having a song from Schoolhouse Rocks pop up between Goober and the Ghost Chasers and the Great Grape Ape. We loved them all, and while we may have been slightly disappointed when it turned out to be a dreamy number like Figure Eight, the grammar songs were huge favourites (Conjuction Junction! Interjection!), and most of all, the American History songs got us up and singing -- chicken dancing to Elbow Room (got-ta got-ta get me some...), getting all soulful with I'm Just a Bill (and I'ma sittin' here on Capitol Hiiiiill...). Talk about indoctrinating! And we're Canadian! Now, maybe it was a subconsciously protofeminist thing, but my absolute  favourite was definitely Sufferin' Till Suffrage -- the beat, the voice, and don't forget mah, mah, mah mashed potatoes. (Right on Sister!)

I heard this comedian, Joe Machi,  recently on Last Comic Standing and I found this joke hilarious:

And I'm thinking that this kind of joke might be a hint that we're ready for a re-examination of history. Schoolhouse Rocks -- with the injuns helpfully getting out of the way of Manifest Destiny and no mention made at all of slavery, slaughters, or the imperialistic conquest of Hawaii -- makes for a nice white-washing of American History, and we all sang along and loved every minute of it. Now, I am certainly not equating a rosy view of American History with those Hamas-sponsored children's cartoons that are designed to indoctrinate impressionable children into anti-Semitic views; The Shot Heard 'Round the World is not a call to arms:

But, wouldn't it be wonderful if we all had a more balanced view of the world we live in and the missteps that our ancestors took along the pathway to the present? Wouldn't it be great to share that balanced view with our children while they're still young? Dave and I both loved Schoolhouse Rocks so much when we were kids that we bought the DVD set for our own girls when it first came out, and what a difference it was to pop one of these discs into the player in my van -- waiting for Saturday morning cartoons is for chumps anymore! But, as much as I still loved the songs, I couldn't help but try to give the girls some context whenever the American History songs came on. And maybe that's where balance starts.

But back to Sufferin' Till Suffrage -- this is essentially a protest song about injustices done in the past, and as a little girl and now as an adult, I identify with the message. In 1977, TV execs thought that children could handle some sad history with a happy ending and it could serve as a template for new releases. Could it be time for a new round of jump-off-the-couch-and-sing-along fact-based children's songs? I know the airwaves are cluttered with choice these days, but as this series proved way back in the 70s, when the songs are catchy enough, kids are going to listen. And learn. (Oh yeah!)

Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

Of course you don't always know where you are going – but for some reason all movements happen because they were meant to.

There's a sense of inevitable tragedy at the heart of Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace and David Adams Richards is so masterful at introducing characters and then subverting the reader's assumptions about them that, while nothing is as it initially seems, the reader doesn't feel tricked – just satisfied when deeper truths are revealed.

The book opens with a fight between 22-year-old Ivan Basterache and his wife of twenty months; the slow-witted, epileptic Cindi. Ivan looks like a monster (there was a shotgun involved that sent Cindi running into the night in just her underwear), but as the story develops, Ivan is revealed to be a noble and loyal soul. Others shun him as “puritanical” – no fun at all – but Ivan is the friend you want around to stare down your bullies, pay off your debts, solve your coyote problem (even if Ivan is sympathetic towards a coyote mama who is just trying to protect her kits). 

Ivan walked right up to him, with a boldness he always had, his eyes very bright and yet always a little detached from the moment; the eyes, in fact, of a person who has survived and lived by himself, without much help in early youth from anyone – neither mother nor father.

As his separation from Cindi drags out, bored neighbours stir up trouble, taking Cindi's side against Ivan, until rumours become fact and even his own father wants to ingratiate himself with others in the community by bad-talking his own son. 

Antony's story was the same one at all times. It was just presented differently, with an indefinable self-deception and a lasting hope that the best points in it were true. And it had become clear now that his side lay with people who had made light of him, ridiculed his family, cheated him out of money, defamed his wife, bore false witness to his son, and held him in contempt.

This is a relatively short book but its mood and characters are just so truthful – I know these people; I'm related to these people – and it was a delight to dip a toe in David Adams Richards' New Brunswick once again.

There's something about New Brunswick that I just find so backward (and this is just my own experiences; I'm sure there are many fine people from the province): I remember nothing but want and coarseness from the time I lived in Saint John (from ages 3 - 9); I successfully convinced Ken and Lolo to move up to Cambridge from Moncton when they were having trouble settling down there (despite Ken's education and work history, he couldn't get better than seasonal employment because everywhere he worked relied on the staff collecting EI through the winter); and most of all, I think of my Great Uncle Donny, who spent most of his adult life in the Nackawick area -- and he's who I'm talking about when I say that I'm related to unsavoury characters like those in Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace.

When my parents retired back to Nova Scotia (to the area where my Dad, and his Uncle Donny, had been born), Donny started showing up intermittently; calling my Dad his favourite relative; my Dad understanding that (like Antony in the book) his uncle could say one thing to his face and another to everyone else around the village. One time, Donny asked my Dad if he could set up a trailer in his back woods -- it wouldn't be seen from the road, and as my parents have something like 15 or 20 acres of forest, Donny figured that his favourite relative couldn't deny an old man a retirement property on the lake that he, too, loved to swim and boat in as a child. Even if there wasn't a property owners' covenant against trailers (this is upscale cottage country), my Dad was unlikely to allow his uncle to squat in his woods, and he told him so. That set Uncle Donny off in a rage, and to anyone who would listen, he referred to my Dad as "a dog with a bone", and that expression delighted my father who then roared with laughter every time my Mum teasingly called him "a dog with a bone".

Still, Uncle Donny would come visit my parents every now and then, and when my Dad grew tired of the WWII-era army personnel carrier he had restored (and nicknamed "Major Payne"), he gave it to his uncle, the WWII vet.

So, one year, when we made our annual pilgrimage to NS, we ensured that we would be there for the unveiling of the new Greenfield Cenotaph, and as the oldest surviving veteran in the county, Uncle Donny was to be honoured at the ceremony. He and his girlfriend, Camilla, arrived the night before the unveiling, and when he heard that Kennedy's birthday was later in the week, he made a big deal of saying that, while the ceremony was a nice thing, he had really come down to make Kennedy a special birthday fryup over the fire. I don't think my girls would have ever met Donny before, and of course, Kennedy appreciated the special attention from this new-found relative.

The unveiling was a very touching ceremony and I was proud that my girls were there at my Dad's side as he watched his uncle laying a wreath. But, as soon as we got back to my parents' place, Donny and Camilla started drinking, and things quickly became uncomfortable. They were smoking in the house -- which even my Dad had stopped doing by then -- and when Mum told them to step outside, Donny was abusive to her and refused to stop. Eventually, he got in a snit and, drunk, he and Camilla drove away. Of course, Kennedy wondered if she was still getting a "fryup" -- whatever that was -- and I had to say I had no idea. They did come back, after dinner, and standing at the campfire, this is when Donny gave my Dad the rifle he had "liberated" from a German farmwife during the war (which I talked about here some other time). Things were kind of normalised after that, but they were so drunk that eventually Camilla pissed her pants, tumbled backwards off the rock she was sitting on by the fire, and cracked her head off the ground. Donny brought her up to bed and I don't know if we saw them again before they left. I do know that visit was the last time I saw Donny before he died in 2008.

After the funeral, I believe Dad gave the German rifle back to Donny's family as he thought it was a drunken impulse that was later regretted. And Donny's daughter called my Dad up to ask if he wanted to buy back Major Payne.

This is all I know about New Brunswick and the folks from there, and based on my own experiences, David Adams Richards always captures the essence of the place.

The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

The quest for deliciousness is the fuel that powers the behavior, the god that breathes life into the machine. Animals eat what they need because what they need tastes good.

What a fascinating book is The Dorito Effect: With equal parts accessible science and entertaining detective tale, author Mark Schatzker attempts to answer the questions, “Why is so much of the human brain devoted to the discernment of flavour, and why, with ever more access to fresh foods and diet schemes are we getting fatter and fatter?” I found the answers to be informative and intriguing.

The science behind flavour was so engrossing: Humans are able to distinguish more than a trillion different aromas in addition to the tongue-sensed flavours of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami, and the little-understood kokumi. Obviously, this much evolutionary devotion to taste must mean something important is involved. Like the author, I had long thought that humans were simply programmed to crave calorie-rich foods, like sugar and fats, but it's really not that simple (or else we'd all be drinking pure sugar water and eating the fat instead of the muscle on our steaks). Demonstrating through experiments that animals from wasps to sheep to humans will unconsciously prefer foods that provide micronutrients that they've been deprived of, Schatzker proves that at the cell level, our bodies understand what it is we need to eat and we seek these foods based on the elemental flavours and scant aromas that we can't possibly be conscious of them possessing. Like some pregnant women who eat clay, it's often the weirdest tasting foods that turn out to be the best for us (like super bitter radicchio or olive oil so pure it burns the throat), and unsurprisingly, the benefits of whole foods cannot be reduced to a multivitamin.

So, if our bodies unconsciously know what's good for us, why do we eat all the wrong things? Three breakthroughs occurred in the food industry at the same time in the mid-twentieth century: The mass production of plants and animals (which dilutes the presence of micronutrients, and consequently, flavour); the discovery of artificial flavours in the lab (the addition of which to unnutritious foods – like vitamin water or sugary yogurts – fools our bodies into thinking they're getting what they need, and when the body still feels malnourished, we crave more and more of these highly-flavoured yet nutrient-poor foods); and the enrichment of rice and flour and breakfast cereals in North America (which trains the body to crave carbs when vegetables are a much more efficient and complete source of things like niacin and riboflavin). I love learning about unintended consequences – the irony of so many wonderful breakthroughs that allow us to feed more people while nourishing them less. It was an interesting observation that countries like Italy, France, and Japan – that enjoy both long lives and vibrant food cultures – don't enrich their flour or wheat and have adults that eat a huge range of vegetables.

I remember someone when I was little (maybe a friend's Dad?) telling me that when he was little, he loved to pluck a red tomato off its vine and eat it like an apple. I have never in my life had a tomato that I would eat plain and that's Schatzker's main point: We have bred the flavour out of our foods (which makes us crave foods with artificial flavours, or at least drench our flavourless tomatoes in ranch dressing) and that should be ringing alarm bells because it means that we've also bred out the nutrition. His investigation culminates in a dinner of heritage ingredients – grown slowly from pre-industrialised varieties of chicken, greens, vegetables, fruit and chocolate – which was intensely satisfying for him and the (mostly scientist) guests he had invited. One guest remarked, “If every portion is small and intensely flavored, then the entire meal stays at the place of greatest enjoyment.” Sounds good to me, and if a person could get a meal like that at an affordable price...

And that's the conclusion: There are affordable varieties of full-flavoured and fully-nutritious greens and vegetables available already, but so long as grocery shoppers want quantity for cheap, growers and grocers aren't interested in taking a chance on them; consumers must demand better. I am on board with the conclusion, but even if a barred rock chicken promises to be the most satisfying protein I've ever experienced, am I willing to pay $20 or $30 for one smallish bird at the meat counter?

And, by the by, this book isn't a hippy-dippy anti-industrialisation, pro-organic shamefest. When talking about the human love of herbs and spices (which, as it turns out, we've been using for over 6000 years and have recently discovered to have a range of antioxident, cancer fighting, micronutrient benefits), Schatzker says:

I am not referring to obscure, wincingly bitter herbal remedies from the Amazon sold in stores by people who think fluoride is a conspiracy.

The Dorito Effect is absolutely my type of book and I hope it gets wide coverage: This is just too interesting and important to learn and then ignore.

Harmless

You read about these personal catastrophes, relieved that your kid wasn't missing, but also secretly disappointed to have missed out on the experience, because how often in this bloodless age do you get the chance to test your mettle against the elements, against the bad guys? You imagine what you'd do in the parents' situation, how you'd act with courage, sacrifice, and resolve right up until the final scene, when your dirt-streaked child jumps into your arms, crying, “Daddy you found me!”

Harmless by James Grainger is an interesting look at what it means to be a man in this “bloodless age”; in a time when even real and pressing danger causes our hero Joseph to stop and scan his memory for appropriate reactions sourced from the action movies he has seen, because nothing from his actual life has prepared him for this. I just wish that Joseph was a more likeable or genuine character – he's about as useful in an emergency as the pricey hiking shoes he bought for the weekend based on their flashy reflective stripes.

The setup: Joseph and his moody teenage daughter Franny go for a weekend visit with old friends at a remote farmhouse. Joseph is an online journalist and arts editor (like Grainger himself), a former Party Boy, and currently, broke, divorced, and disillusioned. The owners of the farmhouse are Alex – a powerfully built man who left his city job as a documentarian for the authentic country life, where he now fashions rustic furniture with his bare hands – and his wife Jane – Joseph's former lover who wants a weekend of debauchery with her erstwhile high school friends, despite the presence of children and her disapproving husband. Two other couples attend the weekend, but they don't matter to the story. After getting wasted at the campfire, they realise that Franny, along with Alex and Jane's daughter Rebecca, have disappeared (that's on the back cover, so not really a spoiler) and their Dads must enter the never-ending woods surrounding the farm to find them. From here, the story becomes tense and dangerous, and even where the storyline strains credibility, it remains a thoughtful examination of modern masculinity.

Grainger stuffed so much into Harmless about modern life, as it affects young boys:

Bereft of ancestral lore, national myths, holy books, and rituals to bind the generations, Mike was initiating his sons in to the world of the Cool Geek, where aggressions and aspirations were channelled into superheroes, video games, movies, TV shows, and the right pop music.

And as it affects teenage girls:

They exuded self-denial and a sensual receptivity focused at the mouth, neck, and belly, their backs as rigid as aristocrats' wives in seventeenth-century portraiture. Time rushed forward and he saw each girl at eighteen, her body a map of tattooed Celtic knotwork, Chinese calligraphy, and Native American icons, a map for lovers, with piercings marking the erogenous zones.

As a modern Dad, Joseph has a mental “Father's Worst Nightmare scrapbook” based on what he assumes porn-raised boys will one day expect of his daughter, and he even worries about those (apocryphal) “Rainbow Parties”. And yet, he doesn't feel the right to intervene when his fourteen-year-old wears slutty clothes or sneaks off to smoke a joint with her friends? Repeatedly, while Franny is missing, Joseph can imagine in graphic detail what various perverts might be doing to her, yet, early on, he can't imagine how to have a long overdue heart-to-heart with his only child. As a character, I had a hard time understanding Joseph, but from what he shares of himself and his history, I really didn't like him:

As Joseph nestled the stock in a convenient hollow between his shoulder and chest he hadn't known existed, he was startled by a sense of impending climax. He stared down the barrel at a pile of boulders outside. Imagine if a man was standing in front of them. Who did he want it to be? Everyone had a list of worthy targets these days – bankers, CEOs, hedge-fund managers, career politicians, religious fundamentalists, climate-change deniers. He squeezed the trigger, wanting the room to fill with sound, smoke, and broken glass. He handed the rifle back to Alex, disoriented by a sudden feeling of weightlessness. It had felt good to hold the gun in his hands.

That's his list of “worthy targets”? Career politicians and religious fundamentalists? No child-molestors or cop-killers? And Joseph isn't even the most liberal of the men, so the intermittent politicking didn't sit well with me either.

As for the writing, Grainger is simile rich and that has varying results:

• Because it was still light out, the flaming logs looked artificial, like a video installation commenting on the cultural practice of building bonfires on summer holidays.

• Martha withdrew his hand, and the sordid history of their break-up lay on the table between them like a platter of freshly eviscerated entrails: his wavering commitment to their marriage; his refusal to ‘prostitute’ his talents and settle for a nine-to-five job; his inability to quantify what he provided in place of financial and domestic stability.

• The forest towered higher with every few steps, pulling him into its wake like a ship passing silently in the moonlight, and when the wind picked up, the rustling treetops became the silhouettes of rats running along the decks.

And yet, and...yet, I can see what Grainger was writing about here. Overall, I appreciated the meditation on modern masculinity (even if he makes sure that Joseph is clueless about modern femininity), there were some genuinely tense moments in the second half, and much of the writing was really lovely. I was not disappointed to have spent time in this world.

Like Joseph (like Grainger?), I also worried about how boys raised on easy access to porn would one day treat my girls. I assumed that modern boys would expect everything that they had seen online, and in my mind, most of that would be degrading. But you know what? All of the young men that I've met so far have been respectful and polite to me, and unless they're truly Jeckyl/Hydes, they seem to be respectful of my daughters as well. I suppose the factor I didn't figure on was that my girls have also likely seen just about everything there is to see, and they aren't babes in the woods -- I'm sure they have ideas about where the lines are drawn and even what they're interested in. And unlike Joseph, my girls don't have disengaged parents -- neither of us would just shrug helplessly as we see a skankily clad daughter smoking pot with their friends, at fourteen. (But please girls, don't correct me on this if I'm wrong. Parents don't actually want to know the details despite our fears.)

I had another complaint about this book, and since I got to voice it anonymously elsewhere, I didn't add it to my review: Why did Grainger feel the need to set this up as an American story? In this article, Philip Marchand calls Harmless a "strong contribution to the literature of Ontario Gothic", and I had to disagree, commenting:

OK, but can we call this Ontario Gothic if Grainger pretends the story is set in the States? Measuring distance in miles and feet, having war vets be from the Vietnam or Gulf Wars, or even contemplating "Murder One" as a potential criminal charge -- these are all American affectations. I understand a writer wants to sell some books and that might mean trying to pass as American, but let's not then pretend it's set in Southern Ontario with a wink.

This is  one of my biggest pet peeves, and although I truly do understand the desire to appeal to Americans and their market share, Robertson Davies, Alice Munroe, and Margaret Atwood were all best sellers with stories set firmly in Ontario. Embrace the setting!

The Strange Library

I knocked. It was just a normal, every day knock, yet it sounded as if someone had whacked the gates of hell with a baseball bat. It echoed ominously in the corridor. I turned to run, but I didn't actually take a step, even though I wanted to. That wasn't the way I was raised. My mother taught me that if you knock on a door, you have to wait there until someone answers.

Knowing that I love me some Haruki Murikami, my girls got me The Strange Library as a Mother's Day gift this year. They know me so well. What they didn't know was that this odd little book, which takes less than a half hour to read, has the look and feel of a children's picture book; if you don't mind your children reading books about a crazy old man who wants to eat their creamy brains. 

At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.

Looking at other reviews, I see that different countries have differently illustrated editions (mine was done in a gorgeous retro style by Chip Kidd), and all share a common tale populated with familiar Murikami motifs: mazes and mysteriously helpful girls and the return of the Sheep Man. Reading any Murikami gives me a frisson of recognition; a jarring realisation that I share some subconscious material with this man from a very different culture on the other side of the world. Even though The Strange Library is very short and simple, this frisson yet applies, and the illustrations only enhance the effect. 

Like a blind dolphin, the night of the new moon silently drew near.

This book isn't going to be for everyone – it may indeed be pointless to anyone who hasn't seen a stranger side of the Sheep Man – but it totally worked for me. Thanks girls!

My edition opens like this:

While I see that the British have an old fashioned library book cover:

And the Germans get this cool cover:

I really have to wonder who made these decisions about the different covers (I have no idea what the illustrations look like inside these alternate versions), but it raises questions about our differing cultural tastes and expectations. And when my favourite thing about Murakami is the universality of his Jungian motifs, why should his first illustrated book be so culturally targeted? I'm just glad this isn't my Sheep Man: