Machine Without Horses: A Novel

Afterwards, she takes a break, because Machine Without Horses is such an exhilarating dance for Megan that she needs some space between it and the next dance she enters. She likes to feel the residue of it in her body for as long as it will linger.

Megan Boyd and Patch

Machine Without Horses is not your average read: The first half begins with author Helen Humphreys considering the little information she has about real life celebrated salmon-fly dresser Megan Boyd (who was awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II, and who counted Prince Charles among her friends and clients), and by explaining the authorial process of turning data points into fiction, and relaying a plot that mostly consists of Humphreys learning how to tie a salmon fly for herself, Humphreys is able to conflate herself with Boyd, conflate the solitary and exacting work of writing with fly tying, and although I have no idea how true-to-life this section is, it's a satisfying look at Humphreys and her processes:

Starting a book is like starting a love affair, it demands full and tireless attention or feelings could change. Commitment takes time, and so there must be a rush of passions at the beginning. This means that the other life of the writer, the “real life”, has to fade into the background for a while. In the past I have found this difficult, but now it is a relief. At the moment, real life is overrated and I am happy to think about River Brora and to imagine Megan's childhood near it.

Explaining that the liberties she intends to take with Boyd's story necessitate a change of name, Part Two of the book is the life story of “Ruth Thomas”, celebrated salmon-fly dresser (recognised by QEII, befriended by HRH, etc.), and the reader gets the opportunity to see how the author delivers on the guesses and suppositions that she had made in the first part. The whole thing makes for an engaging read, and as Humphreys adds a twist of tinsel and a shaving of plume to the fish hook of the known facts, what is created is as complex and as lovely as one of Megan Boyd's flies:

Boyd's flies

If I had a complaint, it would be the too frequent use of salmon-related metaphors (young Ruth dodged through the fields like a salmon swimming upstream, a pregnant woman's belly flutters like a salmon in the river), and even if the fly-tying instructor in the first part encouraged Humphreys to focus on the relationship that Boyd had with the salmon as she did her work, the final passage went too far for me: 

And when death comes then for Ruth, it comes as one of her salmon flies, arcing through the darkness towards her. She shudders her whole body up to meet it, opens her mouth. Swallows it whole.

I do like the lyricism of that, but it's one metaphor too far for me. Overall, I really appreciate the intent and execution of this project; it doesn't take long to read, and I was equally interested in learning about Megan Boyd and about Humphreys herself.

Starlight

For Starlight the farm was his heritage and culture, the plainspoken earnestness of his neighbours all the language he needed, and the feel of the land beneath his feet all the philosophy and worldview that fed his sense of purpose. A night sky brimmed with stars, the snap and crackle of a fire behind him in the darkness, and the howls of wolves on distant ridges were all the spirituality he'd ever needed. He was not displaced or dispossessed. He was home. In that, he felt keenly alive.

It's almost unfair to give a rating to an unfinished novel – Starlight does come off as a first draft, but with some very lovely passages that were probably exactly what Richard Wagamese would have sent out into the world had he not passed away while writing this – so while I'm pleased that this was polished up enough to release (and appreciate the material included at the end that points to how Wagamese wanted to tie everything up), as it is, this isn't really up to Wagamese's standard and I'm going to weasel out with a noncommittal three stars.

After a brief scene that reintroduces Frank Starlight from Medicine Walk, we meet a woman and her young daughter as they escape from the violent drunkard that they have been living with. Emmy and Winnie drive a stolen truck deep into the backcountry of British Columbia, hoping to become lost enough before they run out of gas, and end up in the small town near where Starlight and his handyman, Roth, are now working the old man's farm. There are many scenes of the two men doing hard and honest labour, and this sets up a steady rhythm in contrast with Emmy and her daughter's desperate flight:

They were weathered men. Their clothes were the tough and simple fabric of the farm, the field, the wilderness, and they stood together in that hushed silence, smoking and considering nothing but the gathered evidence of their industry. Above them the congress of stars pinwheeled slowly and a knife slice of moon hung over everything like a random thought. They could hear the sides of cattle shunted against the whitewashed planks of their pens and somewhere far off the skittering soliloquy of a night bird addressing all of it in plaintive, melancholic notes that rose and fell in counterpoint to their breaths, huffed with smoke. Then they nodded, each to himself, and turned in concert and began the slow, slumped walk to the porch and the house and the rustic simplicity of a bed, a quilt, and dreams wove from the experience of passing through a day, satisfied at the scuffed and worn feel at its edges.

In a turn that was expected, but not quite believed, Starlight takes Emmy and Winnie into his home, and at the urging of a childcare worker, he and Roth take the broken pair repeatedly into the wilderness to try and make them whole again. Again, there is very lovely and moving writing about nature and humanity's role in creation, and as Starlight has become a noted wildlife photographer, there is much on the artist's role in trying to capture the wild for those who can't see for themselves (and several asides about how Starlight – half-Native but raised in a white home – resists the label of “Indigenous” photographer; an artist is an artist, and it feels like Wagamese is talking about himself here). Meanwhile, the man that Emmy ran away from, Cadotte, along with his sidekick, Anderson, have sworn to find her and have spent these months travelling from workcamp to inner city flophouse to track her down. In contrast to Starlight's steady industry, Cadotte is a nasty piece of work:

He found that he could lose himself in savagery. That thick coil of vengeance he carried in his gut could unsnake itself and take on the quality of fists and kicks and hammer blows to heads and bellies and the cracking and breaking of teeth and ribs and other bones. So that he found a grim satisfaction in pushing men to fight. In those booze-filled nights in working men's towns, such contests of will and rage were easy to start and he let the vehemence of his shattered ego rain punishment on men in ones or twos or threes. He was thrilling to watch. For such a bulky man he was light on his feet and lizard fast. He punished men. He knew precisely how hard and often to attack and hit, and he toyed with them, bloodying faces and battering knees and hips and shoulders so that in the end his adversaries became limp, defenceless rags of men who dropped at his feet eventually, and he'd raise his fists and face to the ceiling of the sky and howl in a basso keening imbued with every ounce of hate he carried for the woman he hunted unceasingly. She would be his ultimate triumph.

Like I said, I didn't quite believe the happenstance of the reclusive Starlight bringing strangers into his home (even if he is well known for helping out neighbours), and I didn't quite like that everyone is always asking this man of few words to try to describe how he finds communion with nature. On the other hand, the setup creates an interesting plotline (and especially with the violent menace tracking ever closer) and Starlight's grasping attempts to describe his processes and experiences are filled with wisdom and insight; he is obviously relaying the lessons that Wagamese wants his readers to learn. I reckon that my complaints would have been dealt with had Wagamese been able to complete (and participate in the editing process for) this book and I am still happy to have been able to read his final project, in any form.

Jonny Appleseed

It turns out that Johnny Appleseed is some American folk legend who became famous by planting apple trees in West Virginia. I didn't understand why we'd sung about him in camp – I wanted to know about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St. Marie, but instead we were honouring some white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America. Apparently he was this moral martyr figure who remained a virgin in exchange for the promise of two wives in heaven. Oh, and he loved animals, and I heard he saved some horse by hand-feeding him blades of grass, Walt Whitman-style. I would bet my left nut that he was a slave owner too and planted his seeds on Treaty territory. All I know is this: apples are crazy expensive on the rez and they had now become bad things in my head.

Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer author Joshua Whitehead has created a really remarkable character with Jonny Appleseed: knowing himself to be different from the other boys while growing up on the rez, Jonny eventually declares his own Two-Spirit nature – which comes as no surprise to his rock-solid mother and doting kookum – and after high school, moves to Winnipeg where he hopes to find love. As the story starts, Jonny's stepdad has died, his Mom wants Jonny to return home for the funeral, and the only way he can hustle up the money is to turn a few more tricks as a (mostly cyber-based) “NDN glitter princess”. Over the time it takes for Jonny to make enough money, the narrative fluidly traces Jonny's history and present, showing pain and love and friendship and family; Jonny has had it hard without becoming hard. 

Throughout his life, Jonny has had one good friend, Thias – a “friend with benefits” who claims he isn't gay – and throughout the story, this relationship is Jonny's rock:

Instead of saying we liked or loved each other, we just lay there on our backs, our brown skin shiny in the rosy light that poured in from the evening sun. We surveyed each others' body: him seeing the scar above my clavicle from when I fell down the stairs as a kid, and me seeing the patch of hair missing from his scalp. I knew then that I loved him.

Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I'm in pain with you.”

The book is full of these quotable lines, but also full of pop culture references, quirky observations, and social commentary (it's not overtly political, but it's apparent that history and politics have shaped reality for Jonny and those he knows). It also has plenty of graphic sex, violence, and addictions. And still: Jonny isn't broken or defeated; he likes to walk around Walmart and imagine how he'd furnish his own house some day. The most vital part of Jonny Appleseed is best described by Joshua Whitehead himself in the afterword:

I write this book with the goal of showing you that Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous folx are not a “was”, that we are not the ethnographic and romanticized notations of “revered mystic” or “shamanic”, instead we are an is and a coming. In nehiyawewin, there are no masculine or feminine attributes, instead we have animations in which we hold all our relations. We are accountable to those kin, be they inanimate or non-human, or be they unabashedly queer, femme, bottom, pained, broken. We put our most vulnerable in the centre and for once I do just that: 2S folx and Indigenous women are centred here. I hold our relations accountable for us for once. Jonny has taught me a lot of things but there are two that I want to share with you: one, a good story is always a healing ceremony, we recuperate, re-member, and rejuvenate those we storytell into the world; and two, if we animate our pain, it becomes something we can make love to.

Like many others, I've heard the term “Two-Spirit” and imagined I had an idea of what that meant, so it was very interesting to me to read a story that focussed on what the lived experience of a Two-Spirit person is actually like. This book is both an eye-opener and a thought-provoking read; I'll round up to four stars.

The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude

Patrick DeWitt: French Exit

Eric Dupont: Songs for the Cold of Heart

Esi Edugyan: Washington Black

Rawi Hage: Beirut Hellfire Society

Sheila Heti: Motherhood

Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs

Thea Lim: An Ocean of Minutes

Lisa Moore: Something for Everyone

Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth

Kim Thúy: Vi

Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed

*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)

The 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for English-language Fiction Finalists:

Zolitude by Paige Coope
Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage
The Red Word by Sarah Henstra
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

* Won by The Red Word. I think the GGs picked a really strong list this year and I am pleased that Henstra won.

Land Mammals and Sea Creatures

Everyone is already forgotten. She could relax. Even the mass extinction humans were creating, paring down the things worth remembering, trimming diversity into manicured homogeneity, running out of space while surrounded by an infinite vacuum, even this is forgotten as the galaxy moves to collide with its neighbour, as the stars accelerate out of eyeshot.

Land Mammals and Sea Creatures is certainly well written, but it's kind of like a needlepoint sampler; a bunch of showy scenes that display their creator's talents without really making one cohesive picture. There's so much good and interesting, creative and kinetic, in Jen Neale's writing here, but without making me care about any of her characters, and without making me engage in any kind of plot, I'm left wanting something more.

Twenty-five years after serving in the Gulf War, Marty Bird is still suffering the effects of untreated PTSD, and something tells his daughter that it's time to quit her job in Vancouver and head five hours up the coast to make sure her Dad doesn't do something rash. Not long after Julie settles back into her hometown, a strange woman sets up a campsite on the beach, and soon, animals start committing suicide around her: hawks divebomb into the rocks, a moose impales itself on a wrought iron fence, and a massive blue whale beaches itself right at the woman's feet.

The whale's blubber opened like a blossom. A bubble of exhumed insides appeared in the centre of the gash, its split mouth widening. The opening hissed. Blood emerged not as a liquid but as a mist. A spray of gas slapped Julie and painted her face. She scrambled back, shielded her eyes, the taste of aspirin and iron infecting her mouth. The whale's intestines crowned in the opening, then spooled out of its body, looped in the air. Snakes of it twisted and spun. The seagulls screamed louder. Whale guts slapped the beach in coils. The intestines piled out in impossible masses, blood and thick muck carving new paths in the sand, digging trenches of decay down to the lapping water. Julie's hands slid into the ditches. Tears flooded her eyes and she yelled for help.

It turns out this woman knew Marty many years ago (although he doesn't remember this), and not only does she seem to have appeared at this moment in order to give him permission to exit his life if it's no longer worth living, but she is also a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator, here to excite a frenzy in the sleepy village of Port Braid.

Jennie Lee Lewis' head wove side to side like a horse bored in its stall. Her voice dipped and hovered in unexpected places and when the song was over, the people clapped hard. Marty nodded ferociously. Next, she sang “Great Balls of Fire”, which was the one Jerry Lee Lewis song that Julie remembered. Kids at her elementary school used to giggle scream the lyrics whenever they wanted to reassert to their peers that they, in fact, knew what balls were. JLL gave no hint of the comedy, though, and no one in the audience had so much as a smirk. JLL stopped playing the piano each time she sang the main line, then leapt back with her key-pounding. She lifted her foot onto the keys, stepping down and releasing a crush of sound.

Naturally, Julie doesn't want this piano-playing death whisperer influencing her fragile father, but something about her presence allows Marty to share with his daughter all the personal stories that he had held back from her over the years. And something about having this JLL around (gosh, how I hate that name) brings Marty something like peace.

Speaking with JLL about death these last weeks had made him hopeful. Like some people desired sports cars or country villas, he desired to die. For his heart to stop seizing. For his blood to settle in his veins. For his synapses to stop shrieking. To be still and permanent, trustworthy and even. Death was shiny and smooth. A warm and still lake.

This book is crammed with well-written and fascinating scenes, and I believed Neale's portrayal of Marty's PTSD, but as interesting as the device is, I don't understand the suicidal animals – or the point of the orgy-and-riot-inducing Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation. Julie is presumably the foil meant to react to the odd goings on, but her actions and reactions weren't identifiable to me, either. Swing and a miss for me.

2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists 

• Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage.
• Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page.
• Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale.
• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson.
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyen.

*Won by Dear Evelyn

The Grimoire of Kensington Market

At that moment, downstairs in the shop, a small golden light flashes and a book appears on the desk. The book is blue, the colour of the centre of an iceberg. On the cover are the words The Grimoire of Kensington Market.

In both her Acknowledgements at the end of this book and in her own review on Goodreads, author Lauren B. Davis explains that The Grimoire of Kensington Market was inspired by both Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen and the addiction and suicide of her own brother. The first thing I did after finishing this book was to revisit The Snow Queen, and I thought that the concept was so fitting: Anderson starts his classic tale with a hobgoblin, “a real demon”, who had invented a mirror “which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad increased in size and worse than ever”; and doesn't that just sound like the despair of an addict? When that mirror breaks and shards pierce a boy's eye and heart – blinding him to goodness, numbing him to love – he is easily led astray by false glamour, starting the sister who loves him on a quest of rescue. By updating this story to the present, with both magical mirror shards and a powerful new drug transforming the landscape and people of Toronto, Davis brings a really interesting concept to life. The narrative feels like a fairytale, and is itself filled with shorter dreams and fables, but it also addresses the addictions crisis that is currently transforming the landscape and people of so many communities. Interesting and timely isn't quite enough though: I wish this book was twice as long and went deeper than it does (but if I tell myself that it's only meant to be a modern fairytale, I do find it more satisfying). 

That was the way of elysium; it demanded a price for the beautiful visions. It burrowed into your darkest crannies – your memories, your heart – and found the things you regretted most, the things you feared, the things of which you were ashamed, and dragged them out into the world, first in dreams, and then in hallucinations.

Elysium is the newest street drug plaguing Toronto, drawing addicts to pipe dens (even if that means parents leaving their children to fend for themselves on the streets) and transforming the Regent Park neighbourhood into a dangerous wildzone nicknamed “The Forest”. Once it gets its hooks in (usually literally with a shard of an enchanted mirror), elysium can transport a user to an enchanted “Silver World”; a dreamlike state in which the pain and ugliness of our own world has been wiped away. What people don't realise is that the Silver World is a real place, and the more people from our world visit it, the thinner the boundary between worlds become. As familiar Toronto streets begin to move and morph around her, Maggie – the proprietor of the enchanted bookstore of the title and the only addict to have ever kicked elysium – receives a message from her elysium-addicted brother Kyle: he needs rescue from this other plane, and it might require Maggie picking up the pipe again to follow his trail.

A pang of longing gripped her. The Silver World. The Forest. Borderlands. The Below World. The Bright World. Her head hurt. And Kyle was bait.

The bulk of the narrative follows Maggie on her quest, and after rereading The Snow Queen, I can say that Davis cleverly followed in Anderson's footsteps; placing Maggie in much the same settings and situations as Anderson's Gerta, but without being too literal or derivative. I also really enjoyed the organic ways that Davis inserted Maggie's backstory and relationship with Kyle; really enjoyed the way that the siblings seemed to dream in competing fairytales. But here's where my complaint of this not going deep enough comes in: in a lot of ways, The Grimoire of Kensington Market reads like a sequel; like as though I missed a previous book about Maggie's addict years, a book that had gone into much more depth about the magical bookshop and how it functions, and one that showed Maggie's relationship with Mr. Mustby and how he groomed her to become his heir. I didn't much like that Maggie is handed three magical items before she leaves on her quest which are then used in obvious and uninteresting ways, and ultimately, the final confrontation was a bit of a letdown. Also, why mention that there are a multitude of other worlds, but not go there? Ultimately, if I think of this as a novel, these complaints are failings. But if I think of it as a fairytale, then that's how those work; you trick the witch with a chicken bone and then shove her in the oven. Simple. I'm left of two minds here, but I found much to like in this read.

All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Memoir

I was in dangerous personal territory, in fraught border country in which my parents were sliding into neediness and I was rising in power, yet losing my own life.

All Things Consoled is esteemed Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay's account of taking on the role as her parents' primary family contact as they reached their final years. Complicating this always demanding function is the difficult relationship that Hay had with her parents, and as she recounts incidents from throughout her life to illustrate lingering resentments or character quirks, Hay deftly assembles a work that serves as a moving memoir of herself and her family. On the one hand, Hay does a nice job of capturing the challenges of the lingering end-of-life years (in which both of her suffering parents wished for “the Dutch passport”), and on the other, I was glad to see that she had enough time with both of them to come to a place of peace and forgiveness. With Hay's thoughtful and polished prose, this was a satisfying read; a fascinating and fitting tribute to complex people. 

At the lake, inside the dark cabin that was steeped in my parents' lives, I felt permeated by their presence even though they were absent. That a peaceful place should be so full of tension, that their influence should be so potent, that I could not prevent myself from taking on certain of their characteristics and that these same characteristics expanded inside me until I was bloated with impatience, hard with gassy vile severity.

Hay's father, Gordon, was an educator – he went from teacher to principal to professor over his career – and despite having been raised a peace-loving Quaker, he had a hair-trigger and could snap violently with both his students and his own children. Hay's mother, Jean, was a penny-pinching homemaker (not above serving moldy or wormy food) who discovered painting in middle age, and who always took her husband's side over her children. Not only did Elizabeth resent that her mother refused to see how much her father's constant teasing and painful finger jabs bothered her (“He's only ribbing you, lighten up”), but Jean could never see how her own (often unvoiced but suspected) criticism burdened her daughter; Hay did a wonderful job of illustrating the lifelong family dynamics that were looming over this relationship as she finally convinced her parents to leave the family home and move into care a six minute walk from her own house in another city. How hurtful must it have been for Elizabeth to discover that among the possessions that her parents left behind for disposal were her own seven novels, all personally inscribed to the parents who never once told her they were proud of her? (When a friend once asked Hay's father if he was proud of what his daughter has accomplished, he testily responded, “Well, is she proud of me?” Her mother buried one of her novels in the yard "out of shame".)

The issue that finally forced the relocation was Hay's mother's descent into dementia (and at the same time, her father's physical inability to deal with his wife's declining mental and physical states). As a lover of words and phrasing, Hay delighted in and collected her mother's increasingly peculiar ways of expressing herself, concluding, “Her turns of phrase rather confirmed my view that poetry issues from the holes in our heads, that whatever faculty produces the startling contractions and coinages and leaps in logic that we call poetry is also available at an unconscious and uncontrollable level to someone suffering from dementia.” Now, as my own mother-in-law has Alzheimer's without ever once coming out with a poetic construction, perhaps Jean's words came from the same creative spring as her painting talent rather than pointing to something universal as Hay suggests, but it was this mental quirk that led to the book's title:

I got her to sit on the chesterfield and sat down beside her and put my arms around her again, and she was like an ancient child weeping – lost and weeping. “Where am I?”

I told her where she was. “Where did you think you were?”

“Oh, I'm in many places. Where I am keeps changing.”

We walked to the elevator and she said, “I've got some of my wits. But not all.”

And then there was the day she said, “I've had a good life, all things consoled.”

Hay is honest about her own bitterness and the longheld resentments that she refused to let go of, and she doesn't whitewash how taxing these final years with her parents nearby were for her. As her three siblings all lived far away, convincing her parents to move to Ottawa did invite the burden squarely onto her own shoulders, but as Hay writes, “Yes, I volunteered to take it on, but there was never a moment when I didn't wish to be let off the hook.” (And that's something important for me to remember as my kind-hearted sister-in-law has taken on the care of her parents – including the Mom with Alzheimer's – within a shared home.) Yet still, there was an opportunity for a melting of the icewaters: Hay eventually discovered that just starting off a visit with a kiss to her father's bald head was enough to soften him, as though all he ever wanted was forgiveness for his failings. Even so, as Gordon lay dying and Hay's brother leaned in to assure him that the kids would take good care of Mom when he was gone, their father roared back to life with, “But what about me?” Ultimately, because of their time together in those last years, Hay developed a stronger relationship with each of her parents and grew to appreciate what they meant to each other:

Will I go to my grave thinking my mother should have married another man? Someone more attuned to the creative life, who could have cooked for himself and put in his own eye drops? Who didn't fly off the handle at the drop of a hat? Not anymore. Not after seeing how woven into each other, body and soul, the two of them were.

What must have been a therapeutic experience for Elizabeth Hay to write makes for an engaging and enlightening read; I am enlarged by having read her story. 

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Shortlist 2018

• All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Story by Elizabeth Hay
• Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance by Will Aitken
• Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot
• In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by Judi Rever
• The Woo Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong

*Won by All Things Consoled

Our Homesick Songs

There was a mermaid, said Finn.

Yes, said Cora. She pulled an old towel up over her, a blanket.

Out on the dark green night water, said Finn, there was a mermaid. And, because mermaids need to, it sang. Sad songs, homesick songs. Night after night, over a hundred thousand fish. And the only one who could hear it was a girl.

Lonely, said Cora.

Yes, a lonely girl, said Finn. Orphaned. But tying knots and listening to the mermaid sing made her feel a bit better. All through the night, she'd lie awake and knot and listen to the songs.

I was in just the right mood for Our Homesick Songs – it's an atmospheric and quirky tale, yet like the iceberg on the cover of my edition, there's plenty lurking under the surface, too – and as much as I enjoyed reading it in the moment, I don't know if it will stay with me for long. Even so, there's a time for just this type of read and I'm pleased that Emma Hooper's Giller Prize longlisting led me to pick this one up just now.

All songs are homesick songs, Finn.

Even the happy ones?

Especially the happy ones.

The story is split into two timelines: The “present” of 1992/93 and the past of the 1970s. In the present we meet Cora, fourteen, and her younger brother, Finn, who is eleven. They are being raised in a tiny fishing community on a small island off Newfoundland, and despite the generations-long stability that the fishing industry has afforded to Big Running, the cod stocks have suddenly collapsed, the province of Newfoundland has declared a Cod Moratorium, and folks are being offered resettlement packages to move to more viable towns. As the neighbours dwindle to just a handful, even Cora and Finn's parents are forced to go away to work, each of them flying out to Fort Mac for a month at a time while the other stays home with the kids. Art and music and storytelling help Cora and Finn to stay connected to the community that they see disappearing around them, and their favourite story of all is that of how their parents met: a magical fairytale full of singing mermaids, an ocean shining with silver fishes, and words of love woven into fishing nets (this love story being the storyline from the past). The writing is a bit fey and simplistic, but for the most part, I could roll with that: whether we're following Aidan and Martha in the past or Finn and Cora in the present, we're seeing the world through the points-of-view of adolescents; a time when a single kiss can change your life; a time when there's homey comfort in icy salt-spray and boot-sucking bog. And as I have mentioned before, I am a fan of long and repetitious paragraph-length sentences:

First the lightning, then the thunder, then the wind and the waves, the waves and the wind and the night-white water, all of which were the same, all one, pushing and reaching and pulling and pressing in on them, on every side, wind, waves, water, everything wet and loud and black and white, deep night, then light, and everyone was awake now, Aidan's mouth moving like talking but just the sound of the wind and the waves and the water, just a moving mouth, only visible when the light hit, then gone again, his arms up and grabbing things, something, a snake, a rope, just a rope, Martha stepping out, towards him, black white, the wind grabbing her hair, punching her back, deep, heavy against her gut, and something, something else, on her arm, pulling her back, a hand in unison with the wind, pulling her, sudden, and she fell back, away from Aidan and back inside and the hatch banged shut. No, said Molly's mouth, in lightning flashes, full of the sound of the wind. No.

Maybe not to everyone's taste, but it works for me. Here's my small complaint: Emma Hooper isn't actually from Newfoundland (“born and raised in Alberta” sounds about as far from “son of a fisherman” as possible), and although she seems to get the colour right – there are cèilidhs with bodhráns, decaying drying flakes, and gifts of jarred seal meat – and although all of us might know a homesick song for a lost place, there's something very particular about Newfoundland writing that wasn't quite present here. (In an otherwise positive review, The Toronto Star says this book “is like a come-from-away version of the island, celebrating its charm but not necessarily steeped in the salty brine of island culture”.) Even so, I was thoroughly enchanted by the characters here – and particularly by Finn's innocence and efforts to lure the cod back so his family could be together again – and the story ended beautifully, so I don't feel like being harsh today. Four stars is a rounding up.

The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude

Patrick DeWitt: French Exit

Eric Dupont: Songs for the Cold of Heart

Esi Edugyan: Washington Black

Rawi Hage: Beirut Hellfire Society

Sheila Heti: Motherhood

Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs

Thea Lim: An Ocean of Minutes

Lisa Moore: Something for Everyone

Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth

Kim Thúy: Vi

Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)

Dear Evelyn

Evelyn, her spine straight, her shoulders back, strides ahead with the two girls in her wake, Valerie wobbling along on the scooter he made for Lily.

He soon catches up, walks next to his wife. Dear Evelyn, you are the sweetest wife...he used to write her in his letters home. Dear Evelyn. My dearest.

“Oh –” She looks straight ahead as she speaks. “I thought you said you wanted to be left in peace. And frankly, so do I.” Touché. He has to admire her skill with the rapier; though at the same time, it brings him to the brink of tears. Why? What are they doing? Such a waste! He walks beside her, but says nothing.

Dear Evelyn is the story of a seventy year relationship – beginning with the birth of Harry Miles in a “sooty little London terrace house” during WWI and ending with some of Harry's last experiences in a comfortable nursing home. Along the way, we meet Evelyn Hill – a spoiled, headstrong, and beautiful young woman from the same working-class neighbourhood whom Harry finds irresistible – and as they marry, have a family, and move firmly into the middle-class, it's aching to watch as happiness never really finds the pair. If I had a complaint it would be that author Kathy Page felt the need to remind me too many times about the childhood forces that made Evelyn who she was, but I can't deny that watching this couple age together tells a satisfying story of the twentieth century, and ultimately, delivers an emotional wallop. Winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Dear Evelyn is worth a look.

Unreasonable, he felt, put things mildly – truth was, there was a line between strong-minded and outrageous that Evelyn now crossed with increasing frequency. Though sometimes it was his fault, for goading her. Or, according to his daughters, for letting her get away with murder. Or even, as he admitted to himself, because there were still times when he found Evelyn's anger arousing, and enjoyed making up afterwards...

When Harry was at school, he was the only student who responded to the poetry that their WWI veteran teacher – wounded in body and mind – offered to the boys. Throughout his life, Harry would carry a notebook in his pocket for when inspiration struck, but sadly, he was never able to make words do what he wanted them to. Even meeting Evelyn as he did – bumping into her on the stairs of the local library as he was entering and she was leaving, and then offering to walk her home – shows Harry literally turning his back on the world of books and reading to which he had intended to devote his life. Within two years, Harry joined the army and was shipped off to fight the Axis Powers in North Africa, and when he returned, despite having vowed to himself never to be ground down by routine, Harry's main priority became to give Evelyn everything she desired – which somehow resulted in Harry becoming a municipal beancounter. But none of what Harry provided made Evelyn truly happy: the big house and garden made her obsessive about housekeeping, his attempts to be conciliatory made her furious at his subduedness, and every time she complained to their three daughters over the years, they would always seem to take their father's side in things. It's hard to watch both of these characters as they age – neither is truly happy, yet neither of them considers leaving (even if their more modern daughters think a divorce is in order).

Her hunger for life seemed starker and more desperate without the distracting glow of youth, also less charming, more primitive. It was growing more powerful; as she felt the pressure of mortality, the life force in her, the ego, or whatever you called it, the thing about her that everyone noticed, pushed back harder. This was Evelyn: strong, hungry, wilful, beautiful, sometimes kind, sometimes harsh: completely extraordinary. The woman he had met on the library steps thirty-five years ago had changed only in degree. He had chosen her and continued to do so. What love was had changed to the point that he no longer understood it, though he knew its scale and depths, and knew that it was most of who he was.

The narrative in Dear Evelyn can jump ahead years at a time, but the little vignettes are enough to paint a portrait of an entire life. I really enjoyed the bits about Harry's war experience, and also Evelyn's challenges as a woman pre-feminism (how galling would it be to go to the doctor for heart palpitations and have him not only perform a pelvic exam, but recommend volunteer work or hobbies to occupy one's mind?) As uncomfortable as it is to watch the long-suffering Harry squirm under Evelyn's thumb, there are many scenes that make Evelyn's own unsoothable pain apparent; if only love were enough. As the story approaches this pair's elderly years, it becomes nearly excruciating to watch as minds and bodies – and maybe even love itself – eventually waste away. Four stars is a rounding up.

2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists 

• Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage.
• Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page.
• Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale.
• The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson.
• Washington Black by Esi Edugyen.

*Won by Dear Evelyn