Tag: Canada

Review 2447: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

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Ducks is Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir about the two years she spent working in the oil sands of Alberta. Originally from Nova Scotia, she was unable to find work at home that would pay enough to pay off her student debts. So, like many others, she traveled to Fort McMurray to get a higher paying job.

She found herself in a hyper-masculine setting that was toxic, where she encountered routine sexual harassment and was raped twice in her first year. She does attempt to show the whole story, the loneliness of both herself and the men, the nice people she encounters, and so on.

Other themes in the book are the poisoning of the environment, the lip service to corporate safety, the harm to local people, especially the First Nations.

I thought this book was interesting. The cartoons are not beautiful, but they are good enough to tell characters apart and to recognize emotions. It certainly provided a window into another kind of life.

It struck me how often the most beautiful areas to live in are the ones where it’s most difficult to gain a living. I grew up in Michigan, which in my time was a have-not state, but not as bad as Eastern Canada, apparently.

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Review 2337: The Berry Pickers

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Joe’s Mi’kmaq family travels every year from Nova Scotia to Maine, where his dad is the foreman of the berry pickers and the rest pick berries, too. In 1962, Joe’s little sister Ruthie disappears from where they left her sitting on a rock eating a sandwich near their camp. The police don’t give them much help. The family searches for her for days but does not find her and continues to look for her in subsequent years..

Now an older man dying of cancer, Joe has lived most of his life away from the family, blaming himself for events caused by his anger. He has finally returned home to die, surrounded by his family but not Ruthie.

While Joe looks back over his life, we hear from Norma. As a child, Norma had dreams of another home, another mother, a brother named Joe. She also had an imaginary friend named Ruthie. But her mother told her it was just her imagination—her neurotic, overprotective mother who barely let her go outside. It’s not too hard to guess Norma is Ruthie.

Every other chapter is Norma’s, as she grows up, sometimes receiving clues about her identity but never really going there.

The novel is built around whether Norma will find her family before Joe dies. There’s not much doubt about that, although the ending is touching.

I thought the idea behind this novel was an interesting one, although in Norma’s mother Peters has invented a monstrous creation, as proved by her family keeping her secret to pacify her. I think we’re supposed to feel some sympathy with this grief-stricken woman, but I absolutely didn’t, and even though her husband is a sympathetic character, I couldn’t fathom his actions.

That aside, Peters’ writing is fairly commonplace, with lots of clichés. I found her characters flattish. I was a little disappointed in this one.

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Review 2248: Road Ends

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Mary Lawson’s subject is always dysfunctional families in distress living in the far north of Ontario. That sounds deadly, but her novels are absorbing and touching, and Road Ends is no exception.

The novel is told from three different perspectives at slightly different times. Megan Cartwright begins it in 1966, although there is a prologue set in 1967. In the prologue, the best friend of her brother Tom commits suicide where Tom will find him. This doesn’t at first seem to have much to do with Megan’s earlier section but informs Tom’s behavior throughout.

The Cartwrights is a large household of boys with only Megan and her mother the females. Megan’s mother Emily keeps having babies, and Megan is the only one keeping the household organized. Emily retreats to the bedroom with the baby, and Edward, her father, to his study after work. In 1967, baby Adam is a toddler, and Mary has overheard the doctor telling her parents he must be the last child, so she feels free to leave, having realized she will never have a life if she stays. She makes plans to go to Toronto in order to save money to go to London and stay with a friend, but when her father learns her plans, he pays for her to go to London.

Edward has withdrawn himself from the family. One reason is that he is terrified of becoming like his father, a drunkard who used to beat him. He has felt an overpowering anger at times, especially against his sons Peter and Corey, who are always fighting and breaking things. His section of the novel is set in 1969 in roughly the same timeframe as Tom’s, but because of his withdrawal, he hasn’t noticed the household descending into chaos.

For Tom, his friend’s suicide has sent him into a tailspin. He thinks he could have saved him if he had paid more attention. Tom was graduated from college and had job offers in engineering from two aircraft companies, but six months later, he is driving the snow plow at night and spending the day reading the newspaper. He can’t stand to be around people. But he starts noticing that Adam, now four, isn’t being cared for. His mother has had another baby and seems to only care for it. The house is filthy, the child is filthy, and there is no food in the house.

Mary, after a very rough start, has found her dream job in London running a small hotel. She was furious to hear her mother was pregnant again, and she is still homesick but determined not to go back.

I was extremely touched by the ending of this novel. Another really good book from Lawson. I can’t seem to go wrong with her.

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Review 2104: The Other Side of the Bridge

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Mary Lawson’s milieu is the tough life in remote northern Ontario. In The Other Side of the Bridge, she examines the relationships between parents and children and between brothers.

In the late 1930s, Arthur and Jake Dunn are a farmer’s sons. Jake was born after their mother had several miscarriages, and she has been so worried about him that he has not been made to work the farm, while Arthur works hard to help his father. Jake gets by on charm and recklessness, while Arthur tries to protect his mother by lying about the various fixes Jakes gets himself into. Arthur, who is quiet, solid, and dutiful, realizes at one point that Jake is purposefully making trouble for him.

Although his mother loves only Jake, Arthur has the moral high ground until a fateful accident on a bridge.

In the 1950s, Ian Christopherson is a high school student whose mother has left him and his father. He is harboring hatred for his mother for leaving and a disinclination to become a doctor like his father just because it’s expected. He also has a crush on Laura Dunn, Arthur Dunn’s wife, and asks for a summer job on the farm just so he can sometimes be around her. The couple seems content, but their relationship is more complex than he realizes until brother Jake comes home after having been gone for 15 years.

This novel is deeply affecting, dealing with long-suppressed emotions and intricate relationships. It is written in beautifully spare prose. Another great book from Lawson, who deserves a lot more attention than she seems to be getting.

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Review 2045: A Town Called Solace

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I enjoyed Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake a great deal, but I can say for A Town Called Solace that at some point, I became so interested in it that I had a hard time putting it down to get other things done. This novel is set in 1972 and in memories of 30 years earlier.

Eight-year-old Clara is nearly stunned with anxiety. Her 15-year-old sister Rose ran away from home several weeks ago. Clara’s mother is prostrate from grief, and Clara stays looking out the window, because Rose told her she’d send her a message and she doesn’t want to miss it. She takes comfort in going next door to feed Mrs. Orchard’s cat, as she asked her to do when she went into the hospital. The only thing is, a strange man has appeared in Mrs. Orchard’s house.

That man is Liam. Clara’s parents haven’t told her that Mrs. Orchard died and left everything to Liam, a neighbor from her previous home she took care of when he was four. Liam has recently split from his wife and on hearing of his inheritance, quit his job and traveled all the way to far northern Ontario to Solace. His plan is to fix up the house and sell it, but he slowly becomes involved with people in the community.

Liam, who has always had trouble forming relationships, understands that Clara believes her parents are liars because they didn’t tell her about Mrs. Orchard, so he extends her the peace of his home when he is out so that she can feed and play with the cat, and the courtesy of not lying to her. Periodically, the novel returns a few months in time to Mrs. Orchard’s last few days and her memories of that time when Liam was four years old.

I absolutely loved this book. It is about loneliness and the difference that love and understanding can make in a life. It is empathetic without being mawkish or manipulative. It’s also about ordinary people trying to make their way through life. It’s lovely.

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Review 2042: The Maid

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Dear Nita Prose,

For a good example of a narrator who doesn’t understand social cues, read Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and try harder.

P. S. Do you think it’s likely that a person being questioned by the police would, when asked about another person, sit there and think about every conversation they had with them, taking about six pages to do so? I don’t.

P. P. S. I did not finish reading your book.

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Review 2003: The Museum Guard

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I have been a big fan so far of Howard Norman’s quirky novels. However, I had a slightly more mixed reaction to The Museum Guard.

DeFoe Russet has lived in the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax ever since his parents died in a freak Zeppelin accident when he was eight. As a boy, he was cared for by his uncle Edward, if you can call it that. Edward is an irresponsible, gambling, drinking womanizer with a lot of opinions.

DeFoe works as a museum guard in the small Glace Hotel, where his uncle also works when he bothers to show up. DeFoe is very much in love with Imogen Linny, the caretaker for the local Jewish cemetery. However, although they are lovers, Imogen is difficult and seems often to tolerate DeFoe.

DeFoe doesn’t seem to realize how stuck he is in his life. He has no plans except to continue working as a museum guard and to persist with Imogen. He is interested in listening to the tours of the museum given by Miss Dello, a local professor, and likes to think about the paintings.

Edward has been making himself obnoxious about DeFoe’s relationship with Imogen, whom DeFoe has kept from meeting Edward. But Imogen has recently become fascinated by a painting in the museum, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam by Joop Heijman. Then there is a fateful meeting between Imogen and Edward in the museum. Imogen essentially dumps DeFoe and begins spending a lot of time with Edward, who without permission lets her into the museum at night to be with the painting. Soon, the novel takes a bizarre turn as Imogen begins to believe she is the woman in the painting.

The novel is set mostly in 1938 and 1939 against the background of what is happening in Nazi Germany. DeFoe tells us on the first page that he steals the painting for Imogen, and the novel is about what causes him to do that and what happens afterwards.

I guess this novel is about stepping out of ordinary life. However, a lot of time is spent on DeFoe’s obsession with Imogen, maybe a bit too much, and the novel just gets weirder as it goes along. I’m not saying I disliked it, just that it wasn’t one of my favorites of Norman’s novels.

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Review 1998: The Glass Hotel

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A woman, Vincent, falls into the sea at the beginning of The Glass Hotel. Then the narrative returns to the past, covering about 20 years in time.

As a young woman, Vincent works as a bartender in an expensive hotel in Caiette, a small, isolated village on Vancouver Island. One day a strange message is painted on one of the lobby windows. Vincent is sure that her brother Paul, also employed by the hotel, did it because of his behavior and because she pulled a similar prank in high school. However, she doesn’t discuss it with him because shortly thereafter she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy owner of the hotel, and leaves with him.

To get away from Caiette, Vincent has become Alkaitis’s much younger trophy wife. At least, she is pretending to be his wife. They aren’t actually married. Although there are other plot lines in this novel, most of the action centers around the discovery that Alkaitis has been running a Ponzi scheme.

There are a lot of characters in this novel, but Mandel doesn’t do much to make readers interested in them. In fact, I was struck about halfway through the novel when Alkaitis remarks that Vincent is interesting. There is very little dialogue in the novel, and frankly, Mandel hasn’t done much to show that she nor, really, anyone else is interesting.

Frankly, most of the characters in this novel are morally bankrupt. I was going to say excluding the investors, but actually they had to be either clueless or greedy, because most people would know the returns Alkaitis was paying were unlikely.

The last few pages of the book were really good, but do they make the rest worth reading? All I can say is I found the novel slow moving, and I kept putting it down. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t much like it, either.

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Review 1866: The Bird Artist

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The Bird Artist, I find, is listed as the first in Howard Norman’s Canadian trilogy, of which The Haunting of L. is the third. I’m not sure I understand the grouping, since I have read several other books by Norman and they are all set in Canada, so far. However that may be, I continue to be charmed by his work even though it all seems to explore some dark places.

Fabian Vas is the narrator of the novel, and he tells us right off the bat that he has murdered someone. Then he goes on to describe his life in the remote village of Witless Bay, Newfoundland, where he becomes a bird artist and boat fixer, beginning his story in 1911.

Two complicated sets of relationships affect Fabian’s future when he is a young man. One is that between Alaric, his mother, and Orkney, his father. The other is between himself and Margaret, his longtime friend and lover. Margaret is acerbic, and Fabian seems ambivalent. Alaric hates Margaret, so she talks Orkney into arranging a marriage for him with a cousin he has never met. It is this arrangement that kicks off a series of events ending in some fatalities.

That makes it sound like a dark novel, but it is not. In fact, it has a lightness to it, in tone, in its insights in its characters. It is about betrayal and guilt but also about redemption. Another fine novel from Norman.

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Review 1819: Dirty Birds

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Just before I read Dirty Birds, I attempted to read Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, and I was surprised by the parallels. Both protagonists are on a quest to make a woman love them. Although Rushdie’s protagonist is old and Murray’s is young, both are naïve and deluded. Road trips are part of each novel, and so is satire—Rushdie’s for the cult of personality and big pharma, among other things, Murray’s for the Montreal art scene and the young man as artist. I found Murray’s book more successful and a lot funnier.

Milton Ontario is a hapless young man who is not only utterly average but characterized by the extent of his naiveté and inexperience. He gets an idea in his head that he wants to be a poet, even though he writes atrocious poetry (at first dedicated to the love of his life, Ashley, and later to the love of his life, Robin), so he sets out from his small town for Montreal and a tiny room he has rented sight unseen in a dilapidated, filthy house full of students and would-be artists. There he attempts to enter the art scene and falls in love with Robin, the maker of a seven-minute documentary entitled Dirty Birds, who is almost unaware of his existence.

Milton stumbles through a series of horrendous jobs horrendously performed and meets a cast of rowdy, raucous characters. He inadvertently starts a riot and gets to meet his hero, Leonard Cohen, only to find he is a mob boss (where I think the novel starts to go a bit astray). In among all this silly action is a series of footnotes enlightening us about the history of Canadian mistreatment of indigenous peoples, Newfies, and French-Canadians, among others.

Although I think it gets a little carried away with itself (and I didn’t like the part about the late, great Cohen), for the most part, this novel is a hoot.

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