February by Lisa Moore ~ 2010. This edition: Vintage, 2011. Softcover. ISBN: 978-0-099-54628-3. 310 pages.

My rating: 9/10.

*****

An intense read. Absolutely impossible to put down.

February is a story about grief and memory and love and people coping with heartbreakingly dire situations the best way they can, which means not always particularly happily or successfully. The novel ends with optimism, but I could not call it happy. It is a keenly observant, uncomfortably bleak, very believable portrait of a woman and her family and their reaction to the brutally unexpected loss of their son, husband and father.

Lisa Moore has written, all clichés aside, a powerful book. Stark, often deeply uncomfortable, occasionally humorous, never maudlin, and, I suspect, one that will be quite unforgettable.

The novel is based on a true Canadian tragedy. On Valentine’s night in 1982, out on the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland, the oil drilling rig Ocean Ranger capsized and sank during a violent storm. All eighty-four men on board the rig died in the frigid waters, some apparently within hailing distance of a vessel which was unable to rescue them. The families of the dead learned of the disaster from news accounts on the radio; the oil company made no attempt to notify them.

Helen O’Mara loses her husband Cal that night. She has three young children and is pregnant with a fourth. Life for all of them becomes indelibly marked by their loss in ways both immediate and not always obvious until many years later.

The novel ranges from 2009 all the way back to the 1970s, when Helen and Cal were first married, in a series of memories, incidents, anecdotes, and flashbacks. A second storyline develops along with Helen’s, that of her now-adult son John, who has suddenly found out that he has fathered a child during a casual romantic encounter. As he attempts to come to grips with an adequate response to that situation, his story and that of his mother’s form a two-part composition of major and minor key, mingling and contrasting and bringing different incidents into sharp focus.

I thought this approach worked very well. A few reviewers have noted their irritation at John’s weakness as a character; I found him believable, though not at all likeable. Helen herself comes so vividly to life and we are taken so intimately into her thoughts, that everyone else pales just a bit in comparison. For that matter, I did not particularly like her, or most of the other characters, for that matter; many of their lifestyles are not at all in sympathy with my own, and I frequently caught myself getting all judgemental about some of their choices, but I will say that they all felt true and alive there on the page.

I’m cutting this review short right here, as other duties call, and I want to get it posted prior to this week’s Canada Reads debates on CBC Radio.

Would I recommend this book to “everybody”? No, definitely not.

It is an uncomfortable thing, and I’d want the reader to go in with expectations on high alert. In particular, women with husbands engaged in dangerous lines of work, heads up. This is a book you very likely should read, because it speaks bluntly to the situation and spotlights our every nightmare. The good thing about this is because it is fiction, it allows us to analyze the characters’ emotions and responses in relation to their fabricated stories, rather than agonize too deeply over what we would feel like if it were us instead.

Perhaps because it is one of the most contemporary and personally accessible of the five Canada Reads choices, I felt it was much the strongest. Every book on the list has its unique qualities, but for sheer emotional punch, this one wins hands down.

My ranking as of this evening:

1. February by Lisa Moore
2. Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
3. Away by Jane Urquhart (Actually, I’m undecided on how to place this one and Indian Horse. They’re running neck and neck, each with different strengths and types of appeal.)
4. Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan
5. The Age of Hope by David Bergen

I am going to work on completing Two Solitudes tonight and tomorrow, so a response to that one may be forthcoming in the next day or two as well, but no promises.

This is the first time I’ve attempted to read the Canada Reads contenders, and I must say that I have been introduced to novels I would not otherwise have chosen for myself. February I would likely have avoided because of the tragic storyline, The Age of Hope for its mediocre description as a novel of a “woman’s awakening”, and Indian Horse for its declared focus on hockey.

I’m glad I read them all. It will be interesting to see how they all fare in a “contest” situation. They are all quite different, though their universal bleakness is a point in common. So terribly sincere …

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The Age of Hope by David Bergen ~ 2012. This edition: Harper Collins, 2012. Softcover. ISBN: 978-1-44341-136-3. 287 pages.

My rating: 7/10.

A decent enough novel in that it is well written and readable, but is this really the best we could come up with for a Prairies (and “North”) regional choice for Canada Reads?

Here were the other choices for the Prairies and North region:

• The Age of Hope by David Bergen – FINALIST
• Cool Water by Dianne Warren
• The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
• The Englishman’s Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe
• Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson
• The Garneau Block by Todd Babiak
• Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
• Stolen by Annette Lapointe
• The Trade by Fred Stenson
• Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell

Okay, then, I guess the masses have spoken. We’ll work with what we’re given.

*****

This book is about my mother. No, seriously. It really is. My mom was born in 1925, to parents newly arrived during the second Mennonite diaspora from Russia, in a rural town in southern Manitoba. The titular Hope was born in 1930, in similar surroundings, and her young womanhood was much the same; the Mennonite Brethren picnics and bonfires for “young people” which Hope attended were a pleasant diversion from the usual round – school, household chores, church and Sunday visiting, potluck dinners and occasional movie nights – all of the trappings of the middle-class North American post-war world.

Hope is the representation of an entire generation of women who lived through one of the most change-filled centuries the world has yet known. Hope and her kindred fellow housewives are an almost extinct breed today; their everyday reality, so common for their generation, is almost completely foreign to the younger generations immediately succeeding them, and the tendency in many circles is to sneer a bit at the banal stay-at-home lives they appear to have lived.

What with the abundant Canada Reads 2013 discussions taking place right now in various literary venues right across Canada, I don’t think I’ll spend too much time going into the storyline of the novel. Here’s the promotional blurb:

Born in 1930 in a small town outside Winnipeg, beautiful Hope Koop appears destined to have a conventional life. Church, marriage to a steady young man, children – her fortunes are already laid out for her, as are the shiny modern appliances in her new home. All she has to do is stay with Roy, who loves her. But as the decades unfold, what seems to be a safe, predictable existence overwhelms Hope. Where – among the demands of her children, the expectations of her husband and the challenges of her best friend, Emily, who has just read The Feminine Mystique – is there room for her? And just who is she anyway? A wife, a mother, a woman whose life is somehow unrealized?

This beautifully crafted and perceptive work of fiction spans some fifty years of Hope Koop’s life in the second half of the 20th century, from traditionalism to feminism and beyond. David Bergen has created an indelible portrait of a seemingly ordinary woman who struggles to accept herself as she is, and in so doing becomes unique.

So this isn’t a proper review of The Age of Hope at all, I’m afraid. I’ll fast forward to my personal views on the book itself, my general feelings about it after having completed it a week or so ago.

Is this a book “every Canadian should read”? In a word, no.

To elaborate: it’s a fine domestic novel, and it does track the country’s historical progress through a good chunk of the twentieth century as a vague background to the progress of Hope, but it doesn’t really say anything terribly important about either the social group Hope was part of, or the country she lived in. There are many quite nicely drawn pictures of the settings and times Hope moved through, but really, she could have lived anywhere. This book could have taken place in any of the towns or small cities of the American mid-west, or the British industrial towns, or the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.

Though I recognized many of the references, because of my knowledge of my mother’s similar background, there is nothing that stands out as marking Hope’s nationality as Canadian. She’s the sub-fusc universal everywife-and-mother, moving in her little cloud of dull angst among the others of her kind. The unquestioning daughters, wives and mothers; the generation who did their duty, were all about self-effacement and not putting oneself forward, not imposing. And though Hope has a good friend who breaks away from the norm, to separate from her husband and live her life as an independent “liberated woman” in the city, Hope gently accepts that as what someone else does; I didn’t get that there was any sort of yearning coming from Hope for the same kind of “escape”. She nods and smiles and listens and plugs along in her same old groove. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I didn’t much like how it was implied that Hope’s was the less admirable choice. It was a viable option, was it not?

Hope’s mental anguishes, which land her in a psychiatric hospital to undergo shock therapy sessions, are not terribly well presented by the author, though I’m unclear as to what degree that is a deliberate literary choice in order to emphasize the constant dull fog that Hope walks in. It’s either a very clever choice by the author, or sheer authorial laziness.

This book is well written, and I appreciated the author’s stylistic skill. I “got” Hope, and I didn’t think her husband or children were all that unrealistically portrayed – well, except for the 6-foot tall, flagrantly gay, Olympic-athlete daughter – that was a bit of a plausibility stretch, I thought –  but none of them came to life for me. The whole novel had a distance about it, a very hands-off feel. I didn’t hate it, because that would be a strong emotion, and I don’t feel at all strongly about this one.  It’s such a mild drama. And I didn’t like or dislike any single character. I couldn’t care enough to invest my own emotions in any deep way. This is not a good thing in a novel.

I doubt The Age of Hope will have much of a shelf life after its brief prominence as a Canada Reads pick, though it may linger on for a year or two on the strength of that. And from reading this one, I have no urgent, burning desire to explore another work by the same author, though I understand he’s turned out a prizewinner or two. I’ll doubtless pick up his other novels at some point and read them with mild enjoyment, but my expectations are tempered.

Other reviews to peruse:

The Winnipeg Review – The Age of Hope – a generally positive review, highlighting the novel’s strengths.

Quilll & Quire – The Age of Hope  – nailed every negative thing I thought about the story and states them brutally succinctly.

Goodreads – The Age of Hope – a very broad range of opinions, all over the map, as the readers jump into the debate.

*****

With two of the Canada Reads books polished off and mulled over, I’d have to say that at this point Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese is strongly in the lead in my personal race.

I’m currently tackling Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes, and finding it rather dull going. It has its moments, but it’s very much a period piece, I’m finding. Perhaps too much so for a universally recommended “must read” choice?

I’m looking forward, though increasingly apprehensively, to the last two books in the Canada Reads Top Five. So far the choices have been just a bit ho-hum.

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Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese ~ 2012. This edition: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012. Softcover. ISBN: 978-1-55365-402-5. 221 pages.

My rating: 7.5/10.

*****

Saul Indian Horse, a young Ojibway man in his thirties, has hit rock bottom and is crawling back up. He’s in a detox program after spending six weeks in hospital after collapsing in alcohol-induced tremors on a Winnipeg street. Part of the rehabilitation is bringing out old memories to get to the root of the issues behind the addictions, so Saul is writing down the story of his life.

Going back, waaaaay back, Saul starts with the anecdote about his great-grandfather which led to the family name.

The Ojibway were not people of the horse. Our land existed as an untamed thing, lakes, rivers, bogs and marshes surrounded by citadels of bush and rock and the labyrinthine weave of country. We had no need of maps to understand it. We were people of the manitous. The beings that shared our time and place were lynx, wolf, wolverine, bear, crane, eagle, sturgeon, deer, moose. The horse was a spirit dog meant to run in open places. There was no word for it in the old talk when my great-grandfather brought one back from Manitoba.

The traditional life of Saul’s immediate ancestors is changing, and the horse becomes a treasured and useful part of the tribal economy, pulling trees out of the bush to be floated down the river to the mill where they could be sold for cash, a necessity in the evolving way of things.

The negative side of progress is being felt as well. Children are being rounded up and forcibly taken away to mysterious locations where they are taught the ways of the Zhaunagush, the white people. The residential schools. Some – many – do not return. Those that find their way back are changed beyond comprehension of their parents and grandparents, and many, when they have children in their own turn, are emphatic in their fear of losing their own children to the schools. Saul’s parents were both residential school students, and the family  is constantly on the lookout for the floatplanes and motorboats carrying the armed white men intent on collecting the native children.

Despite their wariness, Saul’s sister Rachel is taken, and his brother Benjamin. Rachel never returns, but Benjamin runs away and finds his way home, though he is so sick from TB that he soon dies. The tragedy of finding and then losing their beloved son is too much for Saul’s parents. Against Grandmother’s pleas, they bundle up Benjamin’s body and set out by canoe to take him to the Catholic priest for “proper burial”.  Saul will never see them again.

Saul is only eight, and helpless to interfere. He and Grandmother are left behind, and as winter sets in and the parents do not return, are faced with a choice: stay in the bush and die during the winter, or travel out to the closest town, where there are relatives who will take them in.

Tragedy follows on tragedy, and Saul is eventually bereft of his grandmother as well; she freezes to death while sheltering Saul with her body. Saul is found and rescued, and is sent to “the school”, the regional Catholic residential school, where he joins the other traumatized native children who are in a state of walking apathy as everything they know is stripped away, and they are forcibly remade into “good, obedient, educated Christians.”

Saul already knows how to read and write in English, as his father had taught him from old schoolbooks, so that culture shock is minimized for him. But he desperately misses his family, and carries within him a core of grief that cannot be healed. Like most of the other children, Saul soon adapts to survival mode, learning how to avoid drawing attention to himself and cooperating in all demands made upon him.

A young priest joins the school the same year Saul is brought there, and his enthusiasm for the game of hockey brings interest and opportunity to the group of boys showing interest and ability. Saul is fascinated by the game, though he is considered too young to play. He sweeps the ice in the mornings, and surreptitiously teaches himself to skate and stick-handle, using to0-big skates stuffed with newspaper and frozen horse turds for pucks.

Of course, Saul is a natural. His progression is predictable, though fraught with emotional and physical challenges. Saul eventually gets too good for the Indian League, and is scouted, reaches Toronto, and plays for a top junior league team. Then it all blows up, as the stress of the constant racism – both brutally blatant and thinly veiled – he comes up against, and his deeply hidden bitterness about his tragic family and cultural losses finally push him over the edge.

*****

Richard Wagamese is an excellent writer, with an easy facility for words. I blazed through Indian Horse in one evening, willingly abandoning myself to Saul’s story. I’m not at all a hockey fan, and the description of this novel as a “hockey story” put me off much more than the residential school angle. My reluctance was needless; the saga of Saul did not require any stretch to understand in any of its elements.

I wonder if both the details of the game of hockey and the horrors of the residential schools are so ingrained into our combined Canadian psyches that we now immediately “get” the references? And does this therefore cushion the impact of a book detailing the atrocities done to First Nations people to a mere cultural reference, even when the author is most obviously a member of that cruelly wronged racial group?

For though I understood the points that the author was trying to wake us up on, I didn’t feel shocked. Nothing he brought up surprised me; the story of Saul is not unique, at least in the residential school survivor aspect. The hockey prodigy bit was where I had to stretch my “willing suspension of disbelief.” The kid was just a bit too awesome and magical through his whole short career. After a while his awesomeness, quite frankly, rather bored me. And then when he snaps, he beats up guys much bigger and stronger than he is, from sheer force of his rage. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Next.

Wagamese himself says, about Indian Horse:

I think it is wonderful to be included in the top five [of Canada Reads 2013], mostly because it was Canadian readers who got me to the regional finalists and it shows me that they embraced a book that had a very dark, harrowing and hard theme.

I think it gives the opportunity for more clarity for the impact of residential schools on people, not only for the survivors themselves but the inter-generational impact on the children of the survivors. It allows Canadians the opportunity to have an emotional reaction to the story because it’s very direct and deliberately underwritten. It would have been really easy to go over the top and make it even more bleak and harrowing than it is, but my intention wasn’t to shock anybody or to cause anybody anger or anxiety.

The novel definitely didn’t feel over the top to me, though the atrocities are sprinkled liberally throughout. I guess what I’m feeling right now is that I should feel more “anger and anxiety.” What does it say about me, about our societal callousness, that stories such as this, even though fictional, do not stir us in a much deeper way?

Or maybe it’s just me.

I suspect this novel will do exceedingly well in the Canada Reads debates, both official and among the nation’s readers, because the topic is just so darned “politically correct”, especially with all of the recent “Idle No More” protests and rallies. I’m guessing that a collective “white guilt” will soften any criticism as to whether the book actually excels as a novel, a story.

It’s definitely engaging, and thought-provoking, and representative of an important Canadian issue, though I am not convinced it is better than the other four Canada Reads 2013 choices in being chosen as the book all Canadians should read. I’ll have more to say on that once I finish reading the five picks. I’m halfway through book number three. Not done with discussing this one quite yet!

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