At Work Upstairs

The Nova Scotia Archives has a decent online presence and has a variety on online displays of photographs in it’s holdings. I find some of the photographs in its most recent display–The Royal Engineers in Halifax: Photographing the Garrison City, 1870-1885–oddly compelling.

Photos like this one are, no doubt, valuable for the historical information they provide. The architectural details are interesting enough and make sense given the occupations of the picture-takers. What strikes me first in it is the ladder and the jerry-rigged fence at the side of the road. People work in the urban spaces captured on these glass plates but the workers themselves are invisible. (Photo original here.)

In contrast this photograph of the quarry in Point Pleasant is occupied but it takes close looking to see the two figures. The pond itself is an artifact of the city-building. (Original photo here.)

The notes identifying the photographs are historical artifacts as well, written by one of the early provincial archivists. In most cases the notes are as practical as the photographs themselves. But every once in a while, the notes hint at something more than physical location.

Point Pleasant Park: Quarry Pond (near present Sir W. Young Gates), with Military Cottage of ironstone (just west of present Park Keeper’s Lodge) in which Garrety, an old Engineer soldier, lived; in or about 1875. Looking North-northwest. Judge Bliss’s large house, near Fort Massey Church, can just be detected in extreme distance to right of tree. A good many years ago, perhaps in the 60′s, a boy named Maitland, whose father had the farm just southward of the Old Penitentiary, Northwest Arm, was drowned in this pond. About 1894 the wife of George Harvey, artist, drowned herself in the pond.

Heather

Coady’s Mean Boy, as it deserves, is getting good reviews in the Canadian literary press. As most note it’s an academic satire in the tradition of Lucky Jim and Small World and its setting is a thinly disguised 1970s Mount Allison. Mt. A. is a liberal arts university set in a small town on the edge of the salt marshes of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia borderlands. You can get a sense of the shape and light of the Tantramar Marshes in these photos or in the earlier series published in Dykelands

Even if Coady hadn’t made the inspiration for the novel’s setting clear in her essay in March’s Quill and Quire, anyone who’s spent time in Sackville would recognize the setting. Mel’s Tea Room becomes Carl’s; the Marshlands Inn becomes the Crowfeather; the Fundy Beverage Room becomes the Mariner. And at the centre of it all are Lawrence Campbell, very much the sophomoric poet, and his idolized teacher Jim Arsenault, a chaotic poet modeled on John Thompson.

After several years of depression, heavy drinking and erratic behaviour, Thompson died as a result of combining alcohol and pills, I was a student at Mt. A a few years after his death and the beginnings of the legends that surround him were circulating. Thompson was both the subject of much student curiosity, and very much a mystery, like the troubled and troubling relatives in families everyone knows about but no one talks about. For years whenever I spotted his books in remainder bins, I bought them. And one cold winter night when our apartment was threatened by fire, I left with my birth control pills, our insurance papers, a battered childhood toy, and my battered copies of Thompson’s poetry.

My reading of Mean Boy is inevitably askew: I’ve lived in the places and times Coady describes; I’ve read and reread the poetry of the man she sets at the centre of her book; and I’ve been an academic. What interests me about the novel, though, is not just the way it intersects with my past. Rather it’s the way she explores the intersection of alcohol, poetry, masculinity, and the drive to escape the farm and rural life. She makes sense of both the desperate flailing and the folly of adulation. It’s these things—all the things that Lawrence doesn’t quite see–that take her book beyond it’s satiric portrait of English departments, creative writing students, poetry readings, and the competitive posturings of the Canadian literary scene.

I’ve been putting off writing about Ami McKay’s Birth House. I’ve been dawdling by looking over my blog entries that talked about books. I’m discouraged to realize how often I point out problems in a book and how infrequently I have whole-hearted praise for a book.

I am a not-quite-compulsive reader. I’ve read two books a week, sometimes more and rarely less, since I was about eight. About a third of my reading is something I’d call “bulk-reading”—mostly mysteries with the occasional sci-fi or kids’ book thrown in. These I read for plot and as long as the writing is competent and the characterizations are not insulting, I’m content.

Not so with books pitched as “literary fiction”. My expectations are higher and I reflect more about the book’s qualities. I’m more likely to notice flaws, to be frustrated by something, to be disappointed. I’m also more likely to admire a turn of phrase, to laugh at a situation, to think about the narrative rather than be swept along by plot. Two kinds of reading; two kinds of approaches; two kinds of reactions.

Which brings me back to the Birth House. The published reviews I’ve seen have been almost all positive—some glowing. And most rightfully praise McKay’s accomplishment: her first attempt at fiction has not only been published by a large house but also appears in a significant series. As I read the novel, I kept twitching at small factual errors. Telling myself that it was fiction and that the point of fiction is to make things up didn’t help. It drove me crazy to see references to nets being knitted by women (more likely they’d have been made by men who wouldn’t have used knitting needles) or to “Jerusalem” being sung in 1800 by women marching to protest rum-drinking (Blake didn’t publish “Jerusalem” until 1804 and even then it’s wildly unlikely that a copy of his engraved Milton would have circulated in Nova Scotia at that time). The lapses in historical accuracy drove me crazier when I started thinking about the novel’s use of faux newspaper articles, invitations and catalogues as a way of evoking the historical particularity of life in Nova Scotia before 1920. The inaccuracies pulled one way; the ephemera the other.

In the end, though, the historical slippages troubled me less than fundamental problems with characterization and narrative voice. McKay is writing a corrective to the regional idylls that typically leave out women’s experiences—captured in the Birth House as the struggle for reproductive control. This is an admirable goal for a novelist and there’s a great deal of possibility in the subject matter. The problem for me lies in McKay’s characterization: those who oppose the midwives are flat. Gilbert Thomas, the entrepreneurial doctor, and Brady Ketch, the backwoods drunk, are merely stereotypes, stalking horses required to create conflict and drive the plot.

This flatness of the characterization is partly driven by the choice to narrate the story entirely from Dora’s point of view. But within the constraints of the first person it is possible to create a sense of complexity and multiple points of view. Think, for example, of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans; his narrator is very self-assured but as the reader moves on, more and more doubt about the narrator’s memories and perceptions accumulates. McKay does not draw on the possibilities of unreliable narrator. Dora’s interpretation of events is unchallenged and is rarely unsettled. As a result, the book can be boiled down to a single statement: midwives good; doctors bad. McKay’s replaced one regional idyll with another.

Over the weekend I made my way through three novels.

The easiest read was Lesley Crewe’s Relative Happiness which I bought some time ago. I have a habit of buying novels by Nova Scotians and have had this one on the to-read pile since September. It’s a quick read and while I’m not a great fan of the romance plot or the novel’s faith in love at first glance, Crewe writes great dialogue. My guess is that she’d be be a good screen-writer since her dialogue is better and funnier than some of her exposition and description. In the end I enjoyed Crewe’s nove more than I enjoyed Patricia Pearson’s more widely read and reviewed Believe Me.

The middling read was Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies–I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’ve read very little of Auster’s work–I think I picked something up from the library years ago but did make much headway. It seems to have received mixed though mostly positive reviews. My favourite passage is this: “I like tricking people. I like seeing how much I can get away with. Even as a kid, one of my dreams was to publish and encyclopedia in which all the information was false. Wrong dates for every historical event, wrong locations for every river, biographies of people who never existed.”

And the most challenging read was Erian’s Towelhead. The challenge doesn’t come from the prose but from the narrative perspective. The novel is told entirely from the perspective of a thirteen-year old girl who is immersed in intricate and uneasy-making sexual and social situations. And because of the perspective it is difficult to find an “approved” or easy narrative purchase to view the sexual exploration, sexual abuse, painful family dynamics, and racial sterootyping.

I think I’ll need to pick up some more Auster and Erian

I don’t think I’ve written about George Elliot Clarke and his novels and poetry before even though I’ve been reading his work since the 70s. His novel about the last double hanging in New Brunswick, George and Rue, came out last year. It reworks his award-winning Execution Poems and family stories into a compelling novel.

The complexity and musicality of the prose is much more evident when he reads from it in thispodcast which the ABC recorded nearly a year ago in Montreal (cleaned up transcript here), The thing I always remember about Clarke’s readings is his laughter–even in describing the bad old days of Nova Scotian racism, his laughter rings through it all.

Technorati Tags: Atlantica, Campbell, Maritime, pastoral, Reading

I’ve finished George Elliot Clarke’s novel George and Rue and it’s made me want to go back and read Buckler’s novel which I haven’t read in years. One of the things I most like about Clarke’s writing is that is utterly unsentimental and lyrical.

Sentimentality is the bane of many Atlantic Canadian novels–Alaister McLeod being a typical example. I suspect that the sentimentality–is a generational difference. Younger writers such as Coady, Conlin, and Hynes spend far more time working through what it means to come from or to live in a sodden, alcoholic culture.