March 12th, 2010

Ray Smith’s Century tops Canada Reads: Independently!

Taking 35% of the popular vote, Ray Smith’s Century has won top spot in the Canada Reads: Independently picks. Thank you to everybody who took part, to everybody who voted, to Jian Ghomeshi for mentioning our humble little extravaganza on yesterday’s CBC Canada Reads broadcast, to Dan Wells for nominating Century (and for publishing it), and to Ray Smith for writing it.

Thanks also to the rest of our celebrity panel, for donating their time and for the wonderful books they introduced to us. The five Canada Reads: Independently selections made clear that Canadian Literature is multitudinous, rich, and full of surprises. Which makes it much like literature in general, and in particular too.

Now, why don’t you celebrate by buying the book?

March 10th, 2010

On the Hair Hat Man

I have never met Carrie Snyder, but I started reading her blog just before Patricia Storms recommended Hair Hat for Canada Reads: Independently. (Patricia doesn’t know Carrie either– I checked. Because Canada is a very small town.) So Carrie and I have corresponded by email a few times, and I broke one of my own personal rules to ask her about her Hair Hat Man.

But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.

BUT. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man was so impossibly weird, and I just didn’t get him. Though I understood that my inability to grasp him, pin him down, was part of the power of the collection, that the culmination of the stories serve to make him “almost plausible”.

I love the fact that the Hair Hat Man has had the same effect on Snyder’s negative reviewers that he has on the other characters in her book– he makes us uneasy. People hate the Hair Hat Man, within the book and without it, but any character who provokes that reaction must have some substance behind him. Or rather, the criticism is often that he’s more a device than a character, but I think the same thing applies.

So I had to ask Carrie where he came from. Not that it changes anything at all, but as the answer to such questions often is, what she told me was worth repeating:

In answer to your Hair Hat question (and it’s definitely the most-asked question about the book!) … my inspiration came from actually seeing a man with a hair hat. At least, I think that’s what I saw. I was a grad student in Toronto, and often stopped at a coffee shop on my way to campus (at the corner of Bloor and St. Joseph Street, near Wellesley). One day, while walking past the shop, I thought I saw a man inside with his hair shaped into a hat. I don’t even think I did a double-take, but afterwards kind of kicked myself for not looking twice.

Somehow, the image worked its way into my imagination. He first appeared in a song I was writing. A year later, he made his way into the first hair hat story that I wrote–”Queenie, My Heart” (and that title actually arrived a few years before I’d even seen the hair hat man, scribbled in the margins of notes I was taking for fourth-year English class). But that story went unfinished. For about two years.

I’d just given birth to my first child when I wrote another hair hat story: the one in the voice of the lone male narrator in the book, which includes that coffee shop. After I wrote it, I said to my husband: is this just too weird? Because I want to write more hair hat stories. So I did. They just kind of poured out. At that point, I’d written a novel which had gotten me an agent; the novel didn’t sell, but she was able to sell these stories (which were written over the course of about a year) to Penguin. That happened just before I gave birth to my second child. And then, it was only at the editing stage that I found the ending to my Queenie story. And wrote the last story in the book, which surprised me entirely. I had no idea it was waiting to be written, but it felt like the perfect ending.

March 9th, 2010

Canada Reads: Independently 2010: UPDATE 8

I was looking through the twitter posts about Canada Reads today, and found one that said, “Every year, I get psyched about Canada Reads, and then life gets in the way and I don’t read any of the books”. Or something like that, in 140 characters. And for an instant, I thought that was profoundly sad, and pretty weird, until I remembered that the bookish circles amongst whom I travel the internet are probably way outnumbered by people like that. That though no doubt many people pay attention when Canada Reads rolls around, those who read every single book, those who start up spin-offs, and other spin-offs, or read the books from spin-offs, or blog the whole thing three years in a row, for example– these are sort of extraordinarily book-loving people.

All of which is to say that those of you who’ve read the Canada Reads 2010: Independently books are awesome, and that I very much appreciate you having my reading be just a little less independent. Thanks for all the feedback I’ve gotten so far with your top Canada Reads picks– others still have until Thursday to have your voice heard (even if you haven’t read them all). The Canada Reads 2010: Independently winner will be announced on Friday!

This week, Writer Guy read How Happy to Be: “I “got” Maxime, maybe because I could understand her dilemmas, her struggles. Ultimately, however, what makes it shine is Onstad’s prose: she’s a natural, seemingly effortless, writer. It’s easy to forgive and forget certain plot contrivances when the writing is skillful and fun.”

She who is Buried in Print read Wild Geese: “The dynamics of this story are complex; the emotional alliances between the characters are unpredictable and shift as easily as Caleb’s temper, and the reading experience is painful at times as, like Lind, we are temporarily immersed in this cruel world. But the overall sensation is one of endurance and survival, and it’s clear to see why this novel has endured in the Canlit canon…”

Charlotte Ashley (who has read Canada Reads AND Canada Reads Independently. Impressive, no?) read How Happy to Be and reports: “The figure of the girl who is directionless and out of control until motherhood finds her and gives her some purpose is not without precedent (I’m thinking Natasha from War and Peace, or in some ways myself). But by the same token, it made me feel that Max’s issues earlier in the book were not really that “real” after all, and all her whining and confusion was really just self-absorbed adolescence drawn out too long and she just needed to grow up. Maybe this was what Generation X lacked – the characters didn’t grow up.”

March 5th, 2010

Canada Reads: Independently. It’s the Final Countdown

Okay, it’s not exactly a “countdown”, but “It’s the Final Vote” would bring to mind no song by Europe, and so what’s the point of that? I’ve just posted my final Canada Reads: Independently review, and my rankings are set with Hair Hat in the top spot. But my power only extends so far, of course, and the winner of Canada Reads: Independently isn’t up to me. It’s up to us!

For those of you who’ve taken part, reading all or some of these books, you’ve got a vote. Our little poll will close at midnight on Thursday March 11th. Before then, email me (at klclare AT gmail DOT com) your top pick of the Canada Reads: Independently selections, and the winning book will be announced on Friday March 12 (just in time for CBC Canada Reads champion to be unveiled!)

And my bets are on Century, but anything can happen!

Can-Reads Indies #5: Moody Food by Ray Robertson

Until yesterday afternoon, I was dreading having to write this review. I was about half way into Moody Food and I just wasn’t getting it. I did like the references to 1960s’ Toronto and the Yorkville I only know from ancient mythology; I liked Thomas’s back-story; I liked the Making Waves Bookshop; I loved certain ways Thomas’s understanding of music was described (in particular, what he heard in the vaccuum cleaner when he was a child). But I found the prose awkward, with strangely-claused sentences that were hard to follow. And my biggest problem was with Bill Hansen.

For the first half of the book, Bill was a cipher. He was a non-character, and I couldn’t figure out why any of the others, with their vivid personalities– his cool girlfriend, Christine, his old hippie boss at the bookstore, the enigmatic Thomas Graham himself– why were they even hanging out with him? Bill took responsibility for nothing, had no real talents of his own (so they made him the drummer), didn’t follow through with anything, all of this for no real reason except to propel the plot. Let’s face it– in reality, Christine would never have dated him, Kelorn would never have hired him (and would have fired him once he stopped showing up for work), and Thomas wouldn’t ever have given him the time of day. Moody Food would never have happened. It all seemed like a construct, and that bothered me.

Thomas Graham himself I also had a hard time with– I didn’t buy his charisma. Though I started to see that the problem here was that we were seeing him through Bill’s eyes, and Bill describes himself as “the first and last disciple of Thomas Graham”, plus Bill was doing a lot of drugs, so probably nobody else really bought the charisma either.

So this disparate group comes together to form The Duckhead Secret Society, hooks themselves up with a steel guitar player called Slippery Bannister, they eventually catch the interest of a record producer with their “interstellar North American music”, and the rest is music history. Music history in the “Almost Famous” sense, the Behind the Music downward spiral that by now is a familiar narrative. And for me, once the spiral started, I finally found the book’s momentum.

Thomas and Bill get into cocaine, and then Thomas starts doing heroin, and instead of focusing on their tour and the album they were contracted to make, Thomas becomes absorbed by his magnum opus “Moody Food”. At one point, he’s got a cow in the studio, and he’s got a certain affinity for bovines anyway since becoming obsessed with vegetarianism. Robertson is throwing out these amazing sentences like, “When he hit the desert earth the crunch of his carrot was the only sound for miles.” Thomas is falling apart on stage, but he doesn’t care, and he and Bill spend their nights strung out on coke and writing new material (for which Bill is essential, because he hears music in colours and matches it with passages from library books they steal from all over North America). And Thomas starts referring to himself in the third person, and throwing liver off balconies, and uttering lines like, “The heart gets all the songs written about it and it’s what everybody talks about, but the liver is the biggest thing in you. So how come you never hear anybody talking about the liver? Where are all the songs written about it?”

When Thomas slips too far over the edge, suddenly Bill Hansen makes sense. We’re not supposed to like the guy, much like how we felt about Max from How Happy to Be. Unlike Max, however, Bill lacks wit and charm, and his perspective is remarkably limited: later, a character says to him, “I knew you weren’t bright, but I never took you for stupid.” But he is, a little bit, because he’s just a kid from Etobicoke who’s caught up in a story that’s too much for him. When the Duckhead Secret Society returns from their tour, Thomas holes up in his hotel room until the RCMP catch on (because he’s dodging the draft, and wanted for drug possession). The whole Yorkville scene has gotten out of control, and as a riot breaks out between protesters and police, Thomas Graham urges his band up on the rooftops for one last show that would have been an overwhelming cliche, but hilariously and tragically isn’t, and all of the sudden our perspective (and Bill’s) is whipped back to something resembling reality. How we’ve been following him so up close all this time, but Thomas Graham from far away can actually blend into a crowd.

I really enjoyed this book in the end, and I’m not sure if my early reservations were my fault or the book’s, but I didn’t have any by the time I was finished. That it took me so long to get into it, however (and this is a 400 page book), would have me counting against it. And here’s where this ranking think is stupid– every single book I’ve read as part of Canada Reads: Independently would probably be the very best book on most reading lists, but this is a particularly superlative reading list. Which means that although Moody Food is taking the bottom spot, it’s only because of its very good company, and also that my heart is breaking. But that this entire book list has been a really incredible reading experience and I’m so pleased to have had it.

Canada Reads: Independently Rankings:

1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder

2) Century by Ray Smith

3) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

4) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

5) Moody Food by Ray Robertson

March 3rd, 2010

Canada Reads: Independently 2010: UPDATE 7

Fun fact I’ve noted is that two out of five Canada Reads: Independently picks reference my alma mater Victoria College. In Moody Food, Ray Robertson has his characters meeting up on the stone steps of Old Vic, and Carrie Snyder goes one better in Hair Hat and has her character in “Flirtations” return three books to the Victoria College Library (though was it the library pre or post renos? I wonder…). Anyway, I will try not to let these references colour my perceptions (and as the post below makes clear, I am always very open-minded when it comes to literary perceptions).

I am just about done Moody Food, which took a while to grow on me, but this afternoon when I was this far into the drug-soaked downward spiral, I found myself hooked. Though it’s pretty clear that things aren’t going to end well. Review to follow in a day or two…

Meanwhile, Julie Forrest (who I met today! She’s lovely) read Century this week, and she puts it on top of the rankings: “Powerful and poetic, Century tackles big issues for such a slim volume. Inadvertent as it was, I’m glad I saved the best for last.” Buried in Print struggled with Century, but found it not without rewards in her post “How many clever readers does it take to make a “great” book?”: “I can see that it’s well-written and carefully constructed, but I think I’ve missed a lot of what I was meant to notice, and that’s an uncomfortable feeling.” August reads Moody Food, and found it “damned near impossible for me to put down because there was so much life in it”, though as a self-confessed music snob, he didn’t buy The Duckhead Secret Society. He also read Hair Hat, hated the hair hat, but was more impressed with the book than he expected to be: “Carrie Snyder writes like she knows.” And my husband Stuart read How Happy to Be, finding its heroine reprehensible but, oddly enough, the book much compelling all the same.

February 22nd, 2010

Canada Reads 2010: UPDATE 6

Four down, one to go, and I know lots of other readers are making good progress. Pretty soon I’ll be providing details of the vote we’ll be using to determine which title comes out on top, and I hope you’ll all show support for your favourites.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of reading going on– my husband is eating up How Happy to Be as I type this, and August Bourre had plenty of good things to say about Katrina Onstad’s novel: “Onstad’s send-up of self-important celebrities and the media apparatus that seems structured soley to support their egos is dead-on… and I laughed out loud more than once while Maxime was interviewing Ethan Hawke. It all seems like such a laugh, really, watching Maxime deliberately sabotaging her career, eviscerating her coworkers with her wit, navigating parties and talk shows and fucking Ad Sales out of boredom. And then for a moment it’s all ripped away and we can see the insecurity that underlies it all…”

This week, Charlotte Ashley read Moody Food and found it “engrossing, a genuine page-turner, and uncomfortably evocative of a seriously messed-up time.  But so very not my thing.” Buried in Print read it too, found it not exactly up her street, but wrote, “The dialogue is truly stand-out. It’s walk-off-the-page good. Not overly clever, just damn straight and believable. ” Writer Guy reads Century and suspects it’s untoppable: “Ultimately, the real strength of this work is Smith’s assertive and limpid (a word he actually uses at least three times!) prose. There’s a confidence in his style, a writer who’s totally in command of the language.”

In wider Canada Reads news, can I please credit the CBC people for being so cool and supportive about their imitators? For taking it all on as flattery instead of threat? And certainly, there is much flattery– the National Post announced their Canada Also Reads shortlist, which includes Pickle Me This favourites Come Thou, Tortoise and Yellowknife. And having read Julie Forrest’s review, I’m also going to read Stacey-May Fowles’ novel Fear of Fighting (which is available for free download). And then the fantastic KIRBC pepole bring you Civilians Read, which is the CBC Canada Reads lineup, but with a different panel of defenders. And so it will be interesting to see how things go down there.

March promises to be quite the showdown .

Can-Reads-Indies #4: How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

If Max were a man, there would be no debate about whether or not How Happy to Be is a serious novel. But Katrina Onstad’s Max is a woman, and so we have to discuss whether or not this is chick-lit, and if there is such thing as women’s fiction, and my answer to that one would be that sometimes there is, but not now. That if Max were a man, this novel wouldn’t be so different, except for the scene where she gets her period. I think a man reading this novel would appreciate it as much as I have.

If Max were a man, we’d c0mpare this book to Lucky Jim, but because Max is a woman, someone will mention Bridget Jones. She’s more Jim though, because her behaviour is loathsome rather than lovable, but loathsome is made palatable by being funny. (And I got this whole Lucky Jim thing from writer Kate Christensen re. her first novel In The Drink, interviewed here: “…an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan, three of the books which have inspired me most. Other exemplars of Loser Lit (and there are many) include The Ginger Man, A Confederacy of Dunces, Bright Lights, Big City, Wonder Boys, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Fine Madness, and, most recently, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-up. I was consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre, another reason I worried that no one would “get” In the Drink.”)

I feel bad now about the fact that I have to undermine this book’s femininity (assuming books have genders, but I’ve got a feeling that they do) in order to demonstrate its value. And you’re probably thinking that I’m protesting too much, but I also know that you’d think I was ludicrous to put this book at the top of my rankings. Why? Because it’s a popular novel, because it’s about a wayward youngish woman who finds love at the end, because it engages with pop culture and media culture, because it’s a comedy, because of the scene in which Max gets her period on a first date, the date has to go out and buy her tampons, he comes back with pads so thick that when she puts one on she waddles.

But in many ways, I truly think How Happy to Be is the best of the Canada Reads Independently books I’ve read yet. First: no gimmicks. Like some critics, I will concede that the Hair Hat Man himself was a gimmick. Century had them too (“Does it matter that there was no Jane Seymour? I don’t think so, but I hope you found her convincing.”) In fact, speaking of Century (and these outlandish comparisons are part of what makes a reading challenge like this so interesting), How Happy to Be also takes on “this murderous century”. It’s similarly woven of stories, of true ones and embellished ones, stories about how we tell stories and why, the stories we tell ourselves, those we can’t bear to, those we tell the world, and those that complete strangers tell us while we’re sitting beside them on the streetcar.

More though, about why this book is so wonderful: Katrina Onstad is a stunning writer. She is. “I watched from windows and trees for seventy-two days until Spring came. Her hair was finally longish, down around her ears now, and she looked beautiful again, her high cheeks neither sunken nor overblown. She could catch me. Day 73, she climbed the same tree from a different angle and grabbed my foot. Terrified, I howled like a stubbed toe and she laughed and laughed and my father brought us lunch to the rotted picnic table with only one bench. We sat in a row, my father, my mother, me, eating sandwiches off paper plates, shoulders touching in the summer, our limbs sighing with relief where they met.”

If How Happy to Be had a gimmick, it would be Onstad’s engagement with reality. The novel is a roman à clef of sorts– no doubt the newspaper where Max writes her film column is The National Post (where Onstad was once film critic); The Other Daily‘s vapid girl columnist seems familiar; Onstad counts Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Aniston, and Nicole Kidman among her characters; her fictional headlines mirror actual ones; she skewers a coke-snorting, bitch-slapping media scene culture that is apparently true to life (not that I’d know, of course, as such culture often takes place after 7pm and I haven’t left my house at such an hour since 2004 and that was just to return an overdue library book).

But the punch of her prose and the push of her plot keeps the trick from wearing thin. Max has spent her life looking on and telling stories from the sidelines, but she’s on the edge of something now– not yet recovered from the end of a long-term relationship which broke with “make or break”; desperately unhappy in her job writing about shitty movies whose advertisements pay for her paper; drinking too much; having stupid sex; she doesn’t have furniture or anything fresh in her fridge. “You have run out of repartee. You think of all the time you wasted watching while you should have been remembering what you once knew: how to start a fire with hands and twigs; how to sleep in a snow cave. You should have surrounded yourself with old people and listened to their tales of survival, really listened instead of jotting them down for later. You have entered your thirties without knowledge and you want it in a pile of sticks, a river, your bones.”

She wants her mother, the mother she lost to cancer years ago. And though she’s too angry with him to know it, she wants her father too, who was so paralyzed by his wife’s death that Max could never reach him. She wants roots, something real, and perhaps she might find it in Theo McArdle, who in his absolute goodness is the opposite of the rest of her whole life.

Rona Maynard was right in her pitch: How Happy to Be is a coming-of-age novel. A bad headline for this would be Catcher in the Wry. And now for the reasons that the novel will not be topping my rankings: first, a fairly conventional plot from about midway in is not extraordinary enough to compare with Hair Hat or Century. And also that the whole point of this novel is Max’s singular vision (“I’m being stabbed to death by my point of view”), which is dealt with most effectively, but (redundant though it is to say) is terribly limited, and doesn’t begin to compare with the other books’ polyhedronal approach.

But I love this book. I think it’s an important book, that it sets a standard that all novels about young women should live up to, that it deals with contemporary urban life in opposition to the Can-Lit standard, that it sets a standard of funny that all novels about anyone should live up to, and that it might surprise any male reader who thinks he’s not so interested in stories about women’s lives.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder

2) Century by Ray Smith

3) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

4) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

February 15th, 2010

Canada Reads 2010: UPDATE 5

This week, Wild Geese went in at third in my personal rankings (so far). Charlotte Ashley is reading Canada Reads and Canada Reads Independently together, this time with Good to a Fault versus Hair Hat. Of Hair Hat, she writes: “Carrie Snyder showed an especial talent for directing me to the very heart of a character with a mere observation of his or her lifestyle…  Snyder’s short, sparse book sparkles…” Melwyk reads Wild Geese and attests to its force: “I have to say this was a really uncomfortable read for me. In style, it was very much of its time, something I am used to reading in New Canadian Library selections. But it had a dark energy, a sexuality and a violence which was disturbing. Caleb literally made my skin crawl…” August Bourre determines that Ray Smith’s Century is ” just a spectacular fucking book.” Indeed! Julie Forrest reviews Moody Food to find that it “perfectly captures the experimental headiness of carefree youth… But it also strips away some romantic notions of the age, and exposes the limits of idealism, and the cost of chemically assisted creativity.” And Buried in Print with a take on How Happy to Be, which I’m going to be rereading next…

February 11th, 2010

Can-Reads-Indies #3: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

I wasn’t the only reader for whom the highlight of Canada Reads 2009 was Michel Tremblay’s The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, which was a book that we all should have read, that we were all better for having read, but I would never have picked it up otherwise. Sometimes the prospect of looking to the past for books we should have read is a bit like contemplating getting into Joyce Carol Oates– where do we start, and how would we ever be able to stop?

So it’s nice to get a bit of guidance, and I feel the very same about Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, which I’d never even heard of until I encountered NCL obsessive Melanie Owen online. In its day (1925), Wild Geese was a bestseller, was even made into a film, and heralded a new direction in Canadian fiction (though I’m not sure who followed in that direction– Sinclair Ross? Hugh MacLennan? See, with this early stuff, my knowledge is very sketchy. I read Ernest Buckler once. Anyway…)

Wild Geese takes place in a rural community in northern Manitoba. Schoolteacher Lind Archer arrives to board with the Gare family, and quickly realizes that something is amiss– somehow Caleb Gare has got his wife and children stuck under his thumb, and they’re terrified of defying him. He works them like animals on the farm, keeps them isolated from the community, wields his power with brute force, and he takes care to bully and blackmail his neighbours on the side. Caleb has met his match in daughter Judith, however, powerful in spirit and body (she reminded me so much of Jo March), who is desperate to get away from her tyrannical father and is inspired by Lind to finally do so.

“Powerful” is overused as an adjective to describe a book, and I wish I could coin a new way to describe exactly what Wild Geese does to its readers. The book was engrossing in way I’ve not very often experienced– closest comparison is my Andrew Pyper nightmares. Usually I read at a distance from novels, keeping the literary world and my own sensibly divided, but parts of Wild Geese crept into my consciousness. I read the chapter where Lind comes home in the dark and keeps making out creepy shadows and shapes behind her and around her, and I read this in the middle of a sunny afternoon, but I was freaked out. Similar, the conclusion– I absolutely couldn’t take it anymore and had to skip to the final pages to prevent a heart attack.

I also had such strong feelings about Caleb’s wife, Amelia Gare. Caleb had married her aware that she’d previously had a child out of wedlock, and he uses this knowledge to control her throughout their marriage. The control, however, comes from Amelia’s fear that Caleb would tell her son of his background (which he had been blissfully unaware of, told he was well-born, by the priests who’d raised him). Amelia’s feelings for this son are so strong that she is willing to sacrifice her other children for him, the spirited Judith in particular, and this absolutely enraged me as I read. Perhaps more than Caleb did himself.

Caleb Gare is a fascinating character, soft-spoken in the creepiest way possible. At first, I thought he was simplistic, his purposes far too blatent– Ostenso has him rubbing his hands together whilst surveying his land, wondering, “what the occasion would be, if it came to that, which would finally force him to play his trump card, as he liked to call it… He firmly believed that knowledge of Amelia’s shame would keep the children indefinitely to the land…”

But when I saw him interacting with members of the community with similar schemes and tricks, manipulating and blackmailing, this behaviour with his family began to seem very consistent. Caleb Gare is a completely unsympathetic character, and I am not sure this equals a lack of complexity in his moral make-up. We are tuned these days to see such characters as poorly drawn, but I’m not sure now. Ostenso has Caleb Gare making sense: everything he did was for his own gain– he worked his family hard so that he wouldn’t have to work as hard himself or pay anyone else to do so, he worked his neighbours to get his hands on their land and therefore expand his own power. He delighted in this power too, perhaps his only source of joy, save for his land, and there is a vital relationship between the two.

In addition to his sheer meanness, we are supposed to see Caleb Gare’s connection to his land as part of the motivation for his behaviour, but this is a given, not wholly explored. Which I’ve found in a lot of books, actually. It’s taken for granted that land can make a man do certain things, but I’m often left wondering exactly why. Ostenso does show that Gare (through using his family as slaves) is able to reap a bounty from the harsh northern lands in a way his neighbours are unable to do– that his domination extends even to the crops he commands. But I would have liked to know more about why Caleb feels the way he does about his land. It could be, however, that we don’t know how he feels the feels and thinks very little beyond his conniving. That Caleb is absolutely spiritually bankrupt, and this does seem to be the case.

Ostenso’s treatment of the landscape itself is vivid, of the inhabitants, and elements of Norse mythology informing their lives lends to the spooky treatment. The depiction of the land is also remarkable for the way in which the delicate, lovely and elegant Lind Archer’s contrast with it. Her presence as a foreign object in this strange brutal place is the catalyst for all that transpires, and also gives us a perspective on the Gares from without, which is most illuminating. Her relationship with Mark Jordan, another recently transplant (who is Amelia Gare’s illeg. son! This is not a spoiler, however, as we’re told from the outset) provides also provides necessary relief from the brutality of all other human relations.

In short, unlike much Canadian prairie fiction, Wild Geese didn’t make me want to kill myself.

From about midway in, I was rapt by this book, but there is one big reason why it won’t be top of my list of Canada Reads: Independently picks. Primarily, the way in which the prose of Wild Geese manages to sometimes reads like an undergraduate essay on Wild Geese. Such as when Lind Archer says, “That’s what’s wrong with the Gares. They all have a monstrously exaggerated conception of their duty to the land– or rather to Caleb, who is nothing but a symbol of the land.” There is something particularly ubsubtle about the book’s structures, particularly when compared to the complexity of a book like Century.

Still though, it’s a riveting read, pushes its language and imagery in challenging directions, is unafraid to shy away from uncomfortable or even horrifying situations, and tackles female sexuality in a beautiful way. (Yes– Canadian fiction in which the woman gets to be the horse, for once.) If this book is underread, it should be no longer.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith
3) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso