KfC’s 2013 Project: Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood

Personal first edition

Margaret Atwood is undoubtedly one of Canada’s best known and most prolific authors. The third volume in her Oryx and Crake trilogy, Maddaddam, is due for publication later this year — it will be novel number fourteen on her resume, published forty-four years after The Edible Woman marked her introduction as a novelist in 1969. At that time, she was already a well-regarded poet — she has continued to publish poetry, children’s books, commentary and criticism throughout her career.

As one who has read her first 10 novels (she and I parted ways with Oryx and Crake), I would argue that there are three quite distinct groupings of Atwood novels:

The early “feminist” books, starting with The Edible Woman up to Bodily Harm (1981), including Surfacing, her second novel, published in 1972. “Feminist” is perhaps too lazy a label — the books do feature troubled, youngish female characters who are facing some difficult choices, not all of their own making. The male characters in the books are definitely part of the problem, not the solution, and society in general seems stacked against the heroines.

The “historical” novels, starting with Cat’s Eye (1988) and extending through to The Blind Assassin (2000). These four (The Robber Bride and Alias Grace are the other two) are probably her best known and most critically recognized — they all featured on Booker, Orange, Governor-General’s and Giller Prize short lists. While feminism is still present, they have much broader plots and Atwood doesn’t hesitate to introduce her political leanings (she has been an outspoken activist throughout her career) into her fiction.

The “dystopian” novels, presaged with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and fully developed in the Oryx and Crake trilogy beginning in 2003. My distaste for dystopian fiction is profound — I read, but did not much like, The Handmaid’s Tale, and have not even sampled the two most recent works.

So before even looking at Surfacing, I should note that this is an Atwood work that may not be familiar — or even representative — to some of her most avid fans. It may well be the least read of her 14 novels (although it is still in print) and at first glance seems an unlikely choice for KfC’s 2013 project of rereading a dozen Canadian authors who influenced me. I’ll extend this introduction further by saying that it does have particular personal significance for me. Atwood also published a critical work in 1972, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, arguing in that volume that most Canadian novels published to that date were brutal stories of how individuals coped with a hostile natural environment. I had some experience with early Canadian fiction at that time and was doing some book reviewing for the Calgary Herald — I remember to this day how a scheduled 45-minute interview with Atwood turned into a two-and-a-half hour conversation. While I have never been a fan of her public persona, I can assure you that face-to-face she was a fascinating, warm, informative subject — a positive assessment that may well have influenced my first response to this novel.

Indeed, Surfacing itself is as good an example as one can find of the transition from the fiction that Atwood described in Survival to the kind of work that has proved more representative of Canadian writing since the 1970s. To be sure, every publishing season still features some “frontier” works and the challenges that hostile natural elements present, but that has becomes just one of the streams, not the all-pervasive, central one.

Surfacing definitely has an element of “nature-coping” to it. The first-person narrator is an illustrator who lives in urban Canada (Toronto is suggested, but not named) and who is returning to an island in the rocky Canadian Shield country of Quebec where she was raised, accompanied by her boyfriend Joe and a couple of married friends, David and Anna. She has received word from old friends of her parents that her elderly father (who has retreated, hermit-like, to the rugged island cabin in his retirement) has gone missing — she has persuaded Joe, David and Anna to come along on a two-day trip to see what might have happened.

Atwood wastes no time in letting the reader know that the conflict between frontier and urban environments will be a feature of the book. It opens:

I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hire. But this is still near the city limits; we didn’t go through, it’s swelled enough to have a bypass, that’s success.

I never thought of it as a city but as the last or first outpost depending on which way we were going, an accumulation of sheds and boxes and one main street with a movie theatre, the itz, the oyal, red R burnt out, and two restaurants which served identical grey hamburger steaks plastered with mud gravy and canned peas, watery and pallid as fisheyes, and French fries bleary with lard. Order a poached egg, my mother said, you can tell if it’s fresh by the edges.

That “survival” conflict will never disappear from the novel — the narrator’s three fellow travelers are all urban people, neophytes in the remote environment who can’t even paddle a canoe, so she is their guide into this remote world. Without giving too much away, as the narrator discovers more about herself the theme becomes even more pervasive and dominates the closing chapters of the book.

Along the way, however, we get some of Atwood’s more contemporary observations. She’s never been known as a great supporter of America and that thread also gets introduced in the opening chapter:

Now we’re passing the turnoff to the pit the Americans hollowed out. From here it looks like an innocent hill, spruce-covered, but the thick power lines running into the forest give it away. I heard they’d left, maybe that was a ruse, they could easily still be living in there, the generals in concrete bunkers and the ordinary soldiers in underground apartment buildings where the lights burn all the time. There’s no way of checking because we aren’t allowed in. The city invited them to stay, they were good for business, they drank a lot.

“That’s where the rockets are,” I say. Were. I don’t correct it.

David says “Bloody fascist pig Yanks,” as though he’s commenting on the weather.

And finally, there is the gender tension. Readily-available birth control may have introduced a version of sexual freedom in the 1960s but, in many ways (particularly among pseudo-lefties like these four), it has only increased the dominance of men over women. The narrator and Joe may live and sleep together back in the city, but they are anything but a happy couple. David and Anna may be married, but in no way does that result in Anna being David’s equal. And “sexual freedom” and the remote location supply the excuse for some four-way, male-dominated “play”.

Of the four novels that I have re-read so far in this project, I would have to say that Surfacing has aged least well. Part of that is certainly my own aging: the tension/abuse between the female and male characters had a present-day reality to it when I first read this novel which simply is only a distant memory now. The anti-American story line seems embarrassingly naïve and simplistic, given current reality. The conflict with a hostile environment (and Atwood does get into some natural spirituality in that thread) is the strongest element but even that did not lead to new insights for me on this read.

Having said all that, I would say that readers who respond enthusiastically to Atwood’s dystopian works (and there certainly are many of them) might well want to pick up Surfacing for some early indications of where she will be heading in her later writing career. The latter part of the book may have landed flat with me — I suspect there is much more there for readers who find the “naturalism” of Oryx and Crake rewarding.

As for KfC’s 2013 project, it will be taking a minor detour in the next two months. The first four books have featured well-known Canadian novelists (Robertson Davies, Carol Shields and Mordecai Richler in addition to Atwood) and the last six, while perhaps not so well known to contemporary readers, do have international reputations. My May read is Hugh Hood’s White Figure, White Ground — Hood was my favorite novelist in the 1970s and I would rate him as one of Canada’s most unjustly overlooked authors. And June features Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man, a Prairie novel that I suspect few visitors here have even heard of. If you have found the first four authors of any interest at all, stay tuned — Hood and Kroetsch may not be as well known, but they are well worth reading.

KfC’s 2013 Project: Solomon Gursky Was Here, by Mordecai Richler

Personal first edition

Including Mordecai Richler in KfC’s 2013 project of re-reading Canadian authors who influenced me was a no-brainer decision from the start. Like any Canadian reader of my era, I have known his fiction well for decades (and interviewed the man himself more than once). It was equally impossible to not be aware of his controversial political reputation — Quebec sovereignists have a one-man category of detest reserved for him. And there is no doubt that he is a special “friend” of the blog: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is easily the most popular archived post here and Barney’s Version holds down sixth spot.

Having already reviewed those two popular choices did mean that deciding which Richler novel to include provided some challenge. In the final analysis, it came down to St. Urbain’s Horseman or Solomon Gursky Was Here — the first of those two is probably both better known and more typical of his work, the latter is perhaps his most unconventional adult novel. It has been some time since I last read Gursky and memory said that it had been a bit of a challenge — that was spark enough to convince me it was time for a revisit.

There are a number of traits that are present in all of Richler’s fiction. Growing up Jewish in Montreal is one, for starters. The plot line is always a rich stream, with the author usually enjoying pushing the envelope towards the bizarre. And in every book he uses those two over-arching themes as fertile ground in which to seed acerbic satire and grumpy, but often hilarious, observations on aspects of the current state of play.

All those threads are present in Solomon Gursky Was Here, but they come in different proportions than in his more popular works. The Gurskys are certainly Jews now living in Montreal, but that element doesn’t come with the usual familiarity of Richler’s St. Urbain Street — in this novel, they have roots elsewhere and have graduated to prominent global capitalism in the present. What is most distinctive in this novel, however, is that Richler pushes his many plots even further into the absurd than he usually does — and that does produce some challenge for the reader.

The unfamiliar ground is introduced right from the start. The opening takes place “during the record cold spell of 1851″ in Magog, Quebec, 75 miles east of Richler’s usual urban Montreal turf. The patrons at Wm. Crosby’s lakeside hotel (“Refreshments served at any hour of day or night”) observe a sled pulled by twelve yapping dogs emerge from the swirling snow:

The dogs were pulling a long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip. Ephraim pulled close to the shore and began to trudge up and down, searching the skies, an inhuman call, some sort of sad clacking noise, at once abandoned yet charged with hope, coming from the back of his throat.

In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind.

Ephraim unloads his sled and begins to set up camp — including building an igloo. Just before disappearing into the igloo, he bangs a wooden sign into the snow in front of it: CHURCH OF THE MILLENARIANS, Founder, Brother Ephraim. The scene is stranger by the next morning: three more igloos have appeared and a community of “little dark men” and their families have settled in. For the watchful Crosby Hotel bar crowd, it gets even more confusing:

When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim’s igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Whatever them Millenarians is it’s sure as shit a lot more fun than what we got.”

Finally Ephraim pointed at one, nodded at another, and they quickly scrambled into his igloo. The men, beating on their drums, led the remaining women back to their igloos, punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim’s igloo.

Okay, some back story is required here. The conceit is that Ephraim Gursky was a member of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to the Canadian Arctic — while conventional wisdom says no one survived, Richler fiction says not only that Ephraim did but he has moved back and forth between the Arctic and southern Canada ever since. And is the ancestral father of the Gursky empire, a family-run business which is now a major player in the global liquor trade.

That empire was created by Ephraim’s grandsons, Bernard, Morrie and Solomon, during the Prohibition era. Building off a stake Solomon won by stealing and risking the family “fortune” (meagre savings from his father’s rural Saskatchewan hardware business) in a Prairie poker game (one of his prizes was the deed to the local hotel), they eventually got into the liquor-running business in Western Canada, moved east to the more lucrative Windsor/Detroit run and when Prohibition ended were well-positioned in Montreal to move into the “legitimate” liquor business where they have done exceedingly well ever since.

(Aside: Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Canadian history of the era will immediately make the connection with the Bronfmans, the family behind the Seagram liquor empire, who started out as rum-runners and went on to become one of the country’s leading philanthropic families. And while Richler wrote Solomon Gursky in 1989, elements of the story that I am characterizing as “absurd” live on in the present day. Canadian Club, the rye whisky brought back to prominence as Dan Draper’s drink of choice on Mad Men, was distilled in Windsor and smuggled into Detroit, on its way to Capone’s Chicago. And one of the current Bronfman heirs is in the news as I write this with a bizarre child custody dispute involving the rapper, M.I.A. Some things really don’t change.)

Solomon actually disappears from the novel shortly after that poker game — a sled (apparently driven by Ephraim) arrives and takes him north towards the Arctic. A central uncertainty of the plot is whether or not he is still alive and just what influence he has on its various elements.

That uncertainty provides yet another story line in the novel. Moses Berger is the son of the failed Montreal literary poet, L.B. Berger. As a child, Moses lived down the Mount Royal slopes from the Gursky family multi-mansion estate and becomes obsessed with Solomon’s story from the first time he hears of him. Moses’ lifelong pursuit of that story introduces a whole new set of oddball characters with whom Richler can play.

All of that is a very rudimentary sketch of the various story lines in Solomon Gursky Was Here. Each features a pretty much independent set of characters (although there is some overlap), each has its own intricate plot developments and each provides the author a platform for digressions into cryptic observation or bitter satire. Richler loves complexity and detail and you can rest assured that he spares none of it in any of the story threads.

The problem that I had the first time I read this novel was that there is so much going on (and so many people doing it) that I had a lot of trouble keeping it all straight. Richler shifts focus frequently and without warning — particularly in the first half of the book, when he is establishing these widely varied stories, I felt buried in a wealth of detail and characters whom I only vaguely remembered. The parts were certainly interesting and entertaining, but I wasn’t getting much of a sense of the whole.

That frustration did settle down midway through the book (although, given that it is 557 pages, that involved a considerable investment of time) and I found the latter half much more engaging. I must say I did have a similar experience this time through (my third, perhaps fourth, read of the novel) but had the comfort of knowing that it all does eventually come together.

The jacket promo of my first edition of Solomon Gursky Was Here refers to it as Richler’s “most ambitious and mysterious novel”. I would certainly quibble with “most ambitious” (Duddy and Barney both have an admirable depth to them) — “mysterious” is fair if you accept that it has both negative and positive possibilities. Richler is generally a very accessible author but that is not always the case with this one. His canvas for this one is truly large — while all the parts show his considerable ability, for this reader the bigger picture does not come together quite as readily as it does in his more popular novels.

(In April, KfC’s 2013 Project again heads into “different” territory. The author, Margaret Atwood, is certainly familiar. But the novel, her second, Surfacing, tends to be overlooked in current day attention. I remember well reading it when the author was only coming to prominence — I am interested to see how it has weathered the decades since.)

KfC’s 2013 Project: The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields

All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. At the same time she knows that what lies ahead of her must be concluded by the efforts of her imagination and not by the straight-faced recital of a thottled and unlit history. Words are more and more required. And the question arises: what is the story of a life? A chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression? The bringing together of what she fears? Or the adding up of what has been off-handedly revealed, those tiny allotted increments of knowledge? She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity. And she needs someone — anyone — to listen.

Personal first edition

That excerpt comes almost at the conclusion of The Stone Diaries, towards the end of chapter nine of ten, as 80-year-old Daisy Flett begins organizing what she knows will be her final thoughts and collected memories of a life lived. For the reader, who is all too reluctantly aware that only a few pages remain in the novel, it is a timely synopsis of the story so far — this is not only a life lived, it is a life well-lived. And we have been privileged to be the “listeners” who were there to share the story.

Before we get to Daisy Flett’s story, let me supply some context. I have said it before, but it bears repeating: The Stone Diaries has a unique fiction prize history that may never be repeated. Carol Shields was born in 1935 in Illinois and spent her childhood and student years in the U.S. — she met and married Donald Shields in Scotland in 1955 and they returned to his home in Canada, where she took out Canadian citizenship. That dual citizenship made this 1993 novel eligible for the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S., the Governor-General’s Award in Canada and the Booker Prize in the U.K. — The Stone Diaries won the first two (along with the non-citizenship-restricted National Book Critics’ Award in the U.S.) and was shortlisted for the Booker won by Roddy Doyle for Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha. Curses to the Booker jury for denying Shields a triple that I am sure will not be approached in the future (Australians with dual U.S. citizenship are allowed to replace the Governor-General award with the Miles Franklin if they want to take on the challenge).

The Stone Diaries is book two in KfC’s 2013 project of rereading a dozen Canadian books that influenced me as a youthful reader, so permit me to add some more background. Shields was born only four years after Alice Munro but is far less well known to international readers because of her untimely death in 2003. When this novel appeared, it is safe to say that her literary reputation in Canada rivalled that of Munro’s (and that of Margaret Atwood, born in 1939, as well). An accomplished short story writer as well as novelist, she deserves to be ranked on every count with those two highly-regarded authors.

The last book reviewed here (The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder) was a “novel-in-stories” which provoked some interesting comments on the technique. The Stone Diaries is very much a novel but if you are looking for an example of the form, it is a classic “novel in stories” — with the additional cachet that Shields chooses to employ some widely varying aspects of her considerable short story writing ability as the story unfolds.

The novel’s 10 chapters start with Daisy’s birth in 1905 and end with her death in 199- (that’s all the author gives us, although we can presume from the date of publication it is early in the decade). While it is Daisy Goodwill-Flett’s story throughout and is in chronological order, the chapters come at almost evenly-spaced 10 year points in her life — with every chapter, the reader is left to speculate on much of what has happened in the intervening years. The device not only makes Daisy’s story richer it adds considerable depth to The Stone Diaries — this novel is not only a life lived, it is very much an examination of a 20th century North American life.

Here’s the opening of chapter one, “Birth, 1905″. It offers a flavor of the voice and approach that will appear in a number of the novel’s “stopping points” as the author chronicles Daisy’s life:

My mother’s name was Mercy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband’s supper. A cookery book lay open on the table: “Take some slices of stale bread,” the recipe said, “and one pint of currants; half a pint of raspberries; four ounces of sugar; some sweet cream if available.” Of course she’s divided the recipe in half, there being just the two of them, and what with the scarcity of currents, and Cuyler (my father) being a dainty eater. A pick-and-nibble fellow she calls him, able to take his food or leave it.

The setting is Tyndall, Manitoba: “a dusty, landlocked Manitoba village (half a dozen unpaved streets, a store, a hotel, a Methodist Church, the Canadian Pacific Railway Station, and a boarding house on the corner of Bishop Road for the unmarried men)”. Cuyler Goodwill works as a stone mason in Garson, two miles up the road — his trade introduces a metaphor that will re-appear periodically as the novel progresses (as well as influencing the title).

“Birth, 1905″ is very much like a Munro story in that beneath its gloss of the quotidien it includes its share of surprises which serve to define the parameters of the novel. I am about to engage in spoilers which are necessary for that context, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you can’t stand spoilers. Mercy Goodwill has been unwell, but doesn’t know she is pregnant when she collapses in that Manitoba kitchen. Her cries of pain are heard by a travelling pedlar, known as “the old Jew” in the town, who runs to the house of a neighbor, Mrs. Clarentine Flett, who arrives in time for the birth: “Everyone in the tiny, crowded, hot and evil-smelling kitchen — Mrs. Flett, the old Jew, Dr. Spears, Cuyler Goodwill — has been invited to participate in a moment of history.” Mercy Goodwill dies giving birth and Clarentine Flett will take over raising the young Daisy (and have an even greater extended impact, since she becomes Daisy Flett — but I’ll leave it for prospective readers to discover how that comes about).

On the surface, Daisy Goodwill-Flett’s long life is a mundane one — the beauty of Shields’ novel is how she makes it an extraordinary one. I’ve spoiled enough already so let’s just say that the setting for succeeding chapters will range from Bloomington, Indiana to Ottawa, Ontario to Sarasota, Florida — that geographic range illustrates the “20th century” aspect of the book. It is worth noting that at each of her “stopping points”, the author also supplies a wealth of contemporary detail similar to that recipe for Malvern pudding that opens the book — Daisy’s life may be ordinary but the author is always careful to include details and extended digressions to illustrate what is happening around it.

I have now read The Stone Diaries during three different decades of my own life and have to say that I came away more impressed with the novel with each reading, influenced by the way that Shields has captured not just Daisy’s life but the times and communities of which she is part at each stage where the author has chosen to pause to look into her life. My first reading when the book appeared 20 years ago focused on the wonderful character whose story is being told. My second, roughly a decade ago, added the element of appreciating how well Shields had captured aspects of the century, at least from a well-travelled Canadian point of view.

Both those strengths remained in this reading, but I’ll admit yet another element came to the fore this time around: what a tour-de-force The Stone Diaries is in displaying the breadth and depth of an exceptional writer’s craft. Some chapters (like the first) are told in the first person, looking back in time. Others have a conventional omniscient narrator. One consists entirely of letters sent to Daisy as she recovers from the death of her husband and begins a new life — we know her well enough by then that there is no reason to include her responses. Yet another features first-person perspectives from several different family members and friends on what is happening to Daisy at that stage.

I suspect that that authorly virtuosity had a positive influence on those Prize juries back in 1993 — this is not only a successful novel, it achieves its success through a format that has no comparison in the challenges the author chose to set for herself. Every chapter would stand complete as a short story — taken together, they invite the kind of re-reading again and again that supplies a whole new level of appreciation each time (again, comparisons with Munro at her best come to mind).

In conclusion, my third reading of The Stone Diaries not only showed that it has withstood the test of time, its impact on me has continued to grow. I can’t wait until the time comes around for a fourth exploration of this exceptional novel — I am certain there is yet still more for me to discover.

Book three in KfC’s 2013 project is Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. It is not his most popular title — that would be The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, already reviewed on this site (and by far the most popularly-searched post thanks to its presence on school and university reading lists). Still, Solomon Gursky is well worth the effort. Do join me in the reading (or re-reading) — the review and discussion will be open in mid-March.

KfC’s 2013 Project: Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies

Fifth Business … Definition

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero or Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organised according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.
– Tho. Overskou, Den Danske Skueplads

Available at Indigo.ca

That’s the epigraph to Robertson Davies Fifth Business (1970) and, unlike many epigraphs, it tells us a lot about what is to come. Most obviously, given the novel’s title, the central character will be one whose purpose is to bring the story along (rather than being a hero or villain). More subtly, this will be an “old style” story, the kind that is a staple for drama and opera companies — particularly those specializing in visiting out-of-the-way towns where they don’t want to pose too much challenge to the audience.

The novel is told in the first person by the Fifth Business himself, Dunstable Ramsay, and author Davies, in admirable touring company fashion, introduces all the major characters in an incident that takes less than two pages to recount. First we meet the hero (or perhaps villain?) of the story, Percy Boyd Staunton. He’s the son of a well-off doctor (whose wealth comes mainly from shrewd land purchases) and he and 10-year-old Dunny have been out testing Percy’s “fine new Christmas sled” — alas, Dunny’s old-fashioned, well-used one has out-performed Percy’s new acquisition:

The afternoon had been humiliating for him, and when Percy was humiliated he was vindictive. His parents were rich, his clothes were fine, and his mittens were of skin and came from a store in the city, whereas mine were knitted by my mother; it was manifestly wrong, therefore, that his splended sled should not go faster than mine, and when such injustice showed itself Percy became cranky. He slighted my sled, scoffed at my mittens, and at last came right out and said that his father was better than my father. Instead of hitting him, which might have started a fight that could have ended in a draw or even a defeat for me, I said, all right, then, I would go home and he could have the field to himself. This was crafty of me, for I knew it was getting on for suppertime, and one of our home rules was that nobody, under any circumstances, was to be late for a meal. So I was keeping the home rule, while at the same time leaving Percy to himself.

KfC’s 2013 Project

Deptford is a small village and getting home will not take long. Having efficiently sketched his two main characters on page one, Davies sets the plot in motion on page two. As Dunny hurries home, the Reverend Amasa Dempster and his pregnant wife, Mary, are taking their nightly walk on the street ahead of him, a walk that has attracted some critical town attention since pregnant women, especially minister’s wives, are expected to keep themselves in confinement.

Percy had been throwing snowballs at me, from time to time, and I had ducked them all; I had a boy’s sense of when a snowball was coming, and I knew Percy. I was sure that he would try to land one last, insulting snowball between my shoulders before I ducked into our house. I stepped briskly — not running, but not dawdling — in front of the Demptsers just as Percy threw, and the snowball hit Mrs. Dempster on the back of the head. She gave a cry and, clinging to her husband, slipped to the ground; he might have caught her if he had not turned at once to see who had thrown the snowball.

The incident puts Mrs. Dempster into labor — a son, Paul, is born weeks premature later that night. He will survive, as will Dunny’s guilt for his “role” in the incident. Mary Dempster and Paul will join Percy as the active characters in the drama/opera — Dunny will always be there, in the role of Fifth Business.

With the key cast in place and readers already alerted that there will be a lot of plot to the novel, author Davies steps back and supplies context. What we are reading is a document prepared by Dunstan Ramsay (he’s changed his first name for reasons we’ll discover later) upon his retirement at age 71 after forty-five years teaching at a Toronto private school. He was deeply offended by the “idiotic piece” on his retirement that appeared in the quarterly school magazine and is submitting this account of his life to the Headmaster to set the record straight.

Without giving anything away, here are some of the elements of that life that are relevant not just to Fifth Business but to the following volumes of the Deptford Trilogy, The Manticore and World of Wonders:

Dunny won a Victoria Cross for an action in France in the Great War; for months he was believed killed in the incident. Even in this heroic act, he was the Fifth Business, he tells us, merely reacting to circumstances. While recovering in England, he enters a relationship that supplies a depth to his life that simply was not possible to experience in rural Deptford.

The alternating friendship/enmity between Dunny and Boy Staunton (Percy too will change his name) will be lifelong. Since Boy goes on to become one of Canada’s richest men (his speciality is foodstuffs, especially sugary ones), a personal friend (he thinks) of the dashing Prince of Wales (he is devastated by the Abdication) and is touted as a candidate for Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor (the Queen’s representative), the relationship is a “rich” one in both material results and story.

Not only does Dunny’s guilt over the incident with Mrs. Dempster remain, it becomes an obsession. As his life unfolds, Ramsay becomes a world-recognized hagiologist (expert on the saints), an author of 10 books on mythic history which have sold more than three-quarters of a million copies. This interest is a flip-side of the coin of his obsession with Mrs. Dempster: he is convinced that he has personally witnessed three miracles for which she was responsible, which he feels makes her a candidate for sainthood herself.

He also picks up an interest in psychology and develops an expertise in both Freud and Jung, particularly the latter. While elements of that are more important in the later volumes of the trilogy, both play out here.

I’ve offered enough teases about what Boy gets up to (it is worth noting that he never loses the vindictiveness noted in the first excerpt here), but there is an added dimension to his role in the novel. It is fair to say that Robertson Davies had a personal reputation as a snob (he is as close as Canada can come to being the caricature of an Oxbridge don) but he was an academic one — Boy’s success in the world of of commerce and politics supplies the platform for some wonderful comic insights that only an academic snob could produce.

And finally there is Paul Dempster. In his early teens, Dunny gets interested in the world of magic — Paul is both his audience and student. In fact, at the age of five, Paul can perform card and coin manipulation tricks better than Dunny can. Paul will also change his name (I told you Freud and Jung are present here) several times, eventually settling on Magnus Eisengrim, one of the world’s leading illusionists.

All of that is only the infrastructure that supports a wealth of incidents and set pieces along the way. Suffice to say that Fifth Business is one of those very rare novels that not only has a continually unfurling series of well-executed plot(s), they are carried out by an equally outstanding cast of exceptionally well-drawn characters.

I first read this novel shortly after its release and, like most readers then, was very impressed. I think this was my fourth read of the book and, like a fine wine, it has matured and acquired more depth with each reading (and perhaps that is more a measure of my own maturing and appreciation of the subtleties that passed me by on earlier readings). Dunstan Ramsay is one of those rare characters who stays in a reader’s mind forever. If you haven’t met him, find a copy now.

There is no doubt that Fifth Business sells more copies than the two following Deptford trilogy volumes but it is worth providing a thumbnail sketch of each. In The Manticore, Davies explores his interest in psychology — Boy Staunton’s son, David, is in Switzerland undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis; Dunstan Ramsay is there recovering from a heart attack. World of Wonders is the life story of Magnus Eisengrim, who ran away to join a circus and became the world’s leading illusionist — Dunny is present in many parts of the story. While Fifth Business deserves its reputation as the best of the three that in no way is a critical comment on the other two; rather it is a testimony to how good this first volume is.

That concludes Part 1 of KfC’s 2013 Project, revisiting 12 Canadian works of fiction that influenced me. Next up in early February is Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries (1993) which ranks as the English language’s most global-award-winning novel of the modern era — it won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle award in the U.S., the Governor-General’s Award for fiction in Canada and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the U.K.

KfC’s 2013 Project: Revisiting 12 Canadian authors who influenced me

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” — Robertson Davies

KfC’s 2013 Project

That quote showed up in my inbox a few months back, re-discovered and sent to me by a longtime friend, Marilyn Potts. I certainly was aware of it, although I will admit it had been a few decades since I had last brought it to mind. The email was very timely however because the reminder served as a catalyst to bring together two "reading" thoughts that had been separately percolating in my mind:

– Every time I headed into the basement to search the shelves for an older book, I kept coming across Canadian novels that I had read in my youth (and again in maturity) and found mysef thinking "I really should read that again".

– 2013 is one of those marker years for me: I turn 65 in February. I was looking for some project that would celebrate both that personal landmark and year five in the "publication" of this blog.

So I quickly decided that my 2013 project would be to pay attention to Davies' perceptive thought and revisit 12 novels — one a month — that had served to develop my tastes in Canadian fiction. I've read all of them at least twice (in youth and maturity) and a third read of each did seem in order. Having said that, I am not quite prepared to admit that I have arrived at "old age", so I'd like to modify Roberston Davies quote just a bit: insert "again when you get control of your own time" in the first half of the phrase and, to preserve the symmetry, "at dusk" in the second half (since fine buildings do look different at dawn and at dusk).

I know that only a third of visitors to this blog are Canadian, so I need to make a few qualifications before revealing my schedule. The first is that, unlike the United Kingdom or even the United States, Canadian fiction publishing is a comparatively "young" animal. While there are certainly Canadian authors who were published prior to World War II (Sinclair Ross and Frederick Phillip Grove are two that come to mind), they were originally published in the UK or US, with volumes exported back to Canada. Hugh MacLennan is generally regarded as the first writer to attempt to portray Canada's national character and even his first novel (Barometer Rising, 1941) about the Halifax Explosion was first published in the US. So foreign readers here (except, of course, those from Australia and New Zealand which have similarly young publishing industries) are going to find a very “modern” tone to this list of “classics” — all were first published post-War.

That also means that my life and Canadian publishing occupy the same time frame — okay, I wasn’t reading these books as a child but even the oldest was published less than 25 years before I first encountered it. More important, however, is that in the mid-1970s I was a weekly book columnist for the Calgary Herald and most of these seminal authors were still alive and publishing. That is reflected in this list — I interviewed or met all of the first six authors whom I plan to reread (usually in connection with that particular novel), so much “classic” Canadian fiction took place in real time for me. And that also means my project schedule is roughly in reverse chronological order — I’ll get to older works in the July to December slots.

Finally, this is very much a personal list and not meant to be an attempt at “12 best Canadian novels ever”. Indeed, my favorite Canadian novel — Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance — isn’t part of the project, because I last reread it just before starting this blog and it is too soon for a revisit. (If that perks your interest, Will Rycroft has an excellent review of it here.) And, while Mordecai Richler is part of the project, the chosen novel would not be the conventional choice as his best: I’ve already reviewed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (and that review is by far the most often visited post on this blog). And I have excluded many authors because they are still publishing (Michael Ondaatje, Jane Urquhart, Guy Vanderhaeghe). Only two on my list are still publishing — Margaret Atwood makes it because her career breaks into two parts (pre- and post-”speculative” fiction) and Alice Munro because, because,…well, because she is Alice Munro (the volume that is part of the project was her first collection, published 45 years ago). I would like to think we have not read the last of her new work yet (and I will be reviewing her latest in just a few weeks, which is why she gets pushed to December in the project).

What follows is the list, by month in case you would like to follow along or join in the project on some selected months. A quick scan shows that all but the Hugh Hood selection are available in Canada — non-Canadian readers might have a challenge finding a few of them but Abebooks has sources for all at reasonable prices. (If you are really keen, my essay on economically buying Canadian fiction — here — has some strategies on how to reduce shipping costs.) Except for this month where I have delayed the review to allow anyone who wants to take part time to read the book, I’ll try to post the review in the first week of each month.

January — Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies
February — The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields
March — Solomon Gursky Was Here, by Mordecai Richler
April — Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood
May — White Figure, White Ground, by Hugh Hood
June — The Studhorse Man, by Robert Kroetsch
July — The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence
August — Cabbagetown, by Hugh Garner
September — Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan
October — Collected Stories, Alistair MacLeod
November — The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy
December — Dance of the Happy Shades, by Alice Munro

I am very much looking forward to this reading journey — I hope that some visitors here will find a reason to join at least part of it, be it re-reading an old favorite or taking up a Canadian classic for the first time. These 12 authors have been influential in defining Canadian literature — as a new generation of authors grows into prominence, it is important not to overlook the contribution that they have made.