Book Review #22: The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Proof that Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees was not a one-hit wonder.

By the author of the best-seller, Fall On Your Knees, this long novel opens in 1962 when the MacCarthy family moves from Germany to their new home on a Canadian air force base near London, Ontario. Madeleine, eight and already a blossoming comic, is particularly close with her father, Jack, an air-force officer. The loving Acadian mother, Mimi, and brother, Mike, 11, round out this family whose simple goodness reflects the glow of an era that seemed like paradise. But all that is about to change. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming, and Jack, loyal and gullible, suddenly has an important task to carry out that involves a scientist, a former Nazi, in Canada.

While Jack scrambles to keep his activities hidden from his wife, Madeleine too is learning to keep secrets (about a teacher at school). This novel is all about the fertility of lies, how one breeds another and another. Although the writing flows like a river with a strong current, the profusion of pop references, especially ad slogans, grows tiresome. The author can, however, capture a lovely image in few words: “The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer.” and “…yes, the earth is a woman, and her favourite food is corn.” At times the story is marvelously compelling, as the mystery of a horrific murder in the fields near the base is unraveled. When the story evolves into a trial and its outcome, the story peaks, a conclusion with no easy answers. The last third of the book takes place, for the most part, 20 years later. Here the novel meanders somewhat, losing its ability to captivate with the same intensity. The reader longs to return to the earlier world, which MacDonald has captured in vital detail.

Book Review #21: Ascension by Steven Galloway

An excellent earlier novel from the author of the best-selling The Cellist of Sarajevo.

An imaginative mix of fact and fiction, this novel relates the life of Salvo Ursari, a gypsy from Transylvania whose parents were burned to death in their home by non-gypsies when he was nine. Salvo moves in with an aunt in Budapest where he eventually learns the art of walking the high wire from a tough master. He is later reunited with his brother and sister, who also become high-wire artists and, after a run-in with the Gestapo, the family flees to America where they become a famous act in the Fisher-Fielding circus.

The strength of this novel is the author’s ability to sustain tension. In a number of scenes on the high wire, (besides the circus, Salvo walks across the Grand Canyon and between the twin towers of the World Trade Center) the author has a remarkable ability to involve the reader in the action, although some of the descriptions of circus tricks are difficult to picture. The author offers an excellent description of the horrendous 1945 big-top fire in Boise, Idaho in which 112 people died, bringing the age of large tent circuses to an end. The book is also riddled with gypsy tales that have the feel of genuine folk stories straight from the forests of eastern Europe. Even though we meet the many people who have inhabited Salvo’s world, including the extended Fisher-Fielding family in constant struggle over control of the circus, it is his loneliness on the high wire that we feel most keenly.

Book Review #20: Deactivated West 100 by Don McKay

As well as being one of Canada's finest poets, Don McKay carves insightful and beautiful essays out of the natural world around him.

Two-time Governor General’s Award winner for poetry, McKay, in this collection of essays, explores “the relation between place and wilderness”. Intriguingly, McKay investigates the meaning of place by getting lost in the deep backwoods of Vancouver Island. The author is intimately attuned to plant life, animals and birds, the geologic signatures under the landscape, as well as the few fading remnants of human passage through this thick overgrown bush country. McKay’s wandering, however, is always rooted in language, where he dazzles like sudden sunlight on mica, as he pictures himself “a man stepping blindly into line one of The Inferno…” Any long walk is also an opportunity to muse, as McKay does here, on a variety of fascinating subjects: the use of the cleft-triangle in painted caves and Joyce’s Ulysses, the impossibility of finding hermits as a theme in ancient Chinese poetry, and the way waterfalls can “break into speech”. McKay keeps his feet on solid earth and his ear well tuned – he is as comfortable quoting Yogi Berra and The Globe and Mail as Jorge Luis Borges and Xenophanes. With exhilarating imagination and insight, McKay reminds us that “place is where stories happen…where infinity becomes history.”

Book Review #19: A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

Not only is Alberto Manguel a fine writer, he is one of the great 'readers' of our time, as this volume attests.

Subtitled ‘A Year of Favourite Books’, this small volume combines ruminations by Manguel on twelve novels, memories of childhood (when he first read many of these books), shards of poetry, events in the daily news that link to the books, visits of friends and neighbours, the turn of the seasons in his garden, as well as numerous apt quotes from a variety of sources. Manguel is a voracious, generous and astute reader and he includes works from across the globe: Don Quixote, Kim, The Pillow Book,Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, novels by H.G. Wells and Goethe. His astonishing literary range is evidenced by the inclusion of works from lesser-known South American writers (Bioy Casares and Machado de Assis), children’s literature (The Wind in the Willows) and detective fiction (The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). His comments on the works are always intelligent, insightful, original and engaging.

Manguel maintains a contemplative tone throughout, as befits a book written, for the most part, in a medieval presbytery, now his home in southern France. In this reflective tone, he states: “I, of course, will disappear …the books will be scattered. … As in the eye of a sculptor chiselling away at a stone, the whole will be all the more beautiful for our absence.” Manguel’s enthusiasms encourage the reader to visit or re-visit many of these literary worlds, but he is especially convincing in his discussions of Cervantes, Kipling and Sherlock Holmes. There is no doubt Manguel loves libraries and books: “I explore my library like someone returning to his native land after an absence of decades.” His gift is the ability to foster that same love in his readers.

Book Review #18: The Vicinity by David O’Meara

Excellent poems from a fine Canadian poet.



The urban world of concrete, structural steel and glass is the primary subject of this fine collection of poems on the city acutely observed. In the wrong hands this could have led to a blurred gray vision of the world but O’Meara’s use of language and images is so striking and original that dusk’s “uneven ledges” turn into “long, sun-burned collarbones”. ‘A Civic Gesture’, the first of two sections, ends with a long poem titled ‘Letter to Auden’, in which O’Meara gives the old poet a report on the state of the world since his death. This structured piece of moral outrage also exhibits a wry, infective humor: “And correct me here if there’s some doubt, / But wasn’t the Great Wall constructed / to keep the tourists out?”

Throughout the collection, there are numerous examples of the poet’s exhilarating, fresh imagery: A brick wall is “stoic toil”; a dark window on a train becomes “a specimen slide of dark fields”; and wind is a civil servant “pushing papers along curb lengths”. In arguably his finest poem, ‘The Basilica at Assisi’, the poet imagines himself as a rough laborer in 1233 who wishes he could “swear and still be pious”. As for St. Francis, he could “talk a storm into a rain barrel”, and the deadline for finishing the basilica is “This time next century”. Although the second section of the book, ‘Walking Around’, exhibits an appropriate meandering quality, the poems are less razor-sharp. Altogether, this is an excellent, finely honed collection, filled with precise, wholly original language.

A short excerpt from Walking Backwards, a travel memoir by Mark Frutkin (Dundurn Books)

ISTANBUL, 1968

Istanbul, ancient Byzantium, fabled Constantinople, Gateway to the Orient. We have arrived at last in the city of multiple names. But why is it snowing?

I stand in line in the vast echoing space of the main train station of Istanbul with the two Michaels: one of Irish descent, the other Lebanese, and like me (at that time), both American citizens. It’s January and, outside, a wet, heavy snow settles on the city. All three of us wear backpacks in which we carry, along with our own clothing, a bolt of new cloth each—fine English wool—that a young, engaging Jordanian we met on the train has asked us to carry through Turkish customs for him.

“You are Americans; I am sure they will not bother to check you,” Ahmed had pointed out with confidence, soon after ingratiating himself with us by pulling out and passing around the train compartment an expensive bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch.

As soon as we had arrived and disembarked in the station, Ahmed had disappeared.
The slow stuttering line in which we stand consists of several thousand travellers, and extends for half-a-kilometre through the station. No sign now of our new Jordanian friend with his preternaturally wrinkled face and his wide generous smile. His gentle charisma dovetailed perfectly with our trusting natures and, innocents that we were, it took little to convince us to carry his three bolts of cloth. Each bolt was about thirty inches long, twelve inches wide and two inches thick and we had stuffed them into our packs without hesitation.

From my place in line, I figure that Ahmed has been swallowed by the crowd, a chaotic mix of poor families, old men and women, young children hanging off their mothers, soldiers, gypsies. We are the only obvious North Americans in the station, surrounded by a sea of Turks, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Jordanians, Syrians and other Middle Easterners. Few Western tourists come to Istanbul in January. As I wait I begin to wonder where Ahmed has disappeared to. As an uneasy feeling begins in the pit of my stomach, I try to control my mounting panic.

The line inches forward, approaching half-a-dozen long wooden tables that stretch across the room. Behind these tables stand the customs officials, appearing stern and serious in their too-tight uniforms. As we wait, we notice that the officials are scrupulously examining everything. They empty cheap suitcases and sacks, demanding to see the contents of every parcel and package. We notice that one customs official has uncapped a tube of toothpaste, which he is squeezing, scrutinizing the paste as it oozes out.

“What could they be looking for?” we ask each other. “No one smuggles drugs into Turkey. Jewels? Diamonds? Gold? What?” We give each other uncomprehending, worried looks.

The line lurches forward again in fits and starts and still there is no sign of Ahmed. Now we are swivelling our heads back and forth looking for the Jordanian to come join us at the last minute. Why has he disappeared? I wonder. I’m sure he’ll find us, I think, with an entirely unjustified faith. At the last minute, I’m sure he’ll come running up and go through customs with us. Where the hell is he?
The family of four in front of us is called to the customs table. The three of us wait, clutching our American passports like drowning men holding to bits of grey-green flotsam.

We are next in line. There is no sign of Ahmed.

Book Review #17: Blue by George Elliott Clarke

A superlative poet whose work rings with energy and joy.

George Elliott Clarke is a unique voice in Canadian poetry – ecstatic, sensual, gospel-inflected, occasionally vituperative, always engaging.

Using the entire history of literature as his playground, he writes with the energy, freedom and profusion of the young Ginsberg or the Kerouac of Mexico City Blues.

More black and blue than beat, the “Nofaskoshan” poet can celebrate rum, brown girls, Ovid, Nabokov and Miles Davis in short order, mixing a word cocktail of gorgeous music: “I crave, suffer for, luscious song among apples –/Blessed orchards where I’d think long of coupling,/Stagger drowsy–but holy–with liquor and berries,/Praising peaches and peerless apples-” (Canto XXXIX)

An early work by Clarke, Whylah Falls, stands as one of the strongest works of poetry ever created in Canada, and would hold its own anywhere in the English-speaking world, with its fabulously rich detail and fully realized story line.

With Blue, he continues in that tradition, voicing lyrics soft or hard, from “orchards dusted with snowing light” to “I crave a sound like poison because genius is greedy”.

Numerous poems here are dedicated to other writers and artists (Nietschze, Colette) and some are written “in the manner of” (Pound, Coleman), but there is nothing derivative in the work of Clarke. Like an ecstatic struck alive by jazz and light, he can sing alone or in chorus.

He can also whisper love lyrics sweet enough to melt the hardest hearts: “To hold her is to hold/perfume – whitest breath/of lilies…” or “I could behead the roses/for snatching their scent/from you as you pass.”

Whether Clarke shouts pentecostal-like from the gut, whether he rages and burns, or runs soft as water, we hear poetry.