| Written by Dorothy Cummings McLean,
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 I was at a dinner party in Edinburgh. Icons glowed from the walls.
“A rare edition of Stephen Leacock arrived today,” said my English host. “Have you read Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town?”
I thought back over my education in literature Canadian and foreign.
“I don’t think I have,” I admitted. “When was it published?”
“Nineteen-twelve,” said my host.
“We were encouraged to read more current books,” I said and hoped the conversation would turn to the brilliance of contemporary Canadian literature. It did not. This is a shame because, having spent a week reading the five finalists for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction (English), I am convinced that Canadian literature is in great shape and well worth the attention of the English, the Scots and everyone else.
The finalists include three novels and two collections of short stories. The novels are The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon and Galore by Michael Crummey. The collections are Vanishing and Other Stories by the young Deborah Willis and Too Much Happiness by the old Alice Munro.
The Mistress of Nothing follows a 19th-century English lady’s maid named Sally and her aristocratic mistress to Egypt, where the latter convalesces. Sally, who never enjoyed life in her native England, falls in love with Egypt. She also falls in love with an Egyptian servant, much to the disgust of her mistress.
“The truth is,” says Sally, “that, to her, I was not fully human.”
This is the tragedy of the book. Lady Duff-Gordon is a sophisticated proto-feminist who eagerly adopts male Egyptian dress and argues intellectually with men. She spends hours saving Egyptian villagers from death by fever. She even publicizes abroad the injustices suffered by poor Egyptians. But towards her devoted lady’s maid, she shows no compassion at all.
Pullinger’s writing presents vividly to the imagination the sorry lives of servants in 19th-century England and the hot beauty of rural Egypt. She sustains dramatic tension with the contrast between the two principal characters, the rebellious woman of privilege and the passionate “mistress of nothing.” Oddly though, English characters show not a scrap of their Christian heritage. As far as the Christian religion goes — both women are intrigued by Islam — they are blank pages. This strikes me as unlikely for the time, particularly in a woman of Sally’s class.
The Golden Mean is set even farther back in time. It is narrated by the philosopher Aristotle and set in Pella, the capital city of Philip of Macedon. Aristotle arrives with a message for Philip and hopes to continue on to Athens to teach in the Academy. This dream is deferred, however, when the king asks Aristotle to tutor his sons.
Aristotle is horrified by the new brutality he finds in his native Macedon. In contrast to the sophisticated court of his former patron, Aristotle finds himself in a world of bloodshed and gross carnality. The use of sex to hurt and degrade is prevalent. The Macedonians “celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it, they run the kingdom with it.” Aristotle tries to create a balance, the golden mean, in the brilliant, brutal prince Alexander with his lessons in biology, astronomy, politics and philosophy.
This is an engaging novel, featuring moments of black comedy provided by Aristotle’s confident, but not — as we now know — entirely factual, beliefs. Lyon brings her characters to life by juxtaposing opposites — the mentally impaired Arrhidaeus with his talented brother Alexander, the scientific Aristotle with his spiritual wife, Aristotle’s dissolute tutor with the abstemious Plato.
Lyon’s use of Aristotelian philosophy enriches the plot. It would make a fine gift for an adult lover of Aristotle, but scenes of pedophilia, prostitution and rape make it unsuitable for the young and sensitive.
Galore was my favourite of the books. It is set in a Newfoundland village and the action stretches from the late 18th century to the First World War. Until the coming of the fishermen’s union, the people of Paradise Deep live harsh impoverished lives made easier through family, religion and stories.
A whale is discovered on the shore and the community, lacking whaling tools, waits for its death. Inside its belly, they find a strangely pale, mute, smelly and not quite dead stranger. Judah is gradually absorbed into the Devine family, whose fortunes take pride of place in this astonishing tale.
Anything can happen in Galore, including mermaids, ghosts, prophecies, a promiscuous Dominican priest, incestuous male cousins, the defeat of ecumenism and a latter-day Isaac mistaking Jacob for Esau. And yet, thanks to Crummey’s artistry, it is all entirely believable. An otherwise fantastic book, it also contains material unsuitable for the young and sensitive.
Vanishing and Other Stories is a book of sorrow. The volume contains 14 short stories, 13 of which are about crushing loss — loss of a father, loss of a mother, loss of a stepfather, loss of a wife, loss of a friend, loss of hope in stability, loss of innocence, loss of a babysitting charge, loss of a lover, loss of trust and loss of one’s faculties. Fortunately, the 14th story, the only funny one, suggests that some things, sometimes, cannot be lost.
Willis exhibits a wide range of characters and places. Her narrators and principal characters include Jewish women, a prairie farmer, a B.C. widower, a Montreal French teacher, a B.C. woman professor, teenagers. Willis succeeds in getting into the skin of her very believable characters. Although some of her themes are adult, Vanishing and Other Stories would not be out of place in a high school library.
The letter accompanying Too Much Happiness alienated me. Munro is our Chekhov, gushes this letter. Blah blah blah. The dust jacket, which features a photo of Munro taken more than 20 years ago, brags about “her trademark humour” and announces that Munro is “safely settled inside the gates of Literature.” Note the capital-L. Literature. Lit-er-ah-cha. Hey, she won the Booker Prize. All fall before Alice Munro.
Anyway, Munro’s triumphant volume is not so bad, really. Befitting Munro’s generation of writers, there are a lot of bad or weak men in her 10 stories. There’s a control freak husband, an unfaithful husband, a thoughtless husband, a self-absorbed son, a housebreaker, a lousy father, a dying husband, a selfish lover, nasty brother-in-law, a disappointing nephew and a weak, sexist husband. However, there are also a sympathetic woodcutter and a sympathetic male narrator, so there might not be an agenda here.
There are oodles of praise for Munro in the mainstream press, so I don’t feel bad for saying that, although I enjoyed her stories, I can’t see what the fuss is about. I read carefully to see how her work differed from that of Willis and didn’t come up with much. Of course, it could be that creative writing classes across Canada are teaching us all to write like Munro, “our Chekhov,” and that it is she who has set the gloom-filled standard.
In recent years, the GG finalists have been rather dark, full of talented sorrow and exquisite doom. Contemporary Canadian literature is not all like that: it has its brilliant funny writers, like Stuart McLean, too. But be it fashionably sad or unmodishly merry, it is a tradition we can be proud of and give to foreigners for Christmas.
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