Canadian literature as diverse as our landscape

In Boston, I was so homesick a psychotherapist recommended drugs. Instead I sang a patriotic song to myself. Well — I exaggerate. I didn’t know any patriotic Canadian songs, so I sang Gilles Vigneault’s “Mon Pays” instead. Under all that romantic stuff about snow, it is about a nation without borders, which basically describes my Toronto neighbourhood where the Persian signs are outnumbered only by the Korean signs. 

Once upon a time, all Canadians knew the song “The Maple Leaf Forever.” I’ve often wondered why I was never taught this song in school. 

So instead of patriotic songs that illustrate that Canada was around before the Korean-Persian shopping strip, we have Canadian literature. Canadian literature is completely inclusive of every ethnic group plus sex, violence, empowerment and racist jibes at WASPs.

I am here to review this year’s finalists for the Governor General Award. 

The first finalist I read was Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. Galchen was born in Toronto and lives in New York. Her novel tells the story of a New York psychiatrist who is at home one day when a woman impersonating his wife enters the apartment. Although the simulacrum looks, walks and talks exactly like his wife, the narrator is certain his wife has disappeared. His search for his wife leads him to her native country of Argentina and inspires him to join forces with both a patient who believes he can control the weather and a meteorologist who turns out to be dead.

The speculative science of meteorology provides the work with a rich vocabulary and also illustrates its epistemological theme. The questions the book raises are “Can we know anything?” and “How do we know that we know?”

This book is the ideal gift for the philosopher in your family. For a Canadian novel, it is refreshingly free of sex, violence and anti-Christian sneers. It is also strangely free of Canada, but never mind that. Last year’s Governor General’s Award winning novel didn’t mention Canada either.

The next finalist did, in fact, win the Governor General’s Award this year. This was The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci. Ricci is the Canadian-born son of Italian parents, and the novel is about the Canadian-born son of Italian parents. It is set in Montreal and has plenty of violence, anti-Christian sneers and sex scenes ranging from merely embarrassing to utterly lurid.

In The Origin of Species, self-absorbed Alex Fratarcangeli is a graduate student of English at Concordia University. Alex is a bitterly ex-Catholic and slavishly PC soul who polices his mind for any racist thought, all the while sexualizing and demonizing WASPs. Alex has many adventures and sleeps with several Saxon women. His central adventure, however, is a trip to the Galapagos where he is pressed into service by his first abusive male mentor, an insane Englishman.

The Galapagos are an interesting contrast to Montreal, not because they are different, but because their internal diversity is similar. Ricci does a good, workmanlike job of describing Montreal in the 1980s — right down to the power games of graduate school and the visceral desire, and yet hatred, of many for majority Canadian society, be that majority WASP or French-Canadian. Interesting to pro-life readers will be Ricci’s description of  Dr. Henry Morgentaler as “hirsute and small and slightly simian.”  This book would not make a good Christmas gift, except to ex-Catholic friends who are beginning to feel ashamed of ex-Catholicism and to college-age adults you wish to dissuade from doing graduate studies in English literature.

The third finalist I read was Cockroach by Rawi Hage. Hage was born in Beirut and immigrated to Canada in 1992. His novel is also about Montreal, and it is brilliant. The book is fast-paced and electric. The language crackles. It paints a convincing portrait of some of the immigrant communities in modern Montreal.  It is, however, incredibly contemptuous of the French-speaking majority, people whose parents (grandparents, great-grandparents, 17th-century ancestors) were actually born there.    

The narrator is a Lebanese immigrant or refugee who supplements his monthly welfare cheque by stealing. After attempting suicide in a public park, he is sent to talk to a therapist. The therapist seems to be enthralled by his stories of civil-war era Lebanon and assures him that she will not tell anyone of his break-ins. Amusingly, the narrator breaks into her apartment when she is out as a way of making their fake professional intimacy more authentic.

“Cockroach” has several meanings. The narrator suggests that immigrants to Montreal are cockroaches, those who will inherit the Earth (and Montreal) when French-Canadians sterilize themselves out of existence. His Iranian lover thinks of those who brought about the Islamic Iranian Revolution as cockroaches. Then there are the real cockroaches infesting the narrator’s apartment. The narrator both fights and identifies with them.

I would recommend Cockroach as a Christmas present to any adult with literary tastes or a love of Montreal, with the caveat that there are some brief scenes of sex and violence. For its artistry alone, I would have awarded it the Governor General’s Award.

The fourth finalist was The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards. The author was born in New Brunswick and writes about New Brunswick. Amazingly, the book has Roman Catholic themes and Roman Catholic characters who are not all cruel, vicious and stupid hypocrites. I’m not sure how it got nominated. Every adult Christian in the country, practising or non, should buy a copy.

The plot centres on Alex Chapman, a PhD dropout who returns to his rural community to live off his great-uncle, whom he hates. Alex discovers his great-uncle has won $13 million in Lotto 649 and plots feverishly both to conceal this news from his great-uncle and to steal the ticket for himself. In so doing, Alex begins to fall into a hell of his own making, a hell that he has prepared himself for through a lifetime of selfishness and bad philosophy.

Alex was raised in a devoutly Catholic community, and a neighbour advises him, “if we live as we must everything will turn out.” Alex is disgusted by this advice. After dropping out of the seminary, Alex abandons Catholicism for the gospel of approval/disapproval he learns at university.

Elsewhere, Richards has written as passionate and brilliant an indictment of amoral, unthinking, university department political correctness as I never thought to see in my lifetime. It is an all-out war on the hypocrisy of secular ethics.  Richards may take his place beside Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

The final finalist is The Great Karoo by Fred Stenson. Stenson was born at Pincher Creek, Alta., and some of his characters come from Pincher Creek. However, Stenson was born in 1951, and his characters are cowboys who join the Canadian Mounted Rifles to fight for Queen and Empire in the Boer War.

The Great Karoo is both a gripping adventure story and a celebration of Canada’s history. It tells the whole story. There’s racism against “Halfbreeds,” and yet the “Halfbreeds” worry that their parentage will keep them out of the war; the media’s adulation of heroics, and yet soldiers’ disgust at foolhardiness; the ideal of the British soldier who never loots, and yet the Canadian cowboys who loot so the army doesn’t starve on its marches across the South African veldt.

Harshness and privation faced by Canadian soldiers and their horses is contrasted with the great love the Alberta men have for their horses. Both horses and men are beautifully drawn. Stenson does a skilful job of keeping 19th-century Canadians 19th century. The novel itself has an admirable 19th-century quality in that you could give it to a teenager without doing him or her any moral harm.

I can only speculate on why the Governor General’s Award committee picks the books it picks for final consideration. Quite apart from talent, it seems to be looking for diversity in the backgrounds of its writers. And that seems like a good idea as Canada, particularly in its urban centres, is a diverse place. There are many stories to be told.