2018 Travel: Books Set in Canada

I thought that I would prepare a week-long series of books which I would recommend in the countries which I have been to so far in 2018.  I have copied the official blurbs, and have also linked my review if I have written anything extensive.  I will be including seven books per destination, so as to showcase the best of the work which I have read, and not to make the posts too lengthy.  Our first stop is Canada.

1. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence (1964)
‘In her best-loved novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence introduces Hagar Shipley, one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Stubborn, querulous, self-reliant – and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her – Hagar Shipley makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence.  As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors.  Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart.‘

2. Shelter by Frances Greenslade (2011; review here)
‘A gorgeous, poetic literary debut from award-winning author Frances Greenslade, Shelter is a brilliant coming-of-age story of two strong, brave sisters searching for their mother.  For sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. But at night, Maggie—a born worrier—would count the freckles on her father’s weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother’s laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Then her worst fears come true: Not long after Maggie’s tenth birthday, their father is killed in a logging accident, and a few months later, their mother abruptly drops the girls at a neighbor’s house, promising to return. She never does.   With deep compassion and sparkling prose, Frances Greenslade’s mesmerizing debut takes us inside the extraordinary strength of these two girls as they are propelled from the quiet, natural freedom in which they were raised to a world they can’t begin to fathom. Even as the sisters struggle to understand how their mother could abandon them, they keep alive the hope that she is fighting her way back to the daughters who adore her and who need her so desperately.  Heartwarming and lushly imagined, Shelter celebrates the love between two sisters and the complicated bonds of family. It is an exquisitely written ode to sisters, mothers, daughters, and to a woman’s responsibility to herself and those she loves. ‘

3. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
‘It’s 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.  An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories?  Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.‘

4. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (2004)
‘In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity.  “Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.  This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi’s droll, refreshing voice, we’re told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.‘

5. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993)
‘The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman’s story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy’s struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.‘

6. Selected Stories by Alice Munro (1985)
‘Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories–about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude–is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.‘

7. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature by Margaret Atwood (1995)
‘Margaret Atwood’s witty and informative book focuses on the imaginative mystique of the wilderness of the Canadian North. She discusses the ‘Grey Owl Syndrome’ of white writers going native; the folklore arising from the mysterious– and disastrous — Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century; the myth of the dreaded snow monster, the Wendigo; the relations between nature writing and new forms of Gothic; and how a fresh generation of women writers in Canada have adapted the imagery of the Canadian North for the exploration of contemporary themes of gender, the family and sexuality. Writers discussed include Robert Service, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, E.J. Pratt, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. This superbly written and compelling portrait of the mysterious North is at once a fascinating insight into the Canadian imagination, and an exciting new work from an outstanding literary presence.‘

 

Have you read any of these books?  Which ones appeal to you?

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‘Our Endless Numbered Days’ by Claire Fuller ****

Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days was purchased with some of my Christmas book vouchers, and was the eighth entry for my Read My Own Books project.  I chose to purchase the novel for two reasons – firstly, I had heard so many good things about it, and secondly, the initial sentence of the blurb captivated my attention entirely: ‘Peggy is eight years old when her father takes her to live in a cabin in a remote European forest’.  I adore books which feature child narrators or protagonists, who are wrenched from their comfort zones and have to find a way to cope with their new and unfamiliar surroundings.  I was half-expecting a dark, modern fairytale retelling to spiral from the pages.

Our Endless Numbered Days was the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2015, and is also part of the Waterstones book club.  The novel has been so well reviewed.  The Sunday Express call it ‘Bewitching.  A riveting, dark tale, full of wonders, suspense and revelation, light and shadow’, and Esther Freud believes it to be ‘Utterly gripping, hypnotic.  I tore through it’.

Peggy is our first person narrator for the entirety, telling her story from a position of retrospective, a technique which allows her past to feel just as vivid as her present.  Her father, James Hillcoat, is part of the North London Retreaters group, which prepares for imminent disaster, and her mother, Ute, is a world-class pianist: ‘No one ever described Ute as beautiful – they used words like striking, arresting, singular.  But because she was a woman to be reckoned with the men composed themselves’.  Peggy’s parents came together through a turmoil of sorts: ‘For the public and critics, her relationship with James Hillcoat was a scandal.  Ute was at the height of her career and she gave it all up for the love of a seventeen-year-old boy.  They married the next year, as soon as it was legal’.  Her father’s best friend, Oliver, is frank about his beliefs, telling him: ‘You know what the trouble is with you, James?  You’re so damn British.  And the rest of you – you’re all living in the dark ages, hiding in your cellars, driving off to the country like you’re going on a fucking Sunday picnic.  You still call yourselves Retreaters; the world’s moving on without you.  You haven’t even figured out that you’re survivalists’.

In 1976, whilst her mother is on a tour of her native Germany, Peggy’s father, under a mysterious cloud of anger, takes her to live in a forest, in a dilapidated structure called ‘die Hutte’, far away from civilisation, and a world away from the life she knows.  James tells her that her mother has died, and that is the reason why they are unable to return to their North London suburb.  The reality of Peggy’s situation really hits home with the position of retrospect which she adopts: ‘I had no idea that this wind-worn woman, creased and bag-eyed, standing outside her barn with her cow on a rope, would be the last person I would meet from the real world for another nine years.  Perhaps if I had known, I would have clung to the folds of her skirt, hooked my fingers over the waistband of her apron and touched my knees around one of her stout legs’.

From the start, Fuller’s writing is quite lovely in places; evidence of her Creative Writing MA, it seems: ‘And I thought that maybe it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  Knowing that the sun had shone, and the piano must have been played, and people had lived and breathed whilst I had been gone, helped steady me’.  The entire work is filled with interesting and intriguing details, which often add a sense of mystery to the whole as the plot unfolds: ‘The summer the photograph was taken, my father recast our cellar as a fallout shelter’ proclaims the first sentence of the second chapter, for instance.

Peggy is a lovely character, whom one cannot help but warm to.  Her childish observations and ways of trying to take life by surprise are endearing: ‘I liked to wake without moving my body to see if I could catch myself in that empty place between sleeping and walking, just as I became conscious of the world and the position of my body’.  She is made to grow up at the age of eight, little shocks coming at pivotal points in her journey to attaining adult levels of understanding: ‘As I followed behind him the diamond of blue canvas [from what used to be their tent] mocked me, the awful knowledge staring me in the face whilst I climbed that we wouldn’t be going home’.

The spacing of the plot points ensures that the reader’s interest in Peggy’s tale is sustained throughout.  Our Endless Numbered Days put me in mind of Frances Greenslade’s wonderful Shelter and Claire King’s charming The Night Rainbow from the very beginning.  The novel is engaging, and the tension builds quite marvellously.  Fuller’s writing is taut and emotionally charged, and Peggy is a believable narrator who lingers in the mind for a long while after the final page has been read.

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One From the Archive: ‘Shelter’ by Frances Greenslade ****

First published in July 2012.

Shelter takes place in Duchess Creek in British Columbia, Canada’s most westerly province. It begins during the 1960s and spans a period of several years. Shelter is told from the first person perspective of Margaret Dillon, known throughout as Maggie. The narrative is retrospective and the more sinister events of the novel are foreshadowed as it progresses.

The novel opens with Maggie stating that it was her older sister Jenny who urged her to document their story. The heartbreak of both sisters with regard to their abandonment by their mother, Irene, is clear from the start. Maggie tells us ‘we did not try to look for out mother. She was gone, like a cat who goes out the back door one night and doesn’t return… We let time pass, we waited, trusting her…’. She goes on to say that as her mother ‘was the constant in our lives, the certainty and the comfort’, neither she nor Jenny felt any reason to worry.

The girls’ father, Patrick, works at a local sawmill. His nickname is ‘Mr Safety’, and he is called it not just by his family but by his friends, who are ‘irritated by his careful checking and rechecking’. Patrick’s character is unsettled at times. He is plagued by what the Dillon family term ‘terrors… seizures of fear which took possession of his whole body when he was on the edge of sleep’. Seeing her almost as a ‘son’, Patrick teaches Maggie about survival in the wilderness. He teaches her how to construct a lean-to shelter whilst telling her ‘If you ever get lost, this is what you do first. You build yourself a little shelter’.

To the surprise and shock of the Dillons, Patrick is killed whilst at work and the family is forced to cope without him. Following his death, a chasm opens within the family. Maggie begins to see her mother as a distant figure: ‘she was not really my mother, but some beautiful woman with flushed skin going to have a nap in my mother’s bedroom’. Irene’s previously spirited character begins to unravel in consequence. She leaves the girls with the Edwards family in Williams Lake whilst she begins a job relatively far away. Unlike her popular sister, Maggie feels as though she never really fits with the Edwards, despite the warmth of wheelchair-bound Ted. When payments for the girls’ billet suddenly stop, nobody is able to discover where Irene has vanished to. Undeterred, Maggie sets out to find her and unravel the mystery of her sudden disappearance.

Shelter is rather an uncomfortable read at times. The entire novel is filled with dark incidents. These include shooting accidents, widespread alcoholism, the widespread isolation during the harsh Canadian winters, disability, coping with grief and loss and the wider concept of abandonment.

Greenslade’s descriptions are rich and are balanced well with the unfolding story. Jenny is described as a ‘powder blue beacon’ whose grief at the loss of their mother is ‘majestic and furious’. The natural environment which has prominence in the life of Maggie particularly, has been written about with true care on part of the author. Almost fairytale-esque elements are woven throughout the novel, particularly with regard to Maggie’s daydreams. Maggie’s narrative voice is consistently strong and she is a vivid character from the outset.

Greenslade has a real way with words and Shelter is certainly an accomplished novel. The abandonment of their girls and their gradual realisation of their mother’s whereabouts are realised sensitively and touchingly, and every single loose thread which appears in the novel is tied up well at the story’s end.

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One from the Archive: ‘Shelter’ by Frances Greenslade ****

First published in May 2012.

Shelter takes place in Duchess Creek in British Columbia, Canada’s most westerly province. It begins during the 1960s and spans a period of several years. Shelter is told from the first person perspective of Margaret Dillon, known throughout as Maggie. The narrative is retrospective and the more sinister events of the novel are foreshadowed as it progresses.

The novel opens with Maggie stating that it was her older sister Jenny who urged her to document their story. The heartbreak of both sisters with regard to their abandonment by their mother, Irene, is clear from the start. Maggie tells us ‘we did not try to look for out mother. She was gone, like a cat who goes out the back door one night and doesn’t return… We let time pass, we waited, trusting her…’. She goes on to say that as her mother ‘was the constant in our lives, the certainty and the comfort’, neither she nor Jenny felt any reason to worry.

The girls’ father, Patrick, works at a local sawmill. His nickname is ‘Mr Safety’, and he is called it not just by his family but by his friends, who are ‘irritated by his careful checking and rechecking’. Patrick’s character is unsettled at times. He is plagued by what the Dillon family term ‘terrors… seizures of fear which took possession of his whole body when he was on the edge of sleep’. Seeing her almost as a ‘son’, Patrick teaches Maggie about survival in the wilderness. He teaches her how to construct a lean-to shelter whilst telling her ‘If you ever get lost, this is what you do first. You build yourself a little shelter’.

To the surprise and shock of the Dillons, Patrick is killed whilst at work and the family is forced to cope without him. Following his death, a chasm opens within the family. Maggie begins to see her mother as a distant figure: ‘she was not really my mother, but some beautiful woman with flushed skin going to have a nap in my mother’s bedroom’. Irene’s previously spirited character begins to unravel in consequence. She leaves the girls with the Edwards family in Williams Lake whilst she begins a job relatively far away. Unlike her popular sister, Maggie feels as though she never really fits with the Edwards, despite the warmth of wheelchair-bound Ted. When payments for the girls’ billet suddenly stop, nobody is able to discover where Irene has vanished to. Undeterred, Maggie sets out to find her and unravel the mystery of her sudden disappearance.

Shelter is rather an uncomfortable read at times. The entire novel is filled with dark incidents. These include shooting accidents, widespread alcoholism, the widespread isolation during the harsh Canadian winters, disability, coping with grief and loss and the wider concept of abandonment.

Greenslade’s descriptions are rich and are balanced well with the unfolding story. Jenny is described as a ‘powder blue beacon’ whose grief at the loss of their mother is ‘majestic and furious’. The natural environment which has prominence in the life of Maggie particularly, has been written about with true care on part of the author. Almost fairytale-esque elements are woven throughout the novel, particularly with regard to Maggie’s daydreams. Maggie’s narrative voice is consistently strong and she is a vivid character from the outset.

Greenslade has a real way with words and Shelter is certainly an accomplished novel. The abandonment of their girls and their gradual realisation of their mother’s whereabouts are realised sensitively and touchingly, and every single loose thread which appears in the novel is tied up well at the story’s end.

Purchase from the Book Depository

One From the Archive: ‘Shelter’ by Frances Greenslade ****

First published in July 2012.

Shelter takes place in Duchess Creek in British Columbia, Canada’s most westerly province. It begins during the 1960s and spans a period of several years. Shelter is told from the first person perspective of Margaret Dillon, known throughout as Maggie. The narrative is retrospective and the more sinister events of the novel are foreshadowed as it progresses.

The novel opens with Maggie stating that it was her older sister Jenny who urged her to document their story. The heartbreak of both sisters with regard to their abandonment by their mother, Irene, is clear from the start. Maggie tells us ‘we did not try to look for out mother. She was gone, like a cat who goes out the back door one night and doesn’t return… We let time pass, we waited, trusting her…’. She goes on to say that as her mother ‘was the constant in our lives, the certainty and the comfort’, neither she nor Jenny felt any reason to worry.

The girls’ father, Patrick, works at a local sawmill. His nickname is ‘Mr Safety’, and he is called it not just by his family but by his friends, who are ‘irritated by his careful checking and rechecking’. Patrick’s character is unsettled at times. He is plagued by what the Dillon family term ‘terrors… seizures of fear which took possession of his whole body when he was on the edge of sleep’. Seeing her almost as a ‘son’, Patrick teaches Maggie about survival in the wilderness. He teaches her how to construct a lean-to shelter whilst telling her ‘If you ever get lost, this is what you do first. You build yourself a little shelter’.

To the surprise and shock of the Dillons, Patrick is killed whilst at work and the family is forced to cope without him. Following his death, a chasm opens within the family. Maggie begins to see her mother as a distant figure: ‘she was not really my mother, but some beautiful woman with flushed skin going to have a nap in my mother’s bedroom’. Irene’s previously spirited character begins to unravel in consequence. She leaves the girls with the Edwards family in Williams Lake whilst she begins a job relatively far away. Unlike her popular sister, Maggie feels as though she never really fits with the Edwards, despite the warmth of wheelchair-bound Ted. When payments for the girls’ billet suddenly stop, nobody is able to discover where Irene has vanished to. Undeterred, Maggie sets out to find her and unravel the mystery of her sudden disappearance.

Shelter is rather an uncomfortable read at times. The entire novel is filled with dark incidents. These include shooting accidents, widespread alcoholism, the widespread isolation during the harsh Canadian winters, disability, coping with grief and loss and the wider concept of abandonment.

Greenslade’s descriptions are rich and are balanced well with the unfolding story. Jenny is described as a ‘powder blue beacon’ whose grief at the loss of their mother is ‘majestic and furious’. The natural environment which has prominence in the life of Maggie particularly, has been written about with true care on part of the author. Almost fairytale-esque elements are woven throughout the novel, particularly with regard to Maggie’s daydreams. Maggie’s narrative voice is consistently strong and she is a vivid character from the outset.

Greenslade has a real way with words and Shelter is certainly an accomplished novel. The abandonment of their girls and their gradual realisation of their mother’s whereabouts are realised sensitively and touchingly, and every single loose thread which appears in the novel is tied up well at the story’s end.

Purchase from the Book Depository