BOOK REVIEWS
In Regina writer James Trettwer’s debut collection of short fiction, Thorn-Field (Thistledown, $19.95), the stories are linked by a number of metaphors — thorns being an obvious one — by characters fighting or dying from various addictions, and by the plume of smoke that hangs over their lives from the omnipresent potash mine — their employer and in some cases their killer.
Indeed, in the first two stories, which take over half of the book, we hear that the “mine’s tendrils are thick and invasive. Once they’re in you, it’s like trying to get rid of thistles.” Or thorns. Later in the same story, when contemplating the local bar, the narrator asks how “many lives are buried here, under a mine shaft flood of booze and drugs?” and to drive the metaphor home, the narrator in story two contemplates the mine’s plume and says it “reminds him of nuclear winter and a horror story he once wrote.”
Lourdes, the narrator of story one, tries to make a life for herself after her father died in a mine accident working extra hours to pay off gambling debts, and her alcoholic mother brought home men who tried to rape her and then burned down their trailer. Now she’s working at the motel and trying to get some savings together for university. Against all sound advice, she’s thinking of majoring in English. So is Lewis in story number two.
He’s got a summer job at the mine where, because he’s an English major, he’s called the Purrfesser, among other things. He works with the father who died in story one, the decent guy in the bunch, and this is his backstory.
By the time we get into the next few stories, we’ve moved away from the mine itself to head office in what looks like Regina, where “the grinding tedium set in under a perpetual plume of sales quotas and shipping schedules.” The men in these stories are uniformly unhappy, unfulfilled in their jobs, and deal with the problem with alcohol and drugs. They probably went for the wrong degree, too. The fellow in Blue’s got one in Communications and Journalism and played his cards to get on disability where he reads good literature, while the guy in Leaving with Lena notes that everyone around him went straight into MBAs and are working their way to the top. Not him. He’s an articulate alcoholic.
What it comes down to is you’re either cut out to work in the mine or at head office, or you aren’t. With their literary aspirations blunted by economic necessity, they drink and see the world as one large thorn field. Even in the city, no amount of pavement can cover those tenacious thistles, reminding even the boy in the final story with his aspirations in history, outside that back fence it’s all weeds.
These are engaging stories, but a little too obvious in the symbols and dreams department. Fewer reminders and the reader will still get what that plume of smoke is doing in these characters’ lives.
In Beryl Young’s Miles to Go (Wandering Fox, $12.95), best friends Maggie and Anna are struggling through family and social life as very young teens in small-town Saskatchewan. It’s 1948, and though the recent world war doesn’t elbow its way into the story, strict codes of conduct for women and children do.
Anna is the eldest in a large immigrant Polish family where the children keep coming and the father is well known as a drinker. Maggie’s father is the head of the local RCMP detachment and her mother seems well aware of his position, keeping Maggie on a short leash. While Anna is pushed into the role of mother after a crisis and must leave school, Maggie reacts sharply against her mother’s strictures and makes that classic decision: “If my parents think I’m a thoughtless person, then that’s what I am ... and proud of it.” She even goes so far as to believe she’s adopted.
While Maggie’s behaviour is maddening, especially compared to the struggles her best friend must endure, what both girls have to learn is hard, heartening, and profound. Young, who lives in Victoria but comes from Yorkton, has crafted a story that shows young people’s vulnerability but doesn’t let them off easily.
Finally, in Sapphire the Great and the Meaning of Life (Pajama Press, $19.95), celebrated Saskatoon author and educator Beverley Brenna tells a tale of a nine-year-old named Jeannie who wants, and gets, a hamster during a time of family calamity.
Ever attuned to evolving social dynamics, Brenna presents a family in which the father has left to be with his male companion, and his mystified two children and angry wife are given comfort and cheer by a very large, mannish woman named Anna Conda. Helping little Jeannie navigate her way through this tricky territory is Sapphire, her new hamster, who not only poses intriguing philosophical questions but is co-narrator, with Jeannie, of this story.
While Jeannie tries to figure out why and where her father has gone and why, exactly, her hamster bites some people, Sapphire goes into extended deliberations on the nature of freedom and how much of it she wants. As Jeannie draws up a set of rules to place on her hamster’s cage about how not to get bit, Sapphire discovers that a hamster cage without clean wood shavings or much food, and an indifferent pet shop owner, is indeed a cage. However, a clean cage and lots of food from Jeannie, who pets her regularly, is far better than freedom in a school hallway or out in the winter playground.
As Sapphire discovers that a cage can be a comfort, her owner wishes for a set of rules that could govern human behaviour, particularly that of adults, to keep children tucked in and happy. Brenna understands a child’s need for warm limits and presents a modern family trying to work its way to safety, comfort, and mutual respect.