The mysterious season of book award short lists
Autumn is a very special time around here. The leaves are beginning to fall, wind and waves appear on the bay, the last grass of the year is cut and the annual Canadian literature short lists have been announced.
It’s the time of year that I look forward to. The Jays are gone, basketball season has not begun, the cats sleep in front of the fire as I try and catch up on what I have not read and wonder about the jury selections for the GGs, the Giller, the Rogers Writer’s Trust.
As usual, I do not totally agree with the shortlists. But I never do, always compiling my own alternative list. The Governor General’s Short List has me a bit confused. Especially since it includes Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a book that has been out for some time and has already reaped rewards. Additionally, Joel Thomas Hynes scored a place with my favourite novel of the year, We’ll All Be Burnt in our Beds Some Night (which made the Giller long list).
The Gillers? Rachel Cusk lives in England, Ed O’Loughlin’s, Minds of Winter got a ho-hum from my bocce group, Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square confused me while Eden Robison (Son of a Trickster) was a delight. The fifth novel is Michelle Winter’s I am A Truck that was published in Picton and is in short supply, I bet.
The Rogers Writer’s Trust (which brings in big bucks for the winner just like the Giller and GGs) has a few additional novels that are intriguing. Claire Cameron’s The Last Neaderthal tickled my reading fancy but on a short list with Akkau’s American War and David Chariandy’s Brother, it pales.
Well, that is that, the fall Canadian novel short lists. Now, for the winners!!!
But what about the losers, the novels that did not make any of the three lists?
Let’s start with Wayne Johnston’s First Snow, Last Light (Knopf Canada, $34.95). I’ve been a fan of this Newfoundland writer since The Divine Ryans. A World Elsewhere led me to Ashville, North Carolina and the Biltmore Estate while The Colony of Unrequited Dreams introduced this reader to Fielding, a tall, crippled, alcoholic journalist. His memoir, Baltimore’s Mansion, has got to be one of the finest pieces of nonfiction to ever be published in this country.
First Snow, Last Light is an epic family tale (complete with a wonderful mystery) that brings back Sheilagh Fielding, certainly one of the most compelling figures in Canadian literature. Don’t remember her, you say? Think Colony or The Navigator of New York.
Fourteen-year old Ned Vatcher comes home one winter day to discover his parents gone, their car vanished.
Ned, abandoned, goes on to become a St. John’s media mogul but he never can rid his mind of his father and mother’s fate. Enter Father Duggan and Fielding, the boozy giantess who wanders the city’s streets at night, composing her next column. The day, she thinks, will never come when she doesn’t want to write. “When I’m no long able to write. I dread it. I’d be impossible to live with.”
Of course, Fielding has her own secrets, such as the two children she had by Prowse. But only slowly are they revealed. And what about those long gone Vatchers? Their fate is only known toward the end of the novel, one that ends with, “Whatever snow that moves like dust begins to gather on the pavement and make a cold white desert of St. John’s, I think of the Vatchers, and of the snow falling unseen on the clearing that no one knows the way to anymore.”
Alison Pick’s first novel (reviewed here) The Sweet Edge (2005) was a Globe & Mail “Best Book” while her second, Far to Go (2010) got rave reviews. Pick, who lives in Toronto, also wrote a memorable memoir, Between Gods (2014) that was among the books that that made her a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.
Emerging indeed! Her latest (a novel that failed to make any of the three short lists) is Strangers With the Same Dream (Knopf Canada, $32.95), a book that takes readers back to 1921 when a young band of Jewish pioneers found a settlement on a rock-filled dusty piece of land in Eretz Yisarael (a land occupied by Arabs but claimed by Zionist followers of Herzel.)
One by one, the tale is told from different eyes. Ida is a young, idealistic young woman who is escaping the increasingly tense times in Europe. David has already failed with a first kibbutz while his wife, Hannah, struggles with her husband and fate in a new country with utopian dreams.
“Like the others, Hannah believed death was an extension of life. The land of Israel needed Jews to nourish it, with their work and their sweat and then with their flesh. Abraham would grow again in the barley harvest and the reaping. It was a kind of pagan confidence that would have horrified the religious Jews back home, but she belonged to the young halutzim who saw how the land worked.”
Strangers With the Same Dream was totally overlooked this fall as a nominee for even a long list. Why! I don’t know nor do I understand how David Chariandy’s Brother (McClelland & Stewart, $25) was nearly overlooked.
David Chariandy grew up in Toronto but now lives and teaches in Vancouver. A Trinidadian-Canadian writer, he scored major reviews for his first novel, Soucouyant. His second take readers back to Trinidad. “I remembered,” Michael says, “Mother would sometimes tell us tales of the ghosts and spirits that foolish little children walking alone in her birthplace might imagine themselves encountering. Of soucoyants and lagahoos. Of duennes, little children who died before baptism.”
Brother is a simple, short novel made so very readable by a talented writer whose prose rings. I once spent a few weeks in Trinidad and the taste and aroma of that country came sweeping back as I turned Chariandy’s pages. It is so good; search it out and spend a few hours someplace else.