CANADIAN STORIES GO BEYOND ANNE AND ATWOOD,
With Canadian fiction seeing onscreen success, many more northern stories are ripe for retelling
It might be a national pastime to roll your eyes when you hear the term Can-con, but this year has proven that decidedly Canadian characters and stories have a staying power that goes beyond classrooms — and even our borders — to land firmly in popular culture.
Who would have thought 20- and 30-yearold books would grab the imaginations of TV watchers around the world as much as Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Alias Grace” have, for example? Clearly, her razor-sharp observations about authoritarian societies in terms of the first, and anti-immigrant sentiment among other issues in the latter, have struck a chord.
Another great Canadian book character, “Anne of Green Gables,” has had plenty of onscreen and onstage life in her time, but this year she has had a decidedly feminist portrayal — much sassier and darker than the character has ever been interpreted before. This time around, she’s simply called “Anne.”
And coming to the big screen in April is an adaptation of Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel, “Indian Horse,” which some of us know from school reading lists.
There are plenty of other books out there — books still being taught in our high schools and universities — that are ripe for adaptation to the big screen. Here are our suggestions:
Roughing It in the Bush Can’t you imagine Susanna Moodie and “Roughing It in the Bush” getting the TV treatment but, as with “Anne,” acknowledging the darker bent of our story? While Moodie talks about the struggle to bring some sort of order to her rough life, there should also be an emphasis on the Indigenous narrative that was going on at the same time, better reflecting the totality of this nation’s experience.
Of course, Atwood herself has written about Moodie in her book of poems “The Journals of Susanna Moodie.” And it’s through Moodie that she discovered the story of Grace Marks, the heroine of “Alias Grace.”
A new, fictionalized version of the Moodie story came out this year, “The Lost Diaries of Susanna Moodie,” written by Cecily Ross.
There’s clearly something Moodie in the air. It’s time for a telling that looks at the dark side.
Lives of Girls and Women Speaking of female characters, Alice Munro’s are beautifully, quietly and powerfully drawn. One of the best known is Del Jordan, from what is considered Munro’s only novel, 1973’s “Lives of Girls and Women.”
Interestingly, there was a 1994 made-for-TV CBC movie based on this book (aired in 1996), starring a very young and very Canadian Dean McDermott, Tanya Allen and Wendy Crewson.
But this is more than 20 years later and now, in this post-Harvey Weinstein world, it’s ripe for an adaptation.
The story takes place in 1940s Ontario and is about a woman who wants her daughter to escape from Jubilee, the small town they live in. Del rebels against what her independent and unconventional mother has in mind for her; she gets caught up in an affair with a local boy, an affair that’s exciting and passionate. But when he attempts to baptize her, she finds her own inner strength, breaks up with him and follows her dream of becoming a full-time writer.
Such Is My Beloved Although this book by Morley Callaghan is one of the seminal Canadian novels from the 1930s, it’s not as well known as it might be.
It’s the story of a priest, Father Dowling, who reaches out to two prostitutes in an effort to redeem them. The great and the good are none too thrilled about his association with what they see as dirty women and the lower class.
There’s a struggle, also, between Catholicism and Protestantism, the dominant religious affiliations of Toronto at the time. And Father Dowling struggles: with temptation, morality and his own beliefs. Perhaps the biggest struggle is between church and state.
A big-screen version could see Dowling as an Imam, perhaps, or even give it a more nonsecular treatment, seeing him as a street outreach worker.
Our Canada now has changed in its cultural makeup, but the idea of good and evil, church and state, and inequality are as important now as they ever were.
Barometer Rising Set in the time of the Halifax Explosion in December 1917, Barometer Rising was a great metaphor and provided a context for Canadian identity when Hugh MacLennan wrote it in 1941, leading up to the end of the Second World War. In 1917, of course, the country was embroiled in the First World War, which many Canadians note was when we really forged a distinct identity as Canadians: it was Canadian boys and men who were killed, not simply British colonists. Halifax in 1917 was also where new immigrants passed through, full of sailors and soldiers from all around the world.
That setting provided an emotional parallel with the explosion of those two ships in Halifax Harbour, symbolizing the old order being blown apart. By writing about it in 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, MacLennan was also making a statement about war and our role in it, as well as Canada’s shift from being British and Europeancentric to its own nation.
As the idea of who and what we are continues to evolve, surely this is ripe for the big screen. It’s a warning about what happens if we hold fast to our old ways of thinking and refuse to modernize.
Obasan If ever a book echoed current times with a story from the past, it’s Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan.” Her book, published in 1981, tells the story of the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. They become, thanks to Pearl Harbour, enemy aliens. They were persecuted and sent to internment camps, victims of intolerance and racism.
The story is told from the point of view of Naomi, a first-generation Japanese girl who went through the events but doesn’t remember them well. She reconstructs the past at the same time having to come to terms with what the country she lives in did to her family. Kogawa works to redress a dark moment in our history.
In the Skin of a Lion The best-known adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s work is, of course, the Oscarwinning movie “The English Patient,” starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche and Kristin Scott Thomas. But the Torontobased story “In the Skin of a Lion” is ripe for a modern interpretation in a city that is rebuilding itself and expecting an influx of immigrants that will again change its face.
While building the Bloor Viaduct had a specific symbolism — building a bridge between communities — we’re not so much building bridges as establishing vertical communities these days, which many feel is alienating and divisive. Still, bringing in stories of a vanished millionaire, his mistress and dreams of what the city of the future will look like leaves this book with plenty to tell us about human nature and how the power of dreams drives us, even if the specifics have changed.
Besides, hasn’t everyone been waiting for another Ondaatje book to hit the big screen?