Tales of a fascinating Canadian city
Travelling Light is a rich collection of short stories. The writer, Peter Behrens, often seems to have a Polaroid eye, using words to freeze scenes and allow the reader to immediately visualize what he is portraying.
Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter, where Behrens focuses on Montreal in the early 1960s: “Our city was studded with churches like pieces of costume jewellery, too massive to be valuable. The power of the Church was weakening, though when a bus drove past a church, most men tipped their hats and many passengers made a sign of the cross.”
The people on the bus, making the sign of the cross, are recognizable and the description offers an understanding about Montreal during the Quiet Revolution, the move away from the Roman Catholic Church towards a secular society. Many of Behrens’ stories look at Montreal in the mid-20th century from the perspective of an anglophone living there: the habits of buying bread on the Main (Boul. St-Laurent); the summers in Maine; dinner at Café Martin on Mountain St. before it became Rue de la Montagne; buying a roasted chicken on Laurier Ave.
Even if one has never stayed in Montreal, we intuitively understand the city Behrens is describing. Especially in winter: “The city is grey, not charming, not vivant. Steep streets nasty with ice. . . It’s Montreal, January, early 1980s. No acrobats in town, not yet; no Euro-clowns; months’ worth of festivals as yet uninvented; and what I feel here, baby, is the cold.”
Behrens grew up in Montreal and many of the stories in the collection were written as long ago as 1977. Some characters are young Englishspeaking boys, fighting “race wars” with the French: “Screams were our language. We had icicles for spears; when our supply of snowballs was exhausted, we hurled chunks of ice.” Other stories focus on young men returning from war: “He’d killed, participated in killings, but hadn’t thought of killing Germans as killing people, except once or twice.”
While there is an historical cast to many of the pieces in Travelling Light, they don’t feel dated.
The title of the book was gleaned from advice Behren’s father gave him: “Never drive at night. That’s when all the nuts are out on the road.”
Sound words to a young man getting behind the wheel, even today.
Behrens won a Governor-General’s Literary Award for his novel The Law of Dreams. Like other great Canadian writers, such as Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, Behren’s work is not circumscribed by the time it describes. It isn’t Two Solitudes. It is literature that can be read for decades and seem fresh.
The writing is graceful, the subject matter stimulating and best of all it offers an anglo version of life in Montreal prior to the Quiet Revolution and the separatist movement. It is a Montreal worth getting to know. jhunter@thestar.ca