Read This - by Andrew Armitage
Two novels worthy of book club selection
Column appeared in The Sun Times, Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
“Book clubs make for homogenized reading,” I snorted. Even though I have never belonged to a reading group, I’ve often talked with those who are regular attendees. Looking over their reading lists, I’ve noticed a commonality among them. Popular titles like Three Cups of Tea, Water for Elephants, and The Book of Negroes pop up like mushrooms after rain.
Now there’s nothing wrong with reading the latest, hottest and most talked about books. That’s what this column is about. Indeed, I’ve chosen Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes to defend at an upcoming Canada Reads knockoff known as Georgian Bay Reads. But somehow, I wish book clubs were more adventurous and less prone to pandering to popular tastes.
Well, that’s a mouthful. And maybe I should join a book club before issuing such a challenge. But in the meantime, here are two new novels that I wouldn’t mind seeing more people read.
Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks but spent eight years as a journalist for CBC in northern Ontario. The author of two previous novels, Enemy Women and Stormy Weather, she won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction, was long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and actually captured the Governor Generals Award for Poetry.
She’s back south of the border now, living in Texas Hill country near San Antonio
– and writing up a storm. A masterful researcher, Jiles has dipped into the archives
to retrieve an actual historical character from the past. The result is The Color of Lightning (HarperCollins, $22.95).
In the years following the American Civil War, freed slave Britt Johnson dreams of a new life. Moving his wife Mary and their three children to Young County, Texas, Britt plans on his own freight business while Mary is destined to become a schoolteacher- until a band of Comanche and Kiowa raiders show up.
Britt’s older son is murdered while Mary and the remaining children are taken captive. With Mary severely injured, they are treated barbarously; they either learn to survive or die. As the focus of the narrative shifts back and forth from Britt Johnson to his enslaved family, a government agent, a Quaker named Samuel Hammond, is sent west to “civilize” the warriors.
The Quaker missionary with a faith in God, the vengeful black ex-slave, and the assimilated captives are not just stock stereotypes but full realized characters. And while the plot is neither fresh nor inventive, Jiles’s poetic language and extreme sense of place take this novel to places that will touch your heart.
Shortly after selecting The Book of Negroes for Georgian Bay Reads, I opened
Margaret Sweatman’s The Players (Goose Lane, $22.95), read it through to the end – and nearly changed my mind.
But it’s too late now so Lawrence Hill and I will have to do our best, up against the likes of Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (Georgian Bay Reads takes place in Creemore in late October).
Sweatman, who teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg and was the first to hold the Carol Shields writer-in-residence-post, tickled my reading fancy with When Alice Lay Down With Peter (2001), a novel of Métis life.
Lily Cole is 16 in 1665. With her mother dead and wise in spite of her years, she serves ale in her aunt’s tavern and turns tricks for ready cash. One of her customers, Bartholomew, the Second Earl of Buxborough and Gentleman of His Majesty’s Bedchamber, gives her lessons in stagecraft, turning Lily into a “player” of the book’s title.
King Charles II is so smitten with her charms that he makes her a mistress. And now entering into the drama are the renegade French explorers, des Groselliers and Radisson who are also players on an international stage. Convincing the King and Prince Rupert to finance a voyage through the Northwest Passage, they promise to bring back a load of furs, rich beyond anyone’s imagination.
Embarking on two ships, the Wivenhoe and the Prince Rupert, the party sails into the unknown, destined for the China Sea. But the Arctic isn’t really unknown to Gooseberries and Radishes (their names are played with much like students of Canadian history have done for decades) who both speak the language of the Cree and had lived with them over a winter just passed.
And, of course, Lily, pregnant with the King’s child, stows away on the ship – which gets no further west than the outer limits of James Bay. She is joined by Bartholomew who is considered “a fop” by Magnus Brown, the larger than life pilot and navigator who guides them into the wilderness.
Forced to winter over on the bay, the expedition and its many members suffer from the cold, trade with the First Nations, and eventually make their way back to England where everyone lives grandly ever after, making this the first truly inventive Canadian novel that I have read lately to have a happy ending. Sorry, but I had to warn you in advance.
The Players is a magical tale, much akin to Douglas Glover’s Elle (a woman abandoned in the early 17th century on a deserted St. Lawrence river island) and Bill Gaston’s The Order of Good Cheer (Samuel de Champlain in the New World).
Richly set in Restoration England and Canada’s then virtually unknown northern wilds, this is a wonderfully humourous tale filled with playful language.
Charles thought, “Young Bartholomew had gone too far again. Send him to Hudson Bay, damn his eyes. Puritans, Presbyters, it all has the same old lurching stink of piety. Charles recalled the scent of shame over Montrose, faithful Montrose, executed by the Scots, his head on a pike in Edinburgh, his hands nailed to the Tolbooth at Aberdeen. Charles saw the withered blue hands, like a huge moth, that terrible summer. Montrose died for the greater glory. So it goes.”
Book club material? You better believe it. So, grab a copy of Margaret Sweatman’s The Players, read it, and then recommend it to your reading group. Homogeneity be damned.
