FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS The Garden of Eden "Table for sale by lady with Queen Anne legs." The above example is a grammatical howler. As is: "... that leads from the farm she has lived on all her life to Chinook the town she is driving to" from The Garden of Eden. Writers (even I) have editors to weed out and correct such irritating mistakes. This Garden of Eden is subject to more human error than the original. Even the starting sentence would have Strunck and White, the renounced writing stylists, in a tizzy: "When the muezzin calls faintly from the mosque in the town it is still dark...." "Dark" was aptly chosen by Butala to set mood. Melancholy is the watchword and the gates to disaster are opened from the earliest of phrases. A writer who has been, more than once, in sighing distance of a Governor General's Award, Butala creates a central character forever sad about Canada where the people are singled out as "Not able to make a world, try as they might, and the United States always with them, overshadowing their own possibilities even while sinking further and further into greed, violence, and corruption." The novel's heroine, Iris, seeks to lift this massive burden by searching for her niece among starving Ethiopians. The trek results in more guilt about her own sexual escapades and ends as Iris effects various rescues from death and hunger. She returns to Canada, proceeds to her own little town and restores it to pastoral health and bliss - a veritable Garden of Eden. Of course, she's still melancholy. Alan Egerton Ball Understanding Ken After three successful seasons as goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens in the early 1970s, Ken Dryden suddenly quit hockey to return to college. A minor event in the history of Canada, but a momentous one in the life of the 10-year-old in Pete McCormack's second novel, Understanding Ken. "Hockey isn't like choosing where you want to live," explains the book's young narrator. "You play. Period." Dryden's decision, inexplicable from the viewpoint of a hockey-obsessed youngster with NHL ambitions, provides a fitting metaphor for all the other mysteries of pre-teen childhood. The meaning of life, death, friendship, religion, sex - all of these make an appearance in this lively paced and dryly comic account of a single season in the B.C. peewee leagues. Above all, however, it is the recent separation and impending divorce of the boy's parents that find an echo in Dryden's abandonment of hockey. With his efforts to reunite his mom and dad backfiring in increasingly disastrous fashion, the boy turns his growing frustration and anger against his former hero, until Dryden becomes responsible for everything that goes wrong. This is a marvellous book. McCormack captures perfectly the language and skewed outlook of a confused 10-year-old, caught between two antagonistic and self-centered parents. The boy's relationship with his bullying and single-minded father - none of the book's characters are ever named - is especially convincing. Hints of child abuse - the boy's frequent and implausible injuries, the father's explosive temper and ready resort to violence - are dropped, but McCormack sensibly leaves these for the reader to interpret for him/herself. Despite these dark themes, Understanding Ken is a truly funny book about a time when hockey could more completely capture a young boy's imagination. More than that, Pete McCormack has produced simply the best novel about childhood to appear this year. David Bright |