In the end, Giller reverted to type. During the run-up to the award ceremony, much was made of the relative inexperience of the five shortlisted authors. Of the five finalists, one – Anthony De Sa – was nominated for his literary debut (the short-story collection Barnacle Love); one – Mary Swan – was nominated for her first novel (The Boys in the Trees); and the other three – Joseph Boyden, Marina Endicott, and Rawi Hage – were each nominated for their sophomore novels (Through Black Spruce, Good to a Fault, and Cockroach, respectively). No matter the outcome, it was argued, the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, long seen as an establishment award, would go to a relative newcomer. The unspoken implication seemed to be that an infusion of new blood would signal a broadening of the Giller Prize’s acceptance of what constitutes award-worthy Canadian fiction.
That was the theory, anyway. By giving the prize to Joseph Boyden for his novel Through Black Spruce, the 2008 Giller jury in fact behaved exactly the way the majority of its predecessors had – rewarding the one book that most closely cleaves to the traditionally accepted CanLit pieties: obsession with geography and our psychic relationship with the land, staunch naturalism, and lyrical, poetic prose. If Boyden’s novel modifies these properties, it does so without radically diverging from the accepted template.
Set largely in the north, Through Black Spruce focuses on a fractured family riven by alcohol and drug abuse. From its opening lines, the novel offers sentences burnished with simile and metaphor:
When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town.
The narrator here is Will Bird, a comatose Cree bush pilot confined to a hospital bed in Moose Factory. From his coma, he narrates his story to his two nieces, Annie and Suzanne. Will’s narration is cast in the mode of rugged naturalism, but the naturalism is constantly larded with images that, although presumably meant to be evocative, actually come off feeling artificial and unconvincing. Living “between two colours” is only one example. In the frozen north loneliness “grew like moss,” memories “can’t be burnt or drowned,” and winter “settl[es]” on the land, “laying herself out over the forest and the muskeg and the water.” In a similar fashion, Will recalls his youth: “I believed that the northern lights, the electricity I felt on my skin under my parka, the faint crackle of it in my ears, was Gitchi Manitou collecting the vibrations of lives spent, refuelling the world with these animals’ power.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with using metaphoric language to develop character or heighten narrative; what is troublesome is the notion that this approach is somehow new or groundbreaking in the context of Canadian fiction. In its citation, the Giller jury – made up of novelists Margaret Atwood and Colm Toibin and Liberal MP Bob Rae – stated that in Through Black Spruce “Joseph Boyden shows us unforgettable characters and a northern landscape in a way we have never seen them before.” That we have seen such characters before – and in just such a northern landscape – will be obvious to anyone possessed of even a passing familiarity with Canadian fiction. Notably, the frigid loneliness of the north provided the setting for last year’s Giller champ, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. Beyond that, Through Black Spruce would fit comfortably on the shelf with such accepted CanLit mainstays as The Temptations of Big Bear, Tay John, and Wacousta.
At least one of the Giller jurors should know this better than anyone. In her 1972 book of criticism, Survival, Atwood wrote:
Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back from the awful experience – the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship – that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.
Boyden amends this formula by tacking a frankly sentimental coda onto his story, which is hardly any kind of advancement. His employment of a parallel narrative stream feels similarly forced. Annie Bird’s voyage from her native James Bay to New York (by way of Toronto and Montreal) in search of her missing sister Suzanne, a model who has run off with the brother of a local drug lord, doesn’t have the same ring of authenticity as the sections dealing with her uncle; it seems clear Boyden’s imagination more readily inhabits the milieu of the frozen Canadian north than the high-octane world of Manhattan fashion:
Weekends remain hardcore fun for forty-eight hours, packing in everything we can. During the weekdays I get calls from the agent and for a few hours, a few days a week, I pretend to be my sister when I’m in front of a photographer. The agent says L.L. Bean seems to like me a lot, and they might be interested. I’m told I’m the most Native American of any model they’ve seen. I’ll take it. The amount typed on the first paycheque I receive astounds me.
Compared with the careful, detailed descriptions of Will’s experience in the bush, Annie’s foray through Manhattan seems cursory and underdeveloped. The New York City backdrop is gauzy and indistinct, and the specifics of her experience at photo shoots and “go-sees” appear lifted from an episode of America’s Next Top Model.
Boyden is on safer ground when he confines himself to the milieu of Moose Factory and Moosonee. But it is this very milieu that stamps Through Black Spruce with the imprint of the iconic Canadian novel in the Survival mode. This is not to suggest that some of the other nominated titles are bereft of conventional aspects or themes, but their relationship to a staid, hidebound literary tradition is less obvious, at least at first glance.
Good to a Fault is a contemporary urban novel, which sets it somewhat apart from Through Black Spruce. Nevertheless, it belongs to a well-worn, albeit separate, CanLit camp: that of the muted domestic novel. Giller has a history of acknowledging such novels: think of Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House and Carol Shields’ Unless – the former a Giller winner, the latter a nominee. In fact, Good to a Fault has been compared with Shields’ work, and the comparison is not without merit. Beginning with a bang – literally so, as Endicott’s protagonist, Clara Purdy, slams her car into a station wagon carrying three generations of an itinerant family – the novel then settles into the comfortable rhythms of a domestic drama.
“Comfortable” being the operative word. Nearly plotless, Endicott’s novel centres on the quotidian concerns of child-rearing and housekeeping, all once again carried out in the context of a broken family: the father, Clayton, has vanished following the car crash, and the mother, Lorraine, has been diagnosed with advanced lymphoma. But despite the elements of incipient tragedy, it is the less florid aspects of the story that fascinate Endicott most. “Life,” we are told, “had to continue anyway. Whatever happened to Lorraine, the children had to go to school.”
In short, there is nothing here that is liable to upset a reader’s delicate sensibilities. Notwithstanding Lorraine’s cancer, there is never any sense of urgency to the story; there is never the sense that anything is really at stake. From the moment that Clara decides to take the family into her home right through to the final maudlin scene on the beach, the reader feels coddled and nurtured by the repeated cataloguing of domestic objects and everyday chores: “On the kitchen counters baby-food jars and cartoon plastic cups jostled appliances: the blender, the toaster, the sandwich maker”; “She got the movers to dismantle the bunk beds and deliver them to the right-hand blue duplex, 1008 or 1006, she couldn’t remember which.” In the face of adversity, Endicott implies, life has to continue anyway, and Clara’s concerns about her young houseguests must take precedence over weightier matters: “She shouldn’t give them grilled cheese sandwiches so often.”
While Good to a Fault does not address the national mythology that has come to dominate much Canadian fiction, it nonetheless represents a persistent strain of novel within our culture, the kind that Andrew Pyper lampooned in The Killing Circle, with his sly reference to “the Dickie,” a literary prize that is “awarded to the work of fiction that ‘best reflects the domestic heritage of Canadian family life,’ which has led to a series of hushed, defiantly uneventful winners.” Endicott’s novel is indeed “hushed” and “defiantly uneventful,” and clearly fits what qualifies as Giller – or “Dickie” – worthy fiction.
Two more nominees – The Boys in the Trees and Barnacle Love – can also be read in the context of a particular strain of Canadian literature: the linked story collection. These two books play with generic conventions, the first by fusing discrete chapters told from individual points of view into an integral whole, the second by breaking down a chronological narrative into stand-alone units. In other words, the former is a novel that resembles a short-story collection, and the latter is a collection that resembles a novel.
Mary Swan’s novel, the most technically accomplished of the five nominees, is structured as a series of interlocking stories that circle around a central incident – a businessman’s massacre of his wife and two children at the close of the 19th century – which is itself never dramatized. The ripples from the inciting incident flow backward and forward in time, their psychological repercussions moving outward exponentially, like the rings on a tree trunk.
Swan structures her novel like a mystery, but avoids the concerns of traditional mystery novelists. Motive is unimportant: indeed, the reader never does discover precisely why the central crime was committed. The crime itself is almost incidental; what is important is not the details of the murders, but the ways in which the killings scar and malform the community in which they occur. When a reporter visits one of the murdered girls’ teachers, he asks her to describe what she knows about the murders, saying, “Our readers like the details.” The irony is thick for Swan’s own readers, since no such details will be forthcoming.
At a first pass, The Boys in the Trees might appear frustrating, its various chapters more like discrete units than a cohesive, integrated whole. It is only in retrospect that the various connections and echoes between and among the constituent parts begin to reveal themselves. This novel of voices is powerfully subtle in its construction, resembling the tree trunk that the town’s students ponder at one point:
Then Eaton asked how old the maple tree was. This one, he said, slapping it with his hand. Very old, Alice said, looking up at the thick, spreading branches. But how old? Eaton said, and Alice told him, told them all, that when a tree was cut down rings were visible in the stump, that you could count the rings and know the age of the tree. But then it’s dead, Eaton said, and she could tell that he’d already known about the rings, that for some reason he’d wanted to hear her say it. If you cut it down, it’s dead, Eaton said, so how can it even matter?
The explicit connection between the tree’s rings and the subject of death exteriorizes the connection between the novel’s structure and its theme: the way in which death inflicts itself across time, affecting the various lives that it touches both directly and indirectly. And unlike Boyden’s novel, the metaphoric resonance is deeply embedded in the narrative, refusing at every turn to call attention to itself.
Swan’s technical mastery is on full display here. The novel superficially resembles a collection of linked stories, but its deep structure has the effect of turning this generic form on its head; the individual chapters, which seem so independent at first blush, only yield their full meaning and import when considered as a whole, and when considered from the distance of a second or even a third reading.
Anthony De Sa’s collection has an inverse structure. Beginning in the 1950s with Manuel Rebelo’s departure from his native Portugal en route to Canada, and ending on New Year’s Eve in 1981, the book follows a continuous chronological arc, and is told from two complementary perspectives: the first half is narrated in the third person from Manuel’s point of view, and the second half is narrated in the first person from the point of view of Antonio, Manuel’s son.
Whereas Swan’s novel plays with genre in a brave manner, creating something blazingly original in the process, De Sa’s collection more closely resembles the institutionalized Canadian tradition of linking stories within a collection – a tradition that goes back as far as Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Other examples of this kind of “novel-in-stories” device are not hard to come by: Lawrence’s A Bird in the House, Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are?, Michael Winter’s One Last Good Look, and – most recently – Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.
Like Lam, De Sa writes from an immigrant’s perspective: it’s the kind of fiction that appeals to our post-Trudeau multicultural pride. Taken together, the two halves of De Sa’s collection paint a picture of the immigrant experience. But De Sa betrays the rawness of youth by carelessly caricaturing his immigrant characters, most especially Manuel, who is forced to speak in the stereotypical rhythms of broken English: “Okay – you is okay,” or “I no sing fado.” Moreover, he inserts stock characters into his narrative: the domineering matriarch, the pedophile priest, the alcoholic father. On the level of both genre and storytelling, Barnacle Love resembles its forebears, not necessarily for the better.
Cockroach, however, is sui generis. Like Barnacle Love, Hage’s novel is an immigrant’s story; like Good to a Fault, it is set in an urban metropolis – in this case, Montreal. There, the comparisons end. Where De Sa appeals to our fuzzy multicultural pride, Cockroach takes a sledgehammer to it.
The unnamed narrator, a poverty-stricken immigrant from the Middle East, runs up against racism both institutional and individual, and reacts with seething anger. He rails against the “bourgeois filth” and “bleached Brahmins” of Montreal society, the “impostors” who “all wanted to come back to the same packed kitchens, to the same large houses, the same high beds, the same covers to hide under again and again.” A heightened awareness of the social rung to which his swarthy skin tone and his poverty consign him results in an attitude that is at once derisive and resoundingly forthright:
The rich hate the poor, and they especially hate those whose odour surfaces like a cloud to overshadow the smell of cigarettes and hot plates or to overwhelm the travelling scent of an expensive perfume. Nothing corporeal, nothing natural, should emanate from a servant. A servant should be visible but undetectable, efficient but unnoticeable, nourishing but malnourished. A servant is to be seen, always, in black and white.
Hage’s own refusal to see in black and white is one electrifying aspect of this novel. He pulls back the curtain on the hypocrisy and dishonesty of a society that exists “in a state of permanent denial of the bad smells from the sewers, infested slums, unheated apartments, single mothers on welfare, worn-out clothing.” Cockroach’s narrator resides on the periphery of this hypocritical society, observing it from without, while locating his home in a more unrefined place. “I have to go,” he says at one point. “The underground is waiting for me.”
The reference to “the underground” is a clue to the novel’s origins in European and Russian existentialism; unlike his peers on the Giller shortlist, Hage does not draw his inspiration from the well of Canadian fiction, but rather from Dostoevsky and Kafka, from Camus and Céline. His novel is the most European of the five, and therefore the most removed from the conventional poise of traditional Canadian fiction. It is in many ways an anti-nationalist novel, concerned as it is with calling attention to the poisonous realities that lurk under the carefully cultivated and polished surface of our universalist assumptions.
Putatively, at least, the Giller is supposed to honour the best work of Canadian fiction written in English in a given year. This implies a focus not on some imprecise notion of what makes a “Canadian” book, but on whether a particular Canadian book succeeds on an aesthetic level. In a National Post article published the day after the Giller ceremony, juror Colm Toibin had this to say about the final choice: “It may seem to be a Canadian book, in the same way that, say, In the Skin of a Lion might have seemed a Toronto book, or the novel or short stories of Alistair MacLeod might have seemed to be from Nova Scotia.”
It’s true that Through Black Spruce is a Moosonee book in much the same way that Ondaatje’s novel is a Toronto book. But this misses the essential point. What is significant is not so much the novel’s setting as its overall reticence to chart new ground or to tell its story in an original or surprising way. Certainly Boyden’s voice is his own, and there is no small amount of good writing on display in the novel. But it does “seem to be a Canadian book,” to use Toibin’s own words. Same goes for Endicott’s and De Sa’s books.
Swan and Hage, two technically ambitious writers, are clearly the most accomplished of the bunch. One has written a polyvocal pastiche, the other a vicious existential screed that tears at the heart of our multicultural mythos. They are singular works, idiosyncratic and – most damning, perhaps, where the Giller prize is concerned – discomfiting. Unlike Through Black Spruce, which ends on a note of uplift and redemption, neither Swan nor Hage is willing to accept pat endings or the lure of easy sentiment. Theirs are books in which order is disrupted, never to be restored. They don’t shy away from uncomfortable truths or engage in platitudinous prevarication.
In short, they are the only two novels on the 2008 Giller shortlist that reflect back to us our deepest existential malaise, our shared dilemma, and do so in linguistically provocative ways that fly in the face of our accepted notions of what constitutes an award-worthy work of Canadian fiction. They never stood a chance.