. . . And They Told Us Their Stories

Funk, Jack and Lobe, Gordon. “. . . And They Told Us Their Stories”. Saskatoon: Saskatoon District Tribal Council, 1991. (Reprint of 2008)

“Slowly the Indian people began to realize the life that they had known as mighty warriors and great hunters was at an end. Gradually they began to change. Grudgingly, they began to accept the Whiteman's food, their tools, their clothes, their government, their Christian god and from necessity, they learned their language. Soon the Whiteman's institutions of justice, learning, politics and social security dominated the Indian people. The Department of Indian Affairs and the Indian Act was now their way of life ( p. xi).”

How often have you and I wished we had asked for and written down the stories of our parents and grandparents after the time to do so had passed? We seem always to leave it too long. In . . . And They Told Us Their Stories, we have a collection of reminiscences by various Aboriginal people of the way it used to be, a collection that is invaluable because the editors--Jack Funk and Gordon Lobe--and contributors Shirley Bear, George Sutherland, Carol Lafond, Florence Machiskinic, Marina Smokeday, Christine Baldhead, Peter PeeAce, Gordon Royal and Leona Daniels did not “leave it too late.” Such collections are to be treasured.

The bulk of the stories are collected from the Mistawasis and Muskeg Reserves near Leask, Saskatchewan, with some additional stories from other reserves. What they have in common is their homespun style, a style that does, in writing, what it can to convey the orally delivered memory.

What the reader is likely to take away from . . . And They Told Us Their Stories is a sense that settlement of Saskatchewan was achieved by the creation of pseudo “refugee camps in perpetuity,” that those who gave up freedom of movement, culture, language, food and religion were shamelessly shortchanged by the treaty bargain. As Indians resigned themselves to a sedentary, agricultural life (at which many of them did very well, thank you), the noose around them was drawn ever tighter. Signed passes in order to leave the reserve; permits in order to sell wood, cattle or grain; limits on trade and so on enforced, partly (or mainly) to suppress competition with settlers. Urged to make their way by agricultural enterprise, their best efforts were repeatedly stymied by restrictions that made success almost impossible.

Informants for this book shared memories of the residential school system. For some, the experience was positive: they learned to play hockey, girls learned domestic skills, boys learned to make things with wood and some of the residential school students recall teachers that were kind, generous and whom they recall with fondness to this day. Others weren’t so lucky. Beatings and humiliation as discipline ran rampant for some, running away in an attempt to escape the abuse resulted in boys being beaten in front of peers and girls having their heads shaved (p. 59). All agree that it was a paternalistic system that sought to separate them from their families, their language, their culture and their spiritual roots.  

“. . . we stood at attention beside our desks and sang O Canada. The first class was religion. In this class, we were told that the Indians were savages, that our parents were smart because they had sent us to this school and that we owed our good fortune to God and country (p.65, Harold Greyeyes as told to Jack Funk regarding Duck Lake Residential School).”

Arthur Dreaver of Muskeg Lake Reserve witnesses to another galling injustice. After serving in the Canadian military after WW 1, he expected that the veterans’ land grant would apply to him as to other returning veterans. “I wanted some land from the VLA like the white veterans got. We sure got ripped off in that deal. We were given land on our own reserve, I mean land that was already ours,” Dreaver says in an interview with Shirley Bear. (p.118)

There is no new information in . . . And They Told Us Their Stories; the residential school experience has been aired in excruciating and personal detail through the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation process. Chapter 7 of Roger Epp’s We Are All Treaty People, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Red Earth, White Lies or Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian (see http://readwit.blogspot.ca/2013/06/the-inconvenient-indian-thomas-king.html) are among many sources that can give the reader a firmer grasp of land/entitlement/surrender issues. What . . . And They Told Us Their Stories adds to the library, however, are the voices of those who recall and speak—without academic or literary pretentions—what they lived and saw.

The Book contains a foreword by Chief Harry Lafond, whom you will hear (among others) speaking about the basics of  treaty in Saskatchewan by clicking here and scrolling down to the video (13 minutes) called We are all Treaty People. Exploring the website generally of the Office of the Treaty Commissioner will also be enlightening and a good backdrop to the reading of . . . And They Told Us Their Stories. You can also find the book for purchase at this last website.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Vintage Books. 1999

 

Wikipedia says about Jim Williams: “James Arthur Williams (or Jim Williams) (December 11, 1930 - January 14, 1990) was the only person in the state of Georgia ever to be tried four times for the same crime – the alleged murder of his assistant, Danny Lewis Hansford, on May 2, 1981, in Williams's home, Mercer House.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Arthur_Williams)

Tourists still stop at the Mercer House in Savannah, Georgia to satisfy their prurient curiosity about the murder, asking guides where exactly Danny Hansford and Jim Williams were standing when the fatal shots were fired. Various reviews of the visit on TripAdvisor mention that guides to Mercer House don't talk about the murder, possibly because they've been ordered not to do so. Bummer.

            John Berendt's first book is about Jim Williams, an eccentric character credited with much of the restoration of Historic Savannah. Told through the eyes of a writer from New York who spends time in Savannah getting to know the memorable characters that apparently inhabited that city in the 60s, 70s and 80s, this extraordinary book treads the fine line between the novel and non-fiction genres; it reads like a novel but all it's characters can be found in Wikipedia (except for a few, we're told, whose names were changed for different reasons).

            Take Williams himself. He's invented a game called Psycho Dice, a game that illustrates his belief that through the efforts of mind, he can improve his odds in the great gamble that is his life:

 

“It's very simple. You take four dice and call out four numbers between one and six—for example, a four, a three, and two sixes. Then you throw the dice, and if any of your numbers come up, you leave those dice standing on the board. You continue to roll the remaining dice until all the dice are sitting on the board, showing your set of numbers. You're eliminated if you roll three times in succession without getting any of the numbers you need. The object is to get all four numbers in the fewest rolls. (p. 21)”

 

The game foreshadows the bizarre story of Jim Williams' four trials for the murder of Danny Hansford. So strong is Williams' belief that the advantage he has will eventually free him from the tentacles of the court that he wanders through this phase of his life nearly oblivious to his peril, buying antiques by phone from his prison cell at one point, carrying on with enormous Christmas parties at Mercer House when he's out on bail waiting for yet another appeal.

            After a few convictions however, Williams sees fit to enlist the help of one Minerva, a self-styled conjurer whose bag of tricks involves graveyard digs, roots, herbs, hexes and blessings, none of which seem to have any affect on the train of events:

 

“Thomas pulls to a stop at the ship's bow, and Minerva lights the candle and begins to chant. With the red pen, she scribbles phrases from the Bible onto the vellum. When she is done, she cuts the vellum into small squares and sets them on fire one by one. Glowing ashes float around like black snowflakes inside the car.

  'Take these three pieces I ain't burned,' she says to Thomas, 'and tell Mr. Jim to put them in his shoes.' (p. 283)”

 

Minerva wears the purple glasses of her deceased mentor in the occult arts, and is constantly trying to conjure him for numbers to help her win the lottery. A fitting parallel plot to that of the four-times tried, three-times convicted Jim Williams. 

            And then there's The Lady Chablis, the colourful vaudeville transvestite whose self confidence and sheer bravado as a performer in the transgendered night clubs of Georgia remains a legend  to this day. She provides a counterpoint to Jim Williams and the rumours of liaisons with male prostitutes that surround him (Danny Hansford is widely presumed to have been one of them). Here is a character who makes no excuses for his/her sexual uniqueness, in fact, is quoted on her website to have said: “Oh SHIT . . . Land the Plane and Dock the boat, I am THE Lady Chablis and I put Savannah on the map and then took over the world! You love me, you CRAVE me and you LOVE to HATE me. . .” What he/she shares with Jim Williams is the belief that each of them single-handedly “put Savannah on the map.” One might wonder why he/she would be included in the book, but then, how could you leave him/her out??

            Savannah has a unique history as a southern city in that it escaped much of the destruction visited upon most of Georgia by General William Sherman, who is said to have accepted its surrender in November of 1864 and to have sent a telegram to Abraham Lincoln as follows:

“I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”

            Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil persisted on the New York Times bestseller list for four years. It's a great read!
 

 

Why does the World Exist - Jim Holt

Holt, Jim, Why Does the World Exist? An existential detective story. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012 

“If the laws of physics are Something, then they cannot explain why there is something rather than Nothing, since they are a part of the Something to be explained” p.161. 

The above and many other difficult, existential speculations populate Holt's amazing journey into philosophical conjecturing on that age-old conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing. You may have experienced it in other, similar thoughts that come upon most people—apparently—at one time or another, questions like, “What if I had never been born?” or “What if there had never been an earth?” or “If God created the universe out of nothing, what was God made of?”

            Holt takes us on a journey of discovery through the minds of brilliant thinkers past and present and relates the history of the question going back as far as Aristotle and Plato through Heisenberg, Descartes, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and forward as far as Stephen Hawking and Derek Parfit. (If this sounds like name-dropping, well, it is; I am only marginally conversant with the entire field.) Holt examines the literature of the dead philosophers and actually interviews the living ones, and these interviews are illuminating. What has been described by Hawking and others as “the theory of everything” is still very much the holy grail which science seeks.

            The world we know is a material world. It's made of stuff that can be seen, smelled, felt, tasted and/or heard. None of us can be blamed for growing up thinking that matter is the basic building block of the universe, that when we hold a hand, dig a ditch, eat an apple, we are connecting with fundamental materials that are relatively immutable: flesh, earth, vegetation. In a way, we've always known that when you burn a block of wood, it disappears and that its “material” has been converted into light and heat energy. But what actually happens in that transaction—and why we have never observed the reverse, i.e. light and heat coalescing to form a block of wood—might not even have occurred to us.

            Quantum Mechanics has changed all that. The interchangeability of energy and matter has required us to take a whole new view of the nature of the universe in which we live. In the discovery that the entire universe as we have observed it is expanding outward has raised its own questions, not the least of which is the question of the nature of the point in space (whatever that is) at which the expansion began, and what caused it to do so. The “Big Bang” theory is the current explanation for the origin of the universe as we observe it, but that doesn't explain what went 'bang', and more importantly, how?

            Indeed, the question “Why is there a universe as we know it?” might better be worded, “How is there a universe as we know it?” The “Why?” question was answered for me in my youth: God created the earth with its sun and moon as a home for people like me, most likely because he craved communion with creatures with whom companionship was possible. And so he made us to be like him. The only reference to the “how?” was to assert that He spoke it into existence . . . from nothing. The similarity to the idea that the universe expanded from a point to what we see today can hardly be missed, even though Judeo-Christian doctrine holds that nothing was needed as raw material for a created universe—not even whatever it was that went BANG.

            Which brings us to Chapter 3: A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOTHING—probably the most amusing of Holt's 15 chapters—is tailor-made for the stand-up comic. Holt includes a paradoxic definition of nothing from an unnamed dictionary: “nothing (n): a thing that does not exist,” (p. 41). Historically, persons who contemplated the quality of nothingness saw it either as the most natural state to be imagined, or as an evil state (I almost wrote “an evil something,”) that annihilates something, as in Heidegger's Das Nichts nichtet, oddly translated Nothing noths (p. 43). I picture it as similar to the mathematical equation -1+1=0 or the collision of matter and antimatter in which both are annihilated. But as has always been the case, the human mind reaches some kind of limit when it tries to imagine a state of nothingness. When we were kids, our Low German definition probably came as close as any in Holt's catalogue: Eine uitjedreeda tweeback ohne chjarst. A dried-out bun without a crust. In our English equivalent, it was a bladeless knife without a handle.

             We know a great deal about the behaviour of matter and its relationship to energy; we know, for instance, that in autumn—where we are now—the molecules in the air around us slow their vibrations enough to affect the molecules in the tomatoes in the garden, such that they turn somewhat solid and their cells cease to function. We “cover up the tomatoes so they don't freeze.” We know also that although there is no apparent physical connection between us and a friend, the text he types at any given time appears “magically” and identically on our cell phone. What connects us is real, but its definitely not binder twine!

            A major point to be made in the pursuit of an understanding of why there is something instead of nothing is undoubtedly that discoveries in quantum mechanics have given new life to curiosity about origins. Is it a philosophical pursuit? a science quest? or is it, as Chapter 10 retails, a branch of mathematics?

            Clearly Holt is not a Christian, definitely not a creationist. For many, the lines of enquiry he's pursuing here will therefore be of little interest. For some, conjecture about the origin of the universe and of life on earth is simply not relevant: we are, therefore what we are and what we are becoming are the appropriate fields for study.

             But for those of us who follow the advances in science, who are fascinated by the big questions regarding existence itself, Why does the World Exist comes as a real find. I echo the review by Rebecca Goldstein: 

“To this . . . most sweeping question, Jim Holt brings not only erudition and precision but a great sense of adventure that sweeps us along with him, from the cosmic to the comic, from the mantic to the maniac. Holt has written a metaphysical page-turner and a triumph of intellectual liveliness.” 

The New York Times Book Review named Why Does the World Exist one of the 10 best books of 2012.

             

The Biology of Belief

Lipton, Bruce H. Ph.D, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles. Carlsbad: Hay House, Inc. 2008.

The Biology of Belief, extends the implications of “New Biology” beyond what one might expect into the realm of “consciousness, matter & miracles.” “New Biology” refers to a shift in cell research from the assumption that DNA is the controller—the brain, if you will—of the living cell, to recent research  tending to show that living cells respond much more to events in the outer membrane than was thought. For me, that wouldn't have meant much except for Lipton's readable treatise on what the shift in thinking about cell functioning might mean; implications extend to everything from understanding the evolution of life from the single-cell stage to complex systems like animal life to the rethinking of allopathic medicine as it's practiced today.

            We've long been held in thrall by the idea of  genetic determination (he inherited it from his dad!) and haven't really done justice to the role of environment (he learned it from his dad!). In fact, Lipton suggests that the recent Human Genome Project has increased our tendency to look to inherited characteristics; in this regard, he drops some remarkable stats: “95% of breast cancers are not due to inherited genes.” - 43)

            At one level, we acknowledge that racism is founded on a belief in inherited characteristics but on the other hand, we cling to the notion that much of what we are lies in our genes.

            Both single cells and communities of cells (the liver, for instance) reach their destined makeup through the genetic code of parents; beyond this makeup, however, research has shown that the behaviour of cells and communities of cells responds to signals received through their covering membranes. Some of these signals come through the various hormones and glandular secretions that trigger fight or flight responses in our muscles and organs, some are transmitted through the nervous system (both conscious—like reading and following a map, and subconscious—like ducking in response to an approaching object) but the point is that our body cells are responsive to all kinds of environmental signals. Take the difference between the physiology that responds to stress and fear versus the physiology that follows relaxation or an experience of loving interaction.

            We've long known that laughter makes good medicine; Lipton basically urges us to carry this thought into our health practices with the assurance that we can reduce our reliance on pharmaceuticals and surgery.

            We all know how integral to health care the pharmaceuticals manufacturers have become. Take a walk through a nursing home ward just before meal time and watch the nurse dispensing pills and potions to the patients resident there. Frequently, the particular medications are “experimental;” physicians “try out” a drug or a dosage, alter it if it proves in-efficacious. New research on cell functioning makes it much clearer why this reliance on drug solutions is wrong headed. A drug cannot be assumed to target a problem in one area without finding its way through other cells and cell communities in the body where it's presence may be entirely inappropriate; we euphemistically call the results of drug actions in inappropriate places “potential side effects.” For example, we've known forever that a certain drug that acts against histamine overload also effects a drowsiness, a sure signal that cells involved in our sleep cycles are absorbing drug material and responding inappropriately.

            We live in a hazardous age, health consciousness wise. Genetic modifications to plants and animals may prove to have no dilatory effect when consumed, but we're not sure we want to take that chance. This is in itself a stressor and in a biology that recognizes the role of environment— physical, spiritual and emotional—in the behaviours of cells and cell communities, the mechanics of GM modifications might well be overshadowed by the overall negative consequences of being afraid of our food. That kind of living is very bad for cell health and for cell communities. 

            Lipton ends with a chapter called “Conscious Parenting: Parents as Genetic Engineers” The growth and protection gates on children's cells are active at birth and the implications for raising children in fear or safety are enormous. Habits of thought and expectations are formed early in life and can be highly persistent into adulthood, so it makes sense that the most potent of preventative measures for health is the loving, supportive nurturing of children. Unfortunately, this is difficult for parents who have themselves been raised in an atmosphere of dark thoughts and may still be wrestling with the demons surrounding them as they grew up.

            Passing genes on to a next generation is by no means the critical contribution in parenting.

            Among other things, Lipton's Biology of Belief invites us to rethink our persistent separation of spirit and body, mind and biology. May I hazard a suggestion: what we call “miracles” are not magic events; unexplained remissions and cures happen but not because God reverses the laws of nature for the occasion. It's probable that we have underestimated the environmental influence coursing through our bodies when circumstances of pain and illness meet hope, faith and belief.

            I admit that Biology of Belief leaves me somewhat skeptical, but that's just me. It's clear that health care costs, for instance, are taxing our ability to pay and this escalating cost has no end in sight. If Lipton is right, much of the cost of surgical and drug therapy is wasted; I'd really like to believe there are better ways to be healthy and to that possibility, Lipton lends credence.

The Inconvenient Indian - Thomas King

King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Doubleday Canada, 2012

If I had to select one quote that best summarizes the fork in the rode for indigenous peoples in North America in 2013, it would be most of paragraph 2 on page 265 of Thomas King's Curious Account:

 " . . . there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.

With the rest of the bones."

Everything before the penultimate page 265 is King's accounting of reasons for coming to this conclusion.

In fairness to the other ethnic communities in Canada, the question of assimilating or “sinking into the stewpot of North America” can't be considered exclusively an Aboriginal choice. Something similar could be said about the many Chinatown cultures in our metropolitan areas, the Hutterian Brethren colonies, the Amish of Southern Ontario, the Kurds of Northern Iraq to name just a few minorities struggling to survive while gradually "sinking into the stewpot."

Where the cases differ is in the history that brought us all to these shores. The Inconvenient Indian is a story of a culture over-run by Western civilization, it's a history that can help us understand why "I started with nothing and made it, why can't they?" is an absurd question.

King begins in 1492, where we normally begin our history of the Aboriginal people of North America as if they didn't exist as anything more than the deer and the beaver before then. The memorable stories that followed Columbus' discovery of the New World—Custer's last stand, the Riel Rebellion, the role of the fur trade and its missionary partners—all are clothed in our history books with the patina of a conquerors' viewpoint. Like the cold winters and the vast, formidable distances, the presence of Indians has historically been one more obstacle to overcome as we forged nations after the European fashion. Hence, the inconvenient Indian.

At the least, the story of our interactions with North America's Aboriginal people is highly ambiguous. King traces some of this ambiguity through the portrayal of Indians in movies where the "Cowboys and Indians" mentality had its birth. The relationship between the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto, (remember kemo sabay?) exemplifies one movie stereotype. Tonto is the Indian image that lives on in minds around the world: the noble savage, the living Indian. But there are other images that we carry around with us at the same time: the bloodthirsty savage (the scary one), the "dying" Indian (the disappearing one), the indolent Indian (languishing on reserves), the hungry Indian (poverty is highest on reserves), and you could probably add others. King draws our attention to the multitude of First Nations citizens who have become household names, not because they were Indians but because they were talented: Buffy Sainte-Marie, Kenoujuak, Clint Walker, Jay Silverheels and Will Rogers to name a few. (A joke of Will Rogers: "There's no trick to being a humourist when you have the whole government working for you," underlines another sensibility, namely that every government since confederation has bungled the Aboriginal file - page 39.)

Added to the stereotypes above is the reality of Indians categorized more objectively: the legal Indian or treaty Indian vs. the non-treaty Indian, the Inuit, the Metis and others who may or may not have fallen under any particular treaty. This is all very tricky ground and the moment one starts to define who is a genetic, an ethnic or traditional member of a group, the ambiguities begin to burgeon. There exist certain treaty rights to which only legal Indians are entitled and before 1968, treaty Indians who voted, who served in the military, graduated college, married a non-treaty person were automatically or voluntarily enfranchised, ie. given Canadian citizenship in exchange for treaty status. King quotes a Blackfoot friend: " . . . enfranchised is French for 'screwed'" (page 71). Suffice it to say that King portrays with a concise and ironic wit the ambiguities adding to the inconvenience of Aboriginal populations and the legacy with which early settlement saddled both us and them.

Not every phase of the story from Columbus onward lends itself to witty retelling. The assimilation through education chapter most certainly belongs in the "too tragic for jokes" category. In the "We are Sorry" chapter, King deals with the residential schools period under the general principle that for whites, two options only were considered for resolving the Native inconvenience: extermination or assimilation (page 101). In the endeavour to "kill the Indian to save the man," children of Aboriginal families were forced into residential schools where Indian culture, language and spirituality were drummed out and English or French, European culture and Christianity were beaten in. At least that was the plan, its execution entrusted to various mission-minded churches, a decidedly unholy alliance of state, commerce and Christianity. ( " . . . you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism" – page 103) The cruelty of the plan and its ineffectiveness in reaching its goals is currently being clarified by the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Canada. It's still unclear how much benefit Aboriginal people will experience as a result of apologies heard, received and accepted for the Residential Schools debacle.

In 1991, a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples began work that would conclude with a 4,000 page report and 440 recommendations to government in numerous areas including replacement of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development with something more in line with current realities. "The expectation was that the government would see the report as an opportunity to renew, amend, and restructure its relationship with Canada's First Nations . . . Almost as soon as the report was released, it was placed on the shelf with all the rest of the reports from Royal Commissions." (page 171) It seems that governments still lack either the will or the means—or both—to effect the changes that are necessary but then, the history of the relationship between the Canadian nation and the First Nations has—according to King—always been about land (see page 216), and to this end, the periodic confiscation of reserved land, the delays in settling land claims and the toying with reducing the numbers of status Indians through measures like Bill C-31 would be evidence enough to conclude that the end game is to extinguish the sovereignty of First Nations over their territories and their right to self-determination.

Even so, The Inconvenient Indian is not a diatribe against the evil white man. King is remarkably even-handed in his assessment of where things have gone wrong and where they've gone right. He may be too generous. The mess that characterizes the majority of reserves in Canada was made by the system that has made me well-off, secure and able to make choices. What role should First Nations expect me to fulfil in the cleaning up of that mess? Whatever that role is, it's not about handouts, admonishment or even education; been there, done that--nobody liked it much. For us children of settlers, the first obligation is to get to know the past, to educate ourselves about the present and to grasp finally that we are treaty people as much as the Aboriginal bands, tribes and individuals are.

To this end, a thoughtful reading of The Inconvenient Indian certainly makes a good start.

Three Novels of Character

Bergen, David. The Matter with Morris. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2012

Gibbons, Kaye. A Virtuous Woman. New York: Vintage Books, 1989

Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture. London: Penguin Books, 2008

We used to talk in English 101 about character-driven as opposed to plot-driven fiction. Granted, both are necessary but there are novels where the dissection of a personality seems to be the primary driving force. Take The Matter with Morris. Morris Schutt is a post-modern man, a failing journalist with a weakness for mining the follies and foibles of his family and friends for a regular syndicated column. But when you write in judgment of the world and the people around you, you’d better be careful that you personally stand on firm ground or the core of your existence will crumble. This happens to Morris when his son is needlessly killed in Afghanistan by a friend mishandling his rifle. It’s a tragedy made more poignant by Morris’ having taunted his “wimpy” son into joining the army.

               Morris has been on a trajectory of estrangement from his wife and daughters for some time; the son’s death is too much to handle gracefully and his wife breaks off entirely and Morris moves out.

               There’s a concept in fiction writing known as verisimilitude. The basic idea is that a writer creates a world; that world bears similarities to the real world but is also unique, so that in writing, for instance, a Roadrunner episode, Wiley Coyote is not expected to act as real world coyotes do, but must behave in a believable fashion for the character and the setting the author has created. Characters “believability” hinges on the author’s ability to submerge him/herself into the milieu of his creation and to transmit faithfully to the reader verisimilitudinous characters and actions.

               The matter with The Matter with Morris is that Bergen fails to achieve verisimilitude. Morris does things that are both bizarre in relation to his situation, but are pointless in the advancement of the plot. Drawing out all his assets in cash and buying a safe to store the $300,000 plus proceeds in his apartment is a case in point. This kind of plot whimsy pales, however, in comparison to the behaviour of the minor characters who are super nice for no apparent reason and super critical, also for no apparent reason—and sometimes both at the same time. Then there’s the prostitute he hires only to discover that she’s his son’s one-time friend and a former guest in his home. Bizarre and irrelevant.

               If Bergen had written Hamlet, Ophelia would have been discovered not to have drowned after all, would marry Hamlet after the disposing of Claudius and the reconciliation of mother and son, Polonius would have recovered from the sword thrust to his vitals and Denmark would have been launched on the road to greatness—with copious apologies all ‘round and pledges to do better.

               My advice: give this one a miss.

               Oprah’s Book Club recommends A Virtuous Woman, but I try not to let that stop me from reading a novel. Gibbons’ second novel, it’s set in the south of the USA where landowners rent plots to rag-tag sharecroppers and migrant workers survive by working the fields, sheltering in shacks for night. The “virtuous woman” is the daughter of landowners. As a teenager, she is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who beats her, abuses her psychologically and then abandons her. She’s subsequently “traded”; her father strikes a deal with a migrant worker to give him a small property that he can share crop if he’ll marry Ruby.

               The story is narrated by Ruby Pitt and her second husband, Blinking Jack Stokes until the last chapter where a third person narrator completes it out of necessity. Like Bergen with Morris, Gibbons’ task here is to make Ruby live for the reader as a character deserving of our empathy. In general, she is much more successful than is Bergen. My only reservation would be that motivation is not as clearly drawn as it might be; Ruby’s descent into the madness of a futile marriage is explained by her as something of an infatuation. At the same time, she’s full of praise for the household she’s abandoning, parents who are loving and dependable, a Nanny/housekeeper who is efficient and respected.

But then, pretty girls falling for bad boys is new neither to reality nor fiction. Think Lorna Doone.

A pretty woman is the central character in Barry Sebastian’s The Secret Scripture as well. Like Ruby, her downfall comes at the hands of a reprobate husband, not one that abuses her but one who succumbs to the pressure of a tyrannical Catholic mother to annul his marriage to this child of Presbyterians. Left pregnant and destitute in Sligo in Ireland, a series of circumstances lands her in an institution and when we first meet her, she is a very old woman in yet another institution painfully scratching out her life story on sheets of paper she hides under the floorboards.

Like Gibbons, Barry uses the technique of two narrators simultaneously telling the same story, one being the hapless Roseanne McNulty and the other, a doctor in the nursing home charged with assessing residents for relocation when the old building in which they live will be demolished. Barry masterfully draws out these two characters as he reveals the chasms between what is real and what is remembered by both.

The Secret Scripture requires some suspension of disbelief; it’s hard to imagine a woman of the age and decrepitude of Old Roseanne writing what she writes and how much she writes. This, however, is not much of a hurdle. Verisimilitude: the characters are true to the milieu in which Barry has placed them.

If you’re looking for your next novel read, I’d highly recommend finding The Secret Scripture. Barry is a masterful storyteller and his success as a playwright is evident in scene setting and in dialogue. I can’t help but place him in a long line of superb Irish writers like James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and T.S. O’Rourke to name a few.

I’d also recommend A Virtuous Woman, but with some reservation. I think I should have read two other items first: her first, award winning novel, Ellen Foster, and the biographical notes at http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/11381306.html?refer=y. Gibbons is purportedly an author whose novels are more autobiographical than most.

David Bergen, of course, is Canadian and his latest novel, The Age of Hope made it to the top five in the Canada Reads event on CBC and the web just concluded.