The Back of the Turtle.

 

King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2014

Did ye know that a fortune may be read on a face and a fate found in a query?[i]

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.[ii]

             Imagine you have a job as a technician in a large corporation employing thousands. Imagine further that your job is to develop and produce a certain combination of chemicals in order to facilitate other aspects of whatever else the corporation produces. Suppose that you discover one day that the corporation has been found responsible for the deaths of many people in an accident resulting from the faulty use of a product that contains the component you developed. Would you feel guilt at having contributed to such a disaster? Would you feel that you ought to have had a handle on the potential risks and foreseen the tragedy?

      
            Are individuals responsible for the actions of the collective entities of which they are parts? Does the plea, “I was only following orders,” pass the moral smell test?

            King has created a marvellous novel in The Back of the Turtle, a story that contains the questions above without ready answers. Rich with unforgettable characters, it chronicles the aftermath of a horrifying mistake made by the Domidion Corporation in accidentally destroying a BC reserve and tourist town, poisoning people and destroying flora and fauna alike in a fatal effort to defoliate an area for the construction of a pipeline. What's different from typical diatribes against ruthless resource exploitation is that The Back of the Turtle tells the story through individuals experiencing the events. Corporate groups, institutions, reserves, towns are in the end not so much cohesive, active entities  as collectives that serve to limit accountability, excuse the culpability of the individuals involved, bury the lives of people under the rubric of “the common good.”

            What a fabulous cast of characters King has imagined here. Sonny and Crisp, eccentric characters who have outlived the disaster and continue to inhabit the ghost town that is Smoke River. Mara who comes back to the reserve where she grew up to find that her childhood friend hasn't survived the disaster . . . and then can't leave. Gabriel who turns up in the ruined community with a secret deeper than he can tell.

            And then there's Dorian Asher, the CEO of Domidian, a man swimming in money but drowning for lack of the things money can't buy: a fulfilling marriage, health, peace of mind, self respect.

            King's narrative takes us back and forth between the BC coast and corporate Toronto; the contrasts between the high-end shops of TO and the ruined houses, abandoned convenience stores and motels of Smoke River characterize the gulf between the haves and the have nots: First Nations and white corporate culture in this case. Most Canadians will have sensed the depth of that division by now as it plays out between the Canadian government/petroleum business and the people who are directly affected by the collateral damage of oil extraction, the laying out of pipelines and other infrastructure. What King achieves in his novel is the removal of this tension from the political sphere and the placing of it in the realm of the personal.

            Readers may be left with a question: how ironical is it that people can be trampled by massive projects whose justification is “the welfare of the people?”

            It's difficult for us to be certain about what happens behind corporate board room doors and in the offices of Suncor, Shell or Exxon, and so King's retailing of possible conversations between corporate executives on possible ways of handling disasters like spills and bird deaths has to be speculative. If King is accurate when he fictionalizes their conversations, his boardroom dialogue (including plans to spread suggestions that sabotage, extreme environmentalism, terrorism are behind such “accidents”) has to be read judiciously: companies are run by people, individuals who have homes and lives and families and worries about their health. They are all are people who fear for their jobs, their incomes, the caché and power they possess and a lifestyle that most only dream about. That they are willing to behave ruthlessly, lie if necessary, treat consumers as commodities is hardly surprising. In fact, it should be absolutely predictable. Furthermore, corporations carry the "Ltd" affix after their names; individuals who control them must see their liability as limited and therein lies the dilemma that faces ordinary citizens: you are valued as a compliant consumer, the quality of your life often hangs from a lopsided negotiation.

            But to stop here would be to do The Back of the Turtle an injustice. Smoke River, the reserve, the people who remain and those who wander back are best characterized by their resilience. It's their stories that will stay with readers after the indignation at corporate injustice has faded. The creation myths surrounding turtles and the woman falling from the sky thread through the novel and serve as foundations for the hope that King's characters possess: the turtles, the whales, the people will come back. They will fall from the sky, they will emerge from the sea and the place will flourish once more.

            I've long been impressed with the generosity of spirit in Thomas King's writing. Even in his non-fictional The Inconvenient Indian, the tone is refreshingly conciliatory when considered in the catalogue of literature chronicling indigenous/settler conflicts and injustices. For me as a privileged, white settler who recognizes the need for justice and reconciliation, a real danger exists that I will make the same mistake that governments and corporations have long made at the aboriginal/settler interface, namely the homogenization of “the opposition” into a blob such that the persons involved are rendered faceless and nameless . . . and insignificant.

       
            I began this review with a question: what responsibility does a minor functionary in a corporate entity bear for the actions of the conglomerate for which he works? I might have added: what responsibility do we all share for destructive behaviours that can ensue when we act corporately? I was surprised at the degree to which King practically answers this question for us in a near-essay in Chapter 82 where one of these “functionaries” recognizes his own role in an unbelievable disaster:

How had he come to such a fantasy, that there was a benign purity in scientific inquiry? He had mistaken the enterprise completely, had seen only the questions and had ignored the obvious answers.

  What was the proper goal of research?

  Profit.

  What was the proper use of knowledge?

  Power.

He could see his errors now, could see all his illusions in stark relief. Too late, of course. Very much too late.[iii]

I generally prefer that I be allowed to come to such a conclusion through the actions and words of the characters, but I'm willing to forgive King for superfluous guidance here, particularly as  The Back of the Turtle gave me probably the best read of the year.     

 Really.        

           

           

---

[i]Page 1

[ii] Invictus, William Ernest Henley

[iii]Page 466

Wiebe, Rudy - Come Back

 

Wiebe, Rudy. Come Back. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014

First, a disclaimer: for me to critique either the quality or the content of any of Rudy Wiebe's work would have to be considered presumptuous, what with fully a page-length of titles of literary work behind him, much of it publicly and critically acclaimed. So this is not about evaluating, but about the experience—by only me—to the reading of Come Back.

                A good friend gifted me with Come Back as we celebrated a "Thompson United Mennonite Church alumni" Christmas in Winnipeg recently. I was half way through it by the time we reached home in Rosthern and puzzling about the Author's Note that precedes the novel: "The 'Hal' in this fiction was a character in my first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many . . ." Was this necessary to prevent its being read as autobiography, possibly as a bookend complementing his 2007 Of this Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest?" I couldn't think of any other reason for the note; Come Back certainly doesn't depend on a reread of Peace Shall Destroy Many for coherency.

                But inasmuch as the primary setting in Come Back is territory on which I've walked a lot myself—roughly the Old Strathcona, Whyte Avenue section of Edmonton—and the fact that this is the same ground which both "Hal" and the author consider home, distinguishing the novel from the author was a challenge for me. Those who know Wiebe know that it's not only the setting that he and his fictional Hal Wiens have in common; tragedy very similar to that which gives rise to the central motif of the novel visited the Wiebe household in the early '80s and the existence of Aspen Creek also has family resonances.

                A writer's life quite obviously provides the grist from which a novel is milled. I recently read and reviewed Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows and it shares with Come Back the portrayal of that excruciating pain that is in-family suicide. Is the experience of losing a son, a father, a sister to voluntary, untimely death comprehensible only to those who've gone through it? I've wondered. And is the surviving family by implication invariably guilty of failing to prevent such a tragedy? I too have lost a child—in my case in a highway accident—and that experience has taught me that the stone-in-the-shoe of regret (guilt?) will linger, subside, recur for a lifetime but never disappear. This is a theme worthy of exploration and sharing and it's possible that novels like Toews' and Wiebe's fill a void, one made more poignant in our time by the reconsideration of voluntary death, abortion law and the postmodern climate's permission to rethink older, assumed paradigms regarding life and death.

                Come Back is far more complex than the above would suggest, however. Hal Wiens' "stone of regret" is reawakened 25 years after his son Gabriel took his own life at age 23. Hal and Dene friend Owl are having coffee on Whyte Avenue when through the window, Al sees an orange down-filled parka and the long-hair and walk that is exactly his long-dead son. He rushes out in pursuit, causes a traffic accident by running across the street against the red light but doesn't catch up to the person or apparition. The sighting drives him into his basement where his recently-departed wife, Yolanda, has stored all Gabriel's effects, particularly day planners, coil binders and scraps of writing that he compulsively filled  with thoughts and impressions in his final few years. It's this story within Hal's story that grips and stings: the despair, the hopelessness, the fatalism of a young man inexplicably and increasingly devoid of all joie de vivre.

[Day Planner: 25 July 1984]

8:00 why does it go on and on, self-inflicted. Dear God where are you  Man and alone  both sets of parents have cars  they must both be somewhere close  close only counts in horseshoes XH4U

5:30 DM fuer a Whopper and coffee

End this—

I can do it. To hell with money  here I go.

In bed by 9:45 p.m. Wednesday  o sweet sleep of the dead. be dead  (p. 61)

This excerpt from a diary entry posted while backpacking through Europe is typical of the stream of consciousness style of Gabriel's writing. He jots down a partial thought, something else occurs and the first thought breaks off. As reader, I found I had to do some work to grasp the flow of Gabriel's thinking while allowing the disconnectedness to live as representative of a disjointed, sad state of mind that would eventually lead to suicide.

                Why are we depressed? Why are some people chronically bipolar and others not? There's no certain explanation and Come Back suggests none. In Gabriel's notes, however, it becomes clear that there's stuff going on in him that's probably symptomatic of some pathology.  Particularly striking in his behaviour is his infatuation at 23 with the 13-year old daughter of family friends. Her name is Ailsa and he obsesses about her to the point of writing her letters and declaring his love for her repeatedly in his notes and diary. Memories of Nabokov's Lolita come to mind easily but Gabriel's obsession is that of a man just barely past boyhood and although he recognizes cognitively the absurdity of his unusual attraction (he is also infatuated with Nadia Comeneci and Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas, both females with little-girl-like characteristics), the fantasy of Ailsa as lover persists against all reason, including his own:

June 17, 1985

Well, I look at (in my mind's eye) A[ilsa]'s family and they are nothing special. Middle-class ordinary. And let's face it, what I've observed is that A is physically beautiful but otherwise nothing at all special either—I'm being very cruel—lousy school marks, Christian (?) rock, clothes clothes—why have I created her (with those incredible green eyes) into this legend? All of us, me in particular, are nothing special / I love her, I love everything about her, the things she likes, does, wears, I love every part of her body I have ever seen.

    What does one do with love, emotions, tenderness what stops me

    As the old joke goes: I refuse to worship a god who creates a pathetic lump like me. No way. (178)

                And then there must be some mention of his relationship to church, Christ and God beyond what is telling in his "old joke" above. The Wiens family has apparently been regulars at the generic Edmonton Mennonite Church and it becomes apparent in the latter part of the novel that Gabriel has spent considerable time perusing his Bible, even underlining passages that have struck him, but in a kind of "reverse proof texting" way. Gabriel is disappointed in both the church and the God who is adulated there. "So okay, God, you create a world, a world we have to exist in. Why?" (184) Those who attribute beauty and joy to the benevolent hand of God will adore him; those who experience their lives as tedious, often painful, always meaningless may attribute their reality to God as well, and despise him for it. Gabe's self-loathing generalizes to the one who made him.

                But Gabe's ennui and the tragic end to which it leads is essentially a sub-plot. We come back to those who live on with that stone of regret, of "if onlys." In this story it's Gabriel's father, Hal, the novel's protagonist and the one who can only barely abide the excruciating pain of a tragic past that can't be undone. Wiebe masterfully evokes his dilemma in the imagery of the orange down-filled parka flashback, the ravens that circle the intersection near the old Strathcona Hotel, the dizzying height of the High Level Bridge over which Gabriel used to pass (and from which, Hal realizes, he could have jumped at any time), the search for the wearer of the orange down-filled parka up and down the right bank of the North Saskatchewan.

                As readers, we empathize with Hal's longing for a chance to do over what causes us pain; the man in the parka is never found; the lost never Come Back.

                Come Back doesn't set out to propagate an idea or teach a lesson. It's neither an apology for faith nor for its opposite, doesn't paint a smile on the face of sorrow. What it does, though, is depict courageously and skillfully a significant reality in human life in a way that seems honest . . . at least to me.

                Does it succeed as art?  My test of that is simple: if it moves me, if it carries me along and lingers well after I've put it down, it's probably art. But such judgments end up being moot considerations most of the time, tangled up in questions of taste, literacy and whether or not what's read as a book, seen as a visual representation or listened to as speech or music supports our current and preferred worldview.

                Would I recommend it if asked? Yes, of course. I'd recommend it partly because it's a "hard read;" Wiebe's work has always assumed thoughtful effort on the part of his readers, and literary workouts are probably as good for us as physical exercise.

                If a "work of art" happens to provide insight into the life with which I personally am seeking to come to grips, well that's a bonus.

 

                 

 

 

 

 

Marsden, William. Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care). Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2007

With the rapid developments in the energy economy in the world these days, a book like Marsden's—published in 2007—seems almost . . . old. No mention here of the great pipeline discussions—Keystone, Northern Gateway, Kinder-Morgan—currently in the daily news.

The developments that brought us to this point, however, are summarized here, from Manley Natland's 1950s dream of extracting oil sands oil by detonating nuclear explosions underground to the current (at least to 2007) reality that is the great Alberta oil sands project. We're a country in a schizophrenic bind; addicted to fossil fuel energy and demanding the privileges of driving, flying, effortless home heating and cooling, we are nevertheless fearful of what our appetites are doing to the future of our world. Marsden gives us plenty of reasons for apprehension.

 

The history of the Athabasca oil sands doesn't begin with Natland's bizarre proposal. In 1788, Alexander MacKenzie wrote in his log: "At about 24 miles (39 km) from the fork (of the Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers) are some bituminous fountains into which a pole of 20 feet (6.1 m) long may be inserted without the least resistance. The bitumen is in a fluid state and when mixed with gum, the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, it serves to gum the Indians' canoes."ⁱ Although probably not as an energy source, the knowledge of and the utilization of the unique "tar" under the boreal forest of northeastern Alberta goes back thousands of years.

 

The era of fossil fuel energy use began only recently as geological historians measure time. Marsden traces the birth of the petroleum industry back to Black Creek—later Oil Springs, today the town of Petrolia—Ontario in 1858 where James Miller Williams discovered oil while digging a well. Since whale oil supplies were dwindling and Abraham Gesner had already developed a way of distilling oil to make kerosene, Williams saw an opportunity and the rush to harvest underground oil was on. The industry boomed, land was stripped, the first oil spill contaminated Lake St. Clair and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

 

But Marsden focuses on Alberta, whose reserves of conventional plus unconventional oil stocks rival and surpass those of Saudi Arabia. It's in Alberta that the drama of fossil fuels' final hiccup will likely be played out in Canada. The ability to extract oil economically worldwide has peaked and the oil sands of Alberta are becoming ever more attractive (along with the momentary benefits of fracking) to that part of the world economy that is founded on the profitability of petroleum:

Each year will bring a greater chance of chaos as oil and gas prices rise and nations begin to fight over what's left. Economies will slow and the collapse; refineries will become fortresses; armies will march, nation against nation, neighbour against neighbour, as we fight over every last puddle of fossil fuel. As we enter the downward curve on the oil reserve chart, the conflict will intensify (48).

This scenario accounts for the "Armageddon" in Marsden's title, I suppose. The possibility of an end- of-fossil-fuels apocalypse, however, should at least give us pause enough to move us toward rigorously developing alternative scenarios. (I'm reminded of Mark Twain's defense of bad habits involving alcohol and tobacco, etc. by cautioning that to come to approaching death with nothing to give up would be like a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard.)ⁱⁱ

 

But if Marsden is our guide on this subject, the future for Albertans is bleak. Syncrude, Suncor, Shell Canada continue to apply for permission to expand and license to do so is almost automatic; the Alberta government throughout has been in the pockets of big oil, Marsden contends, and despite the massive profits taken by oil companies, Albertans share of the harvest of their own resource has been pitifully small. And it doesn't end there. 

There are two ways to harvest oil sands oil: open pit and in situ, the latter involving separating the oil below ground and pumping it up. The surface mining of the oil creates an environmental mess that can be seen from the moon, apparently, and for which no certain reclamation method has been proven. Marsden takes us on a journey down the river from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and chronicles some of the (unproven) health-related effects of the chemicals finding their way into the Athabasca River, Lake Athabasca and potentially, the MacKenzie River system. Both in the fracturing of formations to release remnant pockets of oil not previously accessible and in the oil sands separation processes, chemicals known to be dangerous to health are required and this represents one of the 'unknown unknowns' that is worrisome to anyone concerned about the future of the province's population. 

 

I remember a news story about a woman near Rosebud, Alberta lighting the gases that came out of her faucet. Marsden visits families affected (apparently) by the material released in the fracking of coal beds in order to mine methane gas found in abundance in all such deposits. Thousands of such wells are projected to be developed in Alberta and evidence is that this cannot happen without the accidental or incidental release of amounts of methane gas. Oil companies have had to haul water supplies to residents in areas affected, in fact acknowledging that such mining of methane can contaminate wells as well as surface water. For ranchers like Francis Gardener in Happy Valley, the effects of oil industry encroachment looks a lot like the end of a way of life. With contamination of scarce water supplies, physical infrastructure for oil and gas extraction all over the formerly-pristine expanses of native fescue, the bell seems to be tolling for traditional rural life in southern Alberta.

All this may sound alarmist, but is it alarmist beyond reason? In Canada today, the debate about pipelines, oil sands and climate change is indication, surely, that we're beginning to see that the future can't be a facsimile of the past. The Harper government continues to pave the way for the oil extraction industry while watering down environmental regulation and we're quickly dividing ourselves into two antagonistic camps. Objections by aboriginal people whose life-ways are directly affected by the governments' disregard of treaty obligations starkly outline the parameters of the differences. Harper's comments routinely reflect a body of opinion that says that climate change mitigation must never cost the economy:

Recently prime minister Stephen Harper publicly criticized a polluter pay solution to growing emissions, saying no country would undertake climate action that might harm the economy. Onlookers were quick to critique Harper's economy versus environment framing, an outmoded way of viewing the transition to clean energy, a rapidly growing sector of the global economy.ⁱⁱⁱ

There's a great deal of denial going on; the oil sands being just another example of shitting on the dining room table and claiming that its really good for all of us.

Marsden is an investigative reporter for the Montreal Gazette and his credentials for the writing of Stupid to the Last Drop are impeccable. What I found most compelling was his on-the-ground research for the book; he introduces us to an assortment of Albertans directly affected by the subject matter. Augmenting this first-person approach is his extensive research into the nitty-gritty of oil-field politics: the takeovers, the manipulation of government and regulatory agencies, the denial of responsibility when things go wrong and, above all, the details of the enormous profit taking that has characterized the Alberta oil scene from Leduc to the present, and which likely means any fight by the Canadian public to seriously begin kicking the destructive fossil fuel habit will meet with massive resistance. 

 

i "Oil Sands History". Unlocking the Potential of the Oil Sands. Syncrude. 2006. Retrieved by Wikipedia in 2008-02-17; Retrieved from Wikipedia 2014-11-20

ii http://riverroadrambler.blogspot.ca/2012/11/mark-twain-on-bad-habits.html. Retrieved 2014-11-29

iii http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/carol-linnitt/harper-climate-pr_b_5883740.html. Retrieved 2014-11-29

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007

In New York after 9/11, brief but horrible images of people throwing themselves from windows high up in the World Trade Centre towers struck deep into people's minds to linger there. In DeLillo's superb novel about the days after 9/11, a performance artist repeatedly scales high places and hangs himself by harness from one leg, the other crooked in the manner of the falling man captured in an iconic photograph as he plunges to his death.

      Children are observed staring at the sky through binoculars, whispering about being watchful for the evil "Bill Lawton," their childish misunderstanding of the news of "Bin Laden" whose planes may well come again to wreak havoc.

      For Westerners, making sense of the carnage of September 11, 2001 is a near-impossible task. This confusion is masterfully portrayed through one family, an estranged couple, Keith and Lianne and their young son Justin. Keith is one of the lucky ones who escaped down a stairwell and walked away before the towers collapsed. Keith is physically injured—superficially—and ends up going back to his home where his wife and son accept him back, although never sure again who this man who was husband and father is now. A "survivor." 

      Through their struggles to gain a new footing, one can easily conclude that every person still walking the earth in the Western world today is a "survivor" of 9/11.

      Most Americans, I venture to guess, suffer mild to severe PTSD over 9/11.

      I marked pages 46ff as typical of the struggle to understand why men would kill themselves for the sake of killing many others, others who had done them no harm on any personal level. Nina—Lianne's mother—and her boyfriend Martin are talking:

"It's sheer panic. They attack out of panic."

"This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that's spreading," he said.

"There are no goals they can hope to achieve. they're not liberating a people or casting out a dictator. Kill the innocent, only that."

"They strike a blow to this country's dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies (p. 46)."

Who of us hasn't been in such a conversation?

      In several chapters, DeLillo takes us into the possible minds of some of the 9/11 suicide terrorists. In a conversation between a leader, Amir, and Hammad, a dutiful follower who longs for sacrificial death like a hungry man longs for food, Amir says:

" . . . there simply are no others. The others [those who will die] exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying."

Hammad was impressed by this. It sounded like philosophy (p. 176)."

In other words, the 3,000+ who died in the twin towers were born only for the purpose of dying in the demonstration that the terrorists had planned for them. In the eyes of fate, the terrorists were born to kill— the victims were born to fulfill the role of being killed on September 11, 2001.

      But the terrorists victory over the powerful USA was much, much more than the reducing of their numbers by 3,000 and their assets by several billions of dollars. And this "more" is really what DeLillo's novel so excruciatingly, personally lays out. For instance, survivor Kevin gives himself over to the gambling circuit, in effect dismissing the search for meaning in the actual world in order to preoccupy himself with odds that make sense. What refuge does one seek in a world where being born, killing and being killed is part of some horrendous joke of the gods, looking down and laughing at the futility of our small minds attempting to make meaning like children searching the skies for the evil Bill Lawton?

      Again, it's in the dialogue among Martin, Nina and Lianne that we hear echoes of our own thoughts as we ponder the meaning of Allah ordering this atrocity to be done and God allowing it to happen:

"But we can't forget God. They [the terrorists] invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there's something else but it's not history or economics. It's what men feel. It's the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever's behind it, whatever blind force or blunt force or violent need. How convenient it is to find a system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings."

"But the system doesn't justify this. Islam renounces this," he said.

"If you call it God, then it's God. God is whatever God allows (p. 112)."

Enslavement, loss and military defeat in the Old Testament are generally explained as consequences of sin, i.e. God allowing setbacks—or causing them—in order to set people back on a right course. Some have speculated—and DeLillo's novel suggests—that the 9/11 attack was a consequence of America's imperialist sins in the world. With or without naming God as complicit in this tragic development, the possibility that America brought and is bringing retribution down on its own head is not novel to the novel, but for America—who has repeatedly shown herself to be incapable of learning from even the most obvious lessons—this presents just one more pair of unmatched socks in its PTSD suitcase. If it's true, then there is no hope. 9/11 might be repeated endlessly until the whole country descends into a state of collective dementia.

      Which brings us to Lianne's occupation. She works as facilitator to a support group for persons living with early-onset dementia and, with her, we watch her subjects' descent into their final, meaningless worlds, their decline a poignant parallel to that of the characters suffering primarily from post 9/11 syndrome.

      I only recently paid attention to DeLillo on the recommendation of a friend. His White Noise is a novel I was aware of but hadn't gotten around to reading. Reviews of White Noise range from glowing to acerbic with few between. The range may be accounted for by the fact that some will invariably evaluate the quality of the process that produced a work of art while others will judge on the basis of taste for—or against—the subject matter. I tend to judge using a few simple criteria: 1) did the reading absorb me? 2) did the reading effect a mood change in me that lingered? and 3) did the reading raise important and ponderable questions? For me, a book that lacks artistic skill can never answer on the basis of these criteria; to be both moving and motivating, a piece of art must be at least so skillfully done that the brush strokes don't attract attention.

      Falling Man passes the test for me. DeLillo's prose is uncomplicated but rhythmic, sparse when it needs to be and imagistic and evocative by turn. The characters walk off the page and defy the reader to forget them. DeLillo has great command of the power in the merest gesture or word when its well chosen, well placed. Take page 58, where Keith and another survivor are snapshotted in the process of cigarette lighting and smoke blowing; the act flashbacking both the characters and us to the haunting images of smoke billowing from the twin towers.

      Most of us probably don't need to be reminded that 9/11 constituted a sea change in the history of civilization. Most of us remember what we were doing when we first heard. 3,000 people have died in natural disasters, sinking ships, battles, etc. many times in history, but this was different. This opened the door to possible nightmares to come, both for nations and for individuals, the latter so poignantly illustrated by the falling man acrobat/artist and young Justin combing the skies with binoculars in expectation of the return of the evil Bill Lawton.

      Two thumbs up!

The End of Faith - Sam Harris

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005

“As a [North American] culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not (144).”

Sam Harris penned these two sentences before ISIS and the brutality that characterizes their determination to carve out a caliphate in Syria and Iraq through horrible acts of genocide and forced conversion. Had he written it today, he might well have added a chapter right after his most pointed one condemning  Muslim faith as a predictable generator of exactly what we're seeing in the Middle East.

      But this book is not primarily a denunciation of aspects of Islamic faith; it points to the danger represented historically and presently by the clinging to indemonstrable and irrational religious beliefs. By far the heaviest concentration of criticism is for the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the most dangerous belief in all three—according to Harris—is the conviction that there is a life after death and that all persons will be judged by God and rewarded or punished for who they are, what they profess and what they do. 

     The bloodshed that has historically ensued from the exercise of religious dogmas is not difficult to research and demonstrate and Harris makes copious references to examples like the holocaust, the inquisitions, even the My Lai massacres, events that would not have been the horrors they were except for the under-girding of centuries of insupportable beliefs.

      Highly relevant to Harris' thesis is the observation that history is kinetic, religious holy books are static. Something as simple as the rethinking of the Biblical creation narrative in the light of modern archaeology, anthropology, etc., can bring faith up against a brick wall unless it has some resiliency, and the possibility of revising ancient understandings with the acquisition of new knowledge is made enormously more difficult by the presence of holy books that are considered to be inerrant, god-breathed and infallible. It's a conundrum that Abrahamic religions share and according to Harris, the very fact that people literally believe what is written—even if it was meant to be symbolic or metaphoric—represents enormous danger both to believers and to the world at large.

      Strident believers of all stripes will obviously find Harris offensive; I imagine many throwing it out after the first few pages: “Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one (13).” He goes on to assert that whether one's religious views are liberal or conservative, a tacit understanding reigns that beliefs about an afterlife (for instance) are not criticized— in fact, not even discussed. This, to Harris, demonstrates the irrational nature of religious faith as well as its tenacious hold on orthodoxy.

      Obviously, a distinction needs to be made between those who unconditionally believe—in the inerrancy of the book, for instance—those who harbour some doubt and those who claim to be believers but don't participate in an appreciable way in religious activity or discussion. Harris takes a swipe at liberal believers as being enablers to fundamentalist atrocity by being politely silent, a criticism that I, personally, need to give some thought. Fundamentalism in North America has drawn hugely damaging lines in the sand on questions like homosexuality, reproductive rights, stem cell research to cite just a few examples; moderate Christians like me have been milksops when it comes to challenging people who are essentially members of our tribe, as it were. An even better case is made for the tepid response among moderate Muslims to the atrocities of Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups.

      ISIS has opened a whole new chapter in East/West relations and has encouraged us to think again about our response to the wanton murdering of innocents on the basis of their ethnicity, faith or whatever marks them as “not one of us:” infidels, in their terms. To Harris, the actions of jihadists follow naturally from literal belief in the irrational, brutal pronouncements so overwhelmingly evident in the Koran. He cites fully 5 pages of references from the Koran that can be seen to predict and—for more moderate Muslims—excuse certain atrocities. “Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful punishment awaits them – 3:178 (120)” 

     Similarly, Christians and Jews can find handy excuses for atrocities like the Spanish inquisition in their scriptures: “If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing (leading fellow believers into idolatry) has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it – Deuteronomy 13: 12-16 (82).” Who can deny that in Christian and Jewish circles today, Biblically-inspired belief in chosenness and 'Godly' manifest destiny still plays a role in Palestine/Israel, making conflict resolution more than difficult? Who hasn't noticed that the current genocidal warfare being carried out by ISIS bears remarkable similarities to the conquest of Palestine by Joshua? (See Joshua Chapter 8, for instance.)

      Faith moderates under the influence of new knowledge and the passage of time. Most Christians with whom I dialogue don't take the beards, stonings and take-no-prisoners admonitions in parts of the Old Testament as prescriptive for them. At the same time, many of our teachers and preachers are bending over backwards to justify the inclusion of barbarous or absurd texts in our holy book by “contextualizing” them or shining the flashlight of the New Testament upon them. 

     Nevertheless, there remains in the Bible—a book that declares God to be a loving God—the suggestion that since he has counselled genocide, torture and destruction in defence of his people in the past, he might do so again. Who can safely predict that if ISIS grows and expands, the powers of the day in the West won't retreat to this understanding of God, this belief in the efficacy of righteous slaughter, only this time with weapons of mass destruction and not with swords and clubs?

      Warring faiths. Abraham's children butchering each other . . . again.

      The End of Faith was a New York Times best seller. I suspect that Sam Harris did very well financially on it and that many have read it. I'm curious about the way it was and is being read by both conservative and moderate Christians. 

     Some, of course, would proclaim that without an abiding, unquestioned faith in the reality of God as revealed in their particular holy book—as well as in the prospect of everlasting life—religion and even human life and consciousness are rendered utterly meaningless. 

     Those who see God and the book as the source and foundation of right and wrong, of ethics and morality might argue that without such beliefs, the world would quickly descend into bloodshed and chaos. 

     In his book, Can we be Good Without God, Robert Buckman proposes that “it might be a better world if we all believe whatever we wish, but behave as if there was no suprahuman deity to sort out our problems for us (Buckman: 264).” To that, many would undoubtedly say, “Don't hold your breath.”

      There is much to ponder in Harris' book. Reason vs. faith as opposed to faith in dialogue with reason, for instance. About one thing Harris is undoubtedly correct—if my experience is typical: Strident belief by its very nature pours cold water on dialogue, debate and a willingness to adapt.

      Harris sums up his central thesis in the afterword:

“Needless to say, my argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable (231).”

Miriam Toews - All my Puny Sorrows

Toews, Miriam. All my Puny Sorrows. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. 2014

At a recent seminar in Saskatoon on Faith and Literature, a participant raised a question regarding Miriam Toews’ writing and the apparent raging against things Mennonite found there—in his opinion. The family at the core of All my Puny Sorrow is ethnically Mennonite, their roots extending back through a fictitious Southern Manitoba place called “East Village” to the Russian-Mennonite immigration Of the 1870s. Mennonites are mentioned a dozen or more times, but they are not identical to those in the questioner’s imagination: “I don’t remember Mennonites of my youth being anything like Toews’ Mennonites,” he said.

                And neither do I, but then I’ve been around enough to know that the Mennonite basket contains many species ranging from the stoical, authoritarian, legalistic sort to the variety that barely differentiates from mainstream evangelical culture: Amish, Old Colony, Holdemann, Bergthal, Krimmer, General Conference, Franconian, MB, EMC, . . . the list is mighty long by now. What we know about the central characters in AMPS is that they have lapsed from a conservative village-church mentality as a gradual process over at least two generations so that the central character, Yolandi—now in her 40s—connects to Mennonite roots only through her aging mother, aunts, uncles and the memories of some Plaut Dietsch phrases, hymns and childhood ditties. Plus some lingering memories—quite probably distorted—of her childhood.

Memory of the restrictive culture of Yolandi’s youth surfaces frequently (“the bishop—the alpha Mennonite—came to our house for what he liked to call a visit . . . in reality it was more of a raid. He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car—they never carpool because it’s not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car . . . p. 11). And Yolandi—the first-person narrator—says of her sister Elf: “ . . . he’s not a Mennonite, which is important—in a man—for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame (p. 27).

But this is not “Mennonite Literature,” per se; and I would caution readers to get over these references and pay attention to the real story here. The transition from authoritarian, conservative ways of binding communities together to greater freedom of thought and action by individuals is painful in any culture. in fact, I would say that Toews has a tendency to exploit memories of religious restrictiveness and of her own life story too much, and to the detriment of her art. AMPS would not have suffered from omission of the “Mennonite” factor. In fact, I find it to be gratuitous and a major distraction besides being acquiescent to a degree of self-indulgence on the author’s part.  

                The theme around which AMPS revolves is summarized in its title, a phrase borrowed from a Coleridge poem, but the “puny sorrows” for Yolandi’s family are not actually that “puny.” Yolandi’s father is a fictionalized version of author Toews’ own father who suffered from clinical depression and took his life on a train track (see Swing Low by Toews). Family-suicide histories qualify—to my mind—as colossal, permanent sorrows that can debilitate those left behind and haunt the living as far as “the third and fourth generation” if Exodus 34: 6 & 7 are to be applied, and if suicide is considered an iniquity as one of Yolandi’s compatriots staunchly proclaims.

                Toews has again tackled life’s more difficult themes. What is living worth if sorrow and loss are its dominant characteristics? How might God—if there is one; Yolandi isn’t sure—view the self-destroying impulses of those for whom life is a wading through the psychological hell we call depression? What do the living owe to those who face the great abyss?

Yolandi’s mother is the betwixt and between Mennonite Muttachen with one foot in the ordered traditions of Mennonite village life and the other in the secular world in which her children and grandchildren now move. The novel is both a physical and a psychological journey from East Village to Winnipeg to Toronto, each stage representative of a life change for the main characters, where Toronto obviously represents a post-modern kind of world with little in common with southern Manitoba. As her generation and her ties disappear, Yolandi’s mother eventually finds herself adapting to Toronto in Yolandi’s haphazard household: “She’s a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer, and who has rather suddenly moved to the trendy heart of the nation’s largest city to begin, as they say, a new chapter in her life (p. 285).” The intent is unclear and this sentence—complete with the mixed metaphor of being “tossed through life’s wringer”— exemplifies some of the things that make this a flawed novel on several levels.

Despite repeatedly telling us about the inner workings of characters and the inclusion of copious dialogue, the most important characters are, unfortunately, caricatures. Elfrieda (Elf) is a successful and talented concert pianist with lots of accolades, approbation and money, apparently. Through the first three-quarters of the novel, she is in hospital whining to Yolandi about wanting to die, begging Yolandi to help her die, refusing to eat, all without any substantial clue as to the motivation behind this drawn-out desire to be dead. Her “unjustified” despair may accurately portray the reality of a certain mental state which I don’t for one minute want to disparage, but this is a novel, a work of art, and an accepted standard of this particular art is that the characters be full-bodied. Why doesn’t she want to be cured? one can justifiably ask.

Yolandi is, of course, the central character and narrator and I can already hear speculations as to her possible autobiographical source. I’ve nothing to add to that discussion either way, but it’s actually irrelevant. I once had a discussion with Rudy Wiebe in a fiction writing course in which I defended the actions of one of my characters on the basis that “it actually happened.” “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It can’t happen in the piece of art you’re trying to create without spoiling the whole.” Verisimilitude was what Wiebe was trying to teach me about and I find it missing in Yolandi who encourages confusion with her creator by saying things like: “. . . I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too (p. 201). The fact that Yolandi writes rodeo romances but would like to write a real artistic novel plays against her sister’s artistic accomplishments, but the way this irony is mishandled here leaves the reader wondering if Yolandi is a really smart person who says and does things that are beneath her, or just a flake who repeats stuff she’s heard that she hopes will identify her as brilliant . . . in an avant-garde, Toronto-kind-of-way, of course.

Readers of AMPS that I’ve encountered have high praise as do reviewers on Amazon. I agree that it’s an engrossing read and that that was my experience as well. So there are a number of features on which Toews has obviously hit the mark, although I would say that part of the appeal comes from our tendency to run toward a plane crash to satisfy our curiosity. AMPS is a plane crash, and as news of a literal crash must subside and be relinquished—overtaken by the ordinary—so Toews’ plane crash must have a critical climax followed by the cooling smoulder of ruins scattered on the site; a “novel crash” must have a satisfying denouement. In the case of AMPS, the period between the crash and “the end” is too long for my taste—to the point of tediousness even.

Readers who follow Toews’ career shouldn’t miss the interviews on You Tube, particularly the one done by CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi.