Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 8

Slow Dance, by Rainbow Rowell

I found Slow Dance to be a fun and extremely readable novel about a couple of high-school friends, Shiloh and Cary, who meet up again at a mutual friend’s wedding. Shiloh and Cary never dated in high school, had a close brush with romance when Shiloh was in college and Cary was in the neighbour, and then grew apart after some painful misunderstandings. Now both single again, they are finding their way slowly back to each other, but real life in adulthood is full of complexities – Shiloh has two young kids and is sharing custody with her ex-husband; Cary is still in the navy but visiting their hometown to help his disabled mother, who is living in poverty while still being responsible for lots of other, needier family members. I really enjoyed how believable this depiction of romance amid the complications of family, friends, and memories was.

A Class Act, by Rob Beckett

We often pick memoirs by UK comedians we both enjoy as audiobooks to listen to when my husband and I go on road trips. This one was fun; we haven’t seen a lot of Beckett’s stand-up (if any?) but have enjoyed watching him on panel shows and of course Taskmaster. (Rob randomly guessing the “What’s in the Briefcase” task is one of my favourite things from possibly my favourite Taskmaster task of all time, which got me hooked on the show).

While this is a memoir, and is quite funny, there is a serious question underlying it: what is social class, how does it operate in the UK, and what does it mean to move between classes. Rob Beckett’s family origins are solidly working class: does the fact that he’s now a well-off comedian mean that he’s changed social classes? What does it mean that his kids are being raised in a social class very different from the one Rob grew up in himself? Examining all these leads to some hilarious hijinks, as you might imagine, but also a few serious thoughts about the way we divide up and categorize people, and how you stay true to your roots when your circumstances change. I enjoyed this a lot.

Adequate Yearly Progress, by Roxanna Elden

On one level, this is a light and often funny novel about a group of teachers making it through the school year, the rivalries and bonds among them, what different lessons they all learn. On another level, it’s the most dystopian nightmare scenario I’ve ever read, since it’s apparently a relatively realistic portrayal of public-school teaching in some US states (it’s set in Texas). For someone whose teaching experience was in Canada and who hasn’t been in a public high school setting for many years, it’s kind of terrifying. The dystopian vibes come not so much from bad student behavior (though there’s plenty of that) but from intrusive, micro-managing administrations driven by frankly weird political initiatives to “improve” classroom teaching, forcing teachers to waste time writing meaningless objectives on the board and using their non-compliance in silly minutiae to fire teachers deemed problematic. It was really troubling to read and realize that that’s the reality for a lot of US teachers (along with the threat of school shootings, book banning, etc).

I found a glimpse into this teaching world so different from my own experience very interesting to read, and thought the characters were well-developed, with a depth that went beyond the initial race/class/gender stereotypes they could have easily fallen into.

Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade, by Janet Skeslien Charles

Well, how could I resist a book with this title?

This is one of those novels that unlocks a nearly forgotten part of history — in this case, the American women who went to France near the end of and after the First World War to offer aid and help rebuild communities devastated by war. The “Miss Morgan” of the title was a real woman, a famous philanthropist who was the daughter of the wealthy banker J.P. Morgan. While Morgan and her partner, Dr. Anne Murray Dike, are characters in this novel, the main character is a lesser-known (but still real!) member of her book brigade, a librarian named Jessie Carson who, unlike most of the other women involved, was working-class rather than wealthy, and did much to create the library system in France after the war.

The historical story is interspersed with a later story of a librarian in the 1980s who begins researching the documents related to Jessie Carson and the other members of “Miss Morgan’s book brigade.” I’d never heard of any of these women or this story before, so I’m glad to have read the book and learned about it.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea

This is an absolute delight of a book for anyone who’s even a mild Shakespeare/theatre geek, as well as a Dame Judi Dench fan. The book grew out of many, many hours of interviews that Brendan O’Hea recorded with Dench about her lifelong experience which has encompassed playing nearly all the female roles in Shakespeare, in a variety of productions. When the material from those interviews was edited and distilled down into a book, Dench herself could not read her own parts for the audiobook, as her eyesight is now very poor. Barbara Flynn does an amazing Dench impression in her reading (perhaps their voices are just that similar, but I absolutely would have believed it was Dench all the way through) and the real Judi Dench (sounding almost exactly the same but audibly older and frailer) recites some of the many Shakespeare soliloquys and speeches she has memorized, interspersed throughout the book. There’s also a bonus interview between O’Hea and Dench at the end where they talk about recording the book and you get a sense of how funny and chaotic all those original hours of recording must have been.

It’s also interesting, as someone who’s studied Shakespeare in university and taught his plays in high school for many years, to listen to a veteran actor who knows the plays inside and out, talk about them from an acting perspective. Dench has so many shrewd insights on the plays in general and Shakespeare’s women in particularly — but there are many questions that O’Hea asks, especially some about character motivation and backstory, that she just stops dead with “Well, you can’t be thinking about that when you’re playing the part.” It’s a really interesting insight into what a truly great actor does and doesn’t consider when playing a part.

Vigil, by Susie Taylor

When I found out that Susie Taylor, author of the wonderful Even Weirder Than Before, had a new book coming out, I was naturally excited. Then I saw the subtitle: “Stories.” Will I like this? I wondered — because, as regular readers of this blog might know, while I admire the short story as an art form and have the greatest respect for those who write it well, I would always rather pick up a novel than a short-story collection. If someone is going to brilliantly sketch characters and setting for me, I want to immerse myself with those characters in that setting for 250-300 pages or more, not get torn away every 30 pages or so to a new place with new people.

(I absolutely recognize this is a shortcoming with me as a reader, not with the short story as a form).

Vigil is actually a collection of linked short stories, the type of book that sits gently in that space between novel and short-story collection. All the stories deal with a common cast of characters in the fictional town of Bay Mal Verde, Newfoundland (pretty obviously based on Harbour Grace for anyone who knows the region). All the stories relate, in some way or another, to a single event: the death of a young man named Stevie, the latest victim in the epidemic of drug-related deaths in this quiet outport an hour’s drive from St. John’s.

This was enough like a novel to draw me in and keep me engaged — the setting, the characters, the central problem that would stay with me throughout the whole book. Unlike a novel, the story doesn’t unfold chronologically or even in flashbacks, or stick with one or a handful of viewpoint characters. Rather, it tells the story of Stevie’s tragedy, of the town’s tragedy, like a mosaic or a stained-glass window — selecting individuals, moments, scenes from past and present to show how the influx of hard drugs has impacted young people and old from all corners of this community.

Taylor’s gaze on the people of Bay Mal Verde is both generous and unsparing. The same character can be — and often is — both hero and villain, or perhaps neither. A drug dealer who is both directly and indirectly responsible for so many deaths can also be kind and generous to his own family and to those he sees as vulnerable. But there’s no sentimental “heart of gold” whitewashing here: neither good or evil in a person’s character cancel each other out. Rather, each character in this book, whether a recurring one who appears in several of the stories or one who takes centre stage only in a single story, makes beautiful and terrible decisions. Everyone is fragile; everyone is needy; everyone is cruel. There is black, and white, and all shades of gray, but no simple answers.

Contemporary outport Newfoundland life, with ATVs and gas-station convenience stores, and scratch tickets and alcohol and hard drugs and all the rest, is depicted here in vivid detail, as are the rhythms of speech and language that bring the characters to life. This is not your Nan’s Newfoundland outport kitchen, except that it probably is, if your Nan is currently under 70 and living in an outport. By which I mean it’s not an idyllic and idealized version of outport life: it’s thirty-years-post moratorium outport life, with economic hardship laid alongside flashy displays of Alberta oil money and, increasingly, drug money, keeping the economic engines ticking over. It’s not a tourism commercial: it’s the litter in the streets that the tourism commercials won’t show, that we want to look away from.

Don’t look away.

Vigil feels so organic to the community where it’s set that it can be jarring to remember that the author is not “from here” but moved here from elsewhere in Canada. However, Taylor herself doesn’t want us to forget this, and foregrounds here “away-ness” in the bold decision to include a character who has moved to Bay Mal Verde from outside Newfoundland: a character named Susie. Susie is a queer woman, an artist, an outsider, a woman living alone since her partner left her, a runner who covers miles of Bay Mal Verde’s roads daily but will never be viewed as “one of us.” Some key moments in these stories are told through Susie’s point of view; in some stories, we see other characters observing, judging, and commenting on her just as she observes and judges them.

In other words, Susie the character both is and is not like Susie the author; she is a constant reminder that this is a story filtered through an observer’s perception, as all stories are. And yet, in drawing attention to the outside observer, Taylor also draws attention to how transparent she has made these stories feel, how the reader has been brought to ride along in a character’s truck cab, into a crowded bar, up to the counter of the gas station store. We are there and not there, experiencing and observing, judging and accepting.

All this to say: did I like it? “Like” is not the word for a book as exquisitely rendered as this one, treating such difficult and painful topics. I loved it. I devoured it. It hurt. Maybe it even helped.

You should read Vigil.

North Woods, by Daniel Woods

North Woods is such a strange and fascinating book. The premise sounds much more straightforward than the book itself turns out to be: it is a fictional history of a particular piece of land, and the house built upon it, in Massachusetts: a story of the land and the people who live on it over four centuries.

But the book is so much stranger than that. For one thing, when I hear that a novel is going to centre around a particular location over several centuries, I expect that it will also be to some degree a family story, tracing the descendants of the original inhabitants through generations. But (probably more realistically, for most land and old homes) almost everyone who lives on this particular land dies childless; the property passes through dozens of unrelated owners, so that the continuous memory of who has lived there and how the land has been used exists, for the most part, only in the narrative itself, not in the memories of the characters.

It’s almost much more experimental than a straightforward historical novel: as well as telling different stories through time, the author employs striking different narrative voices and literary genres. It’s also very much a ghost story; characters don’t cease to be active within the story after their deaths. The writing is as haunting as the ghosts themselves, and in general I found this a compelling and beautiful book from start to finish.

Beholden, by Lesley Crewe

Set in Cape Breton and spanning the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, Beholden is a story of family secrets, lies, and their impact on several characters, particularly three women and one man whose lives are indelibly impacted by these secrets. I found the writing here easy to get into, the characters engaging and the plot twists interesting. Best of all was the Cape Breton setting which felt so vivid and real. This was an enjoyable summer read.

The Adversary, by Michael Crummey

The Adversary is not a sequel, but a companion volume, to Crummey’s The Innocents. The titular innocents in the earlier novel, an orphaned brother and sister, have to decide whether to move from their isolated home to the nearest community of Mockbeggar; this novel takes place in Mockbeggar during the same time period. (“Mockbeggar” is a fictional town, but in trying to place it in the geography and history of Newfoundland it might not hurt to remember that there was a real fishing plantation called Mockbeggar, now a national historical site, in the town of Bonavista).

I’ve heard Michael Crummey read from this book twice, and talk about the fact that if The Innocents is an Adam-and-Eve type of story, The Innocents is the matching Cain-and-Abel story. Once again we have two siblings, a brother and a sister, but instead of being bound by love and fidelity as the children in The Innocents are, Abe Strapp and his sister, whose first name we never learn (she becomes known as “The Widow Caines” later in life, and this is how she is referred to throughout the book) loathe each other from childhood. When they grow up to control the two powerful merchant firms in Mockbeggar — Abe through inheritance and The Widow through marriage — their personal enmity becomes amplified to the point where the town is torn apart by their feuding.

It’s common, in historical fiction set in outport Newfoundland (and I would put some of my own work in this category) to balance the harshness of the external environment — weather, shipwreck, disease — with the warmth of human community: while many novels portray difficult and tangled human relationships, there is usually an underlying theme of people who will pull together and support one another through the hard times. What makes The Adversary so stark and unyielding in its portrayal of the past is the absence of that warmth and support. While there are good people in Mockbeggar, the cruelty and hate between its most powerful people permeates everything, making this not just a powerful historical but a sobering and timeless reflection on what happens when evil is given power.

Denison Avenue, by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes

A few years ago, I was somewhere other than home — I can’t remember where now, but possibly Halifax, as that’s the place I’ve been most in the last few years. Or it could have been Toronto, which would be appropriate for this post. Anyway, I passed a person on the street collecting recyclable cans and bottles in a grocery cart, as many people do here at home, but was startled to see that the person was an older Asian woman. Here at home, I’ve only ever seen white men, usually older men, collecting recyclables to turn in for money; where I live, it’s generally a money-making activity pursued by men who are making a fairly marginal living, often on social assistance, and is not a job I would expect to see either a woman or a new Canadian doing. But the person I mentioned this to after seeing the woman that day said that in their area, it was quite common for Asian seniors, especially women, to collect recyclables.

That was the context I had when I started reading Dennison Avenue, a novel (or is it??) about a Chinese-Canadian woman, Wong Cho Sum, whose husband dies suddenly, leaving her alone in the house they have shared for decades. The story unfolds not in a traditional narrative, but in scenes, snippets, and poetry, as Wong Cho Sum navigates widowhood, old age, memories, and the changing neighbourhood around her. She has lived her life in Toronto’s Kensington Market/Chinatown area, which is being gentrified around the original residents, forcing many out. Wong Cho Sum is not destitute — and in fact could be very well off if she were willing to sell her house, sought-after by developers — but she is thrifty, and when a friend introduces her to the fine art of picking through recycling bins for returnable cans and bottles, it becomes not only a small source of income, but a new way for her to see the neighbourhood she has known for so long.

Daniel Innes’s beautiful illustrations are not sprinkled throughout the story — they are not, really, illustrations of the story at all — but rather grouped together at the back of the book (you flip the paperback to read the novel one way; the collection of drawings the other way). Like the story, the drawings are an evocative tribute to a fast-changing neighbourhood. There are two drawings on each page, and most (all?) the pages feature the same location at different time periods. I would have liked to see captions indicating where each drawing is, and the time periods depicted in each — but that’s just my usual desire for more information, and has no real bearing on the beautiful writing and drawing in this book that evokes not just a sense of place, but nostalgia for that place.