One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.
Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female. England would be seen as an Alice constantly confronted by absurd rules and conventions, Italy as the rebellious and soul-searching Pinocchio, Switzerland as the determined and self-sufficient Heidi and Canada as that intelligent, concerned survivalist, Anne of Green Gables.
After last call at three a.m. the sun
on the horizon like a giant lodestar
would guide us over uneven boardwalks and dirt roads
toward the George Black Ferry, across
the mud-fed Yukon River to where our hidden world
of tents lay inside a maze of birch,
where branches knocked and clacked in the wind
like the restless bones of ghosts,
where someone always screamed blue murder back
at the landlocked sled dogs as they cried
and howled at the lingering season
and stunning lack of darkness
inside the night...
I found an answer at another film, Alan Zweig’s I, Curmudgeon. Zweig, a Canadian director, is known for his documentary Vinyl, which delved into the strange world of obsessive record collectors.
Roy Woodbridge tries hard to connect everything in his somewhat despairingly named book, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline (University of Toronto), in which he calls for a “war on ecological decline”—a war on the forces that degrade nature. This is a logical and thoughtful book, perhaps because Woodbridge apparently has no political axe to grind.
Alphabet, a novel by Kathy Page (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), is a hopeful story, even though its subject, Simon Austen, is a disturbed, inarticulate, illiterate murderer who is spending his life in a British prison. What makes Simon interesting to readers is that somehow he is mustering the wherewithal to improve his own life, even though in tiny increments.
On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the assumption that there is no such thing as coincidence, I cracked open Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home by Margaret Macmillan et al, (Knopf) and began looking at the pretty pictures.
There is a long tradition of boy-publishing in Canada. Many of our prestigious small magazine and book publishing outfits were founded some thirty years ago by young male writers and publishers who were determined to reinvigorate the publishing industry with a kick-ass attitude, a printing press, a couple of cases of beer and a mandate to stop publishing boring has-been crap. More than one of their young male Canadian writers was photographed while smoking a cigarette—a sure sign that one is in the presence of boy-publishing. For some years the supply of high-quality boy-publishing has been dwindling, but fortunately, now we have the ambitious Pine magazine.
