Having
been promised that a bottle of Lagavulin 16 would be on the table, your
sharp-as-a-tack correspondent dragged himself away from Robbie’s, and the
sunshine on Leith. Soon I was making a rare appearance at the Monthly Book
Group, meeting in misty Morningside.
I was
just relaxing into the first slug of the amber nectar when the host said
“Canada?” “No” I replied, “never with a malt…” and then the frosty stares made
me grab my pen…
Introducing
“Canada” (2012) the proposer said that Richard Ford was an American novelist
and short story writer. His best-known works were the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock
Springs. He was
associated with the ‘Dirty Realism’ movement, which includes Raymond Carver
(see discussion 26/11/08). He was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, and
changed from the study of law to that of creative writing. Like David Lodge, he
had combined University posts with his writing career. He had won many prizes,
notably the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day.
Ford has
described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all
of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things
look on the page".
For
example, when asked why this novel was called ‘Canada’ he said ‘“Canada” –
the word – possessed for me (and still does) what I think of as a plush
suppleness. I like the three softened “a” sounds ... sandwiched among those muted, staccato'd consonants. I like
its pleasing, dactylic gallop on my tongue. I like its rather stalwart, civic
assertiveness to the foreigner's eye’.
[Run that one by me again? Dactylic
gallop??!!
Was he serious, or was he throwing dirt in the critic’s eye? The only answer
was surreptitiously to award myself another generous measure of Islay’s finest.
Now that’s what I call plush suppleness….]
So why
did the proposer choose it? Well ….. he went to Waterstone’s to buy ‘The Secret
Race’, and it was a “buy one get a second half price” offer. He had read Ford’s
‘Sportswriter’ and thought it so-so, but saw ‘Canada’ and thought maybe he
deserved a second chance.
And then
the opening lines had him hooked: “First, I'll
tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened
later”.
“Canada” much impressed the Group. The book was unusual in a number of
ways. The most obvious was that the author kept telling you what was about to
happen before he described the event, as above, thus removing, at least
superficially, suspense. Yet surprisingly this technique did not reduce
the reader’s interest in what followed. If anything it enhanced it, as we
wanted to know the detail of what happened. And the detail of feeling and
description was Ford’s forte. He had the ability to conjure up the fabric of a
scene so convincingly that you felt you were there. He created the very texture
and rhythm of human interaction, the way that people thought as they dealt with
each other, the way they spoke, the quirky little images of a scene that embed
themselves in the memory.
Other writers – such as George Eliot or Henry James – like
to analyse human interaction in similar detail, but they could be quite hard
work to read without attention wandering. However, Ford was not like that at
all. You always wanted to read more, to find out more. He was very accessible,
and if the book was relatively long it could quite accurately be described as a
page-turner.
To achieve this was literary craftsmanship of a highest
order, and reflected a long apprenticeship. Part of the effect was due to his
feeling for language and rhythm. He was very adept in not wasting words, and in
using short sentences, paragraphs and chapters if needed to hold the reader’s
attention. He did not bombard
the reader with descriptive passages, but illuminated his work with the
occasional striking image.
The
structure of the book was unusual. It was divided into three un-named parts,
all narrated in the first person by Dell. The first was set in the mid-to-late
1950s in Great Falls, Montana. It dealt with the build-up to a bank robbery by
Dell’s parents – his plausible, self-confident and unsuccessful father and his
introverted, literary mother. The second described how Dell was spirited over
the border to a pioneer town in rural Canada. His new life, as an odd-job man
for a mysterious American fellow-exile, soon led to his unwitting involvement
as an accomplice in a ruthless double murder. Soon he was again spirited away,
this time to a different part of Canada. The short third part, set in present
times, sketched in the intervening years in which Dell had become a lecturer in
English literature at a Canadian college. After a fair amount of philosophising
about what Dell has learnt from his experiences, and about how he survived
them, it dealt with Dell’s visit to his dying twin sister in Minneapolis.
Ford’s
characterization was very strong. Dell, the narrator and centre of the book,
was characteristic of the child of a military family always on the move - very
self-reliant and with no friends other than his twin sister. From the outset he
was an outsider, a loner, an observer looking through the glass into life and
not actively engaged. Dell was attracted as a child to chess and bees – both
zones of order. Dell was very accepting and did not blame his parents
for what happened. Nor was he scared. He did not let things affect him much,
did not allow himself to go under. Sh*t happened, and at end he emerged.
Despite the shocks of the robbery and the murders, it was remarkable what a
very orthodox and ordered life Dell had lived.
Dell’s sister Berner, to whom he was very close, was
very different – rebellious, rushing into things, chaotic. Three times married,
she could only live “on the
margins of conventional life”. Berner was unequivocally against her parents at
time of robbery, but took to calling herself by her father’s name – Bev – once
he was dead. This could be seen as an attempt to reconcile herself to her past, and to
her father. However, we knew little about her life after the robbery, as the
twins split up aged fifteen.
Dell’s
parents were so well drawn you felt you knew that you would recognize them if
you saw them in a shop, or walking down the street. We could identify with the
problems faced by demobbed members of the Forces such as his father. We also
recognized the man who thought he could get away with every scam. His mother
had made two cataclysmic mistakes. She had married an unsuitable man when
pregnant, instead of putting the twins up for adoption. She had joined in the
robbery when she was already planning to leave her husband. In both cases she
had weakly caved in. It was intriguing how the parents had rationalized the robbery into
something less than a crime, and amusing how they bungled its execution.
The
figure of Reminger seemed a little less plausible, with something of a Gatsby
imitation about him. However, Reminger’s character and motivation gained
plausibility when he committed the murders. The half-caste Charley Quarters was
a very striking creation, but again not wholly plausible, particularly when he
was used as the vehicle to recount Reminger’s past.
Ford’s
sense of place was very strong. Fifties USA was convincingly evoked, and Canada
was brilliantly realized. This was pioneer Canada – lawless life on the
margins, carnal and brutal, disfigured by decay and detritus as ghost villages
rotted away. It was as different from the middle-class Montana that Dell knew,
and the tourist Canada that we knew, as can be imagined. It was remarkable how Dell remained
positive despite living in this desolate borderland.
Crossing
the border from Montana into Canada had a symbolic resonance. It took Dell away
from his childhood into his manhood, and America became a foreign country much
as childhood does. Yet there were some parallels between the two. On each
occasion a father figure detonated change. In Montana it was Dell’s real
father. In Canada it was Reminger, another chess-player, who asked Dell to play
the role of his son in the confrontation that led to murder. Oddly, both
fathers were bombers – his father in the airforce during the war, and Reminger
in his activist period.
We could
not resist discussing relations between Canada and the USA. These had often
been tense, as Americans saw Canada as British North America and
unfinished business. The Americans attacked Canada during the1812 war, and
continued to make plans to invade Canada until well into the twentieth century.
So what
were the main themes of “Canada”?
[Alas
the group was not finished, but the Lagavulin was. What a great invention the
screw top is, allowing you to sneak into your glass a few fingers of red from
your secretly stashed bottle…]
The
proposer empathized with the book’s sense that the accidental, the random, was
dominant in life, and that there was no such thing as fate. This was the “sh*t
happens” school of philosophy. It emerged very clearly from the events in Parts
1 and 2, such as the carcase deal gone wrong, the
decision to rob the bank, Dell and Aunt Mildred fleeing the authorities etc.
The lives of Dell and Berner would have been very different if it had not been
for these events. The book could be seen as illuminating the error of the human impulse first to try to control our ‘fate’, and
then retrospectively to try to make sense of our life, and give it some
importance.
As the narrator put it on the last page: “I’ve often thought that
where I live here, now – in the screwy way of things – was meant to be. But I
simply don’t believe in these ideas. I believe in what you see being most of
what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life is passed along to us
empty.”
However, the narrator was not entirely consistent, as when he said movingly of
his father when he turned to crime: “I’ve thought that a long-suppressed
potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face. He was
becoming who he was and who he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to
wear down the other layers to find out who he was.” But then artists did not have to
be consistent.
Related to this, Ford seemed to believe that good and evil are not
opposing forces but rather a matter of accident. “It’s best to see our life
as and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be
held in the mind simultaneously.... the side that was normal and the side that
was disastrous” and “how close evil is
to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil.” This might be a
debatable position, but the novel certainly brought out powerfully the sense
that committing a crime was an easy thing to do, that it was easy to fall
through the ice.
Part 3
was the only part to attract some adverse comment. One member indeed felt that
the book would have been better without it. Parts 1 and 2 were written in the
tone and language of a 15 year old telling the story, not the language of
someone reflecting in his sixties. A much older man could never have remembered all the detail with which
Dell was writing. Perhaps Part 3 had been an afterthought? There was a
hint or two in the acknowledgements that it had proved difficult to finish the
book.
Another
felt that the narrator was becoming too autobiographical in tone in Part 3.
Ford’s childhood had been disrupted by his father’s heart attack, and he had
spent much time thereafter with his grandfather, a hotel owner and retired
prize-fighter. Had the novelist achieved sufficient distance from his creation?
Another
felt that all the home-spun philosophizing in Part 3 was excessive. The author
had forgotten the principle of “show not tell”. And it was ill judged to attempt to do his
own literary criticism, in the clumsy guise of describing how his literature
students reacted to his life story. But just as this reader was becoming irked,
the author switched back to story-telling mode as he told the story of Dell
crossing the border to meet his dying sister. And immediately the reader was
hooked again, as Ford effortlessly conjured up the meeting, with all the little
nuances of dialogue that reveal feelings, and all the little details of the
scene that snag in the memory. And, for him, this got much closer to felt life
than did Ford the philosopher. It brought back what an exceptional writer Ford
was.
One member pointed out that Dell’s later life was
certainly consistent with what had gone before. He had married an accountant,
and had no children. You could say he had taken an “intellectual diazepam” to
the strife of life. He had become a teacher, an observer and analyzer of life.
And Part 3 was also used to explore our urge to make sense of
what has happened in our lives, to post-rationalize events, to think we have
been in control. This urge might be self-deceiving, but was also very strong: “normal
life was what I was trying to preserve for myself. Through all these memorable events
... - it is all of a piece, like a musical score with movements, or a puzzle,
wherein I am seeking to restore and maintain my life in a whole and acceptable
state, regardless of the frontiers I’ve crossed. I know it’s only me that makes
those connections. But to try not to make them is to commit yourself to the
waves that toss you and dash you against the rocks of despair.....”
The group then started debating how realistic it was that Dell would
have sought so little contact with his twin in later life, or that his father
would have made no effort to contact his children after coming out of prison.
And should Reminger not have killed Dell too as the witness? Hold on, these
were not real people and you had to give the author some artistic leeway…..
Basta!
Yours truly put the top on the pen, pushed the now mysteriously empty bottle of
red under the table, and lurched out into the murky November evening. Up ahead
I could see yellow lights still shining in the windows of Bennets. Yes! I upped
my pace, to a dactylic gallop….
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