The Carnivore, by Mark Sinnett

Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.

This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.

Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had lost most of its momentum before moving north and breaking up, dropping most of its moisture on Toronto. What hit Ray and Mary was much the same; not a passing storm, but an immense flood that did irreparable damage to their relationship.

Raymore Drive, where Ray is literally (and figuratively) swept away by Hurricane Hazel.

As a young ingénue, Mary “hoped, and trusted even, that we could share an extraordinary love, and that would set us apart.” Because her husband had already cheated on her multiple times, Mary comes off as kind of a sucker, and her resentment at committing to her sinking ship of a marriage only grows into deep-seated bitterness as she ages. The only time I sympathized with her character was in relation to Ray, a very particular kind of monster. Completely devoid of any redemptive quality, Ray is eaten by his own selfishness, trapped in memories of his past and hurting everyone along the road to the future, left only to ask himself: “Will something change if I relive it enough times?”

The most remarkable thing about The Carnivore was that, through all of this, I wanted to keep reading. Desperately. Sinnett creates such a vivid and honest picture of Ray and Mary’s world that reading the book feels something like looking over their shoulders during the course of their relationship. Because it moves along at such a furious pace, however, I never felt like I was stuck too long in a room with an arguing couple and needed to escape. Though my first reaction was that the ending was somewhat anticlimactic juxtaposed against the action of the novel, it fits; in a story where sheer, white-knuckle survival is key, the real triumph is that they survived each other.

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Bonus! Mark Sinnett reading from The Carnivore:

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No Previous Experience: A Memoir of Love and Change, by Elspeth Cameron

This is a work of non-fiction. All names, places, and events in this book are real. If the author happened to teach you Canadian poetry in university, you may get a little freaked out.

I remember the third year of my undergraduate degree very well; among other adventures, it was the year I took an early Canadian lit course with Elspeth Cameron. I used to hang out in the ‘English Lounge’ with all the other lit nerds, and there was constant rumbling about this Elspeth person, an adjunct professor about whom gossip was either directed at her personal life or the horrifying, truly horrifying ‘quizzes’ that were more like the kind of exams where all the questions are taken from obscure footnotes.

When I picked up her memoir I realized that all the rumours were true. For this reason, and for many others, I was absolutely gripped by her story.

No Previous Experience has been called Cameron’s ‘coming out’ book, the story of her voyage into her first lesbian relationship – with longtime friend and colleague Janice Dickin McGinnis – and the steps that brought her there. Ironically, this book gave me the sense that the term ‘lesbian’ couldn’t mean less to Cameron. It’s a story of the failure of her life with men, her discovery and appreciation of female friendships, and the ability, after a lifetime of abuse, to fall breathlessly in love with someone who just so happened to be female.

No Previous Experience

The love story that eventually shakes out of this book relies on the breakdown of Cameron’s third marriage. After marrying her highschool boyfriend (he wanted to protect her reputation after one of her first-year professors got her pregnant), and then later marrying that same professor and having two more children with him, only to have it end in divorce, Cameron was determined to make her marriage to Paul Fox work. After all, he was excited to be married, wanted to share her children, and together they’d had another child. As it turns out, happily was never after, and Cameron suffered years of physical and emotional abuse, including instances of being thrown and kicked while pregnant, tossed down stairs, and being ordered to keep her weight down, wear tight clothes, and dye her hair blonde. No, nobody can make you wear something, but they can make you live in fear of violence if you don’t comply. Wonder why she didn’t speak up? She did. “My therapist suggested I wear make-up and sunglasses to hide the black eyes. And what about the Anglican minister and neighbour? He has taken me once to Sunnybrook Hospital, and on two occasions I had turned up on his doorstep, three houses away, to spend a safe night. He advised me to think of the children.”

Ms. Cameron, dreaming up a horrible new quiz...

When Cameron met Dickin McGinnis at a conference in Edinburgh, she met her intellectual and emotional equal, someone from whom she could learn the value of women’s friendships. Claiming she was too busy keeping up with her husband’s ridiculous standards for her in their marriage, and thus she just didn’t know about the kinds of things that were happening outside of it, marvelling at JDM’s observation that European women “walk around like this all the time. Arm in arm. No one thinks anything of it. Nor should they. Our society is set up to keep women from connecting. We’re all trained to think catching a man is a big deal. Says who? It’s men who want to get married. Women are the ones who sue for divorce. In 80 percent of cases these days. I think. As long as we buy into this, women will view other women only as competitors for the big prize. Divide and rule. That’s what the patriarchy has managed to accomplish. Behind this, of course, is a tremendous fear of the power of women.”

The interjection of feminist theoretical foundations into this story was a complete joy to me. Cameron wasn’t the only thing I feared in my undergrad, there were also those senior level theory classes to worry about. Don’t get me wrong, I love Judith Butler as much as anyone, but Cameron delivers thoughts, ideas, and reflections on one of the most influential times in women’s history in an engaging, succinct, and logical way. By sharing chunks of her emails and letters JDM, Cameron invites the reader into the conversation, letting ideas materialize and flow.

This book is a combination of memoir and social commentary, and uses the compelling story as a vehicle for larger concepts – an easily digestible (but no less emotionally taxing) framework. A biographer by trade, Cameron handles her own story with ease, insight, and maximum bravery. In a reflection on her journey, she notes that “being loved by a woman had given me the deepest approval I had ever felt. Janice’s love had helped me love myself. To love her had been to accept all women as lovable, including me. […] We had discovered this love together. We had given birth to one another. We had broken through some barrier together into another world. It had been like waking with a third eye that sees what most others never see. A brave, new world of the heart.”

While the nature of the relationship in this book is sexual, it seems to me that the importance of women’s bonds is the underlying pulse of Cameron’s story, and she urges us to appreciate them, stop competing with one another, and, at least, hold our female friendships as closely to our hearts as we do all others.

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Helpless, by Barbara Gowdy

I stayed up way too late  finishing this book. Thinking back on it now, it’s a wonder I slept at all after that. This book was creepy. Not just roman typeface creepy, but italics creepy. Without being obvious, without giving too much away, and without ever crossing the line into over-detailed descriptions of pedophilia territory, Barbara Gowdy creates a story pushed along by plot and characters but developed almost entirely within the (sub)conscious of the reader.

I must say, mad props to BG for telling a story of this magnitude so carefully. This is a book about the abduction of a child, and the way the people around her act and react to the events that unfold. It takes place in Cabbagetown / Regent Park, and the proximity to my life made it extra chilling.

The novel tracks multiple points of view (abducted child — mother of abducted child — friends of mother of abducted child — man who abducts chlid — girlfriend of man who abducts child) and throughout the book, the reader is given the opportunity to identify with / abhor each of them at any given time.

Let’s dissect, shall we?

Ron (man who abducts child): A chubby appliance repairman with a penchant for rye and vintage vaccuum cleaners, Ron fit the dirty, creepy, and downright weird steretype of a child molestor. This is, of course, based entirely on my assumptions of what this kind of person looks like, a subject on which I have less than zero experience. To clarify, a pot-belly vaccuum festish does not a pedophile make. However, inside my brain, Ron fit the bill. The remarkable thing is the way Gowdy develops Ron’s character. She invites the reader inside his head, accompanying his thought-process throughout the abduction. A victim of ‘murky thoughts’ whenever Rachel (our hero) is nearby, Ron simply cannot help himself when she’s around. He convinces himself that he is nothing more than a father figure to the girl, weaving himself and, by default, everyone around him, into a heinous web that leaves him far from where he started.

The locale...

Nancy (girlfriend of man who abducts child): Nancy is an ex-meth addict and chronic smoker of, well, most other things smokable. She works as a waitress and thinks Ron is the bees knees, even though her friends sense that he is trouble. The two sides of Nancy are as follows: a) she’s a desperate woman with a big empty soul just looking for someone to love her for who she is, and b) an accomplice in the abduction of a nine year old. The reader is forced into a complicated series of emotions with Nancy; you’re torn between feeling bad for her and wanting to slap some sense into the woman.

Celia (mother of abducted child): It’s easy to feel bad for Celia – she’s a single mother holding down two jobs to try and pay rent / feed her spawn. Her only source of joy gets stripped away, and watching her spiral into worry and depression is heartwrenchingly real. However, Gowdy peppers the novel with exterior bites of judgement from the locals: “she doesn’t even know who the father is,” “she left her alone with a friend,” and (my personal favourite) “no child should be an accident.” While you do feel bad for the woman having to internalize the mounds of guilt that must be on top of her, pangs of judgement can and will surprise you.

The wonder of this novel, for me, came more from the telling of the story than the story itself. The details of the plot are almost predicatable at times, but the kind of anxiety created by the interwoven characters and emotions are intense and compelling. Readers will find themselves rapt (haha!) around Gowdy’s little finger, waiting for the story to unfold.

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