Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald

I think I first read Fall on Your Knees (Knopf Canada, 1996) in my third year of university, after I’d picked up the book at a used book sale. I must have recognized the title, since I scooped it without much of a thought, and when I returned home discovered that the copy had been signed. $3 well spent. And when I actually sat down to read the book, the experience mirrored the book’s purchase: I quickly discovered that I was reading something of far more value than I had initially anticipated. I was absorbed, enchanted, utterly devastated. In fact, this is the book that can be attributed with changing negative attitude in regard to all books with a maple leaf stamped on the spine.

This modern gothic saga begins with an inauspicious wedding between young James and Materia, his child bride; a misguided pairing that will result in several children and omipresent misfortune. This tale of familial strife is set against a vast historical and geographic backdrop: in its approximately forty year span, the novel contains both World Wars, the Depression and the Roaring twenties, the Spanish Influenza and Prohibition, depicting these larger historical events alongside the everyday struggles of small-town miners and immigrants to Canada living in Cape Breton. MacDonald also moves easily through the streets and jazz joints of Harlem,  through the trenches of World War I, or along the rocky cliffs of Cape Breton — a testament to her range as a novelist, and to the phenomenal scope of the novel.

Of course the novel’s major historical events are on par with the tragedies that plague the Piper family: suicide, death, rape, attempted murder, physical violence, incest and disowning children. It is a novel where the hope chest is filled with reminders of lost and broken things, where the evocative title is fulfilled by all the major characters save one, as each person falls on their knees both in penance and in despair. It is a novel in which the great dramatic operas are a backdrop for the story of an average family in Cape Breton, and yet the family’s tale emerges as more tragic than anything played out on the stage of the opera house.

Ann-Marie MacDonald is an actress and playwright by training, and she makes the most of her dramatic instincts to keep a fairly hefty novel moving at a swift pace. She may not be the Canadian classic poet-turned-author, but her training endows the novel with its greatest strengths: carefully plotted scenes and effective foreshadowing that allow “family saga” and “page turner” to be used in the same sentence without irony, as well as fully realized and tragically flawed characters. The characters are truly remarkable — we see them in moments of tenderness and committing unspeakable acts; the most pious can be the most cold-blooded; the most loving commit the most appalling crimes.  MacDonald enlists a cast of multitudes for her novel, with most characters given a chance to relate pivotal events from their own point of view. What results is a rich dialogue between perspectives, and as the reader attempts to sort out the facts, what becomes more interesting is how each character remembers them, for as Frances wisely acknowledges, “Memory is another word for story.”

Of course it’s not all darkness and gloom. MacDonald also writes an incredibly sensual and inspiring love story — a classic case of pride and prejudice, though without the benefit of a happy ending. And there is some hope in Lily, whose miraculousness lies in the fact that she emerges from her family’s tragedy still fundamentally good, and escapes her family’s misery in Cape Breton, starting anew in the place her mother discovered to be the land of milk and honey. And as the novel closes, Lily holds the family tree courtesy of Mercedes, a document which faces the past, which joins the family’s stories, and holds both love and loss on its sturdy branches.

I’ll admit, I was a little worried approaching this reread. I rarely reread books (I feel guilty when my TBR list is so long that in physical form it would easily outstrip the Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest freestanding structure). I hoped I would love Fall on Your Knees as much as on first reading, especially when I could still remember some of the novel’s stomach-dropping secrets that are one of its significant accomplishments. In the end, I did. It still may be my favourite Canadian novel. When I completed the book a second time, I felt just as dazed, just as utterly overcome. And I realize that this is the book perhaps least in need of a Canada Reads endorsement of all the competitors (potentially of all those in the Canadian canon). And yet maybe there are people who haven’t read it, for like 20-year-old me, they don’t read CanLit. Or maybe the Canada Reads nomination will inspire others to pick it up once more, to revisit an incredibly complex and unsettling novel that mines its way into you, painfully chipping away at your insides, leaving echoing caverns, but also unearthing diamonds.

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And now, as promised, my 1 minute pitch as a Canada Reads panelist for Fall on Your Knees:

*Note: This took fewer takes this time and I seem less like I’m hosting Masterpiece Theater (or at least more like I’m hosting Monsterpiece Theater instead), but this video pitch stuff is still a work in progress. Also: I open my mouth wider in real life than it appears on these videos (or so I’m assured).

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Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones

“You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is on fire.”

This endearing quotation appears prominently on the back of Mister Pip‘s dustjacket, and I thought it a promising beginning. As I read the flap copy and discovered that it was a post-colonial narrative about the magic of literature, I thought I’d found an ideal reading choice for my tastes. Which of course, made it all the more disappointing when Mister Pip failed to conjure up the literary enchantment upon which its premise is founded.

We are introduced to a nameless island somewhere in the south Pacific, where a civil war rages between the rebels and the redskins. The hapless inhabitants a small village just attempt to carry on with their lives. Specifically, the children continue to go to school, where their new teacher, the lone white man on the island, Mr. Watts, uses a radical new teaching method – he simply reads them Great Expectations. Though they stumble over the foreign words and concepts, they are entranced – Pip, Dickens’ protagonist becomes almost real to them. Of all the students, the one who is most entranced by Mr. Dickens is Matilda, Jones’ protagonist, who also has a name that is an unknown white reference. As the kids absorb this white narrative, Mr. Watts also invites in their mothers, to share more traditional knowledge and folklore. A quiet battle ensues between Matilda’s mother, a devout Christian, and Mr. Watts, an atheist, over who is more real – God or Pip.

Perhaps my enjoyment of the novel was hindered by my half-hearted engagement with the meaning of these racially invested stories. I was troubled by the fact that the mothers’ narratives were so marginalized by this white, British narrative, that these school children’s brains were subject to a literary neocolonialism. Luckily things become more palatable when the book is lost, and the children must recreate the book in fragments. And so they rewrite the story in a way that is meaningful to them. I am reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s essay “Jasmine” in which he relates how he read British novels while growing up in Trinidad, and simply changed the alien references to foreign ones. Naipaul realizes that “an English novel which worked and was of value to me at once ceased to be specifically English.” Likewise Matilda states that Great Expectations “taught me that you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy in Dickens’ England.” Although in itself I have no problem with Mister Pip’s racial strata (a white man writing a black girl reading a white text on a black island and so on…), since the ability of literature to transcend specific circumstances is something I vehemently believe in, I DO think the writing should still ring true. Ian MacEwan can write a little girl better than many women can, though I wouldn’t say the same of Jones.

Which leads to my real disspointment with the book – I found myself unable to engage with the characters and the situation as real people and real events, as Matilda was able to do with Pip. For a long time I had difficultly remembering that Matilda was even a girl, she was sort of an amorphous blob of a protagonist, and seemed to lack any authentic details that would bring her off the page. The political situation was too non-descript, it felt like a failed allegory that attempted to represent everywhere but to me felt like nowhere. The island itself was never vivid, more like a soundstage or the fictional setting of LOST than a real place inhabited by real people. And so when tragedy struck, I was largely unmoved, and for me, that’s saying something. (I’m an unabashed weeper when it comes to books and movies.)  It all seemed bland and hollow, without any real resonance except perhaps its sentimental testament to the power of literature. I’ll confess I haven’t read Great Expectations (though I have read other Dickens), so perhaps some sort of rich subtlety was lost on me, but in any case a reader’s enjoyment and understanding of a work shouldn’t be entirely dependent on referentiality.

Mister Pip won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, so some people certainly must have loved it, though personally I think it couldn’t hold a candle to this year’s winner, The Book of Negroes, which also dealt with the race, and with its intersections with narrative, in a way that was engaging,  rich and resonant. And as for Kiwi-Lit, I’ll take Hulme’s oft-attacked The Bone People instead anyday.

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Barney’s Version, by Mordecai Richler

Winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, The 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Giller prize, I had some pretty high expectations for Barney’s Version – and I am happy to say they were met, if not exceeded.  With his trademark acerbic wit, Richler has created an intolerant, cantankerous, curmudgeonly old man that is one of the most enjoyable characters I’ve ever read. Throw in the wicked delight of Richler skewering the arts in Canada, autobiographies, feminists, artists, nationalism, les Quebecois and numerous other things, sporting an amused grimace is pretty much unavoidable.

Following the publication of an old friend’s book in which he is not only ruthlessly skewered, but accused of murder, Barney Panofsky feels a need to clear his not-so-good name.  Consequently, he sets out his life story (Barney’s Version), recounting his time among the intelligentsia of Paris in the 1950s (and his first marriage), his return to Montreal and success as a producer of terrible Canadian television (and his second marriage), and lastly, his discovery of his true love, Miriam  (and his last marriage.)

But as Barney grows older and struggles to remember the names of the seven dwarfs or the name of a spaghetti strainer, the novel’s machismo and bravado starts to peel away, revealing a tender reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and above all, love. While it is ostensibly a story about truth, truth proves to be elusive, as Barney’s narrative oscillates between past and present and the lines between truth and fiction become fuzzy. Did Barney really kill his friend Boogie? It’s a question that Barney’s kids struggle with, as do the readers. But just as Barney has wooed three wives, he’s also charmed his readers, and you may be surprised to find you don’t care as much as you should. The novel itself implies that love trumps truth every time, the thing that makes “Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire” such an admirable character is that she never asks Barney, but loves him anyway.

I could go on, but I fear that my watery assertions do injustice to Richler’s tightly coiled prose. Suffice to say read it. Read it for its irresistable nastiness, its biting satire, and its surprising tenderness. Start to finish, Barney’s version is a celebration of storytelling that can’t be missed.

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