Review of Half Brothers and Other Stories by Bill Stenson, Illustrated by David Lester

 

 

In this, his fifth book of fiction, Bill Stenson follows his prize-winning novel, Ordinary Strangers (Mother Tongue Publishing, Great B.C. Novel Contest, 2018) with a collection. We are warned from the outset - our reading radar alerted by the title - to expect at least one story grappling with sibling rivalry. Furthermore, Stenson chooses a Jane Austen epigraph: The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.

The novella asks hard questions of the parents, one essentially passive, the other chronically belligerent. Parenting remains the universal preserve of blundering amateurs.

When the plot takes a serious twist, Dora, the mother of both boys, finally speaks some home truths to her husband, a former amateur boxer with drinking and gambling issues: “You can see now where all this fighting has got this family. Don’t you? It’s the grand solution for everything around here. You don’t like the way life is treating you then you fight. Fight, fight, fight…Our kids deserved better than this, and they’re damn well going to get it.
You’re right, Ennis said. You’re right. His contribution to a decidedly one-sided discussion lacked conviction, but she could tell he was trying.”

Dora tends to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and Ennis is the main beneficiary of her wishful thinking. The not-so-subtle matter of transferring his own pugilist ambitions to his brawny son and the countless cruelties his boy inflicts on his younger brother seems to have escaped his fatherly notice.

The plot twists and takes a mighty turn, and the two half-brothers become young men and change, or don’t change much, and Life goes on. It’s a gritty, acutely observed character study and account of the consequences of their actions.

Ball and Chain begins with what I’d like to nominate as a sub-category of North American fiction concerned with raccoons and the often hapless human response. Originally published in the Nashwaak Review, this story is leavened with dry humour: “He couldn’t remember his stomach getting bigger, but it had - from size thirty-four to forty, and a tight forty at that. That was the way a lot of things happened in life. Some days he would drive the eight miles into town, pull in front of the hardware store and not be able to remember driving there. Suddenly your life was altered, they built a new subdivision, and no one asked your opinion.”

The story follows two sets of characters, the man with raccoon problems and a young thief and a real estate agent, a prospective home buyer considering her return to Vancouver Island and her thirteen year old son adjusting to Island life from Toronto. These parallel lives converge in a most satisfying way, the kind of fictional sleight of hand which will make readers and other (generous) writers applaud with hoots and cheers!

Bon is the story of three thirteen year old boys in Duncan who form a gang one summer. Bon, short for Bonnie, is a Grade 8 grifter and femme fatale who soon has the boys doing her bidding after she joins the gang.

“It was the middle of a useless summer and the world was hot. The three of them sprawled out on the bank of the Cowichan River, their bikes in the gravel behind them like dead horses on the battlefield. They were drinking bottled root beer they’d stolen from the back of a delivery truck that followed the same route through town on Mondays.”

Their young lives are about to change during this memorable summer in another nuanced revelation of character in a story, like all in this collection, in which nothing is predictable.

Dick and Jane, first published by event magazine, considers a brother and sister in their early teens. Jane is a very bright girl, destined to be an actuary for an insurance agency at the highest level of management. Her older brother, less gifted but a generous soul, is the first to give her full credit for her brains. Their father has gone missing after a messy extra-marital affair (not his) and after seven years, he is legally declared dead. What could possibly go wrong with this picture? Hang on for the ride!

The perfectly placed finale, Super Reader, is Bill Stenson at his playful peak.
“My mother smokes cigarettes and my dad drinks whisky and I read books. We all have our burdens.”
Chief among them are the boys who call him worm and whom he calls “the beat-you-to-a-pulp kids.” This portrait of a young Super Reader is by turns funny, infuriating and profound because here we are, all Children of the Book, reading this story at the end of this excellent collection, smiling and grimacing, in recognition of ourselves.

 

This review first appeared in BC Bookworld, also in BC BookLook, in 2021. 

Review of Sailing to Byzantium by Maureen Thorpe

A version of this review appeared in BC Bookworld in Spring of 2021. There are three in this series and I am now waiting to pounce on Book #3!

Author Maureen Thorpe was born in Yorkshire, trained as a nurse- and worked on two continents-, travelled the world, keeping fit all the while, and now lives in a log house near Invermere, B.C. She presents talks with slide-shows about medieval life and writes with authority about a time-travelling aunt, a respected witch or wise-woman in 15th century Yorkshire, and her 21st century niece, a trained midwife. Plus their two cats.

Time-travel fans of Diana Gabaldon’s mega-selling Outlander series and historical mystery readers devoted to the perils of the Henry VIII-era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, by C.J. Sansom, will likely enjoy Thorpe’s book set in 15th century Yorkshire en route to the great kingdom known as Byzantium, with its grand city of Constantinople now Istanbul. In fact, the first book in a planned trilogy with the same main characters was released in 2018, Tangle of Time and a third, Coventina’s Well set in Roman Britain, will follow the fall 2020 release of Sailing to Byzantium. 

On page one of this book, Annie Thornton from present-day Yorkshire, lands in a stinking garbage heap with her cat on her lap. Her (great-great x many greats) aunt Meg is running toward her, apologizing for the odiferous botched landing. She has summoned Annie to help her solve a terrible crime which has just happened in Jorvik. (The Vikings are in charge so York is called by its Norse name.) Twin girls, platinum blonde seven year olds, have been kidnapped while playing right outside the door of their own home.

Their father is a Viking fisherman still out at sea and their English mother and her own mother were inside the house weaving wool cloth at the time of the abduction. The elderly grandfather was outside with the twins but, in one of many deft examples of Thorpe’s storytelling combined with her medical background, he was caught short with what the modern reader can tell is a troublesome prostate and had bolted for the outdoor toilet. All three adults are wracked with grief and guilt at letting the girls out of their sight at exactly the wrong moment and they dread the arrival of the father, who doted on his little girls but whose problem-solving skills were limited to using weapons like the King’s warrior he once was.

Aunt Meg is fully capable of magic, of shapeshifting and time travelling as well as a having a long working knowledge of using herbs and other healing practices of the Middle Ages. She also knows that Annie has inherited her maternal line of ‘witchy’ abilities as well as having modern-day medical training. More training in these inherited abilities and practical foraging for herbs will follow as antibiotics and antiseptics are not exactly handy in the 1400’s. Annie is quickly dressed in appropriate linen and wool clothing and footwear and her T-shirt, jeans and slippers were left behind to baffle the archaeologists of the future.

A useful glossary of Yorkshire dialect and a map of the route the two women, the father of the abducted girls, and other trustworthy companions took to follow the kidnappers is provided in the book. So is a very interesting list of the main characters which pinpoints which ones were actual historical figures, who were invented by the author and who just might be real, as there are traces of those names and identities in Norse sagas and other documents. It’s fascinating stuff. The bereft family, with the two wise-woman (and their cats, who also have certain magical abilities of course) alongside them, petition the local Viking King Eiric BloodAxe and his two wives for help, one of whom proves highly problematic for the rest of the story.

There is a wealth of authentic detail about the rigours of the sea and river voyage which takes the group of would-be rescuers from York, England to Birka, an island near Sweden, with its busy trading town and active slave market. Then the group carried on to cross the Baltic Sea and to head down major rivers in shallow draft lightweight river boats to get to Kiev and finally across the Black Sea to Byzantium. There an eccentric and very wealthy man is rumoured to have bought the exotic blonde twins for his collection. The description of the running of rapids or portaging around them, the constraints of campfire cooking and cautious dealings or bloody skirmishes with other tribes in the lands they are passing through all make for a gripping page-turner.

We now know from going to museums and reading and watching documentaries how archaeologists can identify which grains flatbreads were made from (barley is a favourite in this era) and how people of different ranks were buried with protective weapons and jewellery and symbolic offerings for the next world. This ‘day in the life’ of sheer survival on the dangerous waterway journey is later enriched when we meet Princess Olga who supports their efforts and mentions her wish to bring Christianity to Russia, which she eventually does in ‘real life’. We also go to the great bazaars of Constantinople and practically touch the fabrics and soft leather shoes and smell the spices and delicious foods there. The action ramps up even more as Annie must work a major feat of magic in front of a crowd of thousands and the rulers… and two hungry lions.

So if you’d love to escape the woes of the present day and enjoy historical mysteries and archeological detective work, you’ll have come to the right place-and time- with Sailing to Byzantium.

Review of Music From A Strange Planet by Barbara Black

 An earlier version of this review appeared in BC Bookworld in 2021. One of my top fiction reads of the year. Published by Caitlin Press in British Columbia who, I'm happy to say, have signed this brilliant author up for a second collection of flash fiction.

Twenty-four short stories are contained in Barbara Black’s debut collection and the cover art and design, also created by the author, is an intriguing collage of a masked woman caught in the headlights. Her streaked red hair is flying, her deer ears and antlers are alert and her mottled wispy coat seem to catch her in the act of transforming from human to animal or insect…or perhaps it’s the other way around. A clock on the wall suggests a Cinderella-like deadline is imminent. Clues abound in this cover image and the brilliant epigraph by Anton Chekhov: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Some of these stories have been previously published in Canadian and American literary magazines like Geist and The New Quarterly. They have also been nominated for National Magazine Awards, the Journey Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. Clearly, Barbara Black is a writer to read and furthermore, the back cover is replete with kudos from three established masters of the short fiction form: John Gould, Cathleen With and M.A.C. Farrant.

In much the same way many of us marvel at the ability of musicians to create something fresh and new with notes and rhythms and sounds, I also appreciate and admire writers who conjure up and harness a soaring imagination with linguistic dexterity and seamlessly mesh intellectual curiosity with a resonant emotional plumb line. What a treat it is to read these inventive, sometimes sad, and often funny stories by Barbara Black!

A “regular good guy” ends up in a coma and escapes to the wondrous insect world of his Grade 7 Science project. A retired acrobat encounters a retired dentist, both lonely insomniacs. One little girl rejects all that is fluffy, pink and pretty and drags her perfectionist traditional mother and playful papa into seeing another world of colours, textures and behaviours. Insects inhabit many of these stories, a fascinating fusion of science and imagination, with Kafka’s classic Metamorphosis hovering near by in many readers’ minds, no doubt. As Bert, who flies off eagerly to his liberation from a body trapped in a coma thinks; “What did it matter? Only the law of dreams applied.”

The seared memories of childhood are especially poignant in stories like ‘Hot July Day’ where a Grade 5 bully and her accomplice fail to repress the resilience of an undersized, long-suffering classmate. Then we are whisked away to the Bulkley/Nechako region of northwest B.C. where a solitary man, a taxidermist, forms a protective bond with a porcupine he calls Lydia. The trees in his valley are succumbing to a pine beetle infestation and the threat of fire in mid-summer is high. ‘Belly-Deep in White Clover’ is a soulful story about life and death in the wilderness which was first published in Prairie Fire and then long-listed for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It demonstrates yet again Black’s range of subject and setting and her mastery of ever-elusive tone or to use the musical equivalent, pitch, which is never flat or sharp but bang on.

So perfectly attuned to the wild and the domestic as well, is the story, ‘Ghosts on Pale Stalks’ where nature on the West Coast is evoked in all its damp and fecund abundance. A single middle-aged woman is carrying an urn, at the urging of her group of somewhat exasperated friends, through the rainforest and to the ocean’s edge. Easier by far for others to tell us to “just let go” than it is to discard the physical and emotional burdens we’ve carried for decades. Or before finally giving up on advice from Oprah or sifting through whatever insights tarot cards seem to offer by taking decisive action to save our own sanity.

There is seemingly no limit to the inventive breadth and depth of the worlds Black conjures, with writing precisely embedded in each setting. The title story exemplifies her mastery of story structure and dialogue and what I call the alchemy of creating fiction. In ‘Music From a Strange Planet’ we meet Lucky Bee, who experiences both prescient abilities, for impending good news and bad, and the kind of synaesthesia which merges colour with sound, for example, magenta becomes F#major while viridian is heard as B minor. Her companion is a cricket. Given the number of insects fluttering through this book, I know I am less inclined to mindlessly swat them in future.

Prepare to be transported to cities, to other countries, to a crumbling present and then off to a Centre for Biogenetics on an unnamed planet in the future. Still more worlds unfold like wings in this marvellous book, and beguile us. Reader, prepare to be enchanted.

Review of Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures by Ivan E. Coyote

 

Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures by Ivan E. Coyote 

McClelland & Stewart (2021)  *An edited version first appeared in BC Bookworld's Winter Edition.

“Storytellers. We can’t help but keep hoping that there might be a happier ending in there, somewhere.” 

Ivan Coyote writes to console a woman from North Dakota whose parents will only see her and speak to her if she doesn’t talk about “that” and never brings any of “those” people into their home. 

This book of letter and email exchanges came about when a road warrior for nearly three decades, a performer in high demand worldwide delivering at least 200 polished, powerful, and often hilarious shows yearly had Covid lower the boom. No more tours to Australia, America, Hong Kong or hometown Whitehorse either. No more high school gyms packed with hundreds of squirming teens and apprehensive or welcoming teachers, gathered to hear hard-won truths about growing up and being transgender. No more conferences for librarians or statisticians or labour activists or nurses, and among them, a few fearful adults ready to fire verbal arrows at the podium. Ivan Coyote must be one of the bravest, and most tactful, writers on this planet. 

“When a person has been taught, …to hate and revile me stands up to ask me a question, I must reach across that room and find my way past her fear and dogma and doctrine and into the good part of her heart…It is not important to me in those few seconds that everyone in the room agrees with me, but it is vital that they witness her allowing her heart to stretch open enough to make even the possibility of room for people like me.” Ivan Coyote writing to a Christian ‘mostly closeted’ woman who attended the same conference

With all bookings cancelled, and after much-needed rest, Ivan started answering letters and emails. Now, at last, there was time to go deeper, to respond more thoughtfully with the wisdom gained from those years on the road.

One letter came from a closeted Muslim actress from Pakistan who discovered Ivan Coyote on social media. Her identity is protected because even though she moved to England, her family back home would be harassed about their gay daughter. Another exchange begins with a Canadian high school teacher who admits to being rather pleased with his own tolerance when his daughter announced in Grade 10 that she was gay. Fine, he thought, one of my brothers is gay, no big deal. Then his dear child springs the news that she wants to transition to male and, finally flummoxed, Dad turns to Ivan for guidance. This story has what storytellers hope for, that happier ending. A good many of the other letters are filled with despair and grief because fear of the unknown, not love, grips the wheel driving the bus, at school and at home, in the place of worship and in the workplace where some of the most toxic notions of masculinity are unleashed on those who are different.

Because Ivan’s performances are so engaging and because books like Tomboy Survival Guide ( Arsenal: 2016) and for LGBTQ teens, One In Every Crowd ( Arsenal: 2012) have thrown life-lines to struggling individuals and families around the world, the ensuing correspondence must surely fill a massive filing cabinet. In Care Of, there are letters from people of all ages, from eighteen to sixty-something, living in this world as someone other than the gender assigned to them at birth. Or realizing, like the high school student from a traditional Indo-Canadian family that he was gay “ever since he could remember” and his father would kill him, “for real” and his brother would probably beat him up first. Ivan fluently translated his body language and asked if he would carry the stand-up microphone to the parking lot and en route, about sixteen year’s worth of repression poured forth, the first time he’d ever confided to anyone. Ivan still thinks, and worries, about that student.

There are heart-breaking letters like the one from a mother who lost her 21 year old transgender daughter to suicide. Ivan’s own loving connection to a sprawling, raucous Yukon family, storytellers all, proves to be the key that breaks through resistance in other families, like an 18 year old and his mother in Australia.

Families are often simply afraid of losing their loved one. Parents fear what the world will do to their tomboy girl or their tender-hearted boy. Will surgery or any form of identity change mean losing their sister or their brother, their mother or their father? The loyal connection to family so well-portrayed on stage and in print by Ivan Coyote reassures parents and teens alike that the world will not end if the lifelong difference that is felt in every cell by one member of the family is acknowledged and future change is supported. This is not to say that the dark side, the snide and hurtful words and deeds dealt by some adults behind medical counters, or the usual suspects among hockey parents, for example, need to be tolerated. Thankfully there are people like the janitor at the Whitehorse Hockey Arena who created a locker room just for Ivan, at age 16 the only ‘girl’ still playing organized hockey with boys in the entire Yukon. He tacked up a poster of Wayne Gretzky too.

One of my favourite zingers in this tough, tender and life-affirming book now festooned with post-it notes and underlined passages, is the following: 

“This is why labels peel off in the water.”