So it's hair, but it's shaped like a hat. I saw Carrie Snyder read at The Starlite in Waterloo a few years back, at the only UW alumni event I've ever attended. She shared the stage with George Elliott Clarke, Erik McCormack and a few other distinguished bookish folks from UW's past (perhaps even Evan Munday, though I honestly don't remember). She read "Tumbleweed," and I'm pretty sure part of one other story, and I have to be honest and say that I didn't think much of it. As I've written here before, I'm not very good at following fiction when it's read aloud. And really, the hair hat seemed kind of gimmicky. Every time I saw her book in the store (and I've actually seen it quite a bit; for a not-very-well-known first-time author, Penguin sure as hell got that book into stores) I walked past it thinking, maybe next time. I mean, it has French flaps and deckle edges both; it's practically begging for me to hate it.

I don't hate it. It was a pain in the ass to turn only one page at a time, and the weight of the flaps kept smacking it shut if I didn't hold the book just so, but I didn't hate it. I think I read all but the last two stories on the train back from Waterloo last night. For some reason, I tore through Hair Hat. It wasn't that I was so enthralled that I couldn't put it down, it was more a kind of puzzled curiosity. Carrie Snyder writes like she knows. Every sentence is confident, hardened, tempered, fully-formed and whole. There is no hesitation in these stories, and the weaknesses, where they exist, are all in the conception, the plan rather than the execution. Except of course for the hair hat itself, which was fucking ridiculous. If you've been reading my reviews of Robertson Davies' books over the last few months you'll know that I'm perfectly willing to accept outlandish literary conceits, but with Davies the whole world of the novel is in step with the conceit, with the satire, the bombast of it. I get the impression that Snyder's man with the hair hat is meant to be vaguely magical, like the blue mittens socks or the Vietnamese takeout in Rebecca Rosenblum's Once, but it was all wrong. Far too light for the tone of the stories, far too arbitrary seeming. Like Nikolski, it was interesting to see the connections, how the pieces fit together without the characters themselves being able to see it, but for quite a few of the stories ("Tumbleweed" and "Harassment," and "Third Dog" especially) the man and his hair felt tacked on. I can imagine Snyder thinking that she didn't have enough stories that included him to make Hair Hat a true story cycle, but that she also thought it would be too uneven if it wasn't a cycle. I personally think this book would have gotten a lot more attention if she had toned down her conceit a bit and let those other stories stand on their own. They could have been brilliant, and now they are merely good.

Snyder's greatest strength is in revealing family dynamics obliquely, usually through completely unrelated speech. Children argue about hot dogs, an aunt refuses to serve a snack between meals, and beneath it all we learn about abuse, fear, loneliness, self-hate, almost without seeing it happen. And then there's the goddamn hair hat, intruding, breaking apart the delicate emotional structures Snyder builds with her smooth, confident prose. The hair hat man even has his own story, which could have been quite poignant were it not completely undermined by the conceit Snyder has—quite literally—attached to him. Even the explanation makes no real sense. That one telling detail that could have been, should have been, magical takes all of Snyder's excellent craftsmanship and makes it farcical. Reading this book was like looking at a lovely Renaissance painting with a large gash running down the side of the canvas. It's still beautiful, but all your attention is taken up by the thing that spoils it.

Hair Hat was my fourth selection for Canada Reads: Independently, and my eleventh selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott.

Please excuse me for some vagueness, and if I make some minor factual errors. Immediately after finishing The Jade Peony, I loaned it to my mother to read, and since she lives in Waterloo and I'm now back at home in Toronto, I'm unable to have it in front of me while I write this (and I don't take notes while I read). So: I once wrote on this blog that I'm not interested in literature as social work, and I'm certainly not interested in an author behaving like my case worker, and that's what a lot of The Jade Peony felt like to me. I wasn't just supposed to be reading a decent novel about Chinese people, I was supposed to be absorbing a culture, learning about history, becoming a better person. Like broccoli, it wasn't actually bad, but knowing it was supposed to be good for me made me not want to finish it.

But finish it I did.

It's difficult to write in the voice of a child. Children are not simply minature adults, and they certainly aren't stupid. There's an extremely delicate balance that has to be maintained; children don't see the same things we do, the way we do, and writing them as though they do is unconvincing at best. What details will they pick out as important? How will they interpret those details? Choy has an especially difficult task, because he chooses not one just child's voice, but three. Additionally, a great many of his readers may not be Chinese, and the novel takes place in a time that those readers most likely don't have any direct experience of. He has to include sufficient cultural and historical detail to situate the reader in a particular time and place, but he also has to balance it against what a child would pay attention to, how much they would understand, how they would understand it, and so on and so on. I find that there are moments when Choy is convincing, particularly with Jung-Sum and Jook-Liang, but most of the time he swerves around all over the place. Jook-Liang seems to miss far too much even though she's quite young, and Jung-Sum sees far too much for his age. The scene in which Jung-Sum runs to the cinema with his friend, leaving behind his beloved turtle, is told with far too much telling detail and sadness for what a child his age could have mustered, and I don't get the feeling that Choy is trying to present us with an unreliable adult narrator looking back at his past.

It wasn't a bad novel, and I enjoyed the clash between Poh-Poh's ideas of Old China and the new Canadian ways, but for the most part I found it unnecessarily sombre, and a little dull. I think it would have worked better as a collection of linked short stories. The chapters were almost episodic, and there didn't seem to be any definite narrative arc, except perhaps in the second half of Sek-Lung's section, which was so charged with meaning that it was as subtle as a freight train. To be honest I think this is the worst of the four Canada Reads books I've read so far. As much as I hated Generation X, at least it moved me in some way, made me react, even though that reaction was very strongly negative. It's frankly taken all my will to gather enough interest to write even this little bit about The Jade Peony. My final reaction is that I just simple don't care. It probably doesn't help that my edition (earlier than the one pictured here, with a much different cover) was riddled with typos, huge gaps between words, and other production oddities that made it feel more like I was reading an un-corrected proof.

I'm sorry to be so brief, but I just can't find anything I want to say about this novel. Typical CanLit, perhaps? The Jade Peony was my fourth selection for Canada Reads, and my tenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Hair Hat, by Carrie Snyder.

When I was doing my bachelor's degree, one of my summer jobs was working Confined Space Safety Watch (known colloquially as Hole Watch) for the Weyerhaeuser pulp and paper mill in Dryden. The job was pretty simple. The mill would shut down for ten days of the annual top-to-bottom maintenance period, a lot of workers, both contract and union, would have to crawl into some very cramped spaces to work, and often those spaces were dangerous. My job was to put on a tonne of heavy gear, grab a first aid/emergency rescue pack and a walkie talkie, and sit outside a confined space for twelve hours a day making sure nobody died. I worked in the bleach plant, the recovery boiler, the chemical plant, flak dryers, precipitators, black and green liquor tanks, and a few places I can't remember the names for. I did it two years in a row (earning, in each ten day period, about twice my current monthly income), and there were never any accidents or emergencies on my shifts. I got a lot of reading done. On one particularly scorching afternoon I was working in the precipitators—a relatively easy post, because there was a place to sit, it was easy to keep track of the workers, and there were normally at least three other watchers there with you—and I happened to be seated next to a woman whose name I can't recall. The precipitators were an ugly, almost frightening place. To us it was a long, narrow iron corridor with iron doors on either side, like the watertight doors of a battleship. There'd be welders and other tradesmen (always men) on the other side of the doors, balanced on thin, tightly grouped iron rails, a great, black, breathing emptiness far above and below. Even in the heat of the afternoon it was a grim, dark place, like something David Lynch would have built for the Baron Harkonnen. We didn't want to think about our surroundings, and it was too filthy a place to bring a book, so we'd talk. The woman I sat next to on that afternoon told me what she did to pass the time. She would pick a person at random, me, say, or one of the welders, and imagine an entire history for them. Would they have a family? What did they do for fun? Where did they live? If she liked the way her story turned out, she would find a way, small and innocent, to put herself in it, to make it, just briefly, her own story as well. She never wrote any of it down. It all just happened in her head, and when she was done, she'd let it drift away like smoke.

Nikolski is about serendipity, three characters whose lives barely brush up against each other, never quite connecting. Noah, the itinerant archaeologist, Joyce the dumpster diving pirate, and the unnamed bookseller with the ocean in his basement. They are united by the Book with No Face, by trash, and by a shared bond of blood that they don't even know exists. Set in Fournier, Lazer Lederhendler's translation is lovely to read as the three protagonists fumble in the dark, unknowing but, strangely, far from lost. That, I think, is the conventional reading, and it's certainly the best one.

I'm going to offer an alternative.

One of Dickner's protagonists, the only one without a name, and not coincidentlaly, the only one who is allowed to narrate his own story, works in the S.W. Gam Bookshop in Montréal, the only place visited by all three characters. Nikolski begins in 1989 with him cleaning out his dead mother's house, taking with him the Nikolski compass—a cheap plastic compass that points to the island of Nikolski, where our narrator's father lived and eventually died. It's the only thing he has left of his family. The novel also opens with garbage, bags and bags of it, full of history, of treasure, of the stuff that Noah and Joyce will build their lives with.

I wonder if there may not somewhere be a Britannica of our desires, a comprehensive repertory of the slightest dream, the least aspiration, where nothing would be lost or created, but where ceaseless transformation of all things would operate in both directions, like an elevator connecting the various storeys of our existence.

Our bookshop is, in sum, a universe entirely made up of and governed by books—and it seemed quite natural for me to dissolve myself in it completely, to devote my life to the thousands of lives duly stacked on hundreds of shelves.

This could be Nikolski, the book our narrator writes himself, the chapter in the Britannica that contains his slightest dream, the one where he has family, connections. I can imagine him sitting behind the counter, looking at the customers, seeing which books they buy (or steal), finding common ground, making up stories like the woman who sat next to me in the industrial hell of the precipitators. This woman buys books about marine life and shoplifts books about computer programming. That man comes in with a child and browses the dinosaur books. Before that, there was a woman, loud and frantic, with a book that was decades old and falling apart. How do these things connect? I see our unnamed protagonist as the narrator of the entire novel, taking his mother's collection of travel guides as a jumping off point and reaching back, creating a mythology of wanderlust and a family tree to support it, putting up the scaffolding that will let him build the courage to leave a life that holds no connective tissue for him anymore.

Of course this is just me grafting my own experiences on top of a narrative that works exceptionally well as it stands, but I think that any book that can open itself up this way, that can be read as a complex, adventurous, but still accessible novel and like a box of puzzles and secrets, like a map to pirate treasure or a midden heap, is a book that should win Canada Reads. I have two books to go, but I think I've found the contender I'm rooting for. And as an aside, if this is the sort of thing that's going on in French Canadian literature, English Canada needs to get working on more translations as good as Lederhendler's.

Nikolski was my third selection for Canada Reads, and my eighth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Moody Food, by Ray Robertson.

I'm not entirely clear on why, but this book reminded me a lot of Fits Like A Rubber Dress, by Roxane Ward, which I read back in 2008. But here's the thing: How Happy to Be only had a handful of superficial things in common with Rubber Dress. The experimentation with sex and drugs that finally kept Ward's book from being a total waste of time is just the jumping off point for Katrina Onstad, and it doesn't take more than a paragraph or two to see that she's drinking from a deeper well. Onstad's characters have tried hedonism themselves, and while it was the solution to some problems, it wasn't without problems of its own, an idea Ward barely dipped her toe in. But I don't mean to make this into a ninth grade compare and contrast.

Maxime isn't shallow, stupid, or fame-obsessed, but like the smart kid in the rural school who doesn't want to be abused by her classmates, she acts the part—though it's not abuse she's escaping. How Happy to Be shows us what happens when she gets sick of acting, and for a while it's a hell of a lot of fun. Onstad's send-up of self-important celebrities and the media apparatus that seems structured soley to support their egos is dead-on (Onstad's Much Music analog is called BFD-TV, which I can only assume stands for "Big Fucking Deal"), and I laughed out loud more than once while Maxime was interviewing Ethan Hawke. It all seems like such a laugh, really, watching Maxime deliberately sabotaging her career, eviscerating her coworkers with her wit, navigating parties and talk shows and fucking Ad Sales out of boredom. And then for a moment it's all ripped away and we can see the insecurity that underlies it all, Maxime's, the celebrities', the media's.

I look at Nicole Kidman and I realize I know more about her life right now than I do about my father's. But I only know the details, the breakups and the box-office figures: names, dates, and injuries. These are the boundaries of my job, and they're closing in. My palms moisten. My shoulders shudder. I look at my right hand; it's in the air. Somehow, I can't help it; the hand doesn't care about professional repercussions. It waves frantically.

I need to know something.

"Lady in black," says the Czar. Most women in the room answer to that description, but he means me. I stand up, my heart racing a little under the collective sweep of eyes. The notebook paper clots in my palm.

"My question is for Nicole Kidman," I say.

"Speak up please," says the Czar.

"My question is for Nicole Kidman," I shout. I clear my throat. "What's it like?"

The Czar gives Ms. Kidman a quick, apologetic glance that she doesn't catch, plucking at her water glass with her bony fingers. "Can you clarify your question, please?" asks the Czar.

"What's it like?" I'm just going for it now, just letting it all out. "I mean, when everyone thinks your husband is gay, and then he leaves you, and you're a billionaire and not untalented but in a business where talent doesn't really matter and, and, you had a miscarriage that we all know about." The strangeness of this strikes me suddenly and I say it again, "Somehow we all know about that. Every single person in this room knows and, you, and you have children, right? You have two children?"

Nicole Kidman looks up, straight at me, unsmiling, her white skin reflecting the lights of the cameras that line the sides of the theatre.

"My question is, What's it like to be you?" It's a bad question. I recognize it as such even without the Sludge Monster's little choking sounds. But it occurs to me that that's my problem; I don't know what it's like to be anyone else. I can't imagine any other life but this one. I'm being stabbed to death by my point of view. Does anyone else ever feel like that? So desperate to break your own borders, so frantic you want to smash through someone else's stomach and crawl in? Maybe Nicole Kidman knows something about this; a person who walks in other people's bodies for a living must, surely?

Did I just say that out loud?

I sit down.

The room is very, very quiet. The Czar whispers something in Nicole Kidman's ear and she shakes her head. The Italian woman moves ever so slightly away from me. Nicole Kidman leans forward, mouth over the microphone. In a girlish Australian voice, she says softly, "It's probably not that different from being you."

I doubt that, but I write it down anyway.

"Next question!"

Perhaps that was a bit long to quote (I'm sorry, I tend to linger where Nicole Kidman is concerned). In that scene Maxime, just for a moment, sees through the cracks in her own life and directly into someone else's. Later on Nicole Kidman will make a complaint about the question through her "people", but in that instant she's a human being speaking to another human being, unmediated, and it's almost too much for everyone. As Leonard Cohen would say, it's "a breaking of the ancient Western code."

Real life being too much seems to be one of the dominant themes in the book, really. Maxime's father migrates to a remote island with a handful of hippie flakes to escape the reality of his wife's death, Maxime gives herself over to movies and pop culture&mdash to escape the island commune—then alcohol, drugs, and meaningless sex to escape a failed relationship and an empty, unsatisfying job—while her friend Sunera turns to pills.

Only Theo McArdle seems comfortable in the real world, and as a result he seems almost beatific by comparison. He's also the only one whose work deals with "the real world" in a sense (in fact, Maxime and Surena call him a "real person," as opposed to whatever it is they think they are). Maxime's father is a dropped-out wanderer, and she and all her friends create a fantasy world for a living, build up a patina of glamour to protect the myth of what today (the novel takes place in 2001 which, improbably-sounding to this reader, was almost ten years ago) we would call the Creative Class. Theo is a physicist, his entire job to understand the nature of reality. He's not perfect, but Maxime is so bent on self-destruction and Onstad keeps the pace moving so steadily that it can be easy to miss his distraction, his occasional social stupidity. It's good for the book that he's more than just piece to move around the board, even if he's mostly just that, and I liked him despite myself.

I mostly didn't notice Onstad's prose, which is good, because I don't think it was trying to be noticed. When she did do something clever it was also smooth and occasionally lovely. But there were times, especially near the end, when I wanted more. Onstad gets the media/digital age stuff right, which most writers don't (especially journalists—sorry folks, most of you come off like tourists, weirdly, guys like Hal Niedzviecki in particular), but for once I'd like to see a writer who is smart about those things slow down a bit and also give us a rich, Munro-like prose experience. Books like How Happy to Be are fun—really fun—but I'm sick of rush rush rush. Even when the book has some depth to it, the prose often doesn't have enough, and that's what I was missing here. But I suppose it's unfair to criticize Onstad for not writing the book I wanted.

How Happy to Be was my second selection for Canada Reads: Independently as well as my seventh selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and while it's not about to unseat Century, I'd definitely recommend it. Next up is Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner.

It's not difficult to see why Fall On Your Knees was chosen for Oprah's book club. It's not a bad book, but neither is it a particularly good one (I'm not sorry I've read it, but I wouldn't ever actually say to someone "hey, you should read this book"), and it has all the features that a big, serious, meaty family drama/epic is supposed to have. There's a family without a lot of money in a remote village a long time ago, a great romance with disastrous consequences, a great talent nurtured and then prematurely snuffed, any number of lives lived in quiet desperation, a miraculous child, an abusive husband/father, some heartbreaking death. Very little humour, and some modern characters dressed up in period clothes so they can chafe against their fate of being born in a time before they could be accepted for who they are. It's a very Canadian book.

Despite the laundry list of potential clichés I just went through above, none of that is really what keeps Fall On Your Knees from actually living up to all the attention it's gotten. It's just too damned long. That can be—and often is—a facile criticism, but in this case it's accurate. Ann-Marie MacDonald gives us two or three exceptionally managed moments of extreme emotional tension (Kathleen's death, Frances with Ginger in the cave all the way up to the shooting, and the bits in Kathleen's diary when she discovers both jazz and Rose), but they are separated by an ocean of dreary greyness.

Kathleen's death is probably the best illustration of this. Kathleen was the most fully realized character in the book, even though she appears in less than half of it. Her death scene was tragic, monstrous, bloody, and it struck the book like a hurricane. Killing off a character that strong so early in the book was bold, and exactly the sort of thing that could have made Fall On Your Knees great, but killing her doesn't make her gone. Her memory lingers, of course, and her name becomes a kind of curse on the Piper household, but she reappears several times in flashbacks, letters, photographs, and diary entries. She's so close to what happens in the rest of the book that the shock of her death becomes diffuse, absorbed by the rest of the book. As a result it doesn't have anywhere near the impact on the reader (or this reader, anyway) that it could have, and even Frances' antics can't drag us out of the emotional dead zone that follows, the in-between feeling that I got from most of the book. Even when something was happening I felt like I was waiting for something else to happen.

It's not just specific incidents like Kathleen's death that get lost in what seems like interminable interstitial sections. So much of the first few chapters, James' life before Materia, their courtship and the start of their lives together, falls out of memory, irrelevant and almost entirely unnecessary. All of what the story requires of the Mahmouds and the origins of the Piper family could have been condensed dramatically with no real harm done. Likewise the fighting and squabbling between Mercedes and Frances. I couldn't help but feel that I was reading (and re-reading; Frances and Mercedes' relationship was very repetitive) passages that added nothing. I don't mind a sprawling story if I feel like it's well-executed and tightly under control, but MacDonald didn't always seem in control of the material. The more the lies and confusions and superstitions of the Piper family were compounded, the more it felt like overkill, making the same point again and again, avoiding giving the book a real centre. The end result—which I admit I saw coming—was an almost shaggy dog Big Reveal, but for a minor character rather than the reader. I felt cheated, not because the resolution was too clean (it wasn't), but because it was too obvious.

As I said above, I wouldn't go out of my way to hand this book to anyone, but I wouldn't tell them to put it down, either. Fall On Your Knees was my second Canada Reads selection, and my sixth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is How Happy to Be, by Katrina Onstad.

The wonderful Dr. Sarah Tolmie, whom I've mentioned at least once before on this blog, was a professor of mine at the University of Waterloo—my Honours Essay supervisor, in fact (what we at UW referred to as the "Undergraduate Thesis"). In addition to teaching me a great deal about my field, she directed me toward the work of Iris Murdoch, and later, an obscure little novel called Lord Nelson Tavern. She recommended it to me while I was spending a summer alone in Sudbury. My girlfriend was up North working, while I had just moved into a new apartment, and didn't even have a telephone or Internet connection yet. I was, however, making effective use of the Sudbury Public Library. Lord Nelson Tavern, as it turns out, was by Canadian author Ray Smith, and though I promptly forgot both his name and the title of his book, I never forgot the experience of reading it. It was strange, difficult—I'm not sure I understood a single word of it—but it was also amazing. The kind of reading experience I look for over and over again. And then in July, I read this post by Mr. Beattie, and it all came rushing back to me. I'm not sure why I put off reading Century for so long, but Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently has given me the opportunity to correct the error.

Century, though labeled a novel, is six not-quite self-contained fictions that trace the family of Jane Seymour, the subject of the first piece, from 1983 to 1893. The first four are grouped together as "Family," and the last two as "The Continental." Though never explicitly stated, I think that Kenniston Thorson, the American who is the subject of both Continental pieces and Connie (aka Lulu, likely also Constance) from "Red Banner, Black Boots" are Jane's maternal grandparents. Smith arranges the six fictions in more or less reverse chronological order, and as a result there are moments, or aspects of a character's personality, that seem to echo back through time. The second piece opens like so:

Ian knew he was perhaps sentimental, even silly, but he was moved by the landscape and the air in it. I live in the world and this is the world, he thought, as he broke down out of the clouds into the clean air and floated to a stop in the powder snow just below the avalanche platform. This Austrian valley stretching off to the left and right was deep – he could not see the valley floor from here – and steep-walled, the sides dark with rock faces and precarious evergreens picked out by the snow: a dramatic and gloomy scene. But what moved him most was the mist clinging to the mountains across and below, the mist woven through the trees, seeming still.

A hundred pages later and nearly a hundred years earlier Kenniston Thorson is riding in a cab on his way back to his Paris residence when he remembers how,

once, while he was trekking a deep, forested valley in the Vorarlberg, a song had come down to him from the craggy heights, the song of an unseen girl far above had come coiling down through the trees and filled the valley and filled his soul with its clear liquid innocence.

It's not an exact corollary (though "the Vorarlberg" is in Austria), but Century deliberately resists such obvious framing. The novel spans ninety years, not one hundred, and while Gwen has inherited both her parents' sexual appetites (and, particularly, her father's quest for love), it's Jane who most resembles Connie, her nervous energy, her life invaded by the dead of a generation past, dipping her big toe into philosophy but also clearly capable of so much more. Likewise, it's Jane's father who most resembles the sophisticated but restless Thorson, even though they are the only two main characters not related by blood.

Much, perhaps too much, has been made about how difficult Century is to talk about. It's true, but what I wound up inferring from the reviews and blog posts is that it was also a difficult book to read, and it isn't, at least not on the surface. It isn't Ulysses or Sexing the Cherry or Empire of the Senseless, or even Gravity's Rainbow. I found that I had to pay close attention to Smith's prose, but as well as being beautiful, it was also surprisingly charming and straightforward. What makes Century difficult to talk about is its structure, the complex relationships between characters, events, and images. It's one of the saddest, most lovely things I've ever read, but to explain why, I think it would be better, and perhaps even more efficient, to just hand you a copy of the novel rather than to try and say anything about it.

Somewhat surprisingly, I'd come across some of Century before. As soon as I encountered the Venetian masks in "Serenissima" I knew I'd already read that section, and I scoured my bookshelf and magazine rack. The culprit (somewhat unsurprisingly) turned out to be the Salon des Refusés issue of Canadian Notes & Queries (issue #74, well worth reading if you can manage to track down a copy, though bits of it—"Serinissima" included—are available online). I can't overstress this point: Century is one of the finest, most beautiful books I have ever read, regardless of the author's nationality. I don't feel the need to qualify this as a great "Canadian" book. It's just a spectacular fucking book. I will be shocked if I read anything better this year. You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't read this book, and I'm very glad that Biblioasis has included it in their Renditions series. (As an interesting aside, the cover art for this edition is a detail from "Saint-Sauveur Watercolour I" by painter Ken Tolmie, who just happens to be the father of Dr. Sarah Tolmie, who first introduced me to Ray Smith's work.)

Century was my fifth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and my first selection for Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently. Next is Fall On Your Knees, by Anne-Marie MacDonald.

I first read Generation X when I was fifteen (so, 1994), a blue collar kid in a blue collar town. I don't remember much about it except for my reaction. I hated it. "Hate" might even be too mild a word. I don't know that I've ever had as strongly negative a reaction to a book as I had to this one, and I've had some pretty strong negative reactions. My thoughts on it then could be summarized in this statement: yuppies who think they aren't yuppies complain about how hard their lives are. But fifteen years is a long time, and panelist Roland Pemberton (aka Cadence Weapon) has chosen to defend Generation X on Canada Reads. I've revisited other books from my past with positive results, why not with this one?

And the verdict is in! I still hate Generation X. I still hate it a lot, in fact. But unlike fifteen years ago, I now more or less have the vocabulary to vent my spleen. Generation X is about middle class brats slumming it, rolling in the appearance of poverty like dogs roll in shit: to mask their scent. It allows them, Dag and Claire in particular, to be wry, judgemental, hipper-than-thou (but despite being hipsters, they're not trying to be the cool kids, oh God no, not them) without ever having to do the real work of introspection. In one memorable passage, Dag describes the kind of person he believes he used to be:

"I don't think I was a likeable guy. I was actually one of those putzes you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. But at the slightest provocation I'd have been willing to apologize for my working life—how I work from eight till five in front of a sperm-dissolving VDT performing abstract tasks that indirectly enslave the Third World. But then, hey! Come five o'clock, I'd go nuts! I'd streak my hair and drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town."

I got news for you, Dag: you ain't changed. (Pop culture imposition: every time I see "Dag" on the page, I can't help but think of how Brad Pitt pronounces the word "dog" in Guy Ritchie's film, Snatch.) He trades in the trappings of his corporate lifestyle for the nouveau-hippy trappings of a group he calls Basement People, but that's all it is, an exchange of trappings. ("Basement People rent basement suites; the air above is too middle class." Yeah, sure that's why.) He does eventually realize that the superficial changes he made don't work ("But basically, my life-style escape wasn't working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends—no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs."), but he never actually makes a genuine change. I get the sense that we're supposed to imagine that dropping everything and moving to Palm Springs to work a McJob is a genuine change, but it isn't. Dag's coworker Margaret once says to him "the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped," and that's all Dag does, all Andy or Claire does either, for that matter. Stop. Stopping doesn't take you anywhere new, it just leaves you right where you are, except now genuine change doesn't even exist in potentia.

The three of them are all stopped. They ditch their corporate suits for McJobs ("low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future"—but I didn't really need to define that one, did I?), ditch one expression of conspicuous wealth (the accumulation of stuff and homes to put it in, like Dag's old boss) for another expression of conspicuous wealth (services that the genuinely poor largely can't afford, like international travel) and declare themselves on the road to change. Andy calls this shift the "poverty jet set" ("a group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence"), but unlike for the genuinely poor, there's an implicit financial safety net beneath everything these three do. Claire gets regular checkups from the Baxter clan, her father so rich he's moved on to an honest-to-God trophy wife. All three of them, despite their McJobs, rent houses (bungalows in a courtyard, but still) instead of apartments, skip work to travel (Andy somehow found the cash, all on his own, at the age of 15 to fly halfway across the continent to a small regional airport), make impulse purchases, have no student loans despite having college educations, and generally do whatever the hell they please without any apparent anxiety about money. Coupland's characters treat poverty the way Republicans treat homosexuality. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton wrote:

The likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not ... cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

But for Andy, Dag, and Claire, poverty is something to try on while they're figuring out what they want their real lives to look like, it's a lifestyle choice. They are, as I said above, middle class brats, and they've confused ennui with disenfranchisement, with philosophy and morality. When I think of these three, my blood boils, and the lyrics to Pulp's "Common People" spring to mind ("if you called your dad he could stop it all"), followed immediately by The Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia":

Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo
Braggin' that you know how the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul

I worried for a moment that I'm being to harsh on these three, but I don't think I am. In Coupland's clever marginalia, the definition for "McJob" ends with "frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one," and while none of our little Gen-X trio would ever consider them satisfying careers, neither do they have an inkling of the real stress and anxiety inherent in such jobs for people who work them because they have no other choices, no notion of the compromises that have to be made when they are the only way you can get by. But like David Foster Wallace's narrators, they have no problem ratcheting up the irony and making fun of such people's tastes, their choices, their property. They're like the present-day hipsters that make racist jokes (the men in women's jeans so tight that at least they'll never be able to breed and v-neck t-shirts so deep you can see the unwashed hair on their navels) who aren't really racist, they're just being ironic. Puhleaze. Gag me with a spoon already. When Dag tells his boss off, saying,

"[...] do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You make me sick."

I can hear every one of the customers in Larry's bar, or the cashier and the fat man in Dag's nuclear attack story, giving Dag, Claire, and Andy the same speech if they could overhear them telling their stories in the desert, camping out at the site of other people's failures largely because it's kitschy, or because they can gawk ironically at the ruins of middle class privilege, which they largely still enjoy (but pretend they don't).

You might say I found representations of class in Generation X problematic.

The vast majority of these problems are, I grant you, in Part One, but Andy's brother nails it in Part Two when he says that he's afraid of how Andy is living only on the surface of life. Andy believes himself to be seeking depth, a way out of what he finally admits is a middle class existence he feels trapped by (and it's even admitted, finally, that Dag is truly different in his McJob from most, not at all trapped in it, though there's no real significance to the admission; Coupland seems to present it as simply evidence of greater spiritual worth), but all he's really doing is using clever phrases, and worrying about things, even if only to want fewer of them. As for Claire, well, I can understand her a little better after her Christmas in New York (pursuit of a compelling and physically beautiful lover who was with you largely for reasons unknown which eventually turn out to be a kind of metaphysical boost who, upon receiving that boost—or realizing it will never come—makes for the nearest exit? check), but dowsing rod aside I can't picture her as anything more than a chain-smoking fashionista who talks at people instead of to them. Every one of Coupland's characters is repulsive, but it's not until Part Two that they even become characters. I can picture Holden Caulfield reading Part One and tossing the book aside as full of goddamn phonies, though I get the impression that they're actually meant to be little micro-Holdens (not that that would have been any better).

I'm not particularly crazy about the style of Coupland's prose. It seemed to work for me in Microserfs, a novel I loved, so it baffles me (as it did fifteen years ago) why I can't make it work for me in Generation X (or Life After God, for that matter). It seems both flat and unbearably precious at the same time, like DeLillo circa White Noise without the resignation, or Chuck Palahniuk circa Fight Club without the anger (and regardless of his faults, Palahniuk's irony and hipsterism isn't nearly as self-righteous as Coupland's—"Irene smokes") and the sense of humour. Coupland likes to use full, formal names for things that are instantly recognizable to nearly anyone now living by more casual ones ("Hollywood, California" "the Pop artist, Mr. Andy Warhol"—Christ, why not "Andrew"?), and the effect is grating, like he wants to connect to the reader with the cultural touchstones, but is worried that they might be unhip so he's telling us that he doesn't really mean it. And the italics. What the fuck is that about? As a literate human being, I don't need the author telling me where to place the stress in a sentence.

And the lists! All those extraneous nouns and adjectives and adverbs. An example:

Edward's dinner became whatever he could microwave from the local Circle K nuke 'n' serve boutique—a beef-and-bean burrito, say, washed down with Polish cherry brandy, the taste for which he acquired during a long, sleepy earnest summer job spent behind the glum, patronless counter of the local Enver Hoxha Communist bookstore.

Something like this works for DeLillo because, as I mentioned before, of the resignation; it becomes an almost penitent litany for him. It works for Palahniuk as an expression of rage or energetic black humour, and it works for somebody like David Foster Wallace because he overwhelms you with it, making it seem like the only way to extract any meaning at all from banality. In Generation X it feels mocking, and I feel like I'm the one being mocked. (I don't imagine Coupland is actually mocking his readers, but I just can't shake that feeling.)

Generation X ends with the sentence, "I can't remember whether I said thank you," but it's not a question worth asking. Of course he didn't. I know that I'm going to be in the minority by not enjoying this book, and that's okay. It wasn't completely without merits, but the problems I saw with it, particularly in terms of class representation, were deal breakers for me.

Generation X was my fourth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge, and my first book for Canada Reads. Next up is Century, by Ray Smith.

As Kate mentioned here, A Mixture of Frailties is the book where Robertson Davies finally, firmly made the shift from dramatist to novelist. Not to get all "no true Scotsman" on you, but I think, given how his next eight novels play out, a case can be made that A Mixture of Frailties is the first "true" Robertson Davies novel. That's not exactly the case I'm going to be making here, but this will be setting the pattern for most of the remainder of these books. In my comments on Tempest-Tost I discussed the first of the three elements Davies brings together in constructing the identities of his aristocracy of the spirit: self-knowledge. In my discussion of Leaven of Malice I discussed the second element: the conceit. I'm not certain I was clear in how conceits fit in to the framework I'm talking about, as I also spoke about how "we" construct identity, rather than simply how Davies constructs the identities of his characters. I think conceits are analogous to extraordinary circumstances, moments or events that (to return to the jewel metaphor I mangled in my last post on Davies) reveal facets of ourselves that even we may not have known existed. The third element, which takes centre stage in A Mixture of Frailties, is a variation on the bildungsroman. I say "variation", because Davies requires that his characters be, whether they know it or not, apprenticed to various masters throughout the course of their coming of age. (Can we agree, for the purposes of this and later reviews, that "master" is gender neutral? The word "mistress" has connotations I don't want to evoke, and "teacher" or "instructor" aren't quite right for what Davies does.) From what I understand, your standard bildungsroman doesn't actually require this sort of relationship.

A Mixture of Frailties opens with one of Davies' absurd conceits. Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace are now married, and Solly's mother (who, let's face it, was not a very nice person, and was not at all kind to Pearl) has passed away. Her last will and testament is manipulative at best, and punitive at worst. It's simplest to let Davies explain it (I apologize for the length of the quotation):

"Shorn of technicality," said he, "the meaning of the will is this: all of your late mother's estate is left in trust to her executors—you, her son, Solomon Bridgetower—you, Laura Pottinger, spinster—you, Jevon Knapp, as Dean of St. Nicholas' Cathedral. That estate, as outlined here, consists of this house and its contents and considerable holdings and investments. You, Solomon Bridgetower, are to continue to occupy the house, which has always been your home, but it is the property of the trust, and you may not dispose of it. But the income from the estate is to be devoted to the educational project which your late mother has outlined."

"You mean I don't get any money?" said Solly.

"You get a legacy of one hundred dollars," said the lawyer.

"Yes, but I mean—the investments, and the money that brought in my Mother's own income, and all that—I don't quite follow—?"

"That money is all to be devoted to the education, or training, of some young woman resident in this city of Salterton, who is desirous of following a career in the arts. The young woman is to be chosen by you, the trustees. She must not be more than twenty-one at the time she is chosen, and you are to be responsible for her maintenance and training, in the best circumstances you can devise, until she reaches the age of twenty-five. She is to be maintained abroad in order, as your mother says, that she may bring back to Canada some of the intangible treasures of European tradition. The phrase, of course, rules out any possibility of her being trained in the States. And when she is twenty-five, you are to choose another beneficiary of the trust. And so on, unless the conditions under which the trust exists are terminated."

"And I get nothing except a hundred dollars and the right to live in the house?"

"You get nothing, unless the condition is fulfilled which brings the trust to an end. If, and when, that condition is fulfilled and you are still living in this house, you receive a life interest in your mother's estate. Bequests are made to the two servants, Ethel Colman and Doris Black, which will be payable when the condition is fulfilled. Laura Pottinger receives a bequest of the testator's collection of Rockingham china. The Cathedral Church of St. Nicholas will receive all of the testator's holdings in certain telephone and transportation stocks."

"There is a condition attaching to this latter bequest. Until the Cathedral gets the telephone stock, the Dean is to preach, every St. Nicholas' Day, a special sermon on some matter relating to education, and these sermons are to be known as the Louisa Hansen Bridgetower Memorial Sermons. If there is any failure in this respect, the bequest is forfeit."

Solly still looked puzzled. "And all this hangs—?"

It all hangs on your having a son, Mr. Bridgetower. When, and if, you and your wife, Pearl Veronica, née Vambrace, produce male issue, who is duly christened Solomon Hansen Bridgetower, he becomes heir of all his grandmother's estate save for the bequests I have mentioned. But you are to have a life interest in the estate, so that he will not actually come into possession of his inheritance until after your death."

"And if we have a child and it's a girl?"

"The trust will remain."

I may have mentioned, in my review of Leaven of Malice, that Davies' conceits would become less absurd over time. I may have overstated that. Ridiculous? Yes. Punitive? Absolutely. Illegal? Well, who knows, but that's not the sort of thing Davies, at this stage in his career as a novelist, would have even bothered to ask. He just ran with it.

Solly and Pearl wind up facing considerable emotional and financial hardship as a result of this patently ridiculous will, and their struggles in Salterton take up most of the first part of A Mixture of Frailties, far and away the longest novel of the trilogy, but they are essentially just a framing narrative for the psychological and musical development of blue-collar singer Monica Gall. A great fuss (a great fuss) is made over choosing her to be the recipient of the late Mrs. Bridgetower's backhanded charity. Puss Pottinger even rejects one promising young woman because she suspects her of (gasp!) having had relations with a man. There's a lot of good Davies satire in those scenes, and much of it is sharper than in either Tempest-Tost or Leaven of Malice, setting the stage for the quantum leap to come. This is the book where Robertson Davies stops thinking like a playwright, and starts thinking like a novelist.

The woman eventually chosen to be schooled in Europe is twenty-one year old Monica Gall, part of The Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, an amateur vocal group used by Pastor Beamis to raise money on the radio for his parish, a group commonly know as the Thirteeners (who seem to be a none-too-subtle parody of Seventh Day Adventists). Beamis, the Galls, and most of the Thirteener congregation are uneducated, working-class folks, with all the virtues and vices that entails. But Humphrey Cobbler sees the potential for something better in Monica and her voice, and he convinces the Bridgewater trustees to see it too. Most of the rest of the novel concerns her training in England, with occasional visits paid to the Bridgetowers. Robertson Davies wrote eleven novels in his career, and this is the first of my four favourites (in case you're wondering, the others are The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Cunning Man), in large part because for the training of Monica Gall he finally turns satire, theatricality, conceits, and all the other trappings of his first two novels into means rather than ends. A Mixture of Frailties is coherent, human, and holds up remarkably well to repeated readings, without the heavy theoretical scaffolding that characterizes his more celebrated Deptford Trilogy.

In what will become signature Davies fashion, Monica is placed in the care of famous conductor Sir Frederic Domdaniel, who introduces her to three other teachers, each of which will refine her talents and expand (or complicate) her character.

The first of those teachers is Murtagh Molloy, a nasty little Irishman with wandering hands and a coarse manner—but he's also got an unsurpassed sensitivity to the nuances of music and emotion. Sir Benedict sends Monica to him because, though she displays considerable potential, her style is sickly sweet, melodramatic, and obvious (God, it reminds me of pretty much all of my early work). That's okay for The Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, but not for a world-class opera singer. She needs to learn how to evoke "the proper muhd". Molloy makes her sing Paolo Tosti's "Good-Bye!" (listen to Nellie Melba's performance, the touchstone Molloy uses in the novel), and then performs it himself so that she can hear and understand the difference.

He sang the song himself. It was like any singing Monica had ever heard, for although his voice was unremarkable in tone, and he sang without a hint of exaggeration or histrionics, it became as he sang the most compelling and revealing of sounds. The song invaded and possessed her as it had never done in all the time she had known it. Her own rendition, moulded by Aunt Ellen, was carefully phrased and built up emotionally until, she flattered herself, the final repetitions of "Good-Bye" provided a fine and satisfying climax. But as Molloy sang the song there seemed to be no calculation of this kind, and the phrasing was hardly apparent. Yet the whole song was sung with a poignancy of regret which was the most powerful emotion that Monica had ever heard expressed in music. "It's unbearably sad when you really understand it," Aunt Ellen had said, thinking of her dead lover, and Monica had striven to recreate that sadness herself; sometimes she had succeeded, until the sob mounting in her throat brought on a prickling of the eyes, and then a fullness in the nose which ruined the singing. But that was real feeling, wasn't it? And that was what made great music, surely? Yet here was Murtagh Molloy, apparently as cool as a cucumber, giving rise to a sadness in her which swept far beyond anything she could associate with Aunt Ellen and the dead schoolteacher. This was the sadness of all the world's parting lovers, of all the autumns since the beginning of time, of death and the sweetness of death. Monica was moved, not to tears, but to a deep and solemn joy.

"You were dipping your bucket into a shallow well and I was dipping mine into a deep one," he tells her. Finding a deeper well for her bucket is what Sir Benedict wants Molloy to teach her, and by bullying, angering, and embarrassing her, that's exactly what she does. But he doesn't do it alone. What becomes clear is that, while one doesn't have to be an emotional prodigy to call up the proper muhd, it does require more experience and a greater depth of character than Monica possesses at the ripe old age of twenty-one. Molloy would provide that experience and depth with a little bit of guilty, teary-eyed dirty-old-man-style grab-ass behind his wife's back, but with the exception of one sad, drunken misstep, he knows better (and Monica has a better head on her shoulders than anybody really gives her credit for—I think she's one of Davies' best female characters, actually—and would not have been up for any dirty-old-man shenanigans anyway).

To learn more about music theory and to get some dirt under her nails (and for other reasons that aren't really significant to Monica's education), Sir Benedict sends her to work under the young, avante-garde composer Giles Revelstoke. It's through her exposure to him, whether intentional or not, that she finds that deeper well to dip her bucket. Giles is everything you'd expect from a character with a name like Revelstoke. He's brilliant, arrogant, cruel, short-sighted, selfish, and more than a bit of a libertine. Of course Monica fall hopelessly in love with him, and of course he treats her like a drudge. In fact, he gives every indication that he hates her and resents her presence in his life, until one snowy Christmas Eve in Wales he walks in on her brushing her teeth, lifts up her skirts, gives her her first taste of life, and then wanders off to bed without a word being said. When they return to London they are lovers, and she is almost completely his creature. Monica's experiences with Giles are probably the most important and intense in the novel, and though it's an old, old story (really, who among us hasn't fallen in love with someone who treated us like shit to satisfy their own desires?), Davies deserves credit for integrating it successfully into an extremely satisfying transformation from community enforced ignorance to fully independent personhood. Revelstoke teaches her about physical pleasure and desire, about betrayal, about ego and the petty truth of artistic communities, and finally, with his implosion in Italy and his suspect death later in London, about self-preservation. (I actually tried to find a passage to quote to illustrate all of this, but Davies, despite his love of aphorisms, maxims, and proverbs, actually resists that kind of pat summation for important things like a character's maturation.)

Monica's third teacher doesn't cut a prominent figure in A Mixture of Frailties, appearing only twice as far as I can recall, and described in not great detail, but she teaches an often-overlooked lesson that flies in the face of the popular wisdom surrounding the creative class (which a great many of creators believe). Her name is Amy Nielsen, and she is an American living in Paris who runs a kind of finishing school, teaching young women history, literature, which fork to use and so on. She also shows them the sights and lets them soak up a little bit of culture. What she does for Monica is a little more specific. Monica wants to be a singer, and a great one. Amy teaches her how to act the part. There's a truism that creating is so much about the person that the tools largely don't matter. This is, of course, utter bullshit, and Davies never buys into it. Of course tools matter. They won't make a bad artist into a great one, but they will allow someone with talent to maximize that talent. I can tell you from my own experiences as a drummer (oh yeah, I play the drums) that two things, other than practice of course, were responsible for dramatic improvements in my playing. The first was playing with musicians who were more skilled and experienced than I was, and the second was upgrading from a crappy no-name drum kit with pie-plate cymbals and busted tree branches for sticks, to a high-end Sonor kit with top of the line Sabian studio cymbals and laser-balanced signature series Vic Firth sticks. Having better tools allowed me greater freedom, and frankly improved my playing considerably. Amy Nielsen knows that Monica wants to be a singer of operatic quality, and that means mingling with high society. Thirteener surfaces just won't cut it. It all happens off stage, but Amy teachers her to be a great singer rather than just a hick with a decent voice. It amounts to taking her shopping and to a few parties, but the impact it has belies its source, and it will show up in her choices as the novel progresses.

Finally there is Sir Benedict Domdaniel himself. To bring us all the way back to Tempest-Tost, what he teaches her is professionalism, and brings out her professional ambition. When she's weighing her options in a professional capacity it usually winds up being between the extremes of the anti-social Revelstoke and the people's champion Molloy, and that's when she hears, like her own conscience, the voice of Sir Benedict counseling a reasonable middle ground. And truly he is the most professional, the most accomplished, and the most self-aware among Monica's three musical masters. He exposes her to other ways of being an artist, and she learns valuable things from those ways, but by taking on his centrism, she chooses her own middle way, and is ultimately not consumed by the passion of extremes. (Davies also lets it slip that she will be successful, so though the novel ends with a mystery, it's a different mystery entirely.) You can see that voice taking root in her head in this lengthy scene:

"Now listen [Sir Benedict says]: I haven't been bullying you like this just for fun: I've been trying to find out what you're up to. All I know at present is that you have a pretty fair little voice—good enough among several hundred just as good. What training will do still remains to be seen. But unless you have some honest appraisal of your self you haven't much chance. And all that appears now is that you think you have some talent, and are bashful about saying so: you want to sing, with some vague notion of benefitting mankind in general, and raising people a little above the mire of total depravity in which God has placed them. What do you want out of it for yourself?"

"I haven't thought much about that."

"Little liar! Now, answer me honestly: haven't you had daydreams in which you see yourself as a great singer, sought after and courted, popular and rich—probably with handsome men breaking their necks to get into your bed?"

Monica blushed deeply, and was silent. None of her daydreams had ever included bed.

"You see! I was right. In your heart of hearts you think of singing as a form of power: and you've got more common sense in your heart of hearts than you have on that smarmy little tongue of yours. You're right; singing is a form of power—power of different kinds. Singing as a form of sexual allurement—there's nothing wrong with that. Very natural, indeed: every real man responds to the woman with the golden, squalling, cat-like note, and every real woman longs to hurl herself at the cock-a-doodling tenor or the bellowing bass. Part of Nature's Great Plan. But sex-shouting's a trap, too. At fifty, your golden squall becomes a bad joke. What then? Teaching? If you're not born to it—and few of the sex-shouters are—it's a dog's life; pupils are fatheads, most of 'em. Are you trying for—well, when you're trained—a possible twenty-five years of that kind of glory? Because it is glory, you know—real glory."

"I hadn't thought of it that way."

"Not refined enough? Well, there's another kind of singing. The technique is the same, but the end is different. It depends on what you have in your head and your imagination; it means being a kind of bard, who reveals the life that lies in great music and poetry. You use your voice to give delight. That's what music used to be for, you know—to capture the beauty and delight that people found in life. But then the Romantics came along and turned it all upside down; they made music a way of churning up emotions in people that they hadn't felt before. Music ceased to be a distilment of life and became, for a lot of people, a substitute for life—a substitute for a sea-voyage, or the ecstasies of sainthood, or being raped by a cannibal king, or even for an hour with a psychoanalyst or a good movement of the bowels. And a whole class of people arose who thought themselves music-lovers, but who were really sensation-lovers. Not that I'm a hundred per cent against the Romantics—just against the people who think that Romanticism is all there is of music. Well, there are two kinds of singing. The sexual singer is, in pretty nearly all respects, the greater of the two, just as a mountain torrent is necessarily a greater force than the most beautiful of fountains: when she sings, she's a potent enchantress, and the music is merely the broomstick on which she flies. With the bardic singer, the music comes first, and self quite a long way second. Now: which sort of singing appeals to you?"

"Oh, the second, of course. The—bardic kind."

"If you really mean that, I think the less of you for it. Far better to set out aiming as high as you can, and killing yourself to be one of the big, adored, sexy squallers. It argues more real vitality and gumption in you. Still, I don't trust you to know what you want. You're too full of a desire to please—not to please me, but to please your family, or your schoolteachers, or those people—the What's It's Name Trust—who are paying the shot for you. Those people never want you to have great ambitions or strong, consuming passions. They want you to be refined—which means predictable, stable, controlled, always choosing the smallest cake on the plate, never breaking wind audibly, being a good loser—in a word, dead. I admit that the world couldn't function properly without its legions of nice, refined, passionless living dead, but there is no room for them in the arts. So we'll see what you are after you've had a few months of work. At the moment you're just a nice girl with pots of money to spend on training. So let's get to work."

This could be Davies himself speaking to the reader about music, about literature, about love and human relationships, even, and it's a technique he uses frequently—the conversation which is also a lecture which is also a manifesto—but in most cases, as here, it serves to plant a powerful idea into the mind of the protagonist that will shape her choices and her views for the rest of her life.

In A Mixture of Frailties we finally have all the elements of Davies' "personal myth" method/theory of how his aristocracy of the spirit construct their identities. By the end of the novel, Monica Gall finally achieves the level of professionalism and self-knowledge that marked out Valentine Rich in Tempest-Tost, we have a fairly absurd conceit setting the plot in motion as in Leaven of Malice, and finally A Mixture of Frailties brings a kind of bildungsroman into play by putting Monica Gall through a series of literal and spiritual apprenticeships. For the first time we've seen Davies at something like full strength. I haven't even scratched the surface of what this novel has to offer, and I think it's a much-overlooked Canadian classic.

A Mixture of Frailties was my third selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Generation X, by Douglas Coupland.

I wrote in my discussion of Tempest-Tost that I was interested in tracing the development of Davies' system of identity construction through all eleven of his novels, and that Tempest-Tost offered insight into the first of what I believe to be the three major elements of that system: the kind of self-knowledge achieved by his élite, the aristocracy of the spirit (I was perhaps not entirely clear that, while it takes a number of factors for Davies to elevate a character to that aristocracy, it is his or her self-knowledge that is of chief importance). In that first volume, Davies presents us mostly with characters who have already managed the trick of fully constructing their identities, and so we are largely only capable of seeing the end result, not the process or the tools. For Davies identity is like a jewel; it must be cut before it can be said to properly exist, and once cut it does not change. Only a few facets of that jewel can be seen by any one person at any one time, and what can appear to be changes in the personality, in the identity, is merely the rotating of that jewel to reveal more and more facets. In my discussion of Tempest-Tost I wrote about talent, an attitude I called "professionalism" (though it could have other names), and self-knowledge. These are largely the tools Davies uses to cut the jewel. I won't get to the process by which new facets are made until my discussion of A Mixture of Frailties; what concerns us in Leaven of Malice is the chief method of revealing more facets to the reader. And with that I hope I have finished torturing the metaphor of the jewel.

One of the advantages of writing trilogies is that characters can carry over from one novel to the other with much of the heavy lifting already done in terms of introductions and the establishment of certain basic traits. What remains is to be done is simply further development (any writers looking over my shoulder may now give a chuckle at my use of the word "simply"). Davies makes full use of this opportunity, shifting focus in Leaven of Malice to some of the best-drawn secondary characters from Tempest-Tost. More than a decade after my first run through Davies' ouevre I'm still disappointed that Valentine Rich, one of Davies' most real and interesting female characters, never makes an appearance beyond that first novel, though I have no problem understanding why. Gloster Ridley, who makes his only appearance in Leaven of Malice, is another such character, but literary novelists are rarely accommodating to fans of serialized fiction. (Not that I would suggest they should be.) At any rate, characterization isn't what I really want to discuss right now. Davies' technique has improved since Tempest-Tost, but in Leaven of Malice he introduces an element more important to the concept I'm attempting to trace in his work.

According to Wikipedia, the primary definition of a conceit is "an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison." Anyone who's taken a class on 17^th Century literature will remember the concept from John Donne's excellent poem, The Flea, which is the standard scrap of teaching verse. Indeed, Wikipedia also cites it. What I've identified in Davies' work is a definition that's perhaps less explicitly known, but is likely more common in contemporary literature. Also from Wikipedia: "For later literature and film, the term is sometimes used to refer to a device that stretches reality to take advantage of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief."" I would argue that this is an extremely common device in melodrama (and is at the core of situation comedy). I think anyone even casually familiar with Davies' interests will know that he was an absolute fiend for Victorian melodrama, and was clever enough to see its value both as fun, 'trashy' literature and as a source of genuine inspiration. The central conceit of Leaven of Malice could have been ripped straight from such a melodrama, or even an episode of How I Met Your Mother. An elocution teacher (!) who also happens to be a con artist arrives in Salterton and visits a variety of influential local persons, like Professor Vambrace and Gloster Ridley, editor of The Bellman, Salterton's daily paper, intent selling his wares. The instructor in question is Bevill Higgin, an irritating, obnoxious little man, the sort of ingratiating, relentless self-promoter that one despises rather than admires. He is, of course, dismissed by nearly everyone he pushes himself on, except the decrepit, incompetent Bellman reporter Swithin Shillito, and Mrs. Edith Little, Ridley's dull-witted, prudish, easily-manipulated housekeeper (and her family). Higgin wants nothing more than attention, and when he can't get it from the important people in town, he decides to cause trouble. He plants a false wedding announcement for Pearl Vambrace and Solomon Bridgetower in The Bellman (on November 31^st of all days). Seeing that we're talking about Salterton, a slightly cartoonish, satirical version of a small Ontario city (though not so cartoonish as to be completely unbelievable), this isn't just a curiosity to be laughed at and then ignored. Instead it brings down the mother of all shit storms on half the city.

I would say something like "this is where things start to get absurd", but really, an Irish con-man giving elocution lessons who uses a fake wedding announcement as payback for being ignored is pretty absurd all on its own. The point is, once you accept it, everything else in the novel works, and it works well. Professor Vambrace's descent into obsession and paranoia is bizarre on its own, but Davies uses the fake wedding announcement (and, to be fair, a spectacularly fun satire of sociology and sociologists) to create an atmosphere and tone where it makes perfect sense, even when he breaks down to the point of striking his daughter, and things go from amusing to deadly serious. Davies' conceits aren't always so straightforward (though they are sometimes more bizarre), but he seems to still be operating largely with a theatrical mindset.

There's a lot going on in Leaven of Malice, far more than in Tempest-Tost, but not all of it is related to what I wanted to talk about here. The book is a tangle of mostly satirical plot lines that are eventually brought together by the resolution of the wedding announcement incident into a big, frothy, classically comic ending. The wedding announcement strand isn't necessarily the most interesting or important thing going on in the novel, but it is the chief instrument through which Pearl Vambrace achieves self-awareness, and self-actualization. Of course it's also the means Davies uses to throw her and Solly Bridgetower together and get his comic ending, but those two things are closely related, and it all dovetails rather nicely.

Readers of Tempest-Tost will remember that Pearl Vambrace was an insecure young woman, not thought of very highly by most of Salternton, and thoroughly overwhelmed by her domineering father, the Professor. She did have a brief, shining moment as the (alright, a) belle of the June Ball, but by the time Leaven of Malice opens, she's a proverbial shrinking violet, hiding in the listening room at the university library where she works. When the wedding announcement hits, she's bombarded by unwanted attention from her co-workers, accusations from her father, and demands from Solly to "talk." She wants desperately to escape the entire mess, her father's selfishness and Solly's demands in particular. She feels alternately like she's being ignored, pushed around, or insulted. To cope, she winds up doing things—significantly, things like thinking for herself—that she never would have tried before.

First, conscientious girl though she is, Pearl sometimes abandons her place as an assistant librarian and instead hides out in the Music Room of Waverly University Library, where she plays records the Music Appreciation professor refers to as "Horrible Examples" and imagines herself a pianist, a singer, a ballerina of unparalleled grace. Christian Sinding and Frederic Clay aren't exactly the sort of composers I'd imagine a rebellious young girl listening to in 1954; I'd be more inclined to picture her listening to Big Joe Turner (who's much-covered 1939 blues track "Cherry Red" is as proto-rock-and-roll a song as one could ask for) or Ike Turner's pseudonymous band Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, who were already cutting tracks for Sun Records back in 1951, or Les Paul and Mary Ford who sold six million records in 1951 alone, or even Frank Sinatra or the Crew Cuts for God's sake. But then nobody ever would have accused Robertson Davies of being on the cutting edge of music. Details of popular music aside, this little bit of slacking off might seem like no big deal, or even an expression of her generalized anxiety. To a degree it is, but folks who read Tempest-Tost will it's more than that. In that novel Pearl Vambrace was so terrified of her father—of any authority figure, really—that she wouldn't have dared to risk the wrath of someone with as much power over her future as her employer.

An even bolder move is her attending the party of the husband and wife social workers Norm Yarrow and Dutchy Spreewald. These two are... well, let's just say that Davies doesn't seem to have had much respect for the field of social work. "Contempt" might be a more accurate word; about the only good quality he allows them is an earnest desire to help others, but even that is comically twisted into a kind of blind, self-serving, missionary attitude, a cheerful stupidity. The party is a disastrous mess of small-scale social engineering, with a group of young adults being shuffled and herded around playing ridiculous games when it's clear what they're most interested in is chatting amiably with drink in hand. It's a remarkable scene for its razor-sharp satire (Leaven of Malice did win the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, after all), but that's not what interests us here: what makes it important to us is Pearl Vambrace. The old Pearl Vambrace never would have attended at all, and she would have made a colossal cock-up of even getting herself dressed. Her need to escape the embarrassment of her father's rage and selfishness is greater than her fear, and she can't possibly imagine Solly Bridgetower finding her at the party. She puts on her fanciest frock, and off she goes. What Davies does to her at the party is a ploy older than Chaucer but has been in use as recently as last week's episode of How I Met Your Mother; he throws the disagreeable youngsters together in an awkward parody of affection, and lets the reader see a very real sexual tension building between them.

The most significant moment in Pearl's development is also the one most directly caused by Bevill Higgin's mischief (alright, and Professor Vambrace's pride, and some of Humphrey Cobbler's mischief, but it's all set in motion by Higgin). Vambrace gets it into his head that Gloster Ridley is part of some conspiracy to destroy his reputation by linking his daughter with the son of his old rival. This nonsense is mostly a function of his pride, of his being a biggish sort of fish in a smallish sort of pond, of being, essentially, incapable of seeing much beyond the tip of his nose. He takes a cue from trashy detective novels and dresses himself in the gaudy costume he imagines a sleuth might wear, though his notions seem to be a generation or two out of date (it's interesting that Davies inflicts this flaw on Vambrace, the one character he is most consistently critical of in the two novels in which he appears, given that it's a weakness Davies himself always seemed on the edge of succumbing to), and once suitably attired, he proceeds to stalk Gloster Ridley. Well, he tries to, at any rate. All he really succeeds in doing is making a conspicuous ass of himself by skulking around in the bushes and knocking over the landlady's trash cans. He follows Ridley to the home of a friend, where he is easily spotted by the late-arriving Humphrey Cobbler, who later can't resist the temptation to humiliate the professor by shattering his illusions of stealth. The Professor is shocked into a moment of clarity, the closest thing he ever has to true self-knowledge, as Davies writes, "Not only was it bitter to be mocked; it was worse still to feel that he was worthy of mockery." Bitterness turns to rage, however, when he arrives at home just in time to see Solly dropping Pearl off after the party. A row ensues as the Professor completely fails to see reason, and drags Pearl from the car. And then he hits her. It's not a great blow, and she isn't really hurt, but even in 1954 that was not at all the point. Pearl cries until dawn and the Professor loses himself in drink, and nothing will ever again be the same for either of them. Because of his pride, because of his provincial sense of shame, and because deep down the Professor is genuinely a moral man, Pearl will never be under his thumb again. She has all the power in their relationship, and she realizes this as much as he does. Pearl is free to be her own woman, and she grabs hold of that freedom with both hands.

The novel ends with Bevill Higgin revealed as the source of all this mischief, and Pearl's involvement entirely a matter of mistaken identity, but the consequence of his malice (ooooh, there's your title), the ridiculous conceit of a false wedding announcement, is that Pearl and Solly refuse to withdraw it, and by the time A Mixture of Frailties opens, the two are married. These conceits become less absurd as Davies develops as a novelist, but he never lets go of them entirely, and they always play a pivotal role in characters developing their personal myths.

Leaven of Malice has been my second selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is A Mixture of Frailties, the final volume in The Salterton Trilogy.

I could write ten thousand words and still not convey the complexity of the position Robertson Davies' work holds in my life. I somehow managed to make it through high school without reading any of his work, but his name was tossed around with great reverence, though not so great that he was beyond critique. There were a few battered copies of The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks floating around the classroom, and these were used as evidence of Davies' obsolete sense of humour and the special quality he had of being "more British than the British." It was not meant to be complimentary. No doubt Fifth Business was available somewhere in the school library, but I never encountered it. Still, he loomed large, the Grand Old Man of Canadian letters alongside Margaret Laurence, the Grand Old Dame.

I went through a period of discovery when I first entered university. The idea that books were things written in Canada and about Canada was still very new to me, and I set about learning who the biggest names were, and acquiring as many of their books as I could. Today it seems to me like a rather juvenile way of going about exploring your national literature, but sometimes juvenile ways are the best. They can allow you to stay more open and curious, to dive right into things you might otherwise dismiss. At that point in my life I wasn't even making any sort of distinction between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy. It was during this period that I built the core of my CanLit collection, and finally read The Deptford Trilogy. The bar had been raised for me, and the first time I read Davies' own comments about his admiration for Stephen Leacock, I knew exactly what he meant. (There was even a time when I reassessed my admiration in the same way that Davies reassessed his.) I have spent the last decade building the most complete collection of Davies' work that I could. It's not the sort of collection that would be recognized by serious dealers, no doubt, as it contains mostly beat-up paperbacks, reprints, and as far as I know only a single first edition (Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded), but I think it would be the kind of thing familiar to serious readers. It's fair to say that he's my favourite author, and his work has influenced the way I see and think to such an extent that even I can't always see the edges of it.

Tempest-Tost, the first volume in what would come to be known as The Salterton Trilogy, was also Davies' first novel. I believe The Salterton Trilogy is a kind of microcosm of Davies' development as an author. The ideas that are introduced in Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice will combine in A Mixture of Frailtures to form something greater than the sum of its parts, the first "true" Davies novel in a sense, developing a unique concept of how we construct our identities that will not be explicitly outlined until his eight novel, What's Bred in the Bone, and will find its ultimate expression in The Cunning Man, Davies' eleventh and final novel. I hope to trace this concept through his work as I read and review each of his novels in turn over the coming months. True to both his prior incarnation as Samuel Marchbanks and his long-standing relationship with the theatre, Davies began his work as a novelist with a satire of amateurs on the stage. The Salterton Little Theatre Company, a squabbling flock of middle class busibodies and minor local swells, decides to mount a pastoral production of The Tempest when they learn that Valentine Rich, a native daughter who made a minor splash in the American theatre community, will be in town and is willing to direct. The production is the same glorious mess amateur theatrics have been seen the dawn of time, and will probably continue to be until long after I'm in the ground. Nearly everyone involved with the play learns their parts and performs their duties in earnest, but with little seriousness. Professor Vambrace, who is assigned the role of Prospero after passive-aggressively discouraging all other comers with his erudition and great booming voice, is unwilling to content himself with being an actor. He interferes with the set design, the lighting, the blocking, and all manner of things that are the purview of the director and her crew. He has convinced himself that his meddling is the best thing for the play, but the reader can clearly see that it's more about showing himself to good advantage. He is the epitome of the worst kind of amateur dramatist, and Davies is merciless in mocking his pretensions.

To be clear, it is Vambrace's pretensions that he mocks, and not his class or his education or his money. Davies has been charged with what in Canada may as well be high treason: élitism. On its face the charge may bear out. A great many of Davies' characters are wealthy, highly educated, or both, and they usually come off better than characters with less wealth and social standing. This is a clear sign of class bias, right? Perhaps, but what of Professor Vambrace? He has wealth, status, and education, but he's also a complete ass whose arrogance blinds him to his shortcomings. And what about Solly Bridgetower's mother, a woman with considerable education given her age and the period when the novel is set, with even more wealth and status than Vambrace, and yet she may very well be the very same crotchety old woman for whom the phrase "old battle-axe" was first coined. It's also clear that her wealth, her status, even her education isolated her and allowed her bitterness and her inherent inability to overhear herself, as Bloom might say, to consume her. Davies clearly does not place her among his supposed élite. Does this smash the whole idea of Davies as an élitist? Not at all. Think back to the quality that he mocked in Professor Vambrace: his pretensions.

The characters that Davies truly favours, not just in Tempest-Tost but in nearly all his works, his aristocracy of the spirit if you will, are those with talent, professionalism and a fair degree of self-knowledge. This particular kind of status can be earned, so the roster changes and expands throughout the Salterton Trilogy, but in this first volume the three characters to focus on are Tom Gwalchmai the gardener, Valentine Rich the director, and Humphrey Cobbler the musician and teacher. None of them are wealthy, though Valentine Rich is by no means poor and Tom most likely makes a decent living for his trade, but Cobbler is borderline destitute. The three come from dramatically different backgrounds and their personalities might even clash at times. But they do have three things in common, and those three things make all the difference in Davies' fiction.

First, all three have talent. The gardens Tom single-handedly creates for the Webster family are made out to be the envy of all Salterton. Valentine has carved out a solid career for herself as both an actor and director in the unforgiving world of the American stage, and though it's never made explicit until A Mixture of Frailties, the third book in the trilogy, Humphrey Cobbler is a virtuoso performer able to address European greats as equals (I don't think I've been in Toronto long enough yet to want to declare him "world class").

The second thing these characters have in common is their professionalism. Tom manifests it in the most obvious ways; his demeanour is crisp, measured, but not unkind, a reflection of his military background, no doubt. He keeps his tools sharp and clean, and his work shed (a significant location in the book) meticulously organized. It rankles him that the Little Theatre's barely-competent stage manager, Major Larry Pye, wants to tear up his perfect lawn to accommodate elaborate lighting and electrical schemes, but he understands that it's his job to allow it, and even assist, so he determines that if it has to happen, he's going to lobby for it to happen in the least disruptive and most craftsman-like manner possible. This lobbying happens off-stage, so to speak, and is mostly implied, but Tom maintains an aura of dignified professionalism throughout the whole of Tempest-Tost. Valentine Rich's professionalism isn't about rigid organization or strict discipline; it's about people. She manages to put Larry Pye and Tom Gwalchmai both at ease within minutes of meeting them, but even more impressively, she pushes aside the ignorant, manipulative and often bizarre dramaturgical theories of Nellie Forrester, the Little Theatre's presiding matron and busiest of busibodies, without ever damaging the cohesion of the group or losing her self-control. Rich is completely unflappable, even taking over the role of Gonzalo when Hector Mackilwraith nearly brings down the play (more on poor Hector later). And then there's Humphrey Cobbler, who is not professional in an obvious sense. He's loud, obnoxious, and a tremendous trouble maker, but when it comes to his responsibilities as a professional musician, he is as rigid as he is impish in enforcing his standards. When he takes over as the Music Director for the Little Theatre's production, he finds that the job has been double booked. Solly, who has been tapped for the role of Assistant Director, is afraid of confrontation and tries to unload the duty of firing Mr. Snairey (an embarrassingly mercenary amateur) on Cobbler, who wants none of it. Cobbler is willing to work like a dog to make the music beautiful and appropriate; he will even do it for free. But he will not fire Snairey. The hiring and firing of old Music Directors is not the job of the new Music Director, and Cobbler will not budge an inch beyond the purview of his job. Interestingly, when it comes to choosing the music and preparing the musicians, Cobbler is fully invested in the spirit of the Little Theatre, but when he knows it will cause problems for Solly (or just as likely, given their later friendship, when it forces Solly to face his weaknesses and conquer them), he lives and dies by the letter of the law, so to speak.

The third and final trait shared by all of Davies' aristocrats is self-knowledge. Tom recognizes that his affection for Freddy Webster and her home made wine is as much a liability as it is a virtue, since it requires deceiving his employer. He feels guilty, and lets Freddy manipulate him knowing full well what's happening and why. Valentine Rich arrives in Salterton with her reputation as a huge success riding ahead of her through town on the fleetest of horses. It would have been easy (and stereotypical) for her ego to take over and for her to bite off far more than she can chew. Instead she recognizes what's necessary for the production, and what she's capable of handling on her own, so she delegates and trusts the competence of those she delegates to. She understands her own limits, and works within them to create the very best theatre experience she can. Cobbler is much the same, though the limits he acknowledges are not professional, but personal. He's a Puck, a Loki, a maker of merry mischief. But he's also aware that, while he can't let that side of himself run wild, neither can he keep it bottled up, lest it burst out with ruinous results. What he does instead is let the tap drip (to mix my metaphors), so that he can let enough pent up mischief out in minor ways so he won't ever cause serious trouble for the people he cares about.

Hector Mackilwraith is not one of Davies' élite (he lacks self-knowledge), but he is far and away the most important character in the complex ensemble piece that is Tempest-Tost, despite Solly Bridgetower being the superficially obvious choice for protagonist. He is in many ways the true Prospero of Tempest-Tost, Professor Vambrace's posturing aside. The details are handed out piecemeal and not in chronological order, but the story of Mackilwraith goes something like this: Hector had a difficult but not quite abusive childhood, but rose above it to become one of the Province's most promising young teachers, perhaps even to one day cut a figure from within the Ministry of Education itself. He is a talented mathematician and an almost obsessive practical logician, qualities that serve him well in his career. Unfortunately he makes a complete ass of himself at a social function after boasting that he would display his sexual prowess (in a way that's laughably innocent now, but would not have been then, given the comically vanilla circles he traveled in). It's his lack of experience, and his lack of self-knowledge (ie. that he doesn't understand just how important that lack of experience is) that causes his humiliation. Instead of becoming a shining light in the Ministry, Tempest-Tost opens with him as nearly absolute master of a much smaller domain: his mathematics class in Salterton. He likes to impress with complex mathematical games (the magic of Prospero), but otherwise seems known as a fusty disciplinarian with a certain wit, stern but not genuinely cruel. He actually reminds me of one of my high school math teachers. With so little now at stake in his daily life, he's become even more rigid in his adherence to the form of logic that he developed for himself in his youth. He draws up elaborate pro/con lists for every decision that is outside his nearly pathologically micromanaged routine.

When the Salterton Little Theatre decides to stage their production of The Tempest, it offers Mackilwraith a chance to move out of those rigid structures and into a more open and human space, a chance to join Davies' aristocracy, even though he's not yet capable of seeing it that way. What's going on in Hector's mind isn't nearly so grandiose. He's served the Little Theatre as an able (more than able) treasurer for a number of years, and now he feels like he deserves the opportunity to branch out into something more glamourous, hoping it will raise his stature in the eyes of his peers. Nellie Forrester, Professor Vambrace, and the rest of the cabal that runs the Little Theatre are very passive aggressive about discouraging him, but Valentine Rich overrules them. Hector performs well at his audition; he will have his chance to shine.

What follows, despite the banality of its details, is as profound a sexual awakening and crisis of faith as any other in Canadian literature. Where Hector's plan falls apart is essentially the same place it fell apart when he was still in Normal School training to be a teacher. He was completely unable to account for the reality of a flesh and blood woman. The woman in this case is Miss Griselda Webster, cast for the part of Ariel. Yes, Griselda. She's the chaste object of love and lust (Bonnie-Susan "The Torso" Tompkins is the unchaste one) for any number of Salterton's young men, including Solly Bridgetower and Roger Tasset, the only two young men of any real importance in the novel. Mackilwraith, thanks to his inexperience and the misdirected, overwrought tangle of emotions and neuroses that develop after a decades of loneliness, falls hopelessly in love with Griselda after she offers him the most casual of compliments. This makes him the rather awkward fourth party in a bizarre love trangle where none of the participants seem to have a clear picture of the situation. This would be comical (well, okay, sometimes it is) if it weren't so tragic. Mackilwraith has no meaningful way to deal with these emotions, and because he's suppressed them for so long they overwhelm him far more than they would have even during the onset of puberty. He can't cope—his performance as Gonzalo begins to suffer, and so do his duties in the classroom—so he turns to his list making mechanism to find a way out. And for the first time, it fails him. Pro or contra, there are some things that don't answer to the demands of logic, and we might all unravel before them.

And unravel Mackilwraith does. He begins to mistake her acquiescence to his (unlooked for, not really appreciated) solicitude during rehearsals as a sign that she returns his affection, though it must be said that he doesn't really understand that affection himself. He even throws his little lists out the window and tries to spend his savings on a gift for her at an auction, but he fails there too. It never even occurs to him that he should speak to her, one human being to another. At this point most men, having already learned how to deal with these emotions and these little humiliating failures when they were young, would have taken a good, hard look at themselves and seen the absurdity of their situation. They would have put a stop to things before "absurd" became "humiliating". Mackilwraith isn't possessed of that sort of self-knowledge, however. He only knows his pro/con tables and his rather fusty version of logic. He therefore decides his problem is that he hasn't gone far enough, and (through what passes for the underground in Salterton) he acquires an invitation to the June Ball given by the cadets at the local military college, the most important social event of the year. His hope is that he can somehow get the lovely young Griselda to take notice of him. His plan backfires in two unexpected ways. First, his unsuccessful effort at the auction has earned him a reputation as a man with a sharp eye for an investment, and he's celebrated by the biggest of wigs and the fattest of cats at the Ball, who insist on filling his glass and lighting his cigar the whole night through. He's the hit of the party, but Griselda doesn't notice him at all. He also sees Griselda and Roger having a discussion that he simply isn't equipped to understand, even if he could have heard it. During that discussion Roger kissed her twice, the second time entirely against her will. (That discussion contains one of my favourite Old Davies Sayings—aphorisms and clichés and bits of folk wisdom that he tosses out so deftly it can sometimes seem profoundly original—Griselda tells Roger, "Do you know what chastity is? Not the denial of passion, surely. Somebody wise—I forget who it was—said that chastity meant to have the body in the soul's keeping." I believe the "somebody" in this case is Wittgenstein, but don't quote me on that.) Hector, to use my preferred vernacular, loses his shit. Even if he had heard what was said between Roger and Griselda, he wouldn't understand that Roger's advances were unwanted, nor that Griselda could so quickly or ably take control of the situation. He certainly wouldn't understand her notion of chastity. All he saw was a girl he'd idealized—to the point of dehumanizing her—being corrupted, and his own cowardice, since he fled rather than intervening.

I think that all men go through something like this at least once in their lives. We fall in love, not with a woman, but with the idea of a woman that we project onto a real flesh and blood girl. It's usually our first love, or what we imagine to be our first love (I have my doubts that it's anything resembling genuine love), and if we're some combination of lucky and smart we're able to outgrow that kind of adolescent foolishness before we do any real harm to ourselves or others with it. Seeing too much of who our partners are can have equally deleterious effects, but that's an entirely different box of frogs. Mackilwraith didn't have anything that your or I (or even someone of his own generation) would recognize as a proper adolescent relationship or sexual awakening. For all intents and purposes his crush on Griselda is his first pseudo-love, and he's going to make all the mistakes, fall into all the emotional traps, that a young man would, except instead of the raw emotional power of youth, he has the full weight of decades spent in loneliness, isolation, and obsessive routine to throw behind them. Mackilwraith sinks into despair, and does something I think only the most jaded of us would fail to identify with; on the opening night of the Salterton Little Theatre's production of The Tempest, he tries to hang himself in Tom's garden shed. (It is, unsurprisingly, in stage-managing the aftermath of this event where Valentine Rich shows the true extent of her professionalism and her devotion to the stage.)

Mackilwraith's suicide attempt was as botched as his attempts at romance, but it was more a cry for help than an honest attempt to take his own life. He's placed in Griselda's bed, of all places, to recover, and she pays him a long-overdue visit. The two of them talk briefly about what Hector did, and about the feelings that he projected onto Griselda. It's probably the most tender moment in the novel, and Mackilwraith emerges from the other side not an entirely new man, and not quite a member of Davies' self-knowing aristocracy, but taking his first steps in that direction. The journey towards wholeness that Mackilwraith should have taken in his youth finally begins as the novel closes. I think it's hugely significant that, though Mackilwraith is never the obvious choice for protagonist, Davies makes his revelation the final word of Tempest-Tost and the last thing he wants the reader exposed to on their first trip to Salterton. Mackilwraith's awakening into self-knowledge epitomizes the first of the three elements at the core of Davies' "true" novels, and his ideas about how we use myth to construct our identities. I'll discuss the other two elements as they appear in the other two volumes of The Salterton Trilogy.

Tempest-Tost was my first selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Leaven of Malice, by Robertson Davies, the second volume in The Salterton Trilogy.