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.

Packed deep in the centre of Cockroach is a powerful moral disconnect, a narrator struggling to place himself in a world of shifting rights and wrongs, all wrapped in the framework of the immigrant experience.

Rawi Hage never glamourizes immigrant life in Montréal, but despite the frankness with which he depicts its various confusions, humiliations and consolations, he writes with such verve, with such wit and energy, that Cockroach never feels dreary or oppressive. Instead one is swept along by the narrator's amazingly compelling voice; it makes even the most fantastic elements of the novel feel genuine. I found myself missing that voice long after I finished the book.

Hage's characters are not likeable people; if I met any one of them on the street I'm certain that I wouldn't like a single one. I doubt I would even find them all that interesting. But on the page they crackle with life. I couldn't look away from the horrible things they did to themselves, and to each other. Acts of violence and cruelty committed by or against these characters have followed many of them to Canada, a land that in the novel is both literally and figuratively cold. Here is where we find the moral disconnect at the heart of the novel. As they struggle to find their footing and maintain their dignity in this new place, how much of these past wrongs can they bring with them, and can that past justify new transgressions?

Cockroach is an astonishing and confident novel, rich and nuanced, full of humour and tragedy, with the most wonderfully unreliable and charismatic narrator I've encountered in ages.

I wrote this originally for publication somewhere else and intended to expand it for publication here, but have since decided against that. Cockroach was my thirteenth and final selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis.

I find myself frequently on the lookout for books, Canadian books in particular, that deal explicitly with issues of masculinity. Given all the controversy in the last several years over things like the ratio of male to female prize winners and bylines in magazines (not something I put a huge amount of stock in, but whatever), you'd think books like that would be pretty easy to find. It turns out they aren't. Rust and Bone isn't really about masculinity, of course. It looks like it is, what with the emphasis on various blood sports and failed or failing relationships (no matter how stoic the man, no matter how rough-and-tumble, we can each of us be swiftly and thoroughly demolished by a woman). This book is about anatomy.

The titular story opens with a fascinatingly detailed description of the bones of the hand that leads into an equally detailed and fascinating description of how a boxer's body, his hands in particular, impact the finer points of his career. And Davidson goes from there, taking apart the mistakes and the reasons behind this particular boxer's career. The anatomy of the hand becomes the anatomy of boxing becomes the anatomy of this boxer and his grief. It's sweaty and violent and grim, but it's also a heartbreaking account of a man unforgiven by the world and unable to forgive himself.

"A Mean Utility" was so visceral a dissection of dog fighting that I had difficulty finishing it. I quite literally squirmed in my chair and even felt a little bit ill. The most disturbing thing about this story is how dispassionate Davidson's writing is; his narrator comes down neither for or against the sport or how the protagonists raise their animals. He doesn't have to; the bare facts (a tricky concept in fiction, but we'll pretend for the moment that it isn't) allow the sport to damn itself.

The only story that doesn't seem to conform to the pattern (and I say doesn't seem to, because in some ways it actually does) is the final piece in the book, "The Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic." There's no rough-and-tumble manliness in this piece, and only velvet-draped self-destruction as Davidson delineates a family putting itself back together after having to face two traumatic events, one long in the past and one still fresh and bloody, and it's punctuated by wonderful excerpts from a book that doesn't exist, describing how to accomplish classic conjuring tricks. It's the sort of story for which critics dust off words like "poignant" when they probably mean sentimental. It was nice, for the kind of thing that it was (I like to pretend otherwise, but hey, I'm kind of a sentimental guy), but unfortunately it felt weak and parochial next to the rest of the book.

I suppose one of the easiest things to do would be to compare Davidson to Chuck Palahniuk, but that's not really fair. Chuck's work can be fun, but he's more or less a one trick pony, and even though the trick is a pretty good one, it's only really impressive the first time (that's Fight Club, for those of you keeping score at home). In this first collection (it is his first collection, right?) Davidson displays more range than Palahniuk has over his entire career, not only shocking us as hard—or even harder—but also displaying tremendous sensitivity and control.

Rust and Bone was my twelfth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Cockroach, by Rawi Hage.

I'd been anticipating the release of Rebecca Rosenblum's debut book since I first read her work in The New Quarterly's Salon des Refusés issue (it turns out that I'd been running into her on the blog circuit for quite a few months prior to that, though). I don't often keep my eye on what's being published in any given year. I don't make very much money, and since new books cost more than old books, and I still have a great many classics that I want to read, as a rule I tend to buy and read older books almost exclusively. Once is a worthy exception to this rule. I suppose I might be spoiling the plots of a few of the stories I discuss below, but like with most literary fiction, the plot really isn't the point (nor is it the best part or Rosenblum's fiction, so I don't feel like I'm genuinely spoiling anything).

There is a technique (or a collection of techniques, really), that is sometimes called "magic realism" and is sometimes called by other names. I don't like any of the names, but I do like the technique, the idea of dressing up fantasy as though it were reality is quite appealing, particularly when it's done primarily through small, quiet things. Rebecca Rosenblum balances fantasy and reality in an extremely satisfying way. I don't really like referring to what she does as magic realism—and I'm not sure if she would like it much either—but I can't think of what else to call it. The two obvious examples to discuss would be the lovely "Chilly Girl" and the less successful "The House on Elsbeth," but I'd rather talk about "Route 99." It's a low-key slice of urban life, something that I think most of us who live in cities within a certain kind of budget can identify with. Except that it isn't, or at least it isn't just that. Ella and Carmen, her two protagonists, experiment with a kind of urban thaumaturgy as they wait on the ever unreliable TTC. I don't doubt that each of us attempts, from time to time, to impose our will on the obstinate world through small, symbolic acts of imagination. Ella and Carmen try to mend their TTC woes by ordering the correct dish from the nearby Vietnamese restaurant (the Pho-Mi 99, which appears in several of my favourite stories in Once), trying each time to achieve a total of 99 with their order, either through addition or subtraction, since there is no number 99 on the menu. With each attempt the Route 99 bus behaves a little differently, until finally, in a miraculous moment:

There wasn't any smell, there wasn't any sound. No whoomp of the back seats grinding against their fittings, no roar of the motor, no sign of the bus to the west where she had been looking. It just appeared before them. The driver pulled to a stop even though they were both still sitting. It was Carlson, but when he looked down at them, he didn't look at their legs, or glare at them, or slam shut the doors. He just smiled, blank, polite, a man doing his job, taking girls to theirs. (p. 41)

It's no great miracle, but it's more than many of us ever achieve, and the sense of triumph the reader feels is equal to Ella and Carmen's disbelief and almost completely out of proportion to the size of the moment. But still, it's magic.

Another favourite of mine was "The Words." It takes considerable guts to use multiple viewpoints in any work of short fiction, even more so when it clocks in at a mere dozen pages, but both Joe and Colleen come alive, bundles of nuance, confusion and deception and missed connections. Rosenblum develops the religious imagery smoothly and naturally until it culminates in the only potential moment of communion between father and daughter. I wanted to stay with these characters, and so I was pleased that Colleen showed up again in "Blood Ties," though seeing through her perspective grated a little without Joe as a balancing force.

Once is an exceptionally strong debut; in fact, if I didn't know better I'd have a difficult time believing that it was her first collection of stories. Only "The House on Elsbeth" seems to be a freshman effort, but it's such a difficult concept to work with that I can't imagine anyone more experienced (except perhaps Leon Rooke himself) having much luck with it. It will be fascinating to see what she does in the future. Rebecca Rosenblum also has a blog out there on the world wide internets, where you can find out about her reading schedule or what's on her mind, or whatever. You know, blog stuff.

Once was my eleventh selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Rust and Bone, by Craig Davidson.

Being a relative newcomer to the Canadian literary scene (I think it's safe to say that I've only been aware of "the scene" for about six or seven years, which makes me a definite newcomer), John Metcalf's books are like UFOs. People talk about Metcalf and his books. Some people even claim to have read them (especially people who have been around since the '70s). Bringing up his name is always controversial. But what happens if you go out looking for his books on your own? You're not likely to find one at all. Bad UFO metaphors aside, here in Toronto, the capital of Canada's publishing industry, I had to go to nine bookstores to find even a single copy (I found two, both used and both nearly two decades old), and the staff at less than half of those stores even knew who I was asking about. Mr. Metcalf's name is one that I've been hearing ever since I became a dedicated reader of Canadian fiction, somewhere around 2001 or 2002, but rarely were any specifics mentioned. I know he's supposed to be hugely influential, but I don't really know how, or on what or whom. I also know that he's supposed to be at the centre of some kind of controversy, but I don't know anything about it, and nobody will tell me (here's a note for all you journalists and commentators and what not who like to allude to the controversy: chances are good I was still seeing spot run when this controversy began, and I'm almost 30 years old; if you aren't willing to come right out and explain what it is you're talking about, please just shut the fuck up about it entirely). His essay in the Salon issue of CNQ was kind of venomous, so maybe it's all just blunt talk and hurt feelings. Metcalf also had a story in the TNQ Salon issue, and it was quite wonderful (therefore my trek to nine bookstores).

Metcalf's Englishness should be apparent to anyone who reads widely. There's something simultaneously straightforward and musical about English prose (English as in the nationality, not the language) that doesn't seem to happen in other dialects, and it's present in Adult Entertainment. I haven't thought enough about it to be able to cite a specific sentence and then take it apart to explain how it works (is it diction, syntax, some culturally specific combination?), but it's a kind of rhythmic smoothness. Metcalf seems to have an excellent eye for detail as well. Paul Denton's sexual frustration comes fully alive in "Polly Ongle" thanks almost entirely to the specifics of clothing, body parts, food and sound that serve to either exacerbate or distract from that frustration. We get the sense of Paul's senses being so acute, so sharp, only because Metcalf's prose is acute, sharp. "Travelling Northward", a story about a respected but broke and horribly selfish novelist called Robert Forde—the subject of the TNQ piece as well—is successful for much the same reason. If Metcalf wasn't able to take us so fully into Forde's remarkably comic sensebility, we wouldn't have much sympathy—or antipathy, come to that—for anyone in the story, be it Forde himself or any of the mostly well-meaning but equally ridiculous secondary characters. Metcalf wrote in TNQ that he will have a new collection out sometime soon, and that it will include some Forde stories. I am looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Adult Entertainment was my tenth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Rebecca Rosenblum's debut collection, Once.

Flight Paths of the Emperor marks my third consecutive book by a Salon des Refusés author. I was much impressed by the short story, "Five Paintings of the New Japan", which was reprinted in the New Quarterly's contribution to the Salon, and when I found a copy of the first printing of this book two weeks ago I jumped on it. (The image on the cover of my edition is the same as the one shown, but the design and layout of the cover as a whole is quite different.)

It's not difficult to explain what holds these stories together; they all seem to be about Canadians experiencing Japanese (or in one story, Chinese) culture, and butting heads with that culture, and with their own assumptions. Many of the characters and settings seem to carry over from one story to the next. That doesn't sound very exciting, I know, but Heighton pulls it off almost flawlessly (the one yakuza story seems a little out of place). Obviously alienation is a major theme of this collection, as characters with loneliness and unfamiliar surroundings. Like language, the specifics of culture are generally thought of as arbitrary. Just as there is nothing particularly tree-like about the word "tree", nothing that suggests a specific treeness as determined by nature, there is nothing particularly necessary or natural about one style of politess or one system of conducting business. Stories of alienation tend to emphasize this arbitrariness; we either wind up seeing through the assumptions we make about our own culture, or we experience the dislocation of trying to make sense of the assumptions made by another. Flight Paths of the Emperor left me with another idea altogether: the inevitability of culture. I was struck, not by some saccharine notion that we are all the same deep down, but rather that no matter how differently we approach the world or our lives, the reason we reach for solutions, the motivating factors in the emergence of culture, are fundamentally the same. Only the manifestations are arbitrary. This seems like an obvious thing to say, and of course it most likely is; what is non-obvious is thinking about it at all.

Flight Paths of the Emperor was my ninth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Adult Entertainment, by John Metcalf.

I picked this book up because of Mr. Beattie's appreciative essay in the Salon des Refusés issue of Canadian Notes and Queries. I hope that he won't mind my quoting from it. He wrote:

The only thing that can be said definitively about Jarman's stories is that they do not resemble the kind of blandly naturalistic pieces of psychological realism that are normally associated with Canadian short stories.

[...]

Some writers write from the head, others write from the heart. Jarman writes from the gut. Jarman's stories are not places to turn for comfort or succour. He is a ridgidly unsentimental writer, who eschews pat resolutions and reassuring platitudes.

[...]

Instead, he writes subversively about outcasts and roughnecks, men who are desperately trying to eke out an existence on the margins of a society that seems ferociously inimical. The stories are told with a heightened awareness of language and its ability to stretch an contort itself[.]

I must confess that despite these laudatory remarks indicating that Jarman's work is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for in Canadian fiction, the story published in CNQ ("Cowboys, Inc.") did not fill me with confidence. The story is a nonlinear collection of intense, uncomfortable moments in the lives of three people as they pile into a Volvo and try to run from the world, and themselves, through the highways and back roads of the American South. it's not a bad story, by any stretch, but it does have a vague, dreamlike quality to it, and while I'm sure that it probably felt fresh in 1984, it's something that I've seen more than enough of at this point in my career as a reader. Jarman's use of the present tense takes some of the edge off, but not enough to make this story a favourite. I was relieved to see that I'm not alone in that, though; in the afterword, Jarman himself admits that some critics have advised readers to skip the story. I wouldn't go that far, but I'm definitely not in love with the piece.

The subject matter of the stories in Dancing Nightly in the Tavern could become unrelentingly depressing were it not for Jarman's keen eye for surprising and beautiful details. Jarman has seeded each of these stories with lovely imagery, small details that have little or no bearing on the plot or major themes but nonetheless stick in one's mind. My favourite of these images is from "Jesus Made Seattle Under Protest." Ray, an unemployed oil worker, daydreams of a waitress, "her naked ribs floating from the long rope of her backbone" (p. 94).

Dancing Nightly at the Tavern was my eighth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Flight Paths of the Emperor, by Steven Heighton.

Diane Schoemperlen is one of my favourite authors. Her short story collection, Forms of Devotion, is among my favourite volumes of short fiction, Canadian or otherwise. I've had Red Plaid Shirt sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for quite some time now, alongside Our Lady of the Lost and Found. I was saving it for a time when I felt really excited about short fiction, and thanks to the recent Penguin/Salon controversy, that time is now. Imagine my disappointment, then, to learn that many of these stories are from previous collections. It was only outweighed by my joy at learning that Schoemperlen had written more than four books. For some reason, when Forms of Devotion was released, none of her works before In the Language of Love were ever mentioned. I can only imagine that's because they are out of print, but I now at least know there are additional treasures to be found in my local used bookstore's "S" section.

I once heard it said, and I do not recall by whom or in what context, that the quality of an artist's work can be determined by how far that artist can stray from her influences before her work ceases to be any good. I don't know anything about Diane Schoemperlen's influences, but if the above statement is true, then it pleases me to say that her stories get better the further they get from the work of other writers. She is at her best when she defies comparison. The weakest of the stories collected here ("Hockey Night in Canada," which should very nearly be discarded simply for placing that damned sport so prominently—I hate fiction about hockey nearly as much as I hate the damned game itself— "Losing Ground," "Frogs" and "Clues") are all from early in her career and seem to be from a time before she found her voice. They are not Alice Munro stories, but they are from Munro Country, so to speak, stories that lean rather heavily on the muted realist style that she was instrumental in establishing as the "expected" form of short fiction. Where Munro excels, Schoemperlen does not. Those early stories wander in and out of quiet moments in lonely or troubled lives, examining events or people or issues that are only important in hindsight. They are mostly collections of the narrator's memories and musings, eventually gelling into a moment of clarity or emotional resonance in the final lines. Dull stuff, really. The only exception to the dull sameness of these early stories is "This Town," a satirical look at the texture of small town life presented in a way that bears a striking resemblance to a tourism brochure or a Wikipedia entry (not that you could make the latter comparison back in 1979, when the story was first published). The pace of "This Town" is quick and the sentences are sharp, clipped things, full of tremendous wit and energy. It's the first time, in this collection at least, that the reader is allowed to see the Diane Schoemperlen who wrote Forms of Devotion.

My two favourite pieces in this collection (aside from those taken from Forms of Devotion, of course) are "A Simple Story," from 1987's Hockey Night in Canada, and "The Antonyms of Fiction," originally published in Parallel Voices/Voix Paralleles in 1993. "A Simple Story" seems at first glance a parody of creative writing exercises and books like Lou Willett Stanek's So You Want to Write A Novel? (Which was actually given to me by my high school creative writing teacher, who had a tremendously positive influence on my decision to study literature from both the critical and creative ends, though I never did use the book.) The opening paragraph is a cold, hard nugget of plot, the sort of thing that would make a fine back-cover blurb, if short stories had such things:

One night in a small city a man and a woman went out to a restaurant to celebrate. On the way back, they were nearly run down by a car that went out of control and rammed into the window of an apartment building. They were lucky. They could have been killed.

In that one paragraph you have the whole of the plot, and various subtitles that follow ("Describe the Night," "Describe the Car," "Describe the Farmhouse") demand only the fleshing out of "telling details," the sort of information that nearly always appears profound but only actually is under the most skilled of hands. Schoemperlen undermines these demands by providing an excess of detail in crisp, clever prose, moving out in all directions from that one nugget like some linguistic Mandelbrot set. The piece even comes to a dead stop with yet another demanding subtitle, the story expanding ever outward. The most wonderful and amazing thing is not Schoemperlen's postmodern pyrotechnics, but rather that she sketches a half-dozen delicate and emotionally engaging portraits of intersecting lives alongside those pyrotechnics. All this in the space of just twenty pages.

"The Antonyms of Fiction" uses a similar juxtaposition. Despite the bold subtitle ("FACT," it exclaims), Schoemperlen opens the story in the simple and time-honoured this is me, and here is what happened style. Aside from the subtitles, most of which are genuinely antonyms of the word "fiction," the story proceeds in standard realist ways, with characters and plots and closely observed images, as the narrator tells the story of her relationship with a man named Jonathan Wright. The more the narrator reveals about the relationship, however, the more her meditations on truth and reality and fact creep into story, until they begin to take over entirely. In the final section, labeled "FICTION," the rug is swept entirely out from under the reader, as the narrator comes right out and says that she made the whole thing up. Jonathan Wright does not exist, the relationship never happened; the entire point of the story is the narrator's meditations, the conflation of fact and fiction, the ease with which Schoemperlen could have passed off one for the other. And she pulls this rug from beneath us at exactly the moment when the reader is most emotionally invested in the story and the characters. It is classic Schoemperlen, and she handles the transition so expertly that it doesn't feel jarring. The pleasure one gets from being emotionally invested in the characters is transferred seamlessly to the pleasure one gets from taking the story apart and seeing how it works, from being in on the joke. Why Canadian readers have somehow managed to avoid lavishing Schoemperlen's work with the sort of praise that writing both sophisticated and accessible deserves is beyond me. I honestly believe her short fiction is as far ahead of the pack (and the pack includes favourites like Atwood and Carol Shields and Vincent Lam) as is Donald Barthelme's, or nearly any other master that you could name. There are several other pieces, the titular "Red Plaid Shirt" among them, that I would also single out for special praise had I the time, but I will close now by saying that the hunt is on for her out of print collections.

Red Plaid Shirt was my seventh selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, by Mark Anthony Jarman.

I read The Girls Who Saw Everything based almost solely on Mr. Beattie's recommendation, and was well rewarded. Dixon's novel was playful and witty, absurd and serious, emotionally complex and fully engaged with literary culture (though not disconnected from how that culture is viewed from the outside). I was quite shocked then, to learn that Dixon is not primarily a writer of prose fiction, but rather a playwright and actor. Dixon seems quite at home in prose, and the book was a joy to read. Were it not for my inability to look away from the CBC's coverage of the Olympics I would have finished this days ago, perhaps even on the day I began it.

The brilliantly named Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club is a collection of fascinating eccentrics, though their taste in literature is at times questionable (In the Skin of a Lion their favourite novel? For real? Such people are like albinos; you know they're out there but you never expect to actually encounter one). The Lacuna Cabal doesn't just read and discuss books, they go to extraordinary lengths to experience them (including kidnapping Irving Layton). And Emmy Jones! Well, you'd have to read it to believe it. I could not help but be reminded of Corey Redekop's novel, Shelf Monkey, as I was reading this. I enjoyed Shelf Monkey, despite Redekop's considerable stylistic debt to Jim Munroe, but it felt like it was always falling just short of its potential. I won't say that The Girls Who Saw Everything was the book that Shelf Monkey should have been (that's ridiculous), but it is the book that I had hoped it would be. The similarities are plain, I think. The major thrust of the plot in each centres on a cult-like book club that takes its activities one or two steps beyond the rational, with consequences both disastrous and glorious, and both books engage Canadian literary culture with genuinely entertaining results. Dixon's novel seems the more mature effort, however. When I used to play music in front of audiences (a rarity, but it happened), the best piece of advice I was given was to play through the mistakes, and never give any indication that I was anything other than supremely confident in my abilities; that alone was enough to hide all but the grossest of errors. The Girls Who Saw Everything moves with that sort of confidence, and Shelf Monkey, fine novel though it is, did not.

Since the most useful part of this post was most likely my linking to Mr. Beattie's review, I will close by saying that The Girls Who Saw Everything was my sixth selection for the Second Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Red Plaid Shirt, by Diane Schoemperlen.