SHORT STORIES REVIEW

Harold Macy (Harbour $24.95)

BY TREVOR CAROLAN

Spend time with working folks in the towns of upper Vancouver Island or BC’s interior and you’ll recognize the characters in Harold Macy’s unexpectedly fun collection of stories—men and women who still get their hands dirty when they work, usually in tough jobs and marginal, resource-based economies. Or, if you’ve yet to discover the natural grandeur and salty tongues in the bush, then All the Bears Sing will serve you like a Lonely Planet guide to community life where conventional wage-earning is always a good idea, but typically in short supply, and where dynamite-blasting, heli-logging, smoke-jumping with summer fire-fight crews, and bottle and junk collecting from the dump in winter endure as local employment options.

Women who’ve put up with all the crap that men and life can throw at them, old hippies, young stump-farm migrants from the city scuffling to live rural on soil that’s hard to till—Macy’s tales aren’t necessarily about lovable losers or roughnecks who eat nails for breakfast, although you’ll meet a few. He writes what used to be called “yarns:” stories that sound so believable they might even be true. There are 23 of them in this collection, ranging in the 2-, 3-, 8- or 10-page length; just don’t expect the cultivated, ideologically approved fiction that gets nominated for the usual CanLit awards. Macy’s style is less predictable, yet familiar. Written in simple language with twists, occasionally gripping plots, the contingency of urgent decisions, and told with surprising effect from either male and female character points of view, these are “entertainments.” That’s not to dismiss the form: some of Graham Greene’s books and stories that rank among the finest literature of the 20th century he called entertainments.

The skill in making small-town talk work is to bring quirky characters alive in the reader’s mind, so that in an ordinary sense even when their experiences don’t make sense, they still have a way of pointing to a deeper truth. Raymond Carver, the Yakima, Washington, storyteller who revitalized American fiction from its New York-centered neuroses during the late seventies/early eighties understood this too, pioneering his “K-Mart Realism.” A gentle guy who had to fight his way through life, this was Carver’s honest response to South America’s “Magic Realism.” His version was tales from the tired latenight shoppers you see in the glare of US discount stores, people who missed out on the dream, people with trouble coming down. What Harold Macy delivers is a kind of homegrown “Lucky Buck Mart Realism”; the kind you find in BC’s struggling mill-towns, where nobody passes the day-olds without a long look. His characters don’t lug around a grievance that they’ve been wronged somewhere—they bump along with fate and the ordinariness of their limited futures. If there’s magic it’s in a kid’s laugh, a lucky break, a moment of faith, or in the humble joys of what