Literary Review of Canada Vol. 16, No. 2.

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PUTTING POLLING TO THE TEST

LRC Literary Review of Canada

Paul McKenna A policeman’s lot is not a trusted one John Sewell Should activism be pragmatic or idealistic?

$6.50 Vol. 16, No. 2 • March 2008

Tarek Fatah Muslim Canadians: Asking the hard questions Robert Lecker Canon-making in the fields of CanLit Michael Ruse Why Darwin helps us think

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PLUS: Charles Foran on Alberto Manguel’s city of words + Adele Freedman on three Canadian artists + Peter Hadekel on media mogul Ted Rogers + David Malone on Jesuits from Canada in the mountains of Bhutan +Michael Valpy on derring-do journalism + Natalee Caple on fathers and sons + Martin Laflamme on the need for diplomats + fiction reviews by Mark Frutkin and Robin Roger + poetry by Sandy Shreve, Michael Kenyon, Bill Howell, Julie Berry and Allan Briesmaster + responses from William Marsden and Patrick Luciani

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Literary Review of Canada

Editor

Bronwyn Drainie

Vol. 16, No. 2 • March 2008

editor@lrcreview.com

Assistant Editor

3 Constabulary Duties

17 March 10

An essay Paul F. McKenna

A poem Allan Briesmaster

6 Risk-Prone Rogers

A review of High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire that Debt Built, by Caroline Van Hasselt Peter Hadekel

7 The Defender of Stories

A review of Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words Charles Foran

9 Dystopic Utopia?

A review of Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism, by Michael Adams Tarek Fatah

12 Home Schooling with a Difference A review of The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son, by David Gilmour Natalee Caple

13 Where Derring-Do Can Lead

A review of Where War Lives, by Paul Watson Michael Valpy

14 The Head-Counting Game

A review of Polling and Public Opinion: A Canadian Perspective, by Peter M. Butler Steven D. Brown

16 13 Ways of Looking at April Fool’s Day A poem Sandy Shreve

18 Worse Than Dying

A review of Glass Voices, by Carol Bruneau Robin Roger

19 Delightfully Morbid, Acutely Droll

A review of Not Quite Dead, by John MacLachlan Gray Mark Frutkin

20 Darwin on My Mind

A review of Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, by Ronald de Sousa Michael Ruse

22 Three Artists

A review of Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, by Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, and And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, by Elspeth Cameron Adele Freedman

24 ­ Diplomats: Do We Need Them?

A review of Ambassador Assignments: Canadian Diplomats Reflect on Our Place in the World, edited by David Chalmer Reece Martin Laflamme

25 Our Man in Bhutan An essay David M. Malone

26 Canon-Making with a Vengeance A review of New Canadian Library: The RossMcClelland Years, 1952–1978, by Janet B. Friskney Robert Lecker

16 Hand

A poem Michael Kenyon

28 Catching Ottawa’s Attention

16 How She Became A Pairs Skating Judge A poem Bill Howell

A review of The Art of the Possible: A Handbook for Political Activism, by Amanda Sussman John Sewell

30 Letters & Responses

17 the walnut-cracking machine A poem Julie Berry

William Marsden, Patrick Luciani, Sam Solecki

Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by Sylvia Nickerson. Since graduating from art school in 2001, Sylvia Nickerson has designed books, illustrated for magazines, tutored mathematics, worked as an arts administrator in the Canadian book publishing industry and completed an M.A. in the history of science. Her illustrations have been published in The Coast, the New Quarterly, Carousel Magazine, Briarpatch Magazine, The Dominion and The Globe and Mail. To see more of her art go to <www.sylvianickerson.ca>.

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Michael Adams Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Q.C. Alan Broadbent, C.M. James Gillies, C.M. Carol Hansell John Honderich Sandy Houston Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C. Trina McQueen Susan Reisler Grant Reuber, O.C. Don Rickerd, C.M. Mark Sarner Reed Scowen Anthony Westell Poetry Submissions The Literary Review of Canada accepts poetry submissions by email from May 1 to October 1 each year, although it solicits poetry year round. Send submissions to poetry@lrcreview.com in a single Word file as an attachment and include the poems in the body of the email as well. The LRC does not review poetry. founded in 1991 by p.a. dutil The Literary Review of Canada is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Inc.

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Literary Review of Canada

Essay

Constabulary Duties When did the phrase “to serve and protect” begin to ring so hollow? Paul F. McKenna

O

n October 13, 2007, Mr. Robert Dziekanski, ´ a Polish immigrant seeking to join his mother in Canada, arrived at the Vancouver International Airport. Wh a t t r a n s p i re d over the next several hours is a tale of horrific blundering and brutality resulting in the death of Mr. Dzieka n´ ski. Overwhelmed by four heavily armed RCMP officers, Dzieka n´ ski received the short, sharp shock of two discharges from a conducted energy device (aka Taser) in a Kafkaesque scene captured by video on a bystander’s cell phone. The Canadian public has always been alert to police activities when they involve bungled investigations or when officers have erred, or appear to have erred, in ways that lead to perceptions of police misconduct, brutality or corruption. However, the calamity of Dziekan´ ski’s death and the excessive violence that appeared to be in operation in this instance created sustained public indignation and revulsion that has rarely been seen in this country. What happened to this bewildered, exhausted human being was not only the latest in a long litany of RCMP errors that one prays will lead to a fundamental reordering of that organization. It was also a bellwether for a crisis in Canadian policing at large, one that has left the Canadian public feeling profoundly uneasy about its traditional “guardians.” This essay examines aspects of policing in Canada and offers a tentative diagnosis of some chronic problems.

C

anadian policing is, as one might expect in a confederacy dedicated to peace, order and good government, largely a product of compromise, cooperation and co-dependence. Our approach to law enforcement is a blending of British and American traditions in a reasonably Paul F. McKenna is the president of Public Safety Innovation, Inc. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary program at Dalhousie University.

March 2008

sound synthesis. Canadian policing lacks the blatantly political symbiosis that exists in American cities where the chief of police is chained to the commanding voice of the mayor’s office. The startlingly realistic HBO series The Wire could not be set in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal or Halifax without major script changes in which the chief of police was accorded more operational independence. However, there is a great deal that Canadian police organizations share with their American counterparts, including an insatiable appetite for technology, weaponry and equipment. Predictably, our police leaders turn equally to their British and American colleagues for insights on innovation, new initiatives and promising programs. This is not purely a function of our smaller size as a nation. Sadly, it is a direct and debilitating result of a prolonged neglect of robust research and development within the Canadian policing community. The research that is done is largely devoted to advancing technological sophistication and promoting refinements in weapons, vehicles and protective gear. British police, by contrast, have high-­quality contributions coming out of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and the National Policing Improvement Agency, as well as a host of social policy research “houses.” The Americans have a steady stream of excellent resources from the Police Executive Research Forum and the RAND Center on Quality Policing to supply police organizations with timely and thoughtful research. Canada has little to match these reposi-

tories of information and inquiry. Since the swearingin of the Harper government in February 2006, there has been a continued erosion of support for sound strategic research that could benefit policing in Canada. This deteri­ orating landscape is best exemplified by the appearance of a seminal publication, entitled Re-imagining Policing in Canada, in 2005. This work, edited by Dennis Cooley, has important contributions from many leading academics and observers of police organizations. It represents a significant contribution addressing critical issues in Canadian policing. These essays were originally prepared for a conference on public and private security sponsored by the Law Commission of Canada. In December 2006, the Harper government permanently dismantled the commission. The impact of losing such an entity for the policing community is palpable. Those police organizations that are large enough to have inhouse policy and research capabilities are largely consumed with immediate operational imperatives rather than long-range, original or critical inquiry. Accordingly, the research and development enterprise in Canadian policing is more inclined to self-fulfilling prophecy than to serious exploratory hypothesis testing and objective program evaluation. There has always been a gap between reality and the corporate information provided in marquee documents, such as strategic plans or annual reports. In these sanitized documents, everything is presented in the most favourable terms, in the most complementary language, and with the most steadfast optimism for future health and growth. The palpable truth of organizational life is, however, more sobering and less sanguine. In modern policing, reality may be profoundly disturbing and uncontrollable, something the public never fully grasps when gazing upon the serenity of the local police headquarters. It is rare for the public to gain deep insight into the actual workings of a police organization

such as that offered by the recent independent investigation of the RCMP pension fund and the follow-up diagnostic provided by the Task Force on Governance and Culture Change in the RCMP. These two government-directed probes, combined with operational catastrophes represented by the death of Robert Dzieka´nski and the shootings of several RCMP officers, have opened a window into the management and leadership of the RCMP and have resulted in calls for invasive treatment. David Brown, in his role both as independent investigator and as chair of the RCMP task force, is to be congratulated for representing the courageous call on more than cosmetic surgery for this esteemed organization. The RCMP has been revealed as a corporate entity in need of comprehensive and critical treatment. This treatment must include a new prescription for the leadership of the organization and must be given sufficient scope for staged implementation guided by special expertise that is broadly interdisciplinary and avoids insularity. During the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian police organizations steadily intensified their attempts to comprehend and internalize the philosophy and principles of “community policing,” which seeks to invest citizens with increasing responsibilities in the co-production of social order with programs such as Neighbourhood Watch. Today, it is rare to hear this term invoked within Canadian police circles in any deeply serious way, in spite of lingering references to this important concept in those marquee documents referred to above. Police chiefs and their subordinates are now deploying financial, human and rhetorical resources in support of something called “intelligence-led policing.” And while such an approach has an obvious positive resonance with the public, it operates through a degree of abandonment of one of the key components of community policing. As a theory in practice, the intelligenceled approach is about re-vesting the police with control of the policing enterprise. Intelligenceled policing is all about the strategic gathering, analysis, assessment, dissemination and storage of information in ways that effectively contribute to law and order. Intelligence-led policing is much more comfortable with the crime-fighting model than is its community policing counterpart. Indeed, on some level, there is nothing wrong with intelligence-led policing. From a strictly organizational efficiency perspective, it is a winning approach that sharpens the point of police strategies and tactics to their law enforcement ends. Police officers use street-level and other available sources of information (that is, intelligence) to conduct arrests and anticipate crime and disorder problems. However, reformers looking at any number of public institutions in the past diagnosed the fundamental flaw that lies at the heart of intelligence-led policing. The public has a critical role to fulfill in maintaining order and enforcing the law. Community policing seeks to broaden the partnerships that exist between citizens and the police (a subset of the citizenry) in all areas of activity. The “thin blue line” that demarcates intelligence-led policing connotes separation and exclusivity of action rather than partnership with the public. Of course, the events surrounding September

11 have accelerated and, to some extent, sanctified the apparent abandonment of community policing in favour of its intelligence-led alternative. Security, particularly in its national guise, appears to trump those immediate domestic interests that orbit the concept of community policing. In the United States, the creation of the Homeland Security apparatus led to a fundamental dismantling of support for community policing and its kindred approaches. Everything was reconstituted to align with the overarching war on terror. Canadian police leaders were fairly quick to mirror this altered reality through their efforts at promoting integrated policing (a descendent of the intelligence-led strain that includes “integration” with other law enforcement, security, intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies), as well as support for anti-terrorism legislation at the federal level. There are compelling reasons to take the threat of terrorism seriously. However, the alacrity with which Canadian police organizations have suited up in support of counterterrorism, security and emergency preparedness paradigms

of academic research reveals that crime prevention is a more efficacious approach to the challenges facing society. For example, Irvin Waller, the director of the Institute for the Prevention of Crime at the University of Ottawa has provided an articulation of this perspective in his 2006 book, Less Law, More Order: The Truth about Reducing Crime. Waller continues to plead the case for more investment in crime prevention initiatives, especially those that place a premium on substantial investments in youth, women and at-risk neighbourhoods. The recent “Out for Good” proposal by the chief of police in Kingston, Ontario, which aims at the reintegration of released offenders, has, to date, fallen upon deaf ears within Public Safety Canada, the department with responsibility for both the RCMP and Corrections Canada. “Out for Good” is designed to have police officers involved more directly with high-risk inmates throughout their incarceration and following their release in order to facilitate their transition back to society, as well as to offer a measure of public reassurance. Crime prevention may take many forms, including the careful design of the built environment to promote safety, or investments in social development that promote healthy communities. And yet, Canadian police leaders continue to have a much greater appetite for presenting themselves as crime fighters and gangbusters than as community leaders or agents of social change. Many police executives are too impatient, too politically pragmatic, to volunteer for crime prevention initiatives that necessarily take a long time for results to appear. Also, the police culture is largely populated by individuals who seek immediate results and are more inclined to action than to the kind of patient investment of time and energy required by community policing initiatives. Another area of substantial interest in the political dimension of Canadian policing relates to the evolving role of police unions. In February 2007, justice minister Rob Nicholson confirmed an earlier decision to place police officers on judicial appointment committees. Having fixed upon the putative value of including police personnel in the critical process of selecting suitable judicial candidates, the Harper government could have drawn from several pools of potential advisors. Across Canada there are various forms of civilian governing authority that provide guidance and direction to police organizations. These include police commissions and police services boards, which typically have a blend of elected and appointed citizens who function as a kind of board of directors. One would expect that the federal justice minister would consider these individuals to possess a comprehensive perspective on the Canadian justice system such that their presence on judicial appointment committees would be valuable. Also, the existence of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, representing the interests and issues of Canada’s senior police executives, would seem to be a natural wellspring from which the justice minister might draw refreshing views on judicial appointments. And yet neither of these categories of citizens was invited to take a role on the judicial appointment panels. Rather, the Harper government turned to the Canadian Police Association, which repre-

Canadian police leaders have a greater appetite for presenting themselves as crime fighters and gang busters than as community leaders or agents of social change.

is disappointing in light of their apparent earlier sincerity when espousing the foundational goals of community policing. The new reality of policing has become enormously complex, largely because one operational template is being superimposed on another. The earlier reactive model of policing remains in place because of public and political demands for rapid response to calls for service. This in spite of research that demonstrates that such response is unlikely to be successful given substantial delays that occur when people try to decide whether or not to call the police. And yet there is increasing emphasis placed upon models that promote community-based, problem-solving approaches that demand an entirely different set of aptitudes, attitudes and skills from front-line officers. These reactive and proactive modes of policing are difficult to synthesize or coordinate, although Canadian police organizations, especially the RCMP, have been attempting to combine them across the full range of operational responsibilities. There is a persistent sense that the circumstances of 9/11 and its aftermath have allowed Canadian police leaders to sidestep their larger, legitimate and local obligations to community policing. A collateral issue that derives from this reality is the resurgence of the law-and-order theme within Canadian policing. In many jurisdictions, police are legally required to provide a range of core services, including law enforcement, emergency response, public order maintenance, crime prevention and assistance to victims. The first three of these elements are clearly consistent with a law-and-order mentality, while crime prevention and assistance to victims are two pillars of the community policing edifice. Currently, the Harper government appears inclined to advance the law-and-order facets of the police mandate. Indeed, this could be a prudent reading of the public will in such matters, although the weight

Literary Review of Canada

sents the collective bargaining and related labour interests of nearly 55,000 police personnel for support. This decision was criticized by opposition members of Parliament at the time as being transparently ideological and, indeed, a form of gerrymandering. The political expediency, or opportunism, of such a decision is evident. Police unions are powerful political elites in Canada; their strength in numbers is gargantuan. Their national body wields considerable clout and claim with politicians seeking the sanctity of the law-and-order mantle. Tied to this significant preferment of police associations by the Harper government is another aspect of Canadian policing that should prove revealing. Sworn members within the RCMP do not currently have access to a union in the conventional sense. RCMP members associations exist across the country and allow for a degree of representation in matters of salary, benefits, conditions of employment, health and safety. However, the RCMP Act precludes sworn members from joining a union that would collectively bargain on their behalf. This is a complex issue that has been tenaciously debated over several decades. What is illuminating is the recent reaction of the CPA to the impressive, urgent and extensive recommendations of the RCMP’s Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change. Having applauded (somewhat speciously) the appointment of outsider civilian, William Elliott, to the position of commissioner, the CPA reacted with considerable animus to the recommendations of the task force in mid December 2007. Without pausing to parse the precision and wisdom of these recommendations, the CPA has

gone on record dismissing the efforts of the task force simply because there is no recommendation supporting RCMP unionization. In essence, the CPA has chosen to play the Cyclops against the Odyssean efforts of the task force, which crossed the country listening to RCMP officers, civilian members, local politicians and other stakeholders in preparing their recommendations for the rebuilding of this organization. Such reaction on the part of organized police labour in Canada is disappointing, regardless of one’s stance on the merits of unionizing the RCMP. By dismissing out of hand everything brought forward by the task force, and by attempting to undermine the credibility of the membership and consultative approach of the task force, the CPA has reverted to theatrical unionist rhetoric that police scholar Peter K. Manning has called the “dramaturgy� of policing. An “our way or the highway� mentality is not helpful in such circumstances. Without doubt Canadian policing is in the throes of transformative change. Notwithstanding the inherent conservatism of both front-line and managerial strains of police culture, police organizations will be ineluctably drawn into new modes and orders that are now manifest on several fronts. The new patterns of “nodal security� that have been discerned by several criminologists, including Clifford Shearing and Jennifer Wood, indicate that public policing is no longer the exclusively dominant force in a modern society that values security highly. Shearing and Wood argue that the public police must acknowledge the legitimate role of many players (in the public ranks, private security firms, non-governmental organizations, etc.) in order maintenance.

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The exponential costs of public policing will become a central policy issue as municipalities, provinces and federal authorities come to realize that the fiction of professional public policing is unsustainable. Alternative approaches that serve to regulate and regularize a broader range of public, private, not-for-profit and communitybased modalities of public safety and security will materialize, thereby dismantling the monopoly currently held by public police interests. It is possible to make out this sea change in a comparison of two books by former chiefs of police. In Breaking Ranks: A Top Cop’s ExposĂŠ of the Dark Side of American Policing by the former chief of police in Seattle, Norm Stamper, the reader is enlightened with riveting revelations about the dysfunction of the police culture and the need for a reorienting of policing to accord with new realities of civil rights and human freedoms. In Duty: The Life of a Cop, by former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino, we are served up a ghostwritten tome characterized by equal parts of self­congratulation, mythology and Horatio Alger Jr. Policing is serious business. When we contemplate the sickening scene at the Vancouver airport where police officers went well beyond their use-of-force discretion, we come face to face with the imperative for change. When we witness events in Hay River or Kimmirut, where two very young Mounties met tragic ends as they patrolled in isolated solitude, it is compellingly clear that policing must be reimagined in ways that meet higher human standards of dignity, civility and safety.m

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Risk-Prone Rogers A close-up look at Canada’s communications mogul. Peter Hadekel

High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire that Debt Built Caroline Van Hasselt John Wiley and Sons 530 pages, hardcover isbn 9780470152966

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ed Rogers exercises enormous power over Canada’s communications industry; as such, he deserves the attention he gets in this exhaustively researched biography by financial journalist Caroline Van Hasselt. He is the fourth most wealthy Canadian, as ranked by Canadian Business magazine, with a net worth in 2006 that exceeded $4 billion. In a nation remarkably short of entrepreneurs, Rogers is something of an icon—a serial dealmaker who aggressively pursued his dreams with the kind of ardour one usually finds south of the border. He is feared by competitors, revered by the investment community and often reviled by customers. That he succeeded by breaking all the usual rules of business management makes the story even more interesting. Rogers tempted fate by overloading his company with debt, not once but many times. The fact that he survived and prospered is a testament to his extraordinary vision and business acumen. In building an empire combining cable, wireless, broadcasting and internet assets, along with ownership of the Rogers Centre and the Toronto Blue Jays, he displayed an almost unerring ability to make the right decision, when the choices were hardly obvious. The biography is unauthorized, although Rogers cooperated with the author, as did many people who worked with him. Van Hasselt interviewed some 200 sources and delved into the history of Canada’s communications industry. She has done an admirable job of pulling together the strands of his business career, sorting through the many deals and regulatory hearings along the way. That is both the greatest strength of the book and the greatest weakness. All the details are here, but at times they cause the eyes to glaze over. The author does not always manage to frame the facts in a way that engages the reader. After a while, the story begins to read like inside-baseball, of more interest to regulatory lawyers and securities

executives than to the general public. Even so, there is some drama in these pages, especially when the risk-taking Rogers puts everything on the line. He uttered some colourful and controversial opinions as he crossed swords with rival entrepreneurs and consumer groups angry at his company’s practices. As early as 1980, he was boasting to shareholders that he would “murder” the telephone companies if given the chance to compete. A few years later, he characterized a speech by then Bell Canada chair A.J. de Grandpré as sounding like Mein Kampf.

Ted Jr., who was only five at the time. Ever since, he has been driven to complete his father’s legacy, especially after his mother agreed to a suspect transaction and lost control of the prized asset, CFRB. He tried and failed to buy back the radio station, and wound up building a communications business of immense scale instead. As Rogers assembled his radio and television assets, expanded into cable and media in Canada and the United States, and secured the first valuable licence for a national cellular telephone network, he was much shorter on capital than on dreams. In the early days, he was fortunate to be able to tap family money, especially from the well-heeled family of his wife, Loretta. Later, as the business grew, he understood the power of debt in a way that no Canadian entrepreneur had done before. As Van Hasselt deftly portrays, Rogers realized that getting financing was not about how much profit he made or the dividends paid to shareholders (nonexistent for years). It was about how many customers he had and the revenue stream that came with them. It was about investing in leading-edge technology in cable and wireless networks where he enjoyed a virtual monopoly. So, even as his company lost large sums of money, lenders played along because Rogers was building value for the long term. He borrowed eye-­popping sums from banks and in the bond market, but has prided himself on the fact that he always made the interest payments. Not that the company did not teeter on the edge of collapse a few times. But as the book recounts, Rogers’s greatest strength was the ability to come up with a stroke of genius, just before the stroke of doom. He was, as his many partners found out, impossible to work with. Rogers could never abide being a minority investor in any venture. No sooner did he buy into a deal than he began scheming about how to take control. Shareholders also had to live with a dubious, dual-class stock structure that gave Rogers all the voting power. Van Hasselt paints a less than completely flattering picture of this growth-obsessed corporate dynamo, although she does make clear her admiration for his entrepreneurial genius. At a hefty 530 pages, including end notes and bibliography, her well-researched story is sometimes slowed by the sheer weight of her reporting. Even so, it is a valuable contribution to Canadian business history.m

Rogers tempted fate by overloading his company with debt, not once but many times.

Peter Hadekel, a Montreal journalist and author, is a business columnist for the Montreal Gazette.

And then, when he got into the long-distance business in 1989, Rogers promised to put an end to “Soviet-style communications monopolism”—quite a boast from someone who enjoyed a cable monopoly of his own. Unfortunately, Van Hasselt never really gets Ted to open up about himself. He comes across as a driven workaholic, so immersed in the details of his business that he is one dimensional. He is not easily given to reflection on his career or what place he may hold in the history of Canadian business. His voice as recorded here is far from articulate. If Rogers is a tough nut to crack, Van Hasselt succeeds in getting colleagues and former employees to open up about the man’s obsessive style of management and the toll it exacted not only on others but also on himself. He was not blessed with robust health from the start and he has driven himself to the brink several times. “Rogers doesn’t ask his employees to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself,” Van Hasselt writes, “and therein lies the crux of the problem: Ted Rogers lives, breathes and eats work—a major reason, perhaps, why the titan had to cheat death five times.” The book is best as it traces his formative years. Edward Samuel Rogers Jr. was born in Toronto on May 27, 1933, into a life of relative wealth and privilege. The Rogers family had already made a fortune in oil and coal by the time Ted’s father, Edward S. Rogers Sr., dropped out of a University of Toronto electrical engineering program to pursue his invention: the world’s first socket-powered radio. Ted Sr. went on to start a radio-manufacturing company and built one of the first radio broadcasting stations, Toronto’s CFRB. He died prematurely of an aneurysm at the age of 38. This was a defining moment for

Literary Review of Canada

The Defender of Stories From Gilgamesh to Atanarjuat, they have a civilizing influence. Charles Foran

The City of Words Alberto Manguel Anansi Press 158 pages, softcover isbn 9780887847639

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lberto Manguel believes in stories. The City of Words, the book version of his formidably erudite 2007 Massey lectures, is a meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, one written as though from a bunker in the midst of a prolonged battle. Enemies of real stories and real books abound in the dark current times that the author outlines, and they range from the usual suspects—the dead language of politics and advertising, the “limiting imagination of bureaucracies”— to those of the post-9/11 era, including the re-emergence of toxic Us versus Them/Good versus Evil divides. Additionally, there is the Mordor-like overlord of literary late capitalism, with its determination to colonize not only our marketplaces but our actual consciences as well, leading us to only think we are reading the fiction we wish to read. A dark age, indeed. In his introduction, Manguel declares that his starting point is “less a question than a series of questions, less an argument than a string of observations.” He also admits that the project may amount to a “confession of bewilderment.” From such a brilliant reader and thinker about literature, this is an exciting admission, hinting at the unfolding of a personal narrative, an intellectual journey, perhaps, that will allow any affirmations to feel hard won, and so all the more likely to be shared by audience members, and now readers, who are similarly bewildered. Such a dramatic arc, easily and naturally built into a multi-part series, is too rarely employed by Massey lecturers. Excess certitude, and certainly excess scolding—the preferred mode of recent years, makes for dull listening and reading alike. Charles Foran is the author of eight books. Join the Revolution, Comrade, a collection of travel and literary essays, will appear this spring. He is also writing a biography of Mordecai Richler.

March 2008

The first lecture, “The Voice of Cassandra,” declares the “great richness and difficulty of literature” to lie in the fact that it “is not dogma.” Literature has no definitive answers and offers neither any “unarguable assumptions” nor “labelling identities.” All this starts with the complex blessing of language itself. Language does not only name things; it brings “reality” into being by means of words. In turn, accounts of those realities become stories. German novelist Alfred Döblin’s conception of literature, most strikingly in the books he published after the Second World War, makes use of language in a manner that Manguel finds illustrative. Döblin did not want words to simply retell events. He wanted them to force reality to “manifest itself,” and so reveal, by reflecting ourselves to ourselves, the human condition. Dreaming up and then telling stories serves “as vicarious learning, as transmission of memory, as instruction or as warning.” Of course, the curse of Cassandra, the Greek priestess granted the gift

of prophesy on condition that no one would believe her, is that those warnings go forever unheeded. As the titles of the next two lectures suggest, “The Tablets of Gilgamesh” and “The Bricks of Babel” trace back tendencies in western storytelling to the beginnings of recorded narrative. Manguel is at his most learned and intellectually dextrous in these lectures, juxtaposing the ancient with the modern, to evidence the evolution of preoccupations, and how they are playing out in the 21st century. With the 4,000-year-old Sumerian poem Epic of Gilgamesh, the tyrannical king only becomes just, and his city whole, when he embraces his “mirror image,” the wild Enkidu. Self-knowledge and transformation through knowing the “Other” is explored more soberly in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No happy reconciliation occurs in this parable: “fears of self-revelation,” Manguel notes, obliges “the expulsion of this unexplored identity.” Isn’t this akin to our contemporary western anxiety about the Other of, say, Islam? He chides both Tony Blair of England and Nicolas Sarkozy of France for recent utterances suggesting a desire to safeguard their society’s identity by either assimilation of newcomers or by their outright exclusion. With the biblical story of Babel, the expansiveness of Alberto Manguel’s intellect is allowed free rein. The tale of God’s punishment of the builders of Babel—he sent down angels with instructions to “confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech”—compels the retelling of a William Trevor story about an Irish schoolteacher determined to redeem her own experience by refusing to accept the false “curse of Babel” of Irish historical differences. From there, the lecture arcs back into the prehistory of language in order to understand how it encodes the inter-dependency of author, reader and tale. “Readers create writers who in turn create readers,” is his pithy summary of this elaborate process. Here lies the model for the creation of a fluid, evolving identity for a society. “We manage to create an inspired identity,” Manguel writes, “an

inspiring story, coherent and truthful, reflecting back to us a useful concept of reality…” After some speculation about the fragility of the process, using the slow response of Arab writers to the ongoing war in Iraq as an instance of circumstances when “no poetic answer is immediately possible,” the lecture rounds out with an unexpected but illuminating discussion of Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. The Inuit story of a nomad community visited by a shaman bringing upheaval, including murder, into their fragile world, defies western expectations of time. Set in the proverbial “once upon a time,” the film embodies the Inuit disavowal of western notions of our relationships with time, place and, by implication, story. “No event, no act stands alone, nor does any individual or social element,” Manguel declares of the film’s narrative approach, itself rooted in Inuit belief. “The whole natural world is populated by a complex, dense story into which everyone and everything is woven, teller and listener included.” By denying constructed perceptions of Others, such narrative strategies can be helpful to our predicament. Too often today it is “the blanketing notion of a society’s identity” that is the cause of conflict. “The Books of Don Quixote” may be the simplest, and most satisfying of the five lectures. While it would be an interesting exercise for Manguel, or any other literary critic, to try outlining a case for the enduring value of storytelling without using western literature’s first, and still most audacious a n d “d i f f i c u l t ,” novel, there is otherwise no upside to excluding Don Quixote. This is especially the case in The City of Words, given how Manguel makes superb use of lesser known details about the novel, including its false preface declaring it to be a translation of an Arab work, and the simple facts of its publication between 1605 and 1615, during the final ethnic cleansing of Moriscos from the Spanish territories. (Moriscos were Arabs who had converted after 1492 to avoid the expulsion of all Arabs and Jews from the Iberian peninsula.) The length to which Cervantes went to “include” the Other in his conception of Spain at a time when the society was in deep, violent denial, is one of the more subtle reasons the novel rings true to us these centuries later. “For Cervantes,” Manguel remarks, “that which we see as alien is merely ourselves condemned to exile.” As may be now evident, no personal narrative interrupts the dense and compacted arguments of the first four lectures. Alberto Manguel’s “confession of bewilderment” never materializes. It is likewise notably absent from the thunderous certainties and apocalyptic jeremiads of “The Screen of Hal,” the penultimate expression (and repetition, to be honest) of why, though stories “can’t protect us from suffering and error” or from “our own suicidal greed,” they can “tell us who we are” and “offer us ways of remaining alive, together, on this much-abused earth.” The lecture starts off by reasserting the need, pace Constantin Cavafy’s famous poem and, although not mentioned, J.M. Coetzee’s novel, to

deny that the proverbial Barbarians at the proverbial gate are ever anything more than “a kind of solution” to our own endemic weaknesses and paranoia. The problem starts with Manguel’s outlining of foibles that he evidently believes unique—and uniquely lethal—to our times. Take his use of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic George Lukács’s concept, filtered through his colleague Alex Honneth, of reification. Lukacs believed that capitalism’s “commercial fetishism”—a kind of thingification of all human exchanges— amounted to the “colonization of the world of experience.” Reified individuals are incapable of behaving or even thinking autonomously. The sister concept of auto-reification is born out in how such “colonized” people present themselves to each other. For Manguel, “passive reading habits that deny our own intelligence and make us accept that the only stories we deserve are those pre-digested for us” is an example of our reified consciences. He goes on to blame, and harangue, the book industry, singling out the “industrial manipulation known as the editing process” for bracing censure. He also quotes from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World to explain the “tactic” he detects in the business of either palletizing serious writing through intrusive editing or marginalizing it through the relegation of such books to the small and university presses. “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.” It is easy to forgive Manguel’s ove r- l o n g b u t ardent and no doubt wellinformed complaints about commercial publishing. His decision to introduce a concept as vast as reification in a single paragraph in the final lecture may also be put down to his desire to make his point. The condescension implicit in declaring the behaviours of entire societies to have been programmed by broad impersonal forces is irksome, but no more so than a lot of radical thought designed to explain, and generally bemoan, why people insist on doing things the radical thinkers consider bad for them. More vexing about “The Screen of Hal,” for this reviewer at least, is the author’s conviction that all these ills are somehow the property of our dark/darker/darkest age. Over and over Manguel appears to assert that such undeniable ills as “disregarding the abuse of human rights for the sake of economic partnerships” and “refusing to adopt scientific solutions because of superstitious beliefs” are exclusive early 21stcentury ailments. (That said, the ailment wedged in between these two, “allowing the devastation of the planet with the excuse of ever-increasing financial benefits,” is certainly ours.) They are anything but exclusive to us, and can also be traced as far back, sadly, as the Epic of Gilgamesh. They, too, may even be some of the “stories” we have forged out of the realities language formed to reveal our eternally greedy, taste-challenged, market-influenced, Other-fearing selves.m

Enemies of real stories and real books abound in the dark current times that the author outlines.

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Literary Review of Canada

Dystopic Utopia? An optimistic book lends itself to a pessimistic analysis. Tarek Fatah

Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism Michael Adams 180 pages, hardcover Viking isbn 9780670063680

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ollster Michael Adams is known for his 1997 bestseller, Sex in the Snow: The Surprising Revolution in Canadian Social Sciences, in which he studied Canadian population groups defined by their values and resulting lifestyle choices, where the differences between men and women within a tribe were found to be less significant than the differences between different tribes. In Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism, Michael Adams travels a similar route, analyzing the complex relationship

Adams suggests that if attention were turned away from them, Muslim Canadians would integrate with the rest of Canada just as other immigrants do. between immigrant groups, specifically Muslims, and “Canadians,” with a section devoted to real sex in the snow—intermarriage between Canadians of different ethnic backgrounds. In 1997, Adams suggested that the values of men and women were increasingly converging. He suggested that women were less motivated by the traditional values of guilt and duty than they were a generation ago. He wrote, “the values propelling our culture—autonomy, hedonism and a quest for meaning—have influenced women as much as men.” Ten years later, Adams uses the results of an Environics survey—the firm he founded—to make the case that despite misgivings, the values of immigrants are coming together with the rest of Canadians who came here many generations ago. Tarek Fatah is founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and has written for The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post. Born in Pakistan, he is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, in which he challenges the premise of Islamists that an Islamic state is a prerequisite to a state of Islam. The book will be available from John Wiley and Sons across Canada in April.

March 2008

Midway through Unlikely Utopia, Adams alerts us: “This is not a book about Muslims.” The sudden nudge is surprising, almost as if he is trying to steer our perspective away from the subject matter of the book. It is a direction few will accept. Anyone reading the book will find it extremely difficult to agree with the author that the book is not about hijab, sharia and the issue of jihadi terrorism that is on the minds of most Canadians. Notwithstanding his attempt to position the book as one about Canadian pluralism, there is no doubt the book is a vigorous and a well-intentioned defence of Canada’s beleaguered Muslim communities and Canada’s multiculturalism policies. Adams takes on a difficult challenge in good faith and the result should win him accolades among the 800,000 Canadians who turn to Mecca five times a day in prayer. Although the book—showing a welcome mat on the cover—addresses the ties and tensions between Canada’s growing population of African, Asian and Latin American immigrants and the country’s dominant anglo-French citizens, it is essentially structured around a landmark survey

done by Environics to study Muslim Canadians. Between November 30, 2006, and January 5, 2007, Environics surveyed 500 adult Muslim Canadians. The results of this survey made headline news across the country, and CBC’s The National dedicated an entire show to the survey findings with commentaries by academics and reaction from the street. Unlikely Utopia is Environics interpretation of this survey with a comforting assurance to both Muslim and non-Muslim Canadians that not all is as bad as it is seems. The reason Adams would choose to deflect the reader’s attention away from the “Muslimness” of his book can be found when he suggests that if attention were turned away from them, Muslim Canadians would integrate with the rest of Canada just as other immigrants do. At the end of the chapter titled “Muslim in Canada,” Adams quotes Globe and Mail writer Doug Saunders to validate his argument. Saunders says that much of the talk about Muslims in the West is ill founded: “Once we get past the hysteria and look at the facts, something becomes apparent about the Muslims: They’re just like any group of immigrants, except for the stories we tell about them.” Unlikely Utopia, in the words of Adams, is essentially a “backlash against a backlash.” For a book about facts and figures, it is a smooth read, one that appeals to our better angels, struts Canada as a success story in a world deeply mired in mutual suspicion and conflict, yet reveals troubling unresolved fissures; some Adams glosses

over, while others he chooses to ignore. In the chapter titled “Facts on the Ground,” Adams demonstrates why Canadians should be proud of how well new and old Canadians have managed to live together without the tensions we see elsewhere. As evidence of this success, Adams very rightly points to integration where it counts: in the political process. He writes: Canada has the highest proportion of foreignborn legislators in the world. This is true in two ways. First, we have the world’s largest proportion of seats in … [the House of Commons] occupied by people who weren’t born here. Second, our proportion of foreign-born legislators comes the closest in the world to matching the proportion of foreign-born people in the country’s population overall … Moreover, the more than three dozen foreign-born MPs … represent every major political party in this country, from the Conservatives to the Bloc Québécois. His thesis is that there is little for Canadians to fear from newcomers to this country or vice versa, and he provides an array of statistics to support that claim. Canadians, he writes, “consistently express the most positive attitudes in the world toward immigration.” He quotes from an international Ipsos MORI study done in 2006, which found that 75 percent of Canadians believe that overall, immigrants have a positive influence on the country. The 75 percent figure becomes even more significant when compared to other immigrant-receiving nations. Adams writes:

races have always done: gone to the most familiarfeeling neighbourhoods in a new and unfamiliar land. Adams’s passion for Canada is evident from page one where he states, “Canada is special.” But he is careful not to discard some of the real fear that consumes this country that has centred on the feelings of many well-meaning Canadians who believe that newcomers arrive with a sense of entitlement and with little incentive to integrate. This fear has resonated most vividly in Quebec, and Adams dedicates an entire chapter to that province and to the debate about reasonable accommodation. Adams admits that this fear is real. He writes that “our own data suggest that Canadians are indeed starting to worry that this country may have bitten off more than it can chew when it comes to the integration of newcomers of vastly different religious, cultural and ideological backgrounds.” Although acknowledging that this fear is based on data, Adams goes on to say that the problem is not the fear itself but “the more exaggerated version of it which claims that Canada is a powder keg of ethnic strife waiting to explode.” He does not, however, identify the source or the data that confirms this exaggeration of fear. Adams expresses deep admiration for Canada’s successes, and the blemishes that we Canadians notice he blames on our negativity, a product, he believes, of our media. “We have only to flick on

By any account, this was a scary number. Adams in his book estimates that there are today more than 800,000 Muslims living in Canada. The survey results indicate that at least 96,000 Muslim Canadians believe that if, hypothetically, their co-religionists carried out a terrorist attack on Canada, there would be some justification. Of them 40,000 Muslim believe that the terrorists would be “completely justified” in attacking their own country. Ordinary Muslims in Canada were shocked to hear this finding on the CBC nightly news, but as soon as the story emerged, it disappeared from the rest of the media. Only Peter Mansbridge of The National asked Professor Haideh Moghissi of York University to throw light on this high figure, but she seemed unable to fathom the huge number of Muslims willing to justify a terrorist attack on their homeland. In answer to another question, the book reveals, “nine percent told us they had some sympathy with the young men who were allegedly plotting attacks.” Close to 80,000 Muslims have sympathy for the alleged terrorists. Those of us who have been on the frontlines of fighting Islamic extremism and have been yelling into deaf ears about the increasing penetration of radical jihadi literature and preachers in Canada’s mosques were also very alarmed at the finding, but not Michael Adams. He dismissed the survey result, saying “these numbers may sound larger than we might like.” Adams discounts this overt [Muslim] support for terrorist attacks on Canada by stating in his book, “the link between opinion and action isn’t so straightforward.” He then dedicates an entire page to comparing the 12 percent figure with other findings and at one stage draws this incredible analogy: “Ten percent [of Canadians] believe that people who contracted HIV/AIDS through sex or drug use ‘got what they deserve.’ Consider how profoundly marginal these positions are in Canadian society.” He then goes on to trivialize the fact that nearly 80,000 Canadians feel there is justification for attacking Canada. He writes: “Moreover, to say one has sympathy for someone doesn’t necessarily mean one would encourage their behaviour. I have sympathy for young people who commit crimes.” Michael Adams clearly comes out in this book as a friend of Muslims, as someone who cares for and is willing to go to bat for them. However, sometimes a true friend is one who has the courage to say “You have a problem.” Adams fails in that test of true friendship. Not only does he try to cover up a major problem facing the Muslim communities—the influence of jihadi literature and theology on their sons and daughters—the survey itself was tainted in the questions it failed to ask and the way it was conducted. Environics admits that it hired extra Muslim staff to ask the questions. There was no need for augmenting the questioners with Muslim staff. As a statistician, I know that a survey needs to be done with absolutely no chance of respondents being coached. There is no evidence that this happened in this case, but there is also no explanation why additional Muslims were hired to ask questions. In the survey, there was no question asked about whether the respondent believed in the doctrine of armed jihad as pronounced by leading Islamists ranging from the late Syed Qutb

In the survey, there was no question asked about whether the respondent believed in the doctrine of armed jihad.

The country with the second most positive attitudes [towards immigrants], Australia, was slightly over half (54 per cent), with the United States not far behind (52 per cent). In Western Europe, Germans (47 per cent) were the most positive about immigrants’ influence on their country.

Adams provides figures from Statistics Canada to demonstrate that newcomers are succeeding as never before. He writes: Another hopeful sign is the employment outcomes of second-generation Canadians: children of immigrants. Looking at the average incomes of three groups—those whose families have been in Canada for three generations or more, immigrants, and the children of immigrants—it is the last group, the second generation, that has the highest earnings. According to Statistics Canada, second-generation Canadian men earn an average annual income of $49,000, as compared with about $42,000 for those whose families have been here three or more generations. Adams goes to great lengths to show that the existence of “ethnic enclaves” in our major cities is not to be equated with the ghettoes of Paris or Amsterdam. Canadian ethnic enclaves, he demonstrates, are not a result of racism, but of convenience. He writes: The increased concentration of particular visible minority groups in Canadian neighbourhoods is not, then, a case of the growing segregation of long-time Canadians. It’s a case of having more visible minority newcomers than ever before, and of those newcomers doing what newcomers of all 10

the television or open the newspaper to be fairly certain that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and taking us with it,” he writes. However, he does not stop there. He claims that if we feel there is something wrong around us, it is because we are prone to see things in bad light. “Canadians seem to expect, if not downright savour, bad news … Canada is populated by people who are highly attentive to the (bad) news in our country and the bad news from everywhere else,” says Adams, without sharing with us the data that would allow him to make such a claim. “I am by no means a Pollyanna. I am a pollster,” declares Adams as he prepares the reader for the Environics poll that confirmed the fears of many Canadians and alarmed even Muslims, but not him. If we are to believe Adams’s Chamberlainian analysis, his Environics survey found no evidence of the likelihood that Canada may one day face a situation that Britain, France, Spain, Indonesia, Pakistan, India or the United States have faced at the hands of jihadi terrorists or Islamic extremists. I wish he was right, but the survey results suggest otherwise. The Environics survey had questions about the arrest of 18 Muslim men and boys charged with plotting terrorist acts in Canada. It asked Muslim Canadians whether those terrorist attacks would have been justified. An astonishing 12 percent of the respondents said if the 18 men had actually carried out the terrorist attacks on Canada, they would have been “at least somewhat justified.” Five percent said they would have been “completely justified.”

Literary Review of Canada

Taking this voice [of rigid totalitarian ultraconservative Islam] as the voice of Muslims is a fatal mistake with dire consequences. Worse, wittingly or unwittingly, bowing to [its] demands in the name of respecting their cultural heritage is to give up on principles of citizens’ equality before the law and the hard-won norms of women’s rights. Still worse, tip-toeing around harmful cultural practices as some left and feminists are doing is tolerating for Others what is intolerable to “us.” Perhaps in the second edition of this book Michael Adams will not dismiss the growing threat of Islamic extremism in Canada, which his own survey demonstrates is having an effect on the opinions of Muslims.m

Note 1 Haideh Moghissi and Shahrzad Mojab (2008). “Of ‘Cultural’ Crimes and Denials: Aqsa Pervez.” <www. zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16155> (January 2008).

Studies in International Governance Series

to Osama bin Laden, which states that all Muslims living in non-Muslim countries should join the armed jihad if any part of the Muslim world is under attack. This is the only question that sets the Muslim apart from the Islamist. It was not raised. In another question, the respondents were asked: “Some countries have decided to ban the wearing of head scarves by Muslim women in public places, including schools. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?” The answer was obvious. However, as it had no relevance to Canada, it seems the question was unnecessary. Had the following question also been asked, the answers could have shown whether the respondent believes in universal rights or merely their own rights. The question I feel went unasked was: Some countries have decided to punish women who do not wear head scarves in public, including schools. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea? Two months after Unlikely Utopia was launched with much fanfare in Toronto, with Adams a sought-after speaker at Islamic events, an incident in Mississauga would prove that even if less than 1 percent of a community believed in violence in the name of religion, it would be 1 percent too many. A young teenager, Aqsa Pervez, was killed in her own home, allegedly by her father for not wearing the hijab. In the words of Haideh Moghissi and Shahrzad Mojab, the death of Pervez was a wakeup call to those who feel all is well. In January of this year, writing in the online magazine ZNet (after the Toronto Star declined their submission), they warned that Canada was “facing a very serious and growing problem of the rise of religious zealotry.”¹ The two Iranian-born academics wrote that Islam itself has had different readings from almost the very beginning with a strict and rigid literalist reading on the one hand and a rationalist interpretive reading on the other. For centuries, they say, the vast majority of Muslims rejected “the rigid totalitarian ultra-conservative Islam.” Moghissi and Mojab write:

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Critical Mass The Emergence of Global Civil Society James W. St.G. Walker and Andrew S. Thompson, editors Paper $36.95 • 978-1-55458-022-4 • Studies in International Governance Series

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Afghanistan Transition under Threat Geoffrey Hayes and Mark Sedra, editors Paper $29.95 • 978-1-55458-011-8 • Studies in International Governance Series

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March 2008

11

Home Schooling with a Difference A father connects with his son through the medium of movies. Natalee Caple

The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son David Gilmour Thomas Allen Publishers 242 pages, hardcover isbn 9780887622854

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avid Gilmour’s passion for his child in his new non-fiction book The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son displays the wavering incandescence of a self-conscious single human being trying to bring the little knowledge he has of the world to his precious child to provide him some insight into the largely invisible future. The Film Club is the story of Gilmour home schooling his very unhappy teenage son, Jesse, in an unorthodox fashion. When he realizes that his child is miserable and that school is not working for Jesse, he proposes a deal. Jesse can leave high school and he does not have to get a job or pay any rent as long as he agrees to watch three movies a week with his father and swear off drugs (it half works). Gilmour is able to do this because he is largely out of work during the duration of the home schooling—a problem that creates the possibility of the father-son film club of the title, but which terrifies the author and leaves him fearing for both members of the club. The Film Club is a clever, funny tribute to a relationship in transition. Jesse is in the final throes of adolescence and his father is keenly aware that how this transition goes will determine the state of their relationship in the future and maybe even the quality of life his son will attain as an adult. The spectre of Gilmour’s brother (fails at everything, lashes out at family, disappears) haunts Gilmour’s decisions. His own spectre as a lover, husband, television personality and writer haunts him as well. “But what if I’m wrong?” he asks himself over and over. “What if I’d allowed him to fuck up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it?” He pictures his brilliant son driving a taxi through the dark whenever these thoughts get loud. But Gilmour’s parenting is relentlessly active—because of the film club he spends a minimum of six hours a week and often much more, sitting beside his child, talking to him and asking him questions about his life. In addition, he gets a chance to

share his personal experiences, his life, with his son at a time when their experiences are becoming parallel (trouble with love, work, money, dreams). Other subjects they discuss include “the Beatles (too often but he indulged me), drinking badly, drinking well … Adolf Hitler, Dachau, Richard Nixon, infidelity, Truman Capote, the Mojave Desert, Suge Knight, lesbians, cocaine, heroine chic, … sarcasm, weightlifting, dink size, French actors, and e.e. cummings.” The point, Gilmour suggests, is not to talk about movies but to talk about everything. The two struggle openly with the intimacy of their relationship. At one point Jesse declares over dinner in a restaurant, “‘I think you have too big an effect on me … I don’t think other kids get so—’ he looked for the word ‘—paralyzed by

on the side of the bed with the thousand-yard stare. He summons his son over, who sits uneasily on his lap. Looking at his father’s unshaven face and bleary eyes … the little boy asks him why he doesn’t go to sleep.” “I’ve got too much to do” is Nicholson’s chilling response. Gilmour suggests that what is frightening about this scene is the implication that what Jack has to do is kill his family. However, I think that in the context of The Film Club and, frankly, from the point of view of a child, what is chilling about that scene is how intense and mysterious we all must appear to our children in times of stress. Film lovers will find this book utterly chewy for the anecdotes and discussions of an incredibly broad range of films. But the real propellant is Gilmour’s devout, almost obsessive love for Jesse and his terrible anxiety about how best to express that love and still provide his son with structure and guidance. The thank-yous in the end pages mention Gilmour’s daughter for her equal significance in his life. However, this book speaks specifically to the validation a boy brings his father as he grows into a man. And the abject terror a father feels about failing that boy. Gilmour has trod this territory in somewhat different ways before. In his Governor General Award–winning last novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China, a father looks the other way and his son disappears. In an earlier novel, Back on Tuesday, a father kidnaps his own son. The stories are very different, but what is at stake is the son of a foolish/human man. In The Film Club, this theme is underlined by Gilmour’s recognition that sooner or later the child will be lost no matter what. Jesse grows out of adolescence beautifully and finds his talent and becomes the strutting wonder, the magical charismatic creature in the world that he always was in his parents’ minds. “He outgrew the film club and, in a certain way, he outgrew me, outgrew being a child to his father … Some nights I walk by his bedroom on the third floor; I go in and sit in the edge of the bed; it seems unreal that he’s gone.” This book will move you; it must move you. If you are a parent to someone(s), you will recognize that the incredulity Gilmour experiences when his son leaves home is equal only to the incredulity he must have felt when his son arrived. If you are a child of someone, you will realize that no one ever loved you or ever wanted your love more than your parents.m

The Film Club is a clever, funny tribute to a relationship in transition.

Natalee Caple is the author of Mackerel Sky (Insomniac Press, 2004).

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having a fight with their dads’.” Gilmour is miserable when they fight. He seems to feel a sickening dread of one day being told to “fuck off ” by his son, of watching his back as he walks away. But Jesse is a sensitive and thoughtful son who actually listens to his father and reaches out to him even when Gilmour is being a prick and embarrassing his son in a restaurant by mocking his job and correcting his table manners. The detail of this relationship in its tidal wonder is what gives the book its power. Gilmour gleefully shares his knowledge of film—why it works, what the guilty pleasures of film watching are, background stories on actors, directors and writers. His melding of what goes on onscreen offscreen in the film club is wonderful. In one great section of the book, Gilmour and Jesse have been watching The Shining together. When they each name their favourite scenes from the movie, each scene speaks to the monstrous aspect of the controlling father in the movie, giving a subtle nod to father-son anxieties. Gilmour chooses the scene where Jack Nicholson’s character is in a bar in the abandoned hotel being served by the ghost of his predecessor. “The waiter warns Jack that his young son is ‘making trouble,’ that maybe he should be ‘dealt with’ … (with an ax).” Nicholson’s character is starting to lose his mind, but the anxiety that the scene relies on is the anxiety of the frustrated parent who has not gotten to the ax-murdering point yet. Jesse chooses another scene, one that emphasizes the son’s point of view: “He chose the scene where the little boy steals into Jack’s bedroom early in the morning to retrieve a toy only to find his father sitting

Literary Review of Canada

Where Derring-Do Can Lead A journalist recounts his adventures but not their personal cost. Michael Valpy

Where War Lives Paul Watson McClelland and Stewart 384 pages, hardcover isbn 9780771088223

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rom adolescence onward, Paul Watson aches to go to war and experience the rush of surviving when others die. As a young reporter at the Toronto Star he uses his vacation time to travel to the world’s killing fields. He yearns to report on conflict and violence. “Somewhere in the twisted strand of my DNA,” he writes, “I must be wired to crave risk.” On October 4, 1993, this time on assignment from the Star, he is in bloody, murderous Mogadishu where peacekeeping troops are battling Somali warlords and their militias. He has just been through [close up: bullets shattering the hallways of his hotel, whizzing past his head, shards of bodies everywhere] a 16-hour battle that has left 18 Americans and 600 Somalis dead. He hears rumours that the body of an American soldier is being dragged by a mob through city streets. He sets out with his driver and armed bodyguards to locate the grisly procession and succeeds after an hour and a half ’s search. He is given permission to photograph. “It was a high like I’d never felt before, terrified of death and full of life all at once,” he writes. “I walked, hyper-alert, shielded only by a triangle of protectors who stood no chance if the mob turned on us. And then the crowd parted, forming a manic horseshoe around the corpse. … I looked to the ground. And that is how I came to know Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland. “In less than the time it took to breathe, I had to decide whether to steal a dead man’s last shred of dignity. The moment of choice, in the swirl of dust and sweat, hatred and fear, is still trapped in my mind, denying me peace: just as I was about to press the shutter on my camera, the world went quiet, everything around me melted into a slow-motion blur, and I heard the voice: ‘If you do this, I will own you forever.’” He takes the photo. It makes the front pages of newspapers around the world. It wins him a Pulitzer Prize. It is credited with changing U.S. policy on Somalia: Bill Clinton pulls the troops out.

Watson goes on from war to war to war. Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, lots of minimayhems in between. He becomes, and still is, a top foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He remains haunted by photographing Cleveland. He has a breakdown, sees a psychiatrist, is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Years after Somalia, he tracks down Cleveland’s mother in an Arizona trailer park and tries to talk to her but is told by her surviving son to go away. So he writes a book to restore the honour to Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland that he stole when he photographed his corpse. He talks about the baseness and evil of war. He dedicates his book to “the silenced and the suffering.” It should be a great story. The ingredients of

Watson exposes himself to this week after week, year after year. He is an intriguing human being. What makes a man with one hand—a birth handicap—crave throughout his adult life to be a witness to violence? What is the nature of his fearlessness that takes him alone into murderous mobs and the territories of warlords prepared to have him shot without an eye’s blink? What makes him tick? We do not learn those answers—I think because Watson is still entangled in his adolescent narratives. This is not a book by someone who has stepped outside himself and deeply examined his path through life and the events he has traversed and the senseless horror of war he has witnessed. Chris Hedges of the New York Times has written that book: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. To Hedges, like Watson, war was a drug. Hedges was imprisoned in Sudan, expelled from Libya, ambushed in Central America, shot at in Kosovo. Like Watson, he has witnessed atrocities that haunt him. He writes: “There is a part of me—maybe it is a part of many of us—that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life.” But then, after a decade and a half of war reporting, he steps back, reflects on the carnage he has seen and writes a brilliant, unsettling book on “the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.” And he calls it quits. He refuses to witness war any longer. Watson has not done that. He has written a book about the admirable and intelligent ­derring-do of Paul Watson with some notations along the way that whatever it is he has exposed his psyche to has been hazardous and unworthy of the human spirit—an insight he grasps at falteringly with this declaration: “I became a journalist because I believed truth was a solid construction of objective fact, that it existed somewhere in an undeniable form.” And, of course, war—institutionalized killing—as he has discovered, rests always on a plinth of lies. We all come to understand that truth isn’t absolute, that at best it is negotiable. But it is what war has done to Watson that I wish I knew more about.m

What makes a man with one hand—a birth handicap—crave throughout his adult life to be a witness to violence?

Michael Valpy is a journalist with The Globe and Mail.

March 2008

big drama most certainly are there. Paul Watson is a powerful, eloquent writer, a talented storyteller. He is a superb journalist. He is a fearless adventurer. He has witnessed much. And yet, something is not right. I think the problem is that Where War Lives would have been a better book if it had been written about Watson and not by him—or if Watson had co-written it with someone like Anthony Feinstein, the Toronto psychiatrist who studies stress disorders in war correspondents. Or maybe with someone like The Globe and Mail’s soulcaressing Ian Brown. What Watson is not able to do—and I have no difficulty understanding this—is to clutch the drama, the torment, of his soul; his story needs someone like a Feinstein or a Brown to poke into the dark recesses of his mind and explain what he thought, felt—especially felt—as he witnessed all those years of silencing and suffering. I have been, briefly, to this terrain that is Watson’s neighbourhood. It is not natural. I have been cornered by a mob intent on killing me and I have run into a house under gunfire to rescue a man shot in the stomach and have embraced, paralyzingly, the knowledge that my life was on the lip of abbreviation. I didn’t like it. It terrified me. I was aware of no transcendent reason for being there other than—and it was a struggle to hold the thought in my mind—the image of the headline above my story in the next day’s edition of the Globe.

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The Head-Counting Game A new book tries to demystify the art and science of polling, with mixed results. Steven D. Brown

Polling and Public Opinion: A Canadian Perspective Peter M. Butler University of Toronto Press 189 pages, softcover isbn 9780802038190

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t 9:00 p.m. precisely on election night in Ontario last October, Global News declared Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal Party elected with a majority government. The people had spoken. However, the odd thing about this was that the people in question were not the electorate; indeed, not even one vote had been counted across the province when Global made its declaration. Rather, the people in question were about 7,000 members of an Ipsos Reid panel who had been invited to complete an electionday online survey for the company after they had cast their ballots. It was a new “first” for the polling industry in Canada, but really only another small step in the relentless insinuation of polls into the culture and politics of this country. At one time, polling public opinion was just one of a number of ways to tap community sentiment. Letters to the editor, callers to phone-in shows, a columnist’s ear to the ground, informal contacts with constituents and interest group representations could all claim to reflect the public’s views on issues of the day. Those days are gone. For whatever reasons, and over the dead bodies of more than a few objectors, the “head counting” school of public opinion has won the day. Poll findings now stand indisputably as the legal tender for discourse on matters of public opinion in our society. Evidence of this stature can be found anywhere public opinion is considered relevant. Certainly, polls are prominent features in the market, and political and policy research fields. But they can also now be found playing a role in less obvious places, such as our legal system where they have been used as a basis for challenges to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And increasingly they are being used to challenge election results as the legitimate expression of the people’s will. The

most obvious instances of this are in democracies in developing countries where the electoral process is suspect. But it is not unheard of in the Canadian context as well, where falling turnout rates in elections are beginning to undermine the credibility of election “mandates,” leaving open the argument that a “scientific” poll may provide a superior reading of public preferences.¹ This gradual intrusion of polls, polling and pollsters into the social and political fabric of the country has for the most part escaped serious critical examination. Claire Hoy’s Margin of Error, published in 1989, was an informative and highly entertaining analysis of polling in Canada, but his was an anecdotal rather than a systematic take on the subject; and much has changed in Canadian polling culture since his book appeared almost two decades ago. As the polling industry consolidates its monopoly on the measurement and interpretation of public opinion, there is a growing need for the public to become better

and with the way they choose to measure those issues. To take one recent example, the pollster’s decision to include or exclude the Green Party as an explicit option in its standard “voting” question has implications for perceptions of that party as a “viable” competitor in the electoral arena. Include it as an explicit response option and the party appears to challenge the NDP as a third-party “protest” alternative in English Canada. Exclude it and the party is relegated to “fringe” status along with the Marijuana Party. The point is this: optics, viability and momentum all matter in politics, and pollsters are clearly more than midwives in the process. As a consequence of their potential to create, manipulate and interpret the public’s preferences, we need to know more about how they go about their business: who owns these polling firms, what standards do they observe in their research and, of course, who pays the shot when they make claims about public opinion? Finally, we need to know more about the impacts of polling on the public and on governments. Pollsters provide us with their take on the climate of opinion in our communities, but so what? What uses do we make of this information or, more to the point, how does this new source of information about public thinking alter our thinking and our behaviour? If the effects are modest, then the “age of polls” is just another arcane subject for academic research. However, if the accessibility to, the media preoccupation with and the putative credibility of polling information affects our thinking and our practices as citizens, then we should be aware.² For all of these reasons, then, Peter Butler’s Polling and Public Opinion: A Canadian Perspective comes at a very good time; moreover, the objectives he sets for himself in this volume are relevant and promising. He wants “to take some of the mystery out of public opinion polling and to provide … a perspective on its influence in determining what we think and how we act,” “to explain … the techniques for gathering opinions by conducting polls” and “to explore areas other than politics where public opinion research has had noticeable effects on Canadian society.” The book is organized into five chapters, the titles of which identify topics that are equally promising: public opinion, polling methods, the mass media, social policy and change, and stability in opinions. The volume does deliver on some of this promise, but, for this reviewer, the overall

Poll findings now stand indisputably as the legal tender for discourse on matters of public opinion in our society.

Steven D. Brown is Director of the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy (LISPOP) and is an associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

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acquainted with the strengths, limitations and effects of the services pollsters deliver. First, there is a need to gain a better understanding of what it is polls are measuring—“public opinion” itself. For example, a huge body of scholarly literature has documented the average citizen’s weak information base when it comes to public affairs. What meaning should we then attach to the assessments and preferences they express in response to pollsters’ questions about these matters? The polling industry is understandably reluctant to acknowledge potential limitations of their data arising from weak uncrystallized opinions of their respondents, but, as consumers of their product, we should be aware of those limitations. For example, the impact on responses of question wording and question framing is well documented, yet rarely rates any mention in pollsters’ press releases, nor has it caused them to employ safer, more reliable multi-item scales, which are the norm in scholarly research on public opinion. We also need to recognize that pollsters do more than facilitate the expression of public preferences; in some respects, they shape the nature of public discourse with their selection of issues

Literary Review of Canada

reaction is one of disappointment—on a number of fronts. Perhaps most disappointing is that the book fails to introduce the reader to the range of exciting research in the public opinion field. To be sure, the field itself is challenging because it straddles a number of academic disciplines and research traditions. Butler, as a sociologist, draws very heavily on the sociological literature to review what we know about the nature, structure and origins of public opinion. Working from a premise that “what we think is a product of group life,” he focuses almost exclusively on the social bases of public perspectives and preferences. This approach is certainly relevant, but it is not enough to acquaint the reader with what social scientists know today about public opinion. For example, the reader of this book learns very little about the individual opinion holder, and thus learns very little about exciting and relatively recent developments in our thinking about the psychology of opinion holding. If people are generally ill informed and inattentive, just how do they think about politics and especially how do they manage to generate opinions on issues with no crystallized attitude to draw on or much information about the subject in question? This is typically the situation confronting people when they are polled. New models of opinion giving have generated interesting insights on a number of fronts: they suggest when and why we can expect individual-level volatility in opinions, why individual-level volatility coexists with aggregate stability in public opinion, how aggregate public opinion shifts over time and under what circumstances, and—of great relevance to this volume—how and why the pollster’s survey instrument can shape responses (and hence shape our understanding of public opinion on an issue).³ This raises a second area of disappointment. While the book sets as its initial objective to explore how polls affect what we think and do, it tackles this very interesting question in a surprisingly selective and eclectic manner. The effects Butler identifies seem to be reduced to three. First, he introduces the thesis that polls may have the effect of promoting consensus in society, although no evidence is presented for this claim—Canadian or otherwise. Second, he introduces Justin Lewis’s related argument that polls are frequently designed not to discover the public’s underlying preferences but to advance elite interests by asking questions and interpreting results in a manner consistent with their agenda. As with the first, it would have been useful to illustrate or present evidence for this in the Canadian context. Finally, Butler makes a decidedly odd argument that polls may promote “moral panic.” “Moral panic” is a concept introduced by Stanley Cohen in the 1970s to describe a community’s overreaction to the threat posed by a deviant subculture in their midst (such as the Mods and the Rockers in 1960s Britain). Butler suggests that Canadians’ reactions to the healthcare crisis in the past decade is an instance March 2008

of moral panic. While his application of this concept to the healthcare crisis is intriguing, his suggestion that polls fanned the flames of panic because they publicized widespread concern with the situation is, without far more evidence and argumentation than he presents here, unconvincing. Surprisingly absent from the book is any systematic consideration of the claim most often made by critics about the impact of polls: that is, that polls create bandwagons. Butler limits his treatment of the subject to two passing references, and an anecdote about the possible impact of media polling on the 1998 Nova Scotia

election—a claim he rejects. There is a significant body of research on the question of bandwagon effects, some of it Canadian and much of it denying such effects. But since this is the claim usually heard about the deleterious effects of polling, it cries out for more than cursory treatment in a volume addressing possible polling effects. Third, the volume also disappoints because it fails to provide a needed critical perspective on polling practices in Canada. To be sure, Butler brings several constructivist critiques to our attention; as noted, he reviews Justin Lewis’s critique of polling as an exercise in elite manipulation (although he questions its plausibility); elsewhere he summarizes aspects of the postmodern critique centring on the claim that polls are quantitative constructions rather than reflections of reality—constructions used perhaps as a means to control and monitor the public. Although worthy of reflection, these arguments are quite abstract. Surely there are other more practical issues associated with the polling industry that an informed consumer should be made aware of. For example, what of the challenges pollsters currently face over plummeting telephone response rates? Due in part to technological changes such as call display and the movement away from landline phones and in part to increasing public resistance to solicitations of any kind, the response rate issue is reaching crisis proportions in the industry. Yet Butler does not really discuss the problem or its implications at all, except as it might necessitate larger initial sample selections to compensate

for expected attrition. Partly because of this response rate problem, pollsters are moving to the use of internet panels. But how do these panels work and what does recent research tell us about sample representativeness and data quality? Another issue needing some light is the practice of advocacy polling. An advocacy poll is one commissioned by an interest group to generate a view of public opinion consistent with its interests. We learn of them through the group’s press releases that trumpet the “scientific” status of the poll and the credibility of the national pollster that conducted it. What they do not tell us is that the group had considerable input into the framing and wording of the questions asked—the questions themselves are usually relegated to a website—and that different frames and wordings would have produced vastly different views of public opinion. Unfortunately, the practice is not rare but no one, including Butler, talks about it. Given their role as arbiters of public opinion, we ought to hold pollsters to very high standards for the claims that they make. In what is the only volume on polling in Canada, it is unfortunate that Butler did not choose to raise more of these concerns. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not comment on the book’s presentation. As an author, I am only too well aware that in writing a treatise of this scope, trees can sometimes obscure the forest, producing a lumpiness in organization, and minor errors can creep undetected into a manuscript. That is where the publisher’s second readers and copy editors come in. Unfortunately it appears that University of Toronto Press dropped the ball on this one, and failed the author as a consequence. Suffice it to say that too many organizational, factual and terminological errors survived the editing process in this volume. The public’s will is the centrepiece of a functioning democratic system. It follows that those claiming to interpret that will are central players in the system, and that we should know a great deal about how they go about their task. Peter Butler has provided us with a useful first cut at such an analysis. Hopefully, his work will stimulate others to carry that analysis forward.m

Notes 1 An editorial on March 7, 1997, in The Globe and Mail suggested exactly this in commenting on the results of the Toronto “amalgamation” plebiscite that year. Arguing for amalgamation, it discounted the plebiscite’s overwhelming rejection of the proposal because it was based on a turnout of only 26 percent, when “professional polls have consistently shown the population of Metro is split about evenly on amalgamation.” 2 Christopher Page’s recent volume, The Roles of Public Opinion Research in Canadian Government (University of Toronto Press, 2006), goes a considerable distance toward answering part of the question posed above. See Christopher Waddell’s review in these pages (LRC, September 2006). 3 For a sampling of this literature, the reader is directed to R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm, Hard Choices, Easy Answers: Values, Information and American Public Opinion (Princeton University Press, 2002); James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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13 Ways of Looking at April Fool’s Day (with ­apologies to Wallace Stevens) 1 Old fairy opals. 2 If all doors pay… 3 A play for idols. 4 A poor fad, silly! 5 Lily pad? Or sofa? 6 Ay, April floods. 7 Lady foils a pro. 8 Arias fold. Ploy? 9 O, for daily laps! 10 Frail days pool. 11 Afraid? Ply solo. 12 I fold oars, play. 13 Loopy fir salad.

How She Became A Pairs Skating Judge

Hand I don’t recognize my own as my own because it isn’t. It’s old as the hills, an old man’s scrawl. Once the whole valley was clear. Signs could only be read by certain birds who lose what they cannot hear. What you feel now, I believe, you write yourself from. Listen. You take forever because you can. Forever is the time it takes to lace your shoes now laces refuse eye-holes and fingers forget all they are assigned but pain regardless the task. Those brown birds. I held one once, stunned, warm, soft. It flew. The name escapes me.

Michael Kenyon Michael Kenyon’s recent books are a novel, The Biggest Animals (Thistledown Press, 2006), and a book of poems, The Sutler (Brick Books, 2005). “Hand” is from The Last House, a collection due out from Brick in 2009. He is a counsellor and acupressure practitioner on the West Coast. “Just finished reading Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse for the first time in many years. Also read Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida. Moved utterly in both cases.”

“Try to get at the depth of things—that is one place irony never goes down to.” —Rilke Skate. Allegorical diamond-shaped fish with long translucent tail. Still alive, uncaught engine panting under the ancient harbour ice. You push out from your sphincter: little do you know. While sprinting-spirit wind whistles extra starts & stops across your latest meaningful loss. Typical terrible small town: no traffic, people or restaurants to speak of. Newcomers storm local committees, foisting third-rate handicrafts & secondhand biographies on everyone. Long gone natives circumnavigate the place on the phone with loathing. So when do you figure you know enough to start giving marks? Or getting them. No longer body, something more: this synchronized dream dancing into a winning timelessness, speechless but proud. Choreographed climax crescendos building You You YOU, spinning into the ultimate now, wowing your very edges, your frozen smiles. Summer memory catches up to itself: black synthetic sandals clutched offhand like darker dares, two pairs of barely careful 14-year-old feet stretching exactly as far as here. Just short of the daughterly bridge the sequined word ambivalence zaps by— a secret fish with wishes all its own. Every girl for herself? Detached, distracted, mistaken, undone. So “you” becomes You Singular. Missing more than a few compulsories. Finally figuring nothing. When what’s for the best becomes a right: who can do no wrong? You glide upriver in glacial silence, striving to keep your end up.…

Bill Howell Bill Howell was a network producer-director with CBC Radio Drama in Toronto for 27 years. He has published three poetry collections, with recent work in Canadian Literature, Dalhousie Review and Malahat Review. Rubicon Press has recently released his 21-poem chapbook, Ghost Test Flights. He is currently reading Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler. Bill is also narrating Philip Marchand’s Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America for the CNIB.

Sandy Shreve Sandy Shreve has published four poetry collections, most recently Suddenly, So Much (Exile Editions, 2005). She founded British Columbia’s popular Poetry in Transit project and co-edited the anthology In Fine Form with Kate Braid. Her recent reading includes Bruce Meyer’s Heroes, Robert Bringhurst’s Everywhere Being Is Dancing and Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. Shreve is also reading the poems of Gwendolyn McEwen.

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Literary Review of Canada

the walnut-cracking machine

March 10

aunt nellie was a fitch from fingal small like a wren is small inside her she carried an immense drawstring bag crammed with small kindnesses her husband ingersoll was well-read a farmer with a butterfly collection and a killing jar he kept on the kitchen counter he was born and died in the same house painted once as high as he could reach without a ladder

The Inuit report that the sun this year has broken above their winter night horizons in February, not April — apparently due to altered thickness of the southern air.

late april snow covered the green grass the morning i dropped in for tea a vise-like creation sat on the kitchen table somebody had been using it to crack walnuts i tried it out a few times while aunt nellie boiled water fussed with a plate of cookies uncle ingersoll called from the dining room would you like to see the automatic nut cracker he was using a walker so the trip through the kitchen down the back porch steps across the wet lawn took a good half hour the walnut cracker had been out all winter he kneeled tinkered with it a few minutes nellie yelled from the back door it’ll never work he reached for the switch nothing plug it in he yelled to nellie

i took a step back alarmed that electricity was involved it started up right away people miles away that morning in shedden or frome planting peas or leaf lettuce likely straightened their backs turned their faces to the southwest but when uncle ingersoll dumped the pail of last fall’s walnuts into the large funnel-shaped pipe the trees the house the clouds the planets and all their moons collapsed under the weight of the din all creation tumbled together down the pipe and cracked in a rupturous clatter i pressed the heels of my hands over my ears and squeezed my eyes shut the machine broke up the shells spit them out one side the meat of the walnuts dropped into a small china bowl underneath uncle ingersoll reached down turned the machine off the silence was a solid embraceable thing i carried home sometimes i take it out and hold it and dream of someday making something as loud and useful as the walnut-cracking machine

Julie Berry Julie Berry was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, and she still lives and works in this small, southwestern Ontario city. Her poems have appeared in grain, Room of One’s Own, Quarry, Canadian Forum and Carousel and in numerous anthologies. Her first book of poetry, worn thresholds, was published in 1995 by Brick and reprinted in 2006. Two of her prose poems won in the 2005 short grain contest. Julie recently completed a second collection of poems entitled little strip room in heaven. She is reading a number of books at present, including The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford, Or by Tonja Gunvaldsen Klassen, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. Last summer she read piles of books, two of which she remembers: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

March 2008

Experts have just discovered how the soot from China soars far over the Pacific to heighten the jet-stream–diverting storms that splintered the old groves in Stanley Park. Tonight America moves daylight up some three weeks earlier than ever before. A timely power-cutting measure, when the worldwide fuel reserves run somewhat low. I feel as if the tipping point is passed now. So gross the burnup. Excess effluents have spewed too long and too deep to retract. Still, better a pained conscience than a sleeper’s. Having already lost two hours of sleep, I waken reluctantly for further nightmare. At least I write by a fluorescent bulb – taking a small belated measure or two. Let others switch Complacent or Ostrich Time for a Night- and Ice-saving consciousness. And even if it’s too late to unclock the worst, I’ll turn the gas down under the nearest flame.

Allan Briesmaster Allan Briesmaster is a freelance editor and is one of the organizers of the Toronto WordStage reading series. He lives in Thornhill, Ontario, with his wife, Holly, a visual artist. His latest book of poetry is Interstellar (Quattro Books, 2007). Current reading includes Hierarchy of Loss by Steven McCabe, Black River by Kenneth Sherman and Selected Portraits by Ron Charach.

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Worse Than Dying The unending legacy of the Halifax Explosion haunts a conflicted heroine. Robin Roger

Glass Voices Carol Bruneau Cormorant Books 280 pages, softcover isbn 9781897151129

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n December 6, 1917, the French freighter Mont Blanc, carrying a cargo of more than 2,500 tonnes of explosives, collided with the Norwegian tramp steamer Imo in Halifax Harbour. The resulting blast held the tragic distinction of being the largest humanmade explosion in history until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Of the city’s population of about 60,000, 2,000 people died and another 9,000 individuals were injured. Every conceivable kind and degree of wound was sustained, the most prevalent one being loss of vision (and of eyes themselves) due to flying glass. Disfigured corpses and unidentified bodies waited to be claimed, and many survivors sought their missing loved ones in vain forever after, uncertain whether they were dead, disoriented or unrecognizable. Hundreds of children separated from their parents in the mayhem were never reunited with them, and many unclaimed infants were placed in orphanages. The degree to which this trauma is still felt in Halifax is not well understood in the rest of Canada, nor have we truly recognized the city’s heroic emergency response then or its resilience afterward. Heroism takes many forms and expressions and, where trauma is concerned, may also require a long incubation before it can emerge. Carol Bruneau’s remarkably intricate, textured and complex novel Glass Voices, published 90 years after the blast, is a heroic response to the disaster she still felt the ramifications of during her youth in Halifax. Her story of one family’s life in the aftermath of the explosion is a deeply compassionate rendition of how cataclysmic rupture continues to reverberate and repeat itself in survivors and their descendents through their lives. For Lucy Caines, memories of the crisis that derailed her life mix and mingle with the thoughts about her current situation, as if she lives in one long timeless state that is simultaneously 1917 and 1969, when Glass Voices begins. Just searching on all fours for the pickling canner she needs brings back the stabbing pain in her Robin Roger is the fiction review editor of the Literary Review of Canada.

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knees that are “full of arthritis … stiff and blue as the day she almost died but didn’t.” Now in her seventies, she occupies herself, as she always has, with arduous domestic labours for the benefit of her family, more from a sense of moral rigour than a nurturing impulse or a preference for the homemade over the store-bought. Although she wonders why her husband, Harry, burdened her with ten pounds of cucumbers when they could have bought Bick’s pickles, she toils industriously. Arduous cleaning, cooking and household management have been the cornerstone of her reconstructed world ever since the day it flew into total disorder and never quite reassembled itself. But even this disciplined structure collapses on a humid day in 1969 shortly after the moon landing, when she finds Harry sprawled on the bathroom floor in a comatose state, and another memory slashes her mind: “in a blink, she sees herself young once more: her mouth open in a scream, gums pink as the felt edging of the accordion’s keys.” The uncertainty and indignity of Harry’s emergency return her to the state of unmoored chaos that enclosed her the day of the explosion. “There are worse things than dying, way worse,” Lucy acknowledges during her first sleepless night alone after she leaves Harry at the hospital. “It no longer matters if she’s waking or sleeping, all but defenceless against memory’s wave.” The shards of feelings, pain, confusion and despair pierce Lucy’s consciousness as she negotiates her way through Harry’s illness, mixing the two disasters in her mind as she struggles to make sense of each one. It is a struggle she has approached and retreated from for 52 years. Hers is a dilemma that is too paradoxical to grasp. In the midst of the crisis, she went into labour and miraculously delivered a healthy baby boy, but was separated from her blossoming infant daughter, Helena, who was never found or declared dead. After generating one offspring and losing another on the same day, not a single subsequent moment can be unalloyed. Even her son’s birthday is the anniversary of her loss. The descent into mourning for Helena that might restore her is denied not only by the uncertainty of her fate but by those who forbid her to express her grief. Most galling of these is Harry, left with one eye, and whose resolute determination to flee despair through gambling, carousing, contraband smuggling and flagrant womanizing is accompanied by a bitter hostility toward Lucy’s persistent yearning for the lost child and her continued prayers and belief in the possibility of a miraculous return. Lucy is forced to take her own private but

subversive path to recovery, consulting the local tealeaf-reading psychic and committing a daring act of political and sexual treason when she conceals a fugitive German soldier and takes deep physical comfort in their intimate tryst. In a world made utterly incoherent, Lucy’s daring embrace of another desperate creature brings her to a fundamental knowledge that healing can only come through a vital and mutual connection with someone who also knows and acknowledges suffering. She condones her infidelity despite her moral scruples because she knows that giving and receiving pleasure had been “in exchange for his giving her her life back, the small, cool treasure of self-preservation she’d curled her fist around, despite the guilt.” Although this brief liaison cannot fully staunch her despair, it links her to life, and nurtures an inner enrichment of thought and awareness that is expressed in her vivid, fertile reverie. “Grief is a darkness where the only sound is an endless foghorn,” Lucy concludes at the end of the book, with a Maritimer’s resignation to both fate and the sea. This wisdom gives her the strength to face the bitter bargains she must make that summer. Against medical predictions, Harry makes a slow recovery, but the crushing demands of his care are enough to kill Lucy. And it gradually becomes apparent that Elinor, the peculiar, flamboyant and obese bag lady who they hire to help clean the house, is none other than Lucy’s yearned-for little girl, Helena. But before Lucy can fully register this truth and embrace her new reality, her son dies instantly when a piece of shrapnel lodged during World War Two loosens and travels to his heart. It seems as if Lucy must always sacrifice one child to have the other. Unendurable as it is, Lucy watches Harry warm to his daughter’s patient and sensitive care, almost becoming Elinor’s son when she coaxes him out of his wheelchair to take his first baby steps since the stroke, into her outstretched arms. Why does Bruneau have fate play such a cruel trick on her heroine? Possibly because the lesson of the Halifax Explosion is that humans are subject to capricious uncontrollable events. The most heroic thing we can do is acknowledge our pain rather than deny it, but recognize the occasional reprieve, whether it be a fleeting tryst or a miraculous reunion. A saline stoicism runs like a current through Glass Voices, seeming to say that suffering and hope wash over us in alternating waves, and how valiantly we struggle to stay afloat is what measures the content of our character.m

Literary Review of Canada

Delightfully Morbid, Acutely Droll A mystery that mixes dark humour with Victorian grit. Mark Frutkin

like any good theatre man, Gray has made its set pieces and dialogue the heart of this novel. The language is terrific. Listen:

Not Quite Dead John MacLachlan Gray St. Martin’s Minotaur 295 pages, hardcover isbn 9780312374716

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he German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin once wrote: “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.” The theatre is a familiar medium for John MacLachlan Gray, who is the author of Billy Bishop Goes to War, one of the most popular Canadian musicals ever produced for stage. Billy Bishop garnered Gray the 1981 Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award, the Governor General’s Award for drama and the Chalmers Canadian Play Award. In more recent years, Gray has turned his hand to fiction. Not Quite Dead is Gray’s latest novel, after The Fiend in Human and White Stone Day, both of which were set in Victorian England and followed the adventures of journalist Edmund Whitty who, like a classic Dick Francis protagonist, was continuously abused (by others and himself) in both body and spirit. This time Gray has left Whitty at home to recover from his injuries and has moved the action to the New World, specifically mid 19th-century Baltimore and Philadelphia. The delight in a Gray novel is found in its gritty, palpable sense of place. This is decidedly not the 1840s as viewed by Hollywood. If it were a movie, it would offer the harsh realities of Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch rather than the glossy Ansel Adams America of countless epic westerns or the broad gestures of Martin Scorsese’s spectacle, Gangs of New York, which takes place in a similar period. In Gray’s novel, the reader can smell the acrid smoke of locomotives in the air and feel the slick of chewing tobacco spit sliding underfoot, can see the hookers with bad skin and the one-eyed Irish hooligan who has brought his Old World battles with him to America. During this period, Baltimore and Philadelphia were the squalid, suppurating, cacophonous, energetic, chaotic Calcuttas of America. The former also happened to be the haunt of Edgar Allen Poe and the latter the final American stop on a tour by Charles Dickens. Bringing these two famous authors together into an ultimate consubstantiation takes up much of the book. The plot is a bit of a tornado ringing in a spittoon, but

“While he’s feeding the chickens, you can sneak in through the window.” “The mischief I will!” The thought of it made me sick with fear. “You’re the only one small enough. We’ll watch out and warn you, Willie. Honor bright.” And: “Tell me, Mr. Bailey, are you sensible of anyone with the demency to do such a thing? Was an old malice harrowed up in recent times? Mr. Topham in a scrape—any tattle of that sort?”

Inspector Shadduck arrives to a thorough description by Gray of Philly’s early police force, which consists of little more than thugs hired when needed. Like all the characters in this novel, Shadduck is utterly believable and leaps alive off the page. A former military man in a long duster, he is trying his best to think his way through the maze of possibilities presented to him. The reader is pulling for him because he represents the forces of order, although he is little more than the iron fist employed by the law and order element among the local politicians. Yet Shadduck appears to have a mind of his own: he is the good, tough, incorruptible cop in a sea of slime. Then the famous Charles Dickens arrives in town and the Irish mob, run by a one-eyed goon, has its well-placed kidnap victim, who will be held for a significant ransom. The goon is particularly ghoulish in that he has only a hole remaining where his good eye once roamed and he is devilishly skilled at maiming his opponents with his shillelagh and a long and gruesome fingernail. Gray takes the opportunity to present an extended fight scene in a saloon between one-eyed’s mob of Catholics and a gang of Orangemen, extending the blood and gore, and the list of rich insults, for pages. Gray also reveals an acutely droll sense of humour:

During this period, Baltimore and Philadelphia were the squalid, suppurating, cacophonous, energetic, chaotic Calcuttas of America.

Mark Frutkin is the author of Fabrizio’s Return, which won the 2006 Trillium Award and the 2007 Sunburst Award, and was shortlisted for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

March 2008

Part of the story is contained in the diary of one Dr. William Chivers, boyhood friend and dupe of Poe. Poe would like Chivers to help him fake his own death. This, of course, entails stealing a dead body from the morgue in the hospital where the gullible doctor works, allowing Gray the opportunity to indulge in some delightfully morbid descriptions while echoing what might happen in one of Poe’s own dreadful (in its original sense) tales. Chivers is the sort of character who romanticizes about committing suicide but is literally too lazy to put his thought into action. Poe, on the other hand, is driven and manic (and quite capable of suicide), and the credulous doctor is easy prey for him. Poe is also paranoid and believes the Irish mob is after him. Eventually Poe convinces Chivers to sign the death warrant for him and bury another body in his place. Meanwhile, an Irish Fenian with a gift of the blarney, Finn Devlin, is travelling about the eastern United States speaking to crowds of like-minded Irish about the horror of their position as “white niggers” and the unjust power of British-born Americans (and collecting healthy donations from the rabble after each harangue). Devlin is connected to bloodthirsty Irish gangs that are up to no good. Finally, Devlin murders Mr. Topham, Dickens’s American publisher, in his grand home, his body parts scattered about the drawing room (lovingly described), forever out of touch with each other, like separate phrases in a poorly constructed sentence.

Never having entered the offices of a publisher before, Shadduck was surprised how friendly and homey it all seemed, like an expensively appointed den, where deep thoughts were shared and everybody understood Greek. Further humour is found in the definitions (Life, Grave, Repentance, etc.) quoted from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary that headline many chapters. (“History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, brought about by knaves, and fools.”) These display the same compressed intelligence and jaundiced views common to the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde. Despite some needless complexity, this is a highly recommended literary thriller that can be read for its vital, fully human characters, its fluid dialogue, its thoroughly researched world of 19th-century America, its play with the language, its humour, its irony. Like the works of Poe and Dickens, Gray’s novel presents a fairly dark view of humanity and yet it never becomes ponderous or preachy. What the theatre-goer has lost, for the time being, the reader of novels has gained.m

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Darwin on My Mind Evolutionary theory best explains how—and why—we reason. Michael Ruse

Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind Ronald de Sousa Oxford University Press 194 pages, hardcover isbn 9780195189858

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n Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, Ronald de Sousa—a long-time member of the University of Toronto Philosophy Department, now cast out into the knackers’ yard of retirement—discusses two cases of people instructed by God to kill their children. First there was the wretched Texas housewife Andrea Yates, killer of her five kids, who was found guilty of deliberate murder on the grounds that, having got her divine instructions, she planned carefully how she could drown them. Second, there was Abraham, no less of a planner and whose son Isaac was saved only at the last moment thanks to another message from above, not to mention a handy ram ensnared in a thicket. The one was condemned for a vile crime; the other is venerated as a founder of no fewer than three different religions. De Sousa remarks: “When enough people share a delusion, it loses its status as a psychosis and gets a religious tax exemption instead.” At that point, I knew I was going to love this book—and it is indeed a lot of fun. Why Think? is also good and clever. I have always said that the reason why philosophers are so disliked on university campuses is that we are brighter than anyone else and have trouble concealing the fact. Ronnie de Sousa does nothing to change this perception. Of course, that does not mean that I am going to agree entirely with his book. De Sousa and I are very much on the same wave length: we are both committed evolutionists, and we are both convinced that Darwinism—and this means the theory of natural selection—is an important tool, perhaps the important tool, to be used in analyzing human thinking. While we do start to come apart in places, in other words we are both pretty hard-line Darwinians—with a point of exception to be made in a moment. The author starts us off with an important point, namely that most organisms do not think. Most organisms certainly are not rational. Yet they do okay. Moreover, rationality is not necessarily a key to success. Well thought-through courses of action can go wrong; daft decisions can lead to success. How else does one become Michael Ruse, after 35 years of teaching at the University of Guelph, now teaches at Florida State University, where he spends the winters thanking God that he no longer lives in Ontario and the summers wishing to God that he did.

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a university president? De Sousa might have compounded the paradox a bit by pointing out that thinking is expensive. It requires big brains and they in turn demand lots of protein, which, outside modern yuppie societies, generally means meat. As the late evolutionary paleontologist Jack Sepkoski used to say: “I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.” So why do we think? I think de Sousa has the right idea, although I would like to see a bit more biology thrown in here. Thinking gives us options—we are not stuck on one course of action, or with very limited strategic alternatives. Of course, as de Sousa points out, this is partly to do with our being social—in a social situation like ours you need big brains to deal with the various relationships and so forth. “Does Jimmie like me?” “Can I trust him?” “Would it be better to work with Mary instead, even though I know she doesn’t much like me?” On the other hand, being social cannot be all. Ants are social and they don’t do much thinking. I suspect that the real importance of thinking is indeed the fact that we need to make choices, but this comes from the fact that we have got ourselves into a situation where making choices counts. There are two reasons for this in our case. First, there are more choices to be made because we humans have moved into a realm—or realms—where things change constantly. We do not just live in one fixed environment, but rather in environments that vary in food availability, temperature ranges, predators’ threats and much more. These variations require choices by us, but also—and here sociality kicks in—since we cannot go it alone, we have to do it with others and they too are in the choice business and now a lot of the choices do involve working with others. Try putting out a literary magazine on your own. Second, because of the costs of producing thinkers, humans cannot produce lots of offspring. This in itself means that we have got to have the abilities to raise them successfully. Think of mother ant. She has literally millions of offspring. She sends them out to find food, and to do this they follow chemical (pheromone) trails. It rains and she loses a couple of thousand who cannot find their way home. Who cares? Tant pis. There are always more where they came from. Now think of humans. Having taken my evolutionary obligations seriously, I have five kids. But think of it. A couple set out to McDonald’s—alas, even the Ruses are susceptible to advertising and when you have five you give up on wholesome, organic, vegan fare. It is wholesome, greasy hamburgers all the way. It starts to rain. Even I

would regret the diminution of my brood down to three. All of this finding one’s way home in the rain means thinking. Which means brains and all of the rest—getting on with others, finding protein and so forth. I am not sure if this is really an evolutionary justification for eating Big Macs, but one can say that this is all very much a feedback situation. As we—and, for much of the journey, other higher mammals—went down the path of big brains, we became better able to be thinkers but more dependent on being thinkers. (Incidentally note that there is nothing Lamarckian about this, supposing that thinking in itself led to bigger brains. Rather, selection produced slightly better brains that led to success and so forth.) De Sousa rightly points to the work and findings of those scientists who are interested in the evolution of thought processes—the evolutionary psychologists—and notes that they have found that human thought is not like the calculation of a perfect, all-purpose computer (the parallel I suppose many might expect). We think well in situations where thinking well might be of benefit, and not so well when thinking well is irrelevant. This is shown most clearly in those psychological paradoxes where humans perform well on one task and badly on another task, even though formally they are identical. Take for example the Wason test: Given four cards, with a number on one side and a letter on the other, and the distribution D, F, 3, 7, which cards must you turn over to see if the following rule holds true: “If a card has a D on the one side, it must have a 3 on the other”? Now try this one: “Given four drinkers in a bar—beer, lemonade, 25 years old, 16 years old—and if the bar bans drinking among anyone under 18 years old, which equivalent cards must you turn over to see that no one is breaking the law?” Everyone gets the second problem right but most people flunk the first. Why? Simply because, in everyday life, we much more commonly encounter the boozing-type situation than the abstract number-letter situation, and so are better at solving it. Seizing on the failures of reason, the wellknown philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga— a man who dislikes modern science and loathes and detests (and, if the truth be known, fears) evolutionary theory—thinks that the unreliability of reason on the Darwinian scenario is reason enough to reject evolution and embrace God. Actually, Plantinga is less interested in the specific problems of rationality (as we have been discussing in the last paragraph) and more with the general ways in which natural selection might fail to produce good thinkers. As Plantinga points out, what counts in evolution is success Literary Review of Canada

and not the truth. So how can we ever be sure of the truth? �������������������������������������� Perhaps none of our thoughts can tell us about reality. Perhaps we are like beings in a dream world: Their beliefs might be like a sort of decoration that isn’t involved in the causal chain leading to action. Their waking beliefs might be no more causally efficacious, with respect to their behavior, than our dream beliefs are with respect to ours. This could go by way of pleiotropy: genes that code for traits important to survival also code for consciousness and belief; but the latter don’t figure into the etiology of action. … It could be that one of these creatures believes that he is at that

elegant, bibulous Oxford dinner, when in fact he is slogging his way through some primeval swamp, desperately fighting off hungry crocodiles.¹ Everything we believe about evolution could be false. And this is obviously to reduce Darwinian epistemology to a reductio ad absurdum. If our theory of knowledge embraces indifferently the true and the false, so long as it is expedient, we are in deep trouble. Plantinga calls this “Darwin’s Doubt,” because it was even expressed by a worried Darwin himself, in correspondence written toward the end of his life: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (As a matter of fact, Darwin immediately excused himself as a reliable authority on such philosophical questions, but Plantinga leaves this somewhat awkward point unmentioned.) De Sousa has a two-part response to this criticism. First, he argues that our mathematical abilities cannot be the result of natural selection. “On the evolutionary scale, mathematics is part of our present rather than of our evolutionary past. It is therefore out of the question for mathematical talent as such to have been a factor in evolution by natural selection.” Then he goes on to say: Once mathematics had emerged into the light of day, there was still nothing to guarantee that it could prove useful outside the domains in which our practical skills had already been operating for millennia. And yet, pure mathematics notoriously finds all kinds of startling applications in the solution of technological and scientific problems that our ancestors could not possibly have conceived of, and it does so by generating theories that would have remained wholly unintelligible to them. That strongly supports the idea that March 2008

mathematics can uncover aspects of the universe of which neither the usefulness nor even the existence could possibly have been manifested in the environment of our evolutionary adaptations (EEA) in which the basic functions of the brain were being shaped by natural selection. As [Eugene] Wigner has argued, this constitutes at least prima facie evidence for the conclusion that the truths of mathematics do not merely reflect projective constructions of our brains, but probably correspond to an objective reality. I am not sure about either of these steps. It is true that an ability for calculus was not needed in the jungle or the move out onto the plains—stu-

dents of human evolution think that the key break from the chimps occurred about five million years ago when our ancestors came down from the trees and out into the open—but this is not to say that the components of reasoning abilities were not produced by selection. There are good biological reasons why humans have innate abilities at counting, working with sets, geometrical understanding, and so forth. It is true that these rather modest talents then need to be put together, but that is what education is all about. In any case, I agree that the power of mathematics is pretty impressive. Let me correct that— incredibly impressive. And I agree it is hard to see how it works so well if it is not true. But I am not sure that this will meet Plantinga’s criticism. He argues that even if we discount the known ways that selection misleads us (I guess if he had heard of it, he would put the Wason experiment in here), it could be that selection is systematically misleading us all of the way. In a sense, his argument is a version of that used by Descartes in the Meditations—we think we are on safe ground against skepticism when we turn to mathematics, but an evil demon could be misleading us systematically about even that. You, silly person, think that 2+2=4 and that Stephen Harper has your best interests at heart, but—who knows?—a malevolent god could be deceiving you. To which the response is the same to Plantinga as it is to Descartes: you are probably right, but that is a level of skepticism about knowledge that excites philosophers and not mature human beings. In a way, I think de Sousa is scared of regular philosophers and not prepared to endorse fully the radical position that his other arguments implicitly suggest. It is not always easy being right. Move on now through Why Think? The central part of de Sousa’s book looks at collective thinking versus individual thinking. When is something that is rational for the individual not

necessarily the most rational move for the group? One of the main things about thinking from an evolutionary perspective is that one does not necessarily expect nice, neat answers. If a good god did everything, ultimately one would expect no conflicts between individual and group goods. If evolution through natural selection does everything, such harmony is not guaranteed and hardly to be expected at all. I might say, speaking somewhat regretfully as a male interested in those sorts of things, that sexuality is one case where the individual and the group come apart. It would be better for the group of sexual organisms to have just a few fertilizing males and many nurturing females. Whatever the benefits of sexuality—and this is a much-debated question in evolutionary circles—just a few males can do the job, and in fact in most species just a few males do, since the rest get pushed to the side lines. Unfortunately, natural selection works at an individual level and so, if there is an imbalance of males, it tends towards the interests not of the group but of the parents—and it is in a parent’s interest to have male children if males are the minority sex. This prevails until equality is achieved. It will be interesting to see in China and India, countries where policies have led to a surplus of males, whether nature now reasserts itself, makes daughters more valuable, and hence causes the number of females to rise. Finally, de Sousa moves us on to irrationality. There is a nice discussion of superstition and also of why we sometimes flub even quite simple calculations. Here’s a good one. Suppose you take a test for a certain kind of cancer. The cancer is not common. It affects 0.01 percent of the population. In other words, one person in ten thousand. The test is 98 percent reliable. You get a positive reading. What are the chances that you have that cancer? I suspect most people (me!) would conclude that you are doomed. But, in fact, statistically the chances are less than half a percent. (Buy the book if you want to find out why!) In other words, we can work out the right answers, but it is not easy—and there is a good reason why it is not easy. Human reason is a faculty evolved to help us survive in certain contexts, rather than reach the truth on every occasion, and historically we have rarely been challenged to work things out at such abstract levels. This is a great little book that should be read by many people. I would like to see de Sousa do a follow up book on morality—why do we make certain moral choices but not others? For instance, if you saw a rail cart, out of control, going down the track, about to kill ten people, and could choose to switch the points to send the cart onto a side line and kill just one person, you would probably switch the points. Now suppose you are the doctor in a ward with ten people dying for want of an organ. In walks the editor of this magazine who could be harvested to provide pieces for all ten. Would you sacrifice her? I doubt you would do it. Why? Does evolution throw some light on this paradox, for formally the situation is the same in both cases? I suspect that evolution might indeed have something to say here, and I would like to see Ronnie de Sousa act as evolution’s mouthpiece.m

Note 1 James Sennet, editor (1998),The Analytic �������������������������� Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing).

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Three Artists Two sculptors and a photographer in the early 20th century. Adele Freedman

Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie McGill-Queen’s University Press 322 pages, hardcover isbn 9780773531192 And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle Elspeth Cameron Cormorant Books 526 pages, hardcover isbn 9781897151136

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hree women, three special stories, treated by three authors, in two books. One calls itself “the life” of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle as if they were joined at birth and never separated, which, in fact, they hardly ever were. Both born in the American midwest in the 1880s, they met at the Art Institute of Chicago, which offered classes in life modelling and stone chiselling to future creators of monuments, fountains and architectural embellishments. Loring was not quite 20, Wyle six years older. They were schooled in neo-classicism, deemed the visual language most appropriate to a new democratic and nationalistic order. Just two of a legion of women aspiring to lead independent lives in an increasingly available professional world, they held great store by their foundations. From Chicago, to the horror of Loring’s parents, she and Wyle made for Greenwich Village for a go at the Yankee version of la vie bohème. Getting down to work, Wyle modelled a giant kneeling plaster angel with the musculature of a body builder, outstretched wings, a face like Brad Pitt’s and coyly concealed genitals. Her “Mother’s Kiss”—parent and child, lips locked in marble—is surprisingly erotic, the more so by comparison with Loring’s table-top figurine of a horse-mounted policeman stopping traffic. They were also moved to sculpt each other. The resulting pair of busts, expressing mutual empowerment and tenderness, eventually found their way

into the Loring-Wyle Parkette in Toronto (at the corner of Mount Pleasant and St. Clair). But nothing much sold, and life in New York came to depend on Loring’s father, a mining engineer who had struck it rich in British Columbia and northern Ontario. His patience finally ran out. Not that he objected to Wyle, who’d severed the bonds of a rigid rural upbringing and was a steadying influence on his daughter, being older, more focused and further along professionally. Or so he said. His actions spoke differently. He waited until the women were away and, swooping down on their New York studio, had it emptied and shut down. Wyle’s angel was never seen again. Appealing to her pioneering spirit, her father talked Loring into moving to Toronto. If he thought she was coming alone he was mistaken. Arriving within a year of each other just ahead of the outbreak of the Great War, Loring and Wyle ended up living and working side by side for the best part of the next 60 years. From 1920 on, home-cum-studio was a converted Sunday school building they dubbed The Church. They in turn came to be known as The Girls. Loring and Wyle came. Margaret Wa t k i n s left. Likewise a lateVictorian child who lived into her eighties, Watkins was . raised in a prosperous, civic-minded, teetotalling household in Hamilton, Ontario, where her father, who flourished in dry goods, had built a big house, Clydevia. The estate was tended by his Scottish-born wife and a revolving complement of her spinster sisters who came over from Glasgow to help out. When Watkins was twelve, her mother had a nervous breakdown that was kept quiet for the sake of propriety. Three years later, her father, having converted from Methodism to Seventh-Day Adventism, closed his shop on Saturdays: game over. The resourceful and resilient child who sang beautifully, scribbled in notebooks and made pudding-dish tidies for sale to offset her father’s bankruptcy, grew into a rebel. In 1908, she set off for Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts community in New York State, her first declaration of independence. She was 24,

“If I must remain in the flock let me be a black sheep, just to relieve the monotony,” wrote Watkins at age 24

Adele Freedman is a Seattle-based writer specializing in architectural criticism.

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the same age as Frances Loring when she came to Toronto. “People are such SHEEP,” she wrote just before going. “If I must remain in the flock let me be a black sheep, just to relieve the monotony.” A modern black sheep, she took up photography. Three women, all venturers. Taken together, their individual traits form a composite portrait of the emancipated woman. Wyle wrote poetry; so did Watkins. Watkins smoked, Loring smoked, Wyle rolled. Loring was active in the cause of sculpture: she helped found the Sculptors Society of Canada, joined the Women’s Art Association, which held sales and exhibitions, and talked up carving on CBC Radio and elsewhere; Watkins, during her heyday in Greenwich Village, belonged to the Canadian Business and Professional Women’s Club of New York City, was the official photographer of the Zonta Club for business women and sat on the board of directors of the Art Center. Watkins and Wyle both esteemed Rosa Bonheur, the 19th-century animal painter who roamed the cattle markets of Paris dressed as a man; Wyle wore suits and ties and had her hair barbered, short back and sides. Elspeth Cameron, author of biographies of writers Hugh MacLennan, Irving Layton and Earle Birney, seems at a loss to deal with visual artists. For lack of any surviving correspondence by or between Loring and Wyle, she lamely argues “this absence or scarcity of materials is typical of female biographical subjects”—and, moreover, not because letters might not have existed, but rather that their “families did not anticipate their future fame.” Tell that to Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, who had a trove of letters and other ephemera at their disposal when it came to writing about Watkins. It is foolish to make victims out of women who refused to make victims of themselves. And why put Loring and Wyle on a pedestal and then pull it out from under them? Even the pedestal is shaky. Cameron has little that is fresh or revealing to say about Loring’s and Wyle’s sculpture. Overburdened by catalogues, periodicals and press clippings as stand-ins for those missing letters, resistant to paraphrase and reluctant to press the delete button, she is far too willing to take this or that critic’s word for it, and leave it at that. Loring and Wyle, mostly separately, sometimes together, worked on every scale, from the two-foot–high bronzes of workers, mostly women, on the home front created during the Great War, which made their reputations, to Literary Review of Canada

Loring’s enormous roaring lion marking the entrance to the Queen Elizabeth Way—a landmark dating from the Second World War (relocated in the 1970s). Wyle’s range extended from babies and cats to “Torso (Mother of the Race),” a powerful evocation of feminine strength and sexuality. She and Loring collaborated with some of Toronto’s finest architects and landscape architects—John Pearson, W.L. Somerville, John Lyle, H. Dunnington-Grubb—in the way of plaster panels, plaques, medallions and fountains, the last a specialty of Wyle’s. It is not that Cameron does not admire their achievements. But it is not enough to write that Loring wanted to be another Michelangelo, and that Wyle did neo-classicism and curvy Art Deco, and then to hammer home the point that whatever they did became rétardataire with the advent of modernism (which she sometimes confuses with moderne: Toronto City Hall is modern, not modernistic). We have heard that one already. Tell us something new. There is some indication of the way The Girls lived their lives—glimpses of “a partnership that was as intimate and personal as it was public,” in Cameron’s unfortunate phrase. The Saturday night parties they hosted at The Church, for example, were legendary. Guests could include painters Fred Varley and A.Y. Jackson—Wyle named the chickens she kept after the Group of Seven—politician Walter Gordon and his wife, prospector John Flaherty who made Nanook of the North, society photographers Charles Ashley and James Crippen, Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery: they had their crowd. Loring would mix “slotches”—scotch and snow—on a winter’s night; Wyle split eardrums showing off her hog-calling. But the arc of Cameron’s narrative, with its sad denouement as Wyle slides into dementia and Loring into violence and paranoia, keeps snapping under pressure from long-winded regurgitations of tangential data. March 2008

One bone Cameron gnaws to death is the matter of the women’s sexual orientation. Were they, to use Jessica Mitford’s coinage, “you-know-whatbians”? Cameron wants it all ways. Although she quotes three of the pair’s surviving friends as adamantly denying that they were, she frequently hints otherwise. Her reluctance to draw conclusions yields waffle on this order: “The whiff of lesbianism that made ‘The Girls’ a euphemism with a decided subtext gave an exotic and vital air to their existence and their magnificent creations.” For the most part, Cameron suffers from a bad case of subjunctivitis, speculating about what ifs, not what was. “Had Loring and Wyle stayed in the United States, as they fully intended to do,” she writes in one cycle of apologetics, “their lives would have been entirely different.” She is particularly vexed that they were not around for the 1913 Armory Show (“Had Frances and Florence stayed in Greenwich Village they would undoubtedly have seen it”) presumably because they might have become experimental artists on the spot. She is quite sure Loring would have been attracted by the Ashcan School because she was socially minded. And get this: “Had Florence and Frances been men, the Women’s Art Association would have been off limits.” Of course, had Loring and Wyle remained in Greenwich Village, Cameron would not have written their biography. There is no denying her credit for having done it.

Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie didn’t intend to write a biography of Margaret Watkins, and the book they ended up writing, they allow, “may not strictly be one.” In fact, it is a hybrid of biography and feminist dissertation, replete with obligatory riffs on desire, the flâneur, the “other,” Walter Benjamin, gender and the gaze. But as the authors were “seduced” by Watkins’ photographs and “captivated by the life” as revealed in the letters, books, notes and newspaper clippings found in her Glasgow home when she died, I finally gave up resisting myself. So what if the authors neglect to explain how a woman christened Meta became Margaret, or if they bury the first mention of photography a third of the way through a chapter? This may be a biography by default. It is a page turner all the same. For what about Watkins’s life is not fascinating? Her childhood, her searching for self-fulfillment in whacky utopian communities run by charismatic men; her discovery of photography and the pictures she made that then made her; an ugly court case involving her, her mentor Clarence White and Mrs. White that effectively ended a brilliant career; her decades of ministering to three aged aunts in Glasgow in the decrepit house she called the “aunt-hill”; her travels on a shoestring to London, Paris, Cologne, Moscow and Leningrad to keep her sanity and her photography going; the antique business she started with a friend; the lodgers she took in after the Second World War, including renowned conductor Walter Susskind, who left her his baton in gratitude; her vivid writing, gumption and feistiness—all fascinating. Later in life, alone in the Glasgow house, she wrote she was “sorry not to have annexed a husband,” if only as someone to argue with. The way her photographs were rediscovered makes another fascinating chapter. Toward the end of her life, she gave a box to Joseph Mulholland, a journalist who had befriended her in Glasgow, with instructions to open it after her death. When he did so, two years later, he was “enthralled” by its contents: folders filled with her photographs, of which she had never breathed a word. Forming the core of the book are the formally polished still-lifes of homely kitchen utensils, scum, crumbs and all, and bathroom fittings she made in 1919—“The Kitchen Sink,” the most famous and most widely exhibited, was featured in Vanity Fair—and the magazine ads she shot in the 1920s for Cutex nail polish, Myers Gloves, Modess sanitary napkins, Woodbury’s Soap, Phenix Cheese, Macy’s glassware and a demonstration kitchen, the majority commissioned by the J. Walter Thompson Agency. O’Connor and Tweedie have a lot to say about them. One might quibble with their ideological slant, but their devotion to Watkins is felt through every page.m

Loring would mix “slotches”—scotch and snow—on a winter’s night; Wyle split eardrums showing off her hog-calling.

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­Diplomats: Do We Need Them? Canadian ex-ambassadors tell stories about their work abroad. Martin Laflamme

Ambassador Assignments: Canadian Diplomats Reflect on Our Place in the World David Chalmer Reece, editor Fitzhenry & Whiteside 300 pages, hardcover isbn 9781550410741

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s the foreign service passé? ����������������������� In this day and age, when the latest news, even from the most distant lands, is only one mouse click away, when CNN brings us images of the latest humanitarian catastrophe in real time, when people travel quickly and easily to all parts of the world, do governments still need a wide network of embassies, staffed by a professional corps of highly trained diplomats, to tell them what is going on beyond our shores? Of course they do. From the days of Alexander the Great down to those of Lester Pearson, the tools of diplomacy have changed beyond recognition, but the core of the business, its very essence as an art, has and will remain the same: building relationships. This is why we will always need people overseas, people who can speak the language and understand the culture, people who can develop and maintain a wide network of contacts to defend our interests. Just think: how could we fathom the intricacies of a power struggle in a fragile state without having people on the ground enjoying a close and confidential rapport with local officials? How could we convince foreign students to enroll in our universities, foreign entrepreneurs to invest in our thriving energy sector or avant-garde performers to team up with their Canadian counterparts if we did not have people abroad promoting Canada? For a globalized country such as ours, with its booming foreign trade, its increasingly diverse and mobile population and its extensive peace and security commitments from Haiti to Afghanistan, it is crucial that we be able to rely on an extensive network of well-connected representatives overseas. Still in doubt? Then have a look at Ambassador Assignments������������������������������������ : Canadian Diplomats Reflect on Our Place in the World. Edited by David Chalmer Reece, this collection of essays by former Canadian heads of mission clearly shows how, despite the advent of the internet and turbo jets, the effective promotion and defence of Canadian interests would not be possible without a widely deployed foreign service. Of all the authors represented in the book, it is Martin Laflamme is a foreign service officer who recently served in Kandahar and is now posted to Tokyo. The views presented here are his own.

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perhaps Derek Burney who illustrates this reality most vividly. By the time he arrived as ambassador in Washington in 1989, “direct representation to Congress had become an essential part of the ambassadorial agenda.” This was a task that required careful planning. On Capitol Hill alone, there were hundreds of Congressmen, supported by thousands of aides, each one pursuing different interests and priorities. To ensure efficient and timely interventions, it was thus necessary that we keep a close eye on the activities of all these legislators. This, in turn, required not only a “highly committed and professional cadre of congressional liaison officers” but also “careful research and careful nurturing of congressional staff.” Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story. Political power in the U.S. capital was, and remains, extremely diffuse and often spreads far beyond Congress, to the administration of course, but also to businesses, think tanks and the media. These institutions too required constant monitoring so that we would be ready at all times to meet with them to “explain, persuade, rebut.” But did all this talking ever lead to concrete benefits for Canada? It certainly did, and the advocacy campaign on acid rain that our embassy successfully spearheaded in the late 1980s probably ranks as one of the most consequential. For years, there had been extensive opposition in the United States to a bilateral agreement with Canada to cut emissions of sulphur dioxide and other pollutants. Changing that attitude required constant and patient, albeit at times discreet, advocacy on the part of Canadian diplomats and politicians. In I’ll Be with You in a Minute, Mr. Ambassador, Allan Gotlieb, Burney’s predecessor in Washington, explained how it would have been extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to reach an agreement with the Reagan administration had the embassy not engaged in this kind of wide-ranging public diplomacy. There are times, however, when a tense political context can severely limit the nature of our interventions. In a very instructive essay covering his years as ambassador to South Africa in the early 1980s, Edward G. Lee shows how a bit of daring and creativity can go a long way to push the bounds of a tight diplomatic envelope. In those days, when the apartheid regime was perhaps at its harshest, there were only 19 ambassadors left in Pretoria. All others had been recalled in protest. Canada, led by Joe Clark, who, at the time, was serving as foreign minister, had wisely—if controversially—decided to stay put, rightly assessing that our ability to prod the regime toward greater openness would be significantly reduced if we closed our embassy. This, however, raised a serious moral dilemma. How could we continue to deal with a racist gov-

ernment without arousing the disgust and distrust of the black population? By criticizing the government publicly? Not possible. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations states that we “have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs” of a state. Just keep quiet then? This does not sound very proactive. But silence too can be a powerful weapon. Well-planned appearances, even if speechless, can often speak volumes, and this is the approach that Lee adopted. Tightlipped, he often attended the trials of blacks accused of violating racial laws, showing up at the courthouse “in the official vehicle with the Canadian flag flying,” always sitting “in the front row of the public section of the court wearing maple leaf pins.” The black community certainly seems to have appreciated the gesture but more importantly, as Lee reports, judges never failed to notice his presence. Perhaps slightly embarrassed, they invariably took more care in assessing the “guilt” of the accused. Although seriously constrained in what he could say and do publicly, Lee and his embassy colleagues nonetheless took full advantage of their presence on the ground and “developed close contacts with influential individuals in the black community and demonstrated to the public generally that we were with them in their struggle against the South African government.” Beyond the obvious advantage of allowing our government to get a much more accurate picture of the political and social realities of South Africa, keeping our embassy open also allowed us to channel sorely needed development funds where they were most needed. Although one of the core responsibilities of our embassies is to ensure that our government remains fully informed, at all times, of international developments and trends, they must also collectively ensure that Canada remains on the radar screen of the world. Pace some of our most colourful patriots, many Canadians would probably be shocked to learn how little even some of our closest allies know about us, or how clichéd their views are. In his essay, Roy McMurtry readily admits that during the years he spent in London as Canada’s high commissioner, he was often surprised to see that “the majority of the leaders of British business and industry actually knew very little about Canada.” If this group of people, which should perhaps have been one of the most au courant, is so unenlightened, just imagine the Herculean task we face in places like India, Brazil or China. Then as now, promoting Canada required constant and relentless face-to-face advocacy. But as commentators have reported elsewhere, doing so is becoming increasingly difficult at a time when tight budgets are forcing us to keep most of our diplomats at home.m Literary Review of Canada

Our Man in Bhutan How a Canadian Jesuit founded a secular education system in a remote mountain nation. David M. Malone

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f Bhutan’s history, its recent emergence from seclusion, its international relations and its economic, social and political model, I knew nothing at the time of my appointment as non-resident ambassador of Canada to the government in Thimphu, its tiny, scenic capital. Of the country’s connections with Canada, I knew even less. Imagine my surprise when, on my first visit, in October 2006, I found Canada tripping off many tongues, nearly always in relation to one Father William J. Mackey, S.J., a national icon in this small, reserved and proud mountain kingdom. Mackey had introduced, at the invitation of the government of Bhutan, secular secondary education to that country in 1964. How had that come about? In 1946, a call had gone out from the Jesuits of India for their brothers in other provinces of the order to step into the breach left by declining numbers both of local and Belgian Jesuits who had long been a defining feature of Darjeeling in India and its sister towns Kurseong, Kalimpong and Gangtok. English-speaking Canadian Jesuits believed they had sufficient numbers to request Rome to have a mission territory assigned to them. By 1956, 25 of them had answered the call and were thick on the ground. Bill Mackey was among the first, in January 1947. At the time, it was not clear on which side of the new boundary with Pakistan Darjeeling would fall. In fact, only a thin band of territory, which today is bordered by Bhutan in the north and Bangladesh in the south, was preserved by India to link its main land mass to the states of the Indian northeast clustered around Assam. Bhutan was still mostly closed to the outside world. A number of Mackey’s former Canadian Jesuit colleagues, now in their 80s and still living in Darjeeling district, filled me in on his story. After starting off at two different schools in Darjeeling, Mackey began to get involved in local politics. He was spotted during demonstrations on the streets for the recognition of the Nepali language in 1962, which led the Indian authorities to expel him from the area. He was heartbroken to leave. But consequently he was only too willing to pick up on a suggestion by the prime minister of Bhutan that the Jesuits assume the challenge of introducing secondary education to that country. By 1964, he was doing so in remote Tashigang, in Eastern Bhutan. One of his colleagues, Father Van Walleghem, recalls:

That first winter, with an interpreter, he went from homestead to homestead—for there were no villages as such—to inform them about the schooling that would begin in March. He travelled over many mountain passes in the snow, and was hardly successful for the people did not understand what schooling was all about: they needed their sons to herd cattle and yaks. He started out on the margins of an existing school near Tashigang, in a cow-shed with seven boys … Bhutanese are great travellers and as they would pass by this school, they became intrigued by what was going on. These people spread the word that schooling was a great thing, so the next year in Kanglung he had something like 70 youngsters in the school without having to go out to seek them.¹ The venture was a potentially sensitive one in a country on the cusp of change and very nervous about it. Jigme Dorji, the prime minister who was Bill Mackey’s friend, was assassinated in April

Reading between the lines of several accounts of Bill Mackey’s life, one concludes that he was a driven man, convinced of the rightness of his views and methods. Although admired, and popular among many for his devotion to gymnastics, he can not have been easy to work with. His rugged sense of humour helped and his no-­nonsense style was well suited to the challenges of the terrain and the inexperience of his charges. One obituary noted: “He talked a great deal … [and] could be impulsive. … Self-effacement was not a virtue he practiced, if indeed he construed it as a virtue at all.”² Perhaps for these reasons, he was well suited to the role of largely solitary pioneer of modern western-style education in Bhutan, clearly a man in the right place, at the right time, with the right mission, who might otherwise have lived an unremarkable life. Mackey died in 1995, aged 80, and as he lingered between life and death, the king of Bhutan visited and the revered queen mother stood vigil. He was truly among friends and must have passed from this life more serene in that knowledge than most of us can hope to be. His mortal remains, however, provoked some tension. The Jesuits, some of whom had travelled to be with him during his final hours, felt required, under their order’s rule, to reclaim his body for burial among his Jesuit brethren in Darjeeling. The Bhutanese did not want to let him go, wishing to honour his own wish to remain among them in death as in life. “In the end, a compromise was reached. Bill had selected a site on the campus of Sherubtse College in Kanglung, where a chorten, or Buddhist prayer monument, would be erected in which his remains would be placed. After completion of this work, his body would be returned there from Darjeeling.”³ But, in fact, Bill Mackey’s remains linger in Darjeeling (also much loved by him earlier in his career), while his spirit floats free in Bhutan, perhaps anchored there by the Sherubtse chorten.m

The people did not understand what schooling was all about: they needed their sons to herd cattle and yaks.

David M. Malone is Canada’s high commissioner to India and ambassador to Bhutan. He is the author of The International Struggle over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980–2005 (Oxford University Press, 2007). The views reflected here are his alone, not those of the Canadian government.

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1964, at a time when complaints were rife that he was pushing development too fast in what had for so long been a forbidden country to outsiders. Nevertheless, by 1968, Bhutan’s king, a strong supporter, was able to open Sherubtse (“Peak of Learning”) Public School. Its modern buildings were endowed with astonishing facilities for so isolated a locale and still constitute a very handsome campus, which has grown further. Soon, sisters of the order of St. Joseph of Cluny came to oversee the integration of girls into the country’s premier educational institution. The school, largely powered by Indian teachers, was a huge success. By 1978, Father Mackey’s pioneering role was at an end. He left Sherubtse when it became a full college, Bhutan’s first, which soon initiated degree classes (in affiliation with distant Delhi University). By then, other Jesuit institutions had spread across the country. But, as Bhutanese capacities increased, the need for active Jesuit involvement in the educational system declined, ending in 1988, when the umbrella agreement between the Jesuit order and the kingdom expired and the administration of all remaining Jesuit institutions was turned over to the government. Henceforth, all head teachers were to be Bhutanese, which also displaced a number of Indians. By 1989, Bill Mackey was the sole Jesuit remaining in Bhutan, surely a fitting turn of the wheel.

Notes 1 Correspondence, October 4, 2007. A primary school already existed in Tashigang. 2 John Perry in the (Jesuit) Upper Canada Province Newsletter, Winter 1996. 3 John Perry in the (Jesuit) Upper Canada Province Newsletter, Winter 1996.

To read David Malone’s full account of Bill Mackey and his Canadian Jesuit brethren in Darjeeling as well as in Bhutan, please go to ­­ <www.reviewcanada.ca> and click on Free Full-Text Articles.

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Canon-Making with a Vengeance Did some inferior works creep into the Canadian pantheon? If so, why? Robert Lecker

New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978 Janet B. Friskney University of Toronto Press 284 pages, hardcover isbn 9780802097460

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he conception and dissemination of the New Canadian Library series has had a profound impact on the evolution of Canadian literature over the past 50 years. It fostered the teaching of Canadian poetry and fiction in high schools and universities, provided material for critics who built a national literature industry that involved thousands of people in a variety of institutions and introduced the contentious concept of a national literary canon at a time when Canadians were questioning the ways in which their diverse identities were somehow reflected in creative works. Although Canadian literature and criticism existed long before the appearance of the New Canadian Library, no other publishing project accounted for such a massive and systematized presentation of Canadian writing. Janet B. Friskney’s New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978 is a study of the formation and realization of this series during those years. The NCL made Canadian literature approachable by ironing out its eccentricities. Between the year in which its first publications appeared— 1958—and the year that Malcolm Ross stepped down as general editor—1979—more than 180 NCL titles had been released, with millions of units sold to both the school and trade markets. The standardized design of the NCL volumes, along with the critical introductions provided to each book, brought uniformity to the uneven landscape that is Canadian literature. There are a host of issues attached to the creation of such a series, all of them related, in one way or another, to the canonizing process that such a massive editorial project involves. When I learned that Janet Friskney had written a book about the New Canadian Library series, I was curious to see how she would deal with these issues. I could not expect her to consider them until she had provided a detailed commentary on the origins of the series, and this she does with real professionalism. The NCL was conceived Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University and the author of Dr Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit (Vehicule Press, 2006).

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in the early 1950s by Malcolm Ross, a professor of English, who eventually persuaded publisher Jack McClelland to take on the project. There had been British and American models for this kind of national literature series, and even some earlier (but failed) Canadian attempts, but the idea of creating a viable series devoted to Canadian literature posed serious problems and involved considerable financial risk. By the mid 1950s, much of Canadian poetry and fiction was out of print. There were virtually no university or high school courses devoted to Canadian literature, so the idea of supporting the series through sales to the school market was not immediately practical. Ross and McClelland knew that Canadian literature curricula could not be created without the texts to support them, while those texts could not be published without the curricula that would drive sales. The trade market was small, and most Canadian authors were unknown to the general public. This meant that the idea of financing the series through general sales was probably wishful thinking. There was no granting system in place to assist Canadian publishers, and even after the Canada Council for the Arts was founded in 1957, the bulk of the funding it provided went to artists and writers, rather than to publishers and critics—an impediment to publishing that continued until the block grant programs of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council were established in 1972. Clearly, Ross and McClelland had to believe in something beyond money in order to devote the enormous energy it would take to make the series work. Who were these two men who had such a profound impact on Canadian literature? Friskney is reluctant to be critical. From her perspective, Ross transformed himself from a scholar in 17th-century English literature into a progressive critic and editor who embraced the idea of “an emergent multicultural Canadian identity” that expressed itself through an “international idiom” inflected by “several accents.” Ross’s travels across the country convinced him that the face of Canada was changing, and that school curricula had to reflect this shift through the inclusion of literary texts that represented the diversity of Canadian experience, past and present. Ross comes across as devoted, idealistic, altruistic. Yes, he bypassed a lot of literature written by those who had never inhabited the mainstream; he avoided experimental literature; he displayed a reluctance to promote titles that challenged conventional morality (in a letter to McClelland he said that he found Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers to be “painstakingly and repetitively dirty

in its imagery and detail … The book is an artistic failure because there is no control or transcendence of the material”). Well, every editor has his or her biases. That being said, I wish Friskney had been a bit more direct about identifying the ways in which Ross’s biases coloured his creation of the NCL canon. For example, Ross knew that teachers in the 1950s and ’60s (and even the early ’70s) were inclined to teach realistic fiction. They tended to shy away from experimental novels and poetry. As a result, a generation of students had more exposure to writers such as Morley Callaghan and Frederick Philip Grove and Sara Jeannette Duncan than they did to the writers who were emerging in their own lifetime. Where in the NCL universe were bpNichol, Dennis Lee, Scott Symons or Phyllis Webb, to name but a few writers who were challenging convention in those years? Where was concrete poetry? Where were the poets who had gained prominence during the same decades, and where, in particular, was the writing by the immigrants whom Ross wanted to inform about Canada? Even in 1977, McClelland could summarize the conclusions of a meeting he had with Ross and his editorial staff that year: “We decided to eliminate the literary curiosity type of novel. In short we are going for the big ones and major authors and not necessarily looking for adversity, i.e. we have retained most of Gabrielle Roy rather than including the Graeme Gibsons, the Dave Godfreys, etc.” Surely this is a telling indication of the kind of values informing the series in its mature phase. Although this quotation comes from the NCL papers at McMaster University, Friskney omits it. Why? Where does Friskney stand on this kind of bias? If the New Canadian Library articulated a canon that excluded contemporary works that embodied “adversity” (a form of exclusion that Frank Davey calls “genre suppression”), to what extent was it “new”? Friskney might have explored the paradoxical fact that through its choice of material the NCL demonstrated that its version of newness was grounded in books that were old. New, pointedly, did not mean the series was about newcomers. In this regard, she omits another important letter from Ross to McClelland about the title of the series, perhaps because she is concerned with presenting an unsullied view of Ross, who wrote: “the series title seems O.K.—if ‘new Canadian’ doesn’t suggest immigrant literature and/or very recent literature.” Friskney might also have considered the implications of the fact that, at its heart, the New Canadian Library was designed as a reprint series that would resurrect Literary Review of Canada

important texts that had gone out of print. This exercise raises a question that a study such as Friskney’s should answer: If these books were truly of classic status, why were they out of print? I wanted Friskney to look deeper into the nature of the NCL texts. Why did they fall out of favour? Why were they out of print? What had changed in pedagogical or popular taste to allow them to be called classics when so many of them had been dismissed at the time of their publication? Friskney’s subject matter invites an examination of this shift in literary value, but she seldom raises the topic. Ross’s editorial stance was inevitably compromised and transformed through his association with McClelland. It’s a wonder they worked together for as long as they did. Like Ross, McClelland was an ardent Canadian nationalist, but, first and foremost, he was a businessman. The development of the series was always a function of numerous factors that had little to do with Ross’s initial enthusiasm for a title: the cost of printing and design, the need to obtain rights at a reasonable cost, the desire to control inventory, the best way to package and present the titles, the most effective means of obtaining the support of professors and teachers who would use the titles, the debt level of the company and how much the publication of new titles in the series would increase or reduce that debt. Every single title in the NCL was the product of these material concerns. As McClelland wrote to Ross (in a letter also not mentioned in Friskney’s book), “the key to the whole problem, as you realize, is the economic one.” In order to market the series effectively, McClelland encouraged Ross to find critics who would write favourable introductions to each work. When one critic (Mary Jane Edwards) suggested that the book she was introducing might have problems, McClelland balked at publishing her commentary. He explained: “I am . . . opposed as a publisher to limiting the potential of a major work with a substantially unfavourable critical introduction. It makes no publishing sense.” To what extent did this kind of censorship create a critical climate that curtailed honest assessment, and how did these restrictions influence the evolution of criticism devoted to the NCL titles, since in many cases the introduction was the first work of criticism on the subject? As a relentless entrepreneur, McClelland obviously found it impossible to let the texts he was publishing speak for themselves. Instead, he found himself speaking on their behalf, and, soon after the series was launched, he began to refer to the New Canadian Library titles as “classics.” That word—“classics”—was not much of a problem in the 1950s. When the series was launched it was announced by a press release that described it as “the first series of Canadian classics in paper covers to be released in this country.” No one seemed to object to the classics label at that time. But what Ross and McClelland failed to realize as the series developed was that the term was becoming increasingly problematic, associated as it was with canonical ideas that skewed literary values and created multiple forms of exclusion from a hypothetical mainstream. By the mid 1970s, the credibility of canons, classics and the notion of literary consensus had been cast into grave doubt; anyone who asserted the primacy of one set of texts over another set was asking for trouble. Instead of adapting the rhetoric used to proMarch 2008

mote the series to this new anti-canonical reality, McClelland continued to employ the classics label, and by the late 1970s he conceived a plan to persuade professors and teachers to validate the canonical structure he and Ross had constructed over the previous two decades. He imagined a vote on a ballot that would select the most important works of Canadian literature, with the results to be presented at a conference held mainly for academics. The result was the infamous Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, held in 1978. To many of those who attended the conference, it seemed clear that McClelland had manipulated the process to his own advantage and that the primary reason behind the gathering was to promote his own titles, which he believed would dominate the results of the vote that he had engineered. As Friskney says, the conference “became the focal point of the Canadian literary community’s initial foray into debate about the Canadian literary canon”; it was seen as “an overt act of canon-making.” For Ross, in retrospect, it was the “most painful experience” of his career. He found himself personally compromised by the conference, coming under heavy fire for cooperating with McClelland’s canonical shenanigans. A year after the conference he stepped down as editor of the series. This allowed McClelland to push his canonical agenda even further. He established a committee of academics known as the Canadian Classics Committee, whose responsibility it was to confer the status of classic on selected titles. The covers of these books would sport a banner proclaiming their classic status. But the members of the committee soon began to feel that they were being manipulated. Perhaps they got a sense of McClelland’s attitude toward them when he said that “the teachers in our highschools [sic] and the teachers and critics in our universities—what an inept bunch they are—really don’t know a goddamn thing about Canadian writing, what is important and what isn’t important.” The committee fell apart after a few years. The New Canadian Library series continues today, under the general editorship of David Staines. While it does not have the controversial impact it did 30 years ago, the collection remains the source for many of the novels and short stories taught in Canadian literature courses across the country. Its pedagogical value is historically indisputable, even if we now know how many worthy books the series bypassed and even if we realize (as Friskney discusses at length) that many of the texts it did include were marred through abridgement, emendation or questionable editorial practices that failed to respect source texts. While Friskney’s historical research on the series is very thorough, I have suggested a number of areas that she might have explored in more depth. She recognizes that “the processes of selection that they require, and of reception that they invoke, can certainly implicate publisher’s [sic] series in the phenomenon of canonization.” But I would like to have learned more about how this phenomenon worked during the period covered in Friskney’s study (1952–1978). Similarly, Friskney knows that “the study of Canadian literature” that was facilitated by the NCL led many to question “how one defined the concept of literature, by what rationale one determined literary merit, and to what degree national claims justified the serious study of literary works whose qualitative values seemed below par.” If this

was the case, where does Friskney stand on this question? Was it worthwhile to create a canon that included inferior works? If so, why? If not, what are the historical implications of founding a series that relied on such works? By answering questions such as these, Friskney might have explained something about the ways in which literary taste and reception operate in Canada. However, because she shies away from these issues, and from some of the prickly questions concerning the ways in which commercial interests dictated the selection and presentation of the NCL texts, her book falls short of being more than a solidly researched historical account. It would have benefited from a more extended analytical perspective. And from a little more fire.m

WE’RE SEARCHING FOR NEW VOICES From south of the border, we hear about nothing but “change” these days. Whether the Americans choose Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain as their next president in November, things are going to be very different in Washington from here on in. What does this mean for Canada? Have we placed ourselves in opposition to the moralistic conservatism of the Bush White House for so long that adjusting to profound change in our neighbour may be quite a challenge? Will Canada too be a part of a continental wave of hope and energy, as we were during the 1960s? The LRC (Literary Review of Canada) is on the hunt for new voices to explore these themes. Our monthly magazine showcases many of the most important fiction, nonfiction and public policy writers working in this country, names such as Lloyd Axworthy, Peter C. Newman, Margaret Atwood, Andrew Cohen, both Erna Paris, Roland Paris, Jennifer Welsh, Tom Flanagan, Janice Gross Stein, Ezra Levant, Sheema Khan, Patrick Watson, Philip Resnick, Peter Desbarats, Mark Kingwell, David Malone and Conrad Black. We will devote the coveted essay slot in our upcoming September issue to a thought-provoking new vision of Canada. We invite all interested writers to submit a 500-word abstract of their essential ideas for such an essay by April 30th and we will announce our choice at the end of May. The writer we choose will then have six weeks to produce a 3,000-word essay for a July 14th deadline. Our only restriction: Contributors must be new to the LRC. If you have written articles for us before, we love you but we don’t want to hear from you for this project. The theme is change, so we’re looking for change in the voices we hear and include in the national conversation. 500-word abstracts should be submitted by April 30, 2008, by e-mail to <editor@lrcreview.com>. Subject line should read: new voices.

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Catching Ottawa’s Attention There’s how-to pragmatism, and then there’s moral leadership. John Sewell

The Art of the Possible: A Handbook for Political Activism Amanda Sussman McClelland and Stewart 336 pages, softcover isbn 9780771083402

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uccessfully influencing the political process seems like such an unlikely event that those who accomplish it often consider writing about their work before fading into the background. The forms vary from a short essay to a longer story about what happened, to an explanation of how the political system itself can permit outsiders to make change. It is the latter approach that Amanda Sussman has taken in The Art of the Possible: A Handbook for Political Activism. Sussman has had considerable experience in Ottawa, working on human rights and immigration issues for Bill Graham and Elinor Caplan when they were Cabinet ministers in the Chrétien/Martin governments, as well as for public advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Plan Canada (her present post) and Human Rights Watch. She states right off that her goals are limited, “to help make interactions between citizens and their government more effective so that we can produce the best policy we can,” and she provides a nugget from Elinor Caplan to keep ambitious desires in perspective: “Don’t let your desire for perfection get in the way of progress.” The book is a set of checklists about things to keep in your mind, most of which are reasonable and helpful if you are new to the idea of trying to influence the federal government, the locus of virtually everything in the book. For instance, she recommends the SMART test: “SMART objectives are those that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.” Obviously, if you set your objectives according to these goals, you have decided to work within the narrow limits of the system rather than, for instance, to challenge something as big as the detention without trial authorized by antiterrorism legislation. The advice given here is not meant for those with such large interests, although they are sure to find tips that may be useful. What becomes abundantly clear is that

Sussman believes, as do many others, that if you want to be a serious player in Ottawa you must be in it for the long term. You have to get your timing right in terms of the government’s budget, international events, the election cycle and a number of other factors. You have to know the right people in government and in the bureaucracy. It is best if you know the right people in the media. “Successful advocacy,” she writes, “is about making sure that your information is before the right person, at the right time, in the right place.” One cannot argue with this, but, since most people who engage in the political process do so more out of a feeling of outrage than of political purpose, it is difficult to treat as welcome advice. The book provides good descriptions of how federal departments function; how bureaucrats can frustrate and defeat the wishes of the minister, the Cabinet, the House of Commons and the Senate, as they did, for example, by ensuring a Refugee Appeal Board has never been established in spite of legislation and funding allocations, how meetings with ministers should be run, how

and a half gives no sense as to how this remarkable breakthrough was achieved, or the role that Canada played in its making. She mentions Maher Arar just long enough to talk of Amnesty International’s role in freeing him, with nary a mention of the interventions of his wife, Monia Mazigh, or the extent to which the courage of Mazigh and Arar have changed Canada for the better. Or, to take what seems like a much more bureaucratic example, she does not mention how Don Johnson pushed for Ottawa to allow favourable tax status of donations of stock to Canadian charities, a change that has had an enormously positive impact on many institutions. Sussman sees no place for employing the story to explain what is possible and what is not. That’s a pity: well-told stories make for good and easy reading, and the reader often learns more from a story than from a page of things to do. Sussman agrees that government consultations are rarely useful for the public because the government has no serious interest in informed public opinion, stating that “for the most part, governments consult on controversial issues to head off criticism and hear concerns before a decision is announced.” She recounts in detail the steps of the budget process, the machinations within the bureaucracy and the interactions between elected officials and staff, noting that the latter hold the real power. This bears out my own City Hall experience, which is that unless an elected official has a very clear agenda of the change to be made once in public office, and unless that politician is relentless in pursuing that agenda, nothing will change. Unfortunately, too many of those who stand for election think that the achievement of office will by itself lead to positive change. In the face of all these obstacles, some activists have concluded that it is not worth a lot of time and energy trying to change government. They realize that many human organizations often seem impervious to healthy change for the usual reasons of money, power and ideology. Unwilling to see themselves ground down by the process, or worse, many believe that a different approach to creating change needs to be found. The new preferred vehicle has been the social enterprise, and the preferred technique has been social innovation. What social entrepreneurs are apparently able to do is usher in social and political change without wasting time trying to convince elected or government officials about the worthiness of the cause. The most widely known example of the

Government consultations are rarely useful for the public because the government has no serious interest in informed public opinion.

John Sewell has been a writer and activist in Toronto for the past 40 years, including one term as mayor of Toronto.

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to deal with the media, and so forth. All of this is good stuff, well presented and well described but, at the end of the day, daunting. The number of conditions necessary for any reasonable chance of success, following Sussman’s advice, are so many and of such scope that one cannot work well within this system unless one is on the full-time payroll of a public advocacy group or is a lobbyist. If you are someone provoked into an engagement with Ottawa because of your personal concern for, say, ecological damage to a lake (which is an Ottawa responsibility), a safe injection site (funded by the feds), the need for high-speed rail (a federal responsibility), national funding for housing, child care or social services, or the RCMP’s use of the Taser stun gun, my reading of Sussman’s book is that you’ll come away gravely disappointed, with nothing to speak of but brick walls. Sadly, Sussman does not rely on stories to tell us how change can be accomplished in Ottawa. She mentions the establishment of the International Criminal Court, but in a paragraph

Literary Review of Canada

new approach is the Grameen Bank created in the 1970s by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh. The bank loans small amounts of money to groups of women to assist them in starting and then managing new businesses. The loan program makes all the changes one wishes government would make, and it does it outside of a government framework: empowering women, creating employment, expanding the economy. Loans are at interest rates high enough to allow the bank to operate in the black so that no government funds are needed to support the venture. Today there are 2,500 micro-lending programs in the world serving more than 41 million individuals. Canada needs exactly the same innovative approach to make house ownership available to the large number of families who are excluded from it. Some social entrepreneurs make change by looking at the big picture, an exercise that has grown unusual since too many governments have decided big pictures do not hold any interest. One example is dealing with asthma in New York City. The costs of keeping a child with an asthma attack in the hospital overnight is close to $5,000, and hospitals and governments tried to find ways of reducing those costs by efficiencies inside the hospital. But entrepreneurs showed that spending money visiting homes, then making those homes dust free, putting them in a state of good repair, suing landlords and supporting kids with good food—all those actions mean that kids didn’t need to go to the hospital, and the savings were considerable. The big picture shows that public costs are less if one spends money addressing causes rather than trying to repair breakdowns and damage. It is an old story, but as governments have withdrawn from social equity as an issue, it has taken on new life. Strangely, the selling point for government involvement is that it costs less to look at the big picture. Supporting social entrepreneurs and social innovation is popular among charitable foundations at the moment since these approaches represent ways of making political change without being directly “political.” The international context of this phenomenon is well described in David Bornstein’s book from a few years ago, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Bornstein tells many compelling stories, although accessing funding from foundations and a relentless emphasis on the new and the innovative seem to be the mainstays of his advice to would-be social entrepreneurs. Tried and true approaches (strong recreation programs for kids, good schools, comprehensive child care) seem to get short shrift. Maybe we are missing the big picture and a corrective is needed. There is a larger issue not addressed by Sussman, namely who actually creates change at the governmental level and how they do it. There is considerable force to the argument that those who push far beyond the pragmatic boundaries of SMART change are the ones who actually get things done. Asking for the impossible might be March 2008

a better strategy. Here is Václav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, speaking in Athens in 1993: Politicians seem to turn into puppets that only look human and move in a giant, rather inhuman theatre; they appear to have become merely cogs in a huge machine, objects of a major automatism of civilization which has gotten out of control and for which nobody is responsible. He then goes on to next steps: From whichever angle I look at this menace, I always come to the conclusion that salvation can only come through a profound awakening of man to his own personal responsibility, which

is at the same time a global responsibility. Thus, the only way to save our world, as I see it, lies in a democracy that recalls its ancient Greek roots: democracy based on an integral human personality personally answering for the fate of the community. These words are from one of Havel’s many illuminating speeches gathered together in his 1997 collection, The Art of the Impossible. Havel’s interest lies in the moral mechanisms of the pursuit and exercise of power, and for him tinkering with political mechanisms will not get us to where we want to go. The key is making a new political approach as an individual, which of course is what led to his part in creating new organizations such as Charter 77, his subsequent imprisonment and then his surprising release after the fall of Berlin wall and his appointment as the country’s president. His life trajectory seems to make the point that the most important political infrastructure to pay attention to is the moral one. Discussion of morality may seem a long way from the kind of political change one might strive for, but it is actually at the very heart of it. The change agent is not the carefully worded letter or the street demonstration (even though they are often part of political change), but the attempt to find new ways to make decisions, ways that involve a lot more people acting together as part of a fluid, open and responsive community. That is usually as true for a neighbourhood issue as it

is for change to a city’s waterfront, the reorganization of local government or the development of the Mackenzie Valley. New and successful political processes rely on a moral dimension that tries to involve more and different people in decision making. This is certainly the case for the larger issues that have been addressed in recent centuries. Think Emily Pankhurst, Agnes MacPhail, Martin Luther King, Tommy Douglas or the attractiveness of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Think Nelson Mandela, Jane Jacobs, Paul Watson, Aung San Suu Kyi, David Suzuki. It is always the larger moral elements of their visions that attract and sustain supporters. And as we know from political struggles we have all engaged in, the moral dimension does not require a celebrity endorsement by a Bono or Brad Pitt: it needs otherwise ordinary individuals who give voice to it. Sometimes this is more difficult than one thinks, given all the acronymic advice we are bombarded with: Keep It Simple Stupid, keep it SMART and avoid addressing larger issues. One of the key issues before us today is our response to global warning. As Paul Hawken describes in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, there has been a veritable explosion of groups and initiatives around the world as people refuse to wait for government to begin addressing issues of energy use and climate change. But even with these many new groups, it is clear we need the rule-making power of government to address these issues with the appropriate scope, as well as the access to large amounts of capital available only to government to ensure there is fast and effective action. How are we to get to that destination? I suspect we will not arrive by playing by the rules, or dealing with the existing elected leaders and their officials as described by Sussman. Instead, and David Suzuki gives a preview of this scenario, change will happen through leaders with powerful moral messages who shake the political establishment and create a new and more appropriate sense of public order and decision making. Many will come forward, few will be called, but when they are they will describe more open ways of working together, larger challenges we must grapple with and processes which we have not yet thought of. Obviously, we cannot afford to ignore governments since they are our important and legitimate institutions for joint decision making. On that point, Sussman is dead right. But on climate change and other important public issues we need to operate on a wider and larger scope than this book describes, one that calls on the best moral values of us all. That’s where we should lend our support, and that’s when effective responses will finally become possible.m

29

To the Editor:

Letters & Responses To the Editor: Patrick Brethour isn’t the first, and I’m sure won’t be the last, reviewer to question my right to comment on Alberta simply because I live in Quebec (“Who’s Stupid?,” January/February 2008). I can only imagine his disdain had he known that I am not only a Montrealer but also an immigrant who grew up in Ontario. Putting that aside, the heart of the matter is Brethour’s worship of the free market, which is largely responsible for the environmental and economic catastrophe that is gradually levelling Alberta. This clinging to a barren 19th-century capitalist dogma as the saviour that will lead us out of the wilderness dangerously delays action. Yet Brethour exalts this fanciful notion of the free market as policy. Trouble is the free market has nothing to do with the well-being of the commonwealth of the planet. Markets have one purpose: to chase money. If they have to strip forests, dig up whole provinces, contaminate fresh water, poison the air and destroy the earth, so be it. Unless they are checked. The tale of the free marketer is a gritty and edgy narrative. Not well woven. Not a smooth novel or a Renaissance painting. But a messy episodic mosaic of crazyeyed men bent on nuking the earth, if that’s what it takes. And when free market acolytes feel their temple of George Bush is under siege they accuse the apostates with the worst sin of all: “anti-Americanism.” Then they dismiss their complaints as “charmless” and their voices as “marginal.” I guess my interview with Syncrude president Jim Carter was an inconvenience to be ignored. Just as the reference to energy companies not paying income taxes was not my assessment but a quote from a Fort McMurray tax collector angry that energy companies don’t pay their fair share. But distortion is part of the armoury of the embattled faithful. Never mind that Albertans are destroying the land beneath their feet, the water they drink, and hugely intensifying greenhouse gas emissions to feed the American gluttony. Never mind that most of the profits flow to foreigners. Never mind that what’s left over is consumed in an inflationary feeding frenzy. None of that matters as long as men of power dominate. Is this Stupid to the Last Drop? Yes. Are the smart men of business that partake in this rape stupid? Yes. Are the politicians that allow it to happen stupid? Yes. Are those who re-elect them over and over again stupid? Yes. They all may benefit now, but what of the estate they eventually will bequeath to the next generation in this finite world? It is small comfort to think that some day proud Albertans will have to swallow the bitter pill of culpability. But it won’t happen. For the simple reason that Alberta will be as empty as the east coast fishery, as barren as Quebec’s Boreal forest and as stripped as the prairie grasslands. All of these disasters, by the way, are mentioned in my book. Alberta as metaphor. We are all willing players. William Marsden Montreal, Quebec

To the Editor: When we started the Salon Speakers Series at Grano restaurant, our intention was to invite 30

to Toronto thinkers whose ideas may have influenced American foreign policy, whether we agreed with them or not. Reading Raymond Conlogue’s review (“Empire à la Carte,” January/ February 2008) of American Power—transcriptions of the first eight talks—I suspect he judged the essays more by who gave them than by what the authors actually said. Readers will discover the book isn’t the apologia for hegemonic thinking the reviewer claims. Conlogue accuses William Kristol, editor of the influential Weekly Standard magazine, of having no idea where terrorism comes from. What Kristol does say is that America was careless about terrorism in the 1990s, which led to problems down the road. But that was only a small part of his talk. His attack on Robert Kaplan, an instructor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and senior writer for the Atlantic Monthly, was also distorted. Kaplan reminds us that most of the U.S. military forces around the world aren’t engaged in combat, but in humanitarian and disaster relief. Just ask the thousands of grateful Indonesians after the 2004 tsunami. But to accuse Fouad Ajami, the Middle East scholar at John’s Hopkins University, of being a “nominal” Muslim not interested in a serious analysis of Islam, is bizarre. To Conlogue’s mind, a serious scholar of Islam is Tariq Ramadan, “who has shown that European Islam is rapidly liberalizing.” That’s just willful ignorance. Let me suggest Bruce Bower’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within as a starter. And for all of Ramadan’s enigmatic and slippery writings about Islam and its peaceful intentions, he refuses to condemn, unequivocally, the Islamic code known as huddud, or the stoning of adulterers. The essays by Samuel Huntington, historian John Lukacs and Michael Ignatieff meet with more approval, though Conlogue can’t resist taking a swipe at Ignatieff, accusing him of “liberal imperialism,” whatever that means. He criticizes Christopher Hitchens for despising the regime of Saddam Hussein and the clerics of Iran as if one should choose. I assume Conlogue never approves of foreign intervention anywhere, anytime, especially if it’s American intervention. Taking that attitude overlooks a lot of evil in the world. Whether for or against the war in Iraq, let’s remember the U.S. unearthed over 240 mass graves. When Europe finally decided to intervene to stop the slaughter in the Balkans, they left it to the Americans to do the heavy lifting. When Rwandans begged for help, no one came. And we’re still waiting for someone to save Darfur. A final criticism of the book is that most of the Grano speakers were American. Conlogue suggests a list of his own thinkers we might invite; ironically, all, with the exception of Charles Taylor, are American. Chacun à son goût. If we took his advice, it wouldn’t be our series, it would be his. But if invited, I’d gladly attend. Patrick Luciani Toronto, Ontario

Your short course in literary demolition (“Great Disappointments,” December 2007) was entertaining, but it left me wondering where some of your writers got the idea that Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Turgenev’s First Love, DeLillo’s Underworld and Roth’s The Plot Against America are classics (or, as you put it more tentatively, “classics”)? Then there’s As for Me and My House, which is, let’s be clear, a Canadian classic, something ersatz, closer to Frederick Philip Grove’s Fruits of the Earth than to The Brothers Karamazov. Speaking of the last, when my colleague Keith Oatley confesses to finding Dostoevsky’s novel “boring,” he might want to look over his shoulder at Lionel Trilling’s comment that some of the modern classics once found him boring: “I have been read by Eliot’s poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them” (my emphasis). As for Ulysses, I’m not sure that Rex Murphy is right in claiming that “it lacks the compelling artistic energy of managed suspense.” The majority of my students over the past four decades at the University of Toronto seemed to wonder and care about whether Molly Bloom would sleep with Blazes Boylan and how Leopold Bloom—one of the most decent figures in all literature—would respond. But even if, like Mr. Murphy, one doesn’t, the novel gives many other pleasures, as he backhandedly acknowledges. Surely there’s room in the house of fiction for novels like Ulysses, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual that focus on pleasures other than the big bang of “managed suspense.” We all need the big bang, but sometimes a back rub and a foot massage will do. Finally, if, as Reed Scowen claims, “Nostromo is a mess,” then I can’t help thinking that it’s the kind of mess that most writers—think of Greene, Naipaul and Le Carré—would sacrifice their significant other for. It has its flaws, but, then, classic doesn’t mean perfect, it just means great, unless, of course, you agree with Mark Twain that a classic is “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Here’s a question for Oatley, Murphy, and Scowen: however “bad” Dostoevsky’s, Conrad’s and Joyce’s novels might be, imagine a book shelf with only The Brothers Karamazov, Nostromo and Ulysses on it. Now sit back and think of all the Booker, Giller, Pulitzer, Governor General and Goncourt prize winners of the past half century. How many would you set by their side confident that the newcomers will still be read and discussed at the end of the century? Sam Solecki Toronto, Ontario

Literary Review of Canada

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