Book Fever
Marcia Loy May 23, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

More Canadian writers

This was a time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half of her world.―Michael Ondaatje

Book Fever continues to look at interesting Canadian writers.

Away by Jane Urquhart, 1993. This novel begins in Ireland during the potato famine and ends in Canada. It’s a story full of Irish mysticism and mythology. When a ship sinks and a dying sailor is washed ashore on an Irish island—along with cabbages, whiskey and silver teapots—a young girl named Mary has her life changed forever.

The islanders believe she’s “away,” and the local priest talks a schoolmaster into marrying her to bring her back.

Excerpt: At first it was believed that Mary would die; that she would waste away, abandoning a body that had already been “left behind.” As time went by, however, and she seemed stronger and more beautiful than ever, it began to appear that other steps would have to be taken. She did nothing but sing quietly—there was no other form of speech—the songs she had invented during her night vigil with the corpse. She performed her chores methodically and easily—too easily, her mother thought—as milk turned to butter with a few light touches of the churn and eggs were produced by hens the moment the girl stepped outside to collect them. Her bread rose to ridiculous heights in the oven and the sweet berries for which the islanders spend hours searching began to appear in profusion all around her mother’s cabin.

The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens, 2006. Like Away, this book begins at the start of the potato famine in Ireland and traces the life of Fergus O’Brien as he finds his way to Canada. This author, though, deliberately avoids mysticism and magic. He says he wanted to be as hard, as real and as unsentimental as he could.

Excerpt: Ten weeks later his people were the only ones left upon the mountain. All the other cabin tenants had accepted the quit fee Farmer Carmichael offered and had gone to the workhouse to submit themselves. Or had gone on the roads, begging. Or were trying the public works: breaking rocks at sixpence a day, living under hedges and in scalps and burrows dug in along the edges of public roads. Narrow and grassy, those road verges—Ireland’s long meadow—were the only lands in the country, apparently, that didn’t quite belong to one farmer or another.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, 1992. Most good books do not make good movies. This one’s an exception. Ondaatje, of Sri Lankan and Dutch parents, lives in Toronto and won the Booker Prize for The English Patient. There’s lots in the book that wasn’t in the film and it’s beautifully written.

Excerpt: There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western world towards the desert for hundreds of years. From 425BC to the beginning of the twentieth century there is an averting of eyes. Silence. The nineteenth century was an age of river seekers. And then in the 1920's there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis, the quick, flat wit of bus conductors.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be contacted at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.