New Books

In the 1870s, a teenage criminal from New York makes history when he becomes the first person arrested by Canada’s newly created national police force — the original RCMP. Following this encounter, he unwillingly accompanies the North West Mounted Police on their 1874 expedition into Canada’s untamed and lawless west. At first the street-smart youth privately mocks his Mountie companions, but after sharing their hardships he comes to identify with them. The March West, as it became known, was quite well documented. The Mounties first commissioner, George A. French, gathered 275 policemen (the youngest of whom was a 16 year old), 339 horses, 142 oxen, 114 Red River carts, 73 wagons, and two cannons each weighing a ton. From Fort Dufferin, near Winnipeg, they headed 800 miles west toward the Rocky Mountains, to restore order in the northwest. They endured terrible hardships: lack of water and firewood, and insect plagues. Most of the horses died, and the equipment soon proved to be inadequate. Their fate changes when the force meets up with Jerry Potts, an extraordinary guide, who leads them to the hub of the illegal whiskey trade at Fort Whoop-up.

This rollicking and humorous historical adventure story sheds light on a colourful chapter of Canadian history, one most Canadian writers have largely ignored. In McDivitt’s capable hands it comes to life again.

The Path to Ardroe is an exploration of friendship and its limits, life changes, and the challenges and aspirations of writers. Peter Chisholm, a writer wrestling with his craft, finds himself at forty-two without direction, and so it seems an eerie coincidence to him that unplanned events have conspired to place him in Lochinver, Scotland, developing his next novel, seeking out his former lover, and trying to find a solution to his restlessness and self-imposed fakery. But he has no idea of the fearful ghosts he will conjure. In various states of introspection Peter’s friends are also coming to terms with their own life-changing moments. For emerging writer Melissa Picard, on a six-month trip to Strasbourg, France, it will be her struggle with the past criticisms of her writing. Through a budding friendship with a celebrated writer and a transformative affair with an artist, she begins to understand that her challenges are not unique and that to write with a simple purity, the way Derain painted, she must finally listen to her own voice.

Another friend, Rick Connelly, at a creative crossroads of self and meaning is struggling with the control of his writing voice and intently floundering in his need to show what his father meant to him. He seeks the solitude of nature to reshape his instincts about himself and the life path he has chosen.

Finally there is Tania, who lost her mother too young and whose immigrant roots shape her in ways she is only beginning to understand. Faced with her own immanent death from pancreatic cancer, she is stripping her life bare of all pretense, while taking stock of the people and events who have made her who she really is. But it will be Peter Chisholm at the novel’s end, who in a profound epiphany, will discover the fulcrum that balances private compromises with the artistic quandaries of the literary life, and it will not be the revelation he assumed.

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection The Sometimes Lake will transport readers from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the deep lasting space of the prairies. The characters that readers meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; others who are confused by cultural shift or troubled by the security of cults; women who try to grieve for their unborn children, and others who play at suicide.

At the vortex of the surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion. Her curiosity and scrutinizing intelligence as well as her ever playful wit guide the reader through close encounters with physical and psychological landscapes and then reveal the uncommon denominators in them that make people unique.

Voiceless is a coming-of-age novel with a twist: it features a teen runaway who has no speaking voice. Nicknamed Ghost, runaway teen Annabel’s interaction with her world is limited to how well she can convey her wants and feelings to others, and how intuitive the other characters are in interpreting her expressions and gestures. Danger lurks in many places and she faces harrowing situations when she leaves her foster home with a tough and messed up boy and hitchhikes to the city. Once there, the danger intensifies as she confronts a rounder who expects sex in return for shelter. How she survives without her voice adds significant tension to the story.

What has driven Ghost to the road is love. She misses her mother’s love, and felt her grandmother’s love was inadequate. In her quest, she finds Mary who rescues her and other runaways, just as she rescues abused horses. It is Mary who gives her a chance to rediscover the peace that can be found in nature and allows Ghost to discover her love of horses — but she seeks a more intimate love and mistakenly overlooks Tully who would protect her and respect her, in favour of Graydon who would do neither. It is Graydon, damaged by an abusive past, who seeks the respect and approval of an older abusive rounder and in the process endangers Ghost both physically and emotionally.

Donald Ward’s stories in The Weeping Chair are confidently layered with unexpected situations and characters whose faith in themselves provides the strength to confront whatever weird or challenging experience befalls them. While Ward’s style is steeped in the traditional storytelling structures of Flannery O’Connor and P.G. Wodehouse, his highly imaginative settings and eccentric character profiles push the stories’ energies into contemporary spheres of literary entertainment. His thematic pursuits usually deal with the human willingness to carry on in the face of an often hostile and baffling universe, where nothing is as it first appears and that is clearly evident in this collection.

The Weeping Chair employs ideas that are both impossible and unexpected to serve as platforms for the edgy humour always lurking in the human condition and beyond: a race of superior chickens investigate their earthly origins, a badger shares his fears with a monk, a nasty grandmother’s false teeth take on symbolic power, and a female dwarf from the 17th century pursues an octogenarian at Starbucks — all serve as prime examples. With Ward’s stories you can always expect the unexpected and be assured that his intentions are not frivolous.