GUSH reviewed in Herizons!

So GUSH was reviewed in Herizons by Courtney Dickson. Yaaaaay! It's so lovely to see some of these reviews coming in...

Talking trees

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon 

You’re on a walk in Assiniboine Forest. After years of noting "that whitish tree" and "that tree with acorns," you’ve brought along a field guide — say, Lone Pine’s Plants of the Western Boreal Forest & Aspen Parkland — that helps you to identify the trees as trembling aspens and burr oaks, both of which are native to Manitoba.

When you get home, you’re still curious about the trees, so you pull Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s Arboretum Borealis: A Lifeline of the Planet from the shelf.

From one, you get descriptions of leaf shape and bark: data. From the other, you learn aspens manufacture salicylates — the source of Aspirin — and release aerosolized salicylates into the air via their rustling leaves, creating "an antiseptic for the atmosphere."

This is nature writing, a heady mixture of science and literature that not only situates the tree within the forest but also takes a moment to consider its beauty.

The most recent entry in this genre is German forester Peter Wohlleben, whose The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World is an international bestseller. (Vancouver’s Greystone Books, in partnership with the David Suzuki Institute, has just released the English edition with a foreword by Tim Flannery, the Australian environmentalist and climate change activist.)

Before he wrote The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben was a typical forester, assessing the suitability of individual trees and stands of trees for the lumber mill.

One day, he found the remains of an ancient stump, parts of which were still alive. He wondered how that was possible, without leaves or branches or even a trunk. The answer: neighbouring trees were feeding the stump sugars they’d photosynthesized via their connected roots.

Wohlleben was changed in that moment. He started living and working differently, studying the scientific literature on the "wood wide web" and closely observing the trees in his forest.

"When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines," he writes.

While Wohlleben worked as a forester for 20 years and his discussions of forests and trees frequently bring in current research, his use of the expression "tree parents" shows he’s fairly comfortable with anthropomorphism, which is to say he frequently attributes human characteristics such as language and memory formation to non-human organisms (trees).

Do trees talk? Well, no, not as we’ve defined it.

What is clear from the research Wohlleben draws on — including from University of British Columbia’s pioneering professor of forest ecology Dr. Suzanne Simard, who herself could write an astonishing book on trees — is trees communicate, both above and below ground. Individual trees "talk" with trees of the same species and their competitors as well as with the creatures who attempt to burrow under their bark or eat their leaves.

Terminology and analogs aside, what The Hidden Life of Trees does especially well is explain how trees function — from seed to sapling to ancient tree, from root to bark to leaf.

Wohlleben describes how different species co-exist in the forest and how they compete for space and sun and water. What’s more, he explains how trees adapt to catastrophic events such as ice storms and tornados but also to climate change. And he sugar-coats all of these explanations with a great deal of enthusiasm and fondness for his subject.

That mixture of information and storytelling, science and sentiment, is exactly what we need here in tree-loving Winnipeg, with our doomed elm canopy and our expectation the emerald ash borer will show up any minute.

A final thought, in the interest of de-anthropomorphizing this review: if Wohlleben were a tree, he’d be a beech. The forests of central Europe where he lives are dominated by beeches, so he spends a great deal of time describing them.

But don’t let that put you off. As Wohlleben notes, "your trees may not function exactly as my trees do, and your forest might look a little different, but the underlying narrative is the same: forests matter at a more fundamental level than most of us realize."

Ariel Gordon is completing a manuscript of essays about Winnipeg’s urban forest.

Animal Internet could help species survive

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

My smartphone pings. My sister has texted me, reminding me that I’m supposed to make a salad for our family dinner this weekend.

Another ping — this time from my electric car, letting me know it’s fully charged.

I could go to the store for lettuce, but instead I spend the time watching a peregrine falcon nest on the roof of the Radisson Hotel via webcam. I’ve been binge-watching the chicks since they hatched.

So far, according to Munich-based writer Alexander Pschera, I’ve just accessed three different Internets: Human, Internet-of-Things and Animal.

Pschera has written several books about the Internet and media in his native German, but Animal Internet is the first one released in translation in North America.

There are a few facts that underlie Pschera’s examination of the Animal Internet. The first is that according to the World Wildlife Fund, Earth has lost half of its animals in the last 40 years. The second is that the average American child spends over 50 hours per week on electronic devices and less than an hour outside.

To Pschera, those are the results of ecology. He believes that attempts to protect endangered animals by separating them from people has only distanced us from the natural world and hasn’t slowed the rate of species loss. And the Human Internet has only widened the gap between people and nature.

"But I watch kitten videos and look at pictures of wild animals on a regular basis," one could protest.

Pschera counters that images of something are not the same as the thing itself.

"Over the last two hundred years, the real animals have been replaced by likenesses. The process is dialectical: the further we distance ourselves from nature, the more we produce, reproduce, and disseminate images of animals — all without moving a single step closer to nature in the process."

What’s needed, Pschera says, is direct access, either in person or online, via the Animal Internet.

Pschera thinks that being able to watch a peregrine webcam or "follow" a wolf on Facebook will allow people to connect with animals in a way that nature documentaries and information-dense signage at provincial parks can’t. "Seeing creates knowledge and knowledge leads to action," he writes.

His logic is that interest in a single wolf leads to affection for wolves in general, which leads to advocacy that will protect wolves and the ecosystems they need to survive.

Pschera also believes that gathering data on hitherto-unstudied species, particularly migratory animals, will enable us to better plan for their protection.

But what are the ethics of the Animal Internet?

Pschera claims that there are currently nearly 50,000 wild migratory animals equipped with GPS units. Will having a large population of plugged-in animals enable us to better predict and therefore protect against natural disasters like earthquakes or avalanches? Perhaps. But does having a better early-warning system justify capturing and attaching sensors to ever-increasing numbers of wild animals?

Also, how will we go about monitoring the wealth of information created by the Animal Internet? Pschera says a global monitoring system is needed and quotes German scientist Martin Wikelski, who is attempting to partner with the European and German space administrations to implement this idea.

Are there dangers inherent in the Animal Internet? Yes. For instance, poachers could use the information provided to them by GPS units to more easily find their prey. And allowing people into land trusts and conservation areas might result in paved strips in the wilderness blanketed with discarded Tim Hortons cups.

Is the Animal Internet the answer to our environmental problems and increasing use of the Human Internet? It’s hard to say.

What is certain is that Pschera is an interesting guide to the issues — technological, scientific and philosophical — that derive from such radical thinking.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Exploring finer foods a tasty treat

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon 

Chocolate got American environmental journalist Simran Sethi through a divorce.

Chocolate, coffee and the occasional cigarette got Sethi through every page of her intriguing first book, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.

"Staples like rice, corn and wheat make up over two-thirds of the world's diet," she notes in the introduction. "But they aren't what get me out of bed in the morning or help me celebrate at night."

And so, after working as an environmental correspondent for NBC News and anchoring the PBS series Quest on science and sustainability, Sethi took three years to focus on five "intimate" foodstuffs: wine, chocolate, coffee, beer and bread.

In each of the book's sections, Sethi takes us to the places coffee, cacao, grapes, hops, yeast and wheat are grown, processed and packaged—from farmers' fields to bakeries, wineries, chocolatiers and coffee roasters.

Along the way, she asks why coffee, chocolate, wine, beer and bread taste the way they do, how they're commodified and what varieties are commonly and uncommonly grown. Which means that in addition to a cultural and personal history of each foodstuff, in each section she also writes about fair-trade practices, food distribution systems and genetic diversity.

This is a lot of ground to cover, both literally and figuratively.

Sethi's insistence that we slow down and really taste the food we're eating would be familiar to devotees of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Her focus on small farmers and fair-trade practices as well as the real cost of our industrialized approach to food evokes Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey. And her science-driven approach to how we perceive food brings to mind Alton Brown, host of Iron Chef America and a legion of other shows.

Unfortunately, this multi-pronged approach doesn't quite cohere. Bread, Wine, Chocolate doesn't really work as travel writing for foodies or food-security-focused environmental literature. It isn't a confessional memoir or a stylish cookbook.

In addition, there is a lot of sameness in book's first three sections on wine, chocolate and coffee. They're all premium products, many of which we import, and we think and talk about them in similar ways. Though the bread and beer sections provide some variety, they come nearly 200 pages into the book.

And so while Bread, Wine, Chocolate isn't as focused or as charming as one would hope, Sethi does provide us with new ways of thinking about food.

One such tidbit is this quote from conservationist Colin Khoury: "Eating anything that's not rice, wheat, corn, soy or palm oil is radical." Another is Sethi's discussions on how we perceive food, from smell to touch to taste.

Those readers interested in broadening their food vocabulary will especially appreciate the full-colour appendix of "flavour guides," including a coffee flavour wheel (and its dark twin, the coffee defect wheel) and the guides in each section on how to set up a proper wine tasting or a coffee cupping.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer who volunteers for Fruit Share.

Northern reflections: Author ponders sense of place during fortnight in the Arctic

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage
By Kathleen Winter
House of Anansi Press, 256 pages, $30

In 2010, just after the release of her much-acclaimed first novel Annabel, Montreal-based writer Kathleen Winter got an unusual phone call.

It was Noah Richler, and he was offering her his spot on the Clipper Adventurer, a ship scheduled to travel the Northwest Passage in a little less than a week.

As part of the services offered to its passengers, tour company Adventure Canada usually added ornithologists, scientists and artists to its roster of crew members. If Winter accepted, she would be the designated writer.

Winter packed her bags, stowing her husband's duct-taped and paint-smeared raincoat and a flip-flop/little-black-dress combo in her bag and locating an insulated beer cooler that would hold her old, out-of-tune concertina.

This being Kathleen Winter, she also packed a beard: "The forms and waivers came with photos of the other resource staff. I noticed they were nearly all men, and most had explorer-type beards. I happened to have a beard I'd crocheted out of brown wool on a train trip with my mother—it was a bit more Rasputin than Explorer, but it possessed loops that fit nicely around my ears, so I packed that as well."

Because of her last-minute assignment, Winter had no formal responsibilities during the two-week journey, unlike cultural ambassadors such as Greenlandic-Canadian Inuit guide Aaju Peter, Canadian Inuit guide Bernadette Dean and Winnipeg-based singer Nathan Rogers.

Winter spent her time on board writing and sketching, trying to unpack her ideas about Canada's North and what it means to be both home and away.

This process starts when she listens to Rogers perform his father's Stan's song The Northwest Passage, with its line "tracing one warm line / through a land so wild and savage."

Though now based in Montreal, Winter spent her childhood and early adulthood in Newfoundland, where she moved with her English family as a child. As a grown-up, with elderly parents and children of her own, Winter feels like a cultural orphan, being neither fully Canadian nor properly English:
"How devoid of this warm line my life had felt, uprooted from ancestry, living in industrial cities and mill towns, not understanding messages from animals or from ancestors the way Bernadette and others appeared to do."

She confides some of this to Aaju Peter, herself a mix of Greenlandic and Inuit traditions, who notes: "It's perfectly OK to belong to two cultures. Your voice is authentic, because it's human."

Consoled, Winter begins thinking on the mixed European and indigenous legacy confronting her at every step, how the two ways of life have been intertwined in the North for a long time.

She spends her evening knitting the muskox fur she's collected into the hat she's working on. She starts listening to the land, accumulating lists of fauna with English common names, Latin names and Inuit names.

And so it goes, in a relatively peaceful fashion, until the last leg of their journey, when the Clipper Adventurer runs aground and its 128 passengers have to be rescued. Winter and her fellow passengers weren't in any danger, except perhaps of missing their pre-arranged flights home while waiting for the Amundsen, the Coast Guard icebreaker that happened to be nearby conducting research, to come get them.

But adventure is not really the point of Boundless, which was recently a finalist for the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. It is a meditation in the truest sense by a skilled and ever-so-slightly strange storyteller on a two-week trip to Canada's North.

Readers who followed the discovery this past fall of Sir John Franklin's ship HMS Erebus—lost in 1845 as he searched for the Northwest Passage—will enjoy following Winter and her fellow passengers along his route, as well as Winter's account of the ceremonial unearthing of what was supposed to be the logbook from Franklin's voyage.

The long-buried box contained a cardboard box, pieces of newspaper and tallow, but like Boundless, it still makes for a pretty good story.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Northern histories explored in tale of Arctic trek

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic
By James Raffan
HarperCollins, 472 pages, $35

Based near Kingston, Ont., James Raffan has built a career writing and lecturing on Canadian wilderness travel. He has written more than a dozen books in this vein, including the bestsellers Wildwaters (1986), Summer North of Sixty (1990) and Bark, Skin and Cedar (1999), a cultural history of canoes.

In 2007, Raffan set himself a larger canvas, writing a biography of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from 1820 to 1860.

While researching that book, Raffan was intrigued to learn that Simpson had made an around-the-world tour in 1841-42, visiting the Arctic Circle in Russia. Later, Raffan was invited to attend a 2010 conference in Iqaluit on the issues facing the Arctic, whose delegate list was "heavily skewed towards non-indigenous men and women, like me, with addresses in the middle lattitudes."

After decades visiting the North, Raffan wanted to know how climate change and industry was affecting the land. But he also realized that many southerners knew nothing about the North, a point driven home when he saw tourists on weekend jaunts to Santa's Workshop theme parks in Finland and Alaska. He also noticed how fluffy polar bears had become the face of climate change for organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund.

As Raffan argues in his introduction, the North is more than Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns have made it out to be: "there are people who live in the Arctic, four million of them, in eight countries, speaking dozens of languages and representing almost as many indigenous cultures."

As such, Circling the Midnight Sun documents Raffan's three-and-a-half year circumpolar journey, visiting indigenous communities in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.

But make no mistake. With the exception of a long and bone-shaking ride to visit a Siberian shaman, where the driver blasted Russian techno-pop and smoked incessantly, and a fishing trip in Iceland that includes dolphin, this book is not adventure travel of the traditional sort.

Raffan spends much of his time in the book in transit, to and from his home, to and from remote Arctic communities.

The majority of Circling the Midnight Sun's pages, in fact, are devoted to histories of the peoples he meets.

More importantly, it also details contemporary attempts by indigenous peoples to gain any kind of sovereignty over their traditional lands, given the influx of industry, the new shipping lanes from China, Singapore and Korea, and the changing winds of politics.

Along the way, Raffan meets with political leaders, reindeer herders, activists, spiritual leaders, museum curators, artists and engineers.

Thankfully, Raffan is a careful and sympathetic tour guide to all these varied communities. What's more, he always seems aware that his is the perspective of a white southerner, that there is more to knowing a place than canoeing its rivers, so he spends most of his time listening.

One of the most memorable moments in this book comes when Raffan is served baby horse in a Siberian restaurant.

When asked by the chef, Igor Makarov, if he likes it, Raffan says, "We have horses at home. My wife and daughters are competitive riders. They are horse-lovers. Horses are a big part of our family's life as well. But I'm not sure how they will react when I tell them that I enjoyed a meal of foal here in Yakutsk."

The chef's answer encapsulates everything that Circling the Midnight Sun attempts: overcoming culture shock, deepening our ideas about indigenous peoples, and beginning a north-south dialogue.

"Here in Sakha, horses are sacred," replied Makarov. "They are a part of who we are. They have been a part of Sakha culture as long as anyone can remember. And, for my part, I can't imagine loving a horse and not eating them."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

The not-so-big chill: Naturalist's northern reflections feel guarded, routine

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild
By Jennifer Kingsley
Greystone Books, 240 pages, $30

These days, Ottawa-based naturalist Jennifer Kingsley builds radio documentaries about encounters with whales and is the on-board naturalist for National Geographic tours through the Northwest Passage.

But, back in 2005, when she embarked on a 54-day canoe trip to the Arctic with five companions, she was still trying to figure out the boundaries of what increasingly was becoming a "wilderness-bound life," saying "most of the people closest to me would never see me in the places I love most, where I am often my best and sometimes at my worst."

The record of this negotiation is Paddlenorth, Kingsley's first book. This is travel writing of an extreme sort, where the narrator describes her numb and cracked feet and bug-bitten skin with a kind of pride.

Unfortunately, Kingsley is unwilling to slip into either the naturalist or confessional modes that are de rigueur for either nature writing or memoir, and the book suffers as a result.

Though she now makes her living as a guide for other people seeking their own adventures, Kingsley seems reluctant to spend too much time describing the landscape around her or to put what she's seeing into context for the reader.

For instance, Kingsley fervently hopes that their journey on Nunavut's Back River intersects with the annual barrens caribou migration, writing over and over that this is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." Eventually, their group is surrounded by more caribou than Kingsley can count. But what's missing is the information that the caribou herds were in significant decline even in 2005, and that there were concerns by northern officials over how rising temperatures owing to climate change and the incursions by mining companies in caribou calving grounds were affecting the herds.

Kingsley is also unwilling delve too deeply into the interpersonal relationships among the six companions. And that's a shame, because it robs the book of much of the "resilience" and "renewal" promised in the book's subtitle. We don't really get to know more than one or two of the other paddlers and the conflict suggested by passages here and there is never fully explored.

Kingsley chooses to fill these gaps with descriptions of other travellers in the region, focusing in on British naval officer and explorer George Back, who explored the area in 1834 as well as the disastrous tenure of Catholic missionary Joseph Builiard in the area in 1949.

She also goes into great detail about the ill-conceived 1955 Arctic journey led by Arthur Moffatt, which led to his death from hypothermia.

All of these histories are interesting, but they're exclusively male and Euro-western. (Where are the Inuit and Dene stories from the region, both historical and contemporary?)

They also serve to highlight the fact that, while anyone would agree that spending the summer canoeing in the Arctic is extreme, there is very little privation for Kingsley and her companions. They have space-age fabrics, maps and plenty of food to see them through their trip.

Which leaves us with the subtitle's final hook: "adventure." Yes, Kingsley's group traverses several sets of big rapids and even capsizes a canoe early on. They also have to wait out some nasty weather, which threatens to delay their departure, but everything mostly goes as planned...

Towards the end of Paddlenorth, Kingsley writes "everybody has a different reason for committing a journey to paper, and no one has the same memory." She's talking about George Grinnell's 1996 account of the Moffatt expedition, but she could have easily been discussing her own story.

It's unclear what Kingsley's reasons were for writing about this particular trip, especially as she's since been on dozens of others and because she seems so guarded about what seems to have been a largely uneventful trip.

My wish for her is that the next time she writes an account of her travels—and I'd like to read that next book— that she trusts both her readers and herself a little more.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Lost in the wilderness

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants

By Jane Goodall with Gail Hudson
Grand Central Publishing, 420 pages, $33

In 1960, 24-year-old Jane Goodall arrived in Tanzania to study chimpanzees.

Sent by British scientist Louis Leakey, the former secretary initially had to be chaperoned by her mother. Goodall later obtained a PhD from Cambridge University in ethology, a branch of zoology that studies animal behaviour, based on the her work at the Gombe Stream National Park.

Goodall began by studying our closest relatives, discovering their propensity for using tools and hunting small mammals for meat. These were startling revelations in their day, since it was believed that using tools was a human trait and that chimpanzees were vegetarian.

More than five decades later, Goodall is still far from home, and still part of the conversation about what it means to be human.

The octogenarian spends 300 days a year on the road, lecturing on conservation and raising funds for both the Jane Goodall Institute, which funds ongoing research at Gombe, as well as Roots and Shoots, a global youth-education program.

This spring sees the publication of her 25th book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, the third book she's co-written with journalist and former spirituality editor for Amazon.com, Gail Hudson.

Refreshingly, Goodall is upfront about her credentials: "Of course I am best known... for the study of the Gombe chimpanzees... But there would be no chimpanzees without plants - not human beings either, for that matter. And the chimpanzee might never have materialized for me had I not been obsessed, as a child, with stories of the wilderness areas of the planet and, most especially, the forests of Africa."

And so, in Seeds of Hope Goodall (and her co-writer) describes her specific history while also presenting a brief history of the different kinds of plants and trees, and how they have been cultivated over time. Goodall relies heavily on stories from the environmental and community groups she works with.

She also delivers a handful of big ideas with her anecdotes: Organic food is healthiest, the effects of GMOs on humans aren't fully known, mono-cultures aren't sustainable over the long term, we need our forests to be fully human.

All these big ideas bear repeating; the problem with Goodall's approach to these issues, however, is that readers aren't left with a big picture. The material hopscotches geographically between England and Africa, the two poles of Goodall's life, with stops nearly everywhere her tour bus has paused in between - but there's very little cohesion.

Also, although Goodall is reliably charming, the sections that include material outside of her first-hand experience and/or limited areas of expertise feel like they were written by an inexperienced speechwriter.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Goodall and her collaborators were accused of plagiarism last year by the Washington Post after the American edition was released.

Goodall subsequently apologized and pledged to work with editors to correct future editions. Potential readers will be glad to hear the Canadian edition has received a relatively thorough going-over.

But even that last-minute tinkering wasn't enough to save Seeds of Hope; though its authors are earnest, the book isn't half as compelling as it should be.

Those looking for a local equivalent should dip into The Global Forest by Ontario-based botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, who is also interested in working with storytelling and environmental advocacy.

J.B. MacKinnon's The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, shortlisted for this year's Charles Taylor Prize for non-fiction, is also worth a read as it digs into the archeological record and challenges some of the assumptions underlying the main tenets of conservation.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer who once considered a career in science journalism.

Tough to connect with characters in intriguing, dystopian tale

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

On Such a Full Sea

by Chang-rae Lee

Riverhead Books, 368 pages, $33

American novelist Chang-rae Lee writes what could be called Ivy League fiction.

After doing an MFA at Yale, his first novel, 1995's Native Speaker, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Since then, on top of his work teaching creative writing at Princeton, Lee has written a book every four or five years, which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2010 for The Surrendered.

Lee's most recent book, the dystopian On Such a Full Sea, represents a departure for the Korean-born writer.

Having written about the intersections of class and race in books that referenced Korean comfort women during the Second World War (A Gesture Life) and orphanages in post-Korean War South Korea (The Surrendered), Lee has abandoned specific histories for imagined ones, and race for class.

This shift is front and centre in the book's opening passage: "It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think, Why bother? Except for a lucky few, everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone."

So, instead of the United States of America, we have the Association of Charter Villages, run by multinational corporations instead of governments.

The villages are home to the upper class and ultra-rich. Middle-class people live in directorates, which are basically company towns, producing goods for Charter citizens such as fish raised in tanks and vegetables cultivated in greenhouses.

On Such a Full Sea's main characters, a young couple named Fan and Reg, were born and raised in B-Mor, a directorate assigned to a group of immigrants from China, which is close to the Charter village Seneca.

Though there are few perks in the directorates, there is the security of (crowded) housing and (increasingly limited) medical care. Lower-class people live in the open counties, where there are no illusions: If you can't afford something, you try to take it by force.

A cynical reader would note here that this state of affairs isn't that different from our current circumstances... but what is different is that the citizens of Lee's imagined world all eventually contract C, or cancer.

And Reg, a gangly 19-year-old gardener, is somehow C-free. When medical tests reveal this fact, he is whisked away by administrators.

Fan, a diminutive 16-year-old tank-diver, resolves to find him and leaves B-Mor for the outlands. She doesn't have any inkling where he might be, but leaving seems to be a logical first step.

She spends the rest of the novel moving in the opposite direction from most upwardly mobile Association residents: from B-Mor to the outlands to Seneca, a Charter village.

Interestingly, although Fan spends little to no time in B-Mor, her story is narrated by a directorate resident who prefers the first-person plural. He is the one who describes the ins and outs of Association society, who reflects on the changes to B-Mor after the disappearance of Reg and the departure of Fan, and who tries to make sense of all their lives.

So the question remains: is On Such a Full Sea a fully formed dystopia? A fully formed fiction?
While Lee's imagined world has some interesting flourishes and some ingenious ideas, it never coalesces into a completely convincing whole.

And while it is masterfully written, in Lee's trademark formal diction and elaborate, slightly overwritten sentences, ultimately we know Fan and Reg the way our anonymous narrator does: by name and in passing.

Although On Such a Full Sea probably won't be counted among Chang-rae Lee's successes, it does make for a most interesting departure.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Bold combo of memoir, travelogue

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage
By Jay Ruzesky
Nightwood Editions, 240 pages, $25

On his mother's side, British Columbia poet and professor Jay Ruzesky is a cousin, twice-removed, of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

Ruzesky's compelling new memoir, In Antarctica, tells the story of his trip to the Antarctic a century after his ancestor became the first person to set foot on the South Pole.

Ruzesky, who now teaches in Duncan, spent his childhood dreaming of the polar expeditions. But his adult life had been consumed by writing three collections of poetry and a novel, teaching and having a family.

As the 2011 anniversary of Amundsen's achievement approached, Ruzesky tried to reconcile himself to not following in his ancestor's footsteps.

He failed. Instead, Ruzesky found himself online, booking a berth on a ship that would take him from Patagonia to the Antarctic.

What's more, he convinced his brother Scott to come along, even if his sibling's first question was, "Which one of us is Amundsen?"

Ruzesky knew he was incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt but thought there might be a book in his trip across the ice. (Which, in case you're wondering, makes perfect economic sense to a poet.)

Structurally, In Antarctica parallels Ruzesky's 2011 trip with episodes from Amundsen's 1911 voyage on the Fram and his earlier expedition to the Antarctic on the Belgica in 1887. His title is obviously an homage to the late Bruce Chatwin's classic 1977 travel memoir, In Patagonia.

The sections from Ruzesky's point of view meld travel writing with memoir, which effectively sets the stage for the writer's month-long voyage.

For instance, though Ruzesky has called B.C. home for 20 years, he spent his childhood in the cold-weather climes of Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon and Calgary.

One story that would be familiar to anyone who grew up on the Prairies details how the entrance collapsed to the quinzee he and his schoolmates had built in their school playground in Thunder Bay.
 This is meaningful, given that Amundsen's crew spent more than a year in a large hut connected to a series of snow caves on the Ross Ice Shelf before making their attempt on the pole.

Also interesting is Ruzesky's anecdote of a failed dog-sledging lesson in Whitehorse in 2002. Knowing that Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was largely attributed to his use of dogs instead of ponies, like his English rival Robert Falcon Scott, supercharges this story.

Ruzesky also includes meditations on exploration and cartography and provides context for Amundsen's journey by providing thumbnail sketches of other voyages to both the North and South poles.

The other half of In Antarctica is in Amundsen's voice, an incredibly detailed account that Ruzesky somehow cobbled together from the explorer's journals and photographs.

More importantly, these sections are very finely written. Ruzesky illuminates Amundsen's dreamy childhood and his possible motives for devoting his life to exploration instead of medicine, as his mother would have preferred.

Ruzesky's description of Admundsen's affair with the married Sigrid Castberg that preceded the 1911 voyage, however, read like the best historical fiction.

All of which is to say that In Antarctica is a bold and satisfying composite of creative non-fiction, memoir and travel writing.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg poet whose paternal great-grandfather died on the shores of Antarctica's South Georgia Island in 1914.

Ecological 'rewilding' a manly affair

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life
By George Monbiot
Allen Lane, 336 pages, $30

Rabble-rousing U.K. journalist George Monbiot doesn't much like sheep.

In his eighth book, Feral, he minces no words about the effect the ruminants have on the British landscape: "Sheep farming in this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution."

Monbiot worked as an investigative journalist in Brazil, Indonesia and East Africa for six years. He's been a columnist for The Guardian for nearly two decades, writing on multinational corporations (2000's The Captive State), democratic reform (2003's The Age of Consent) and climate change (2006's Heat).

.But it was a move to the Welsh countryside with his young family in 2007 that forced Monbiot to focus on his immediate surroundings: the heaths and moors of the Cambrian Mountains.

Even though his Guardian column demanded that he range across disciplines - from science to economics to politics - Monbiot realized he felt disengaged from his body and his environment. He was, as he called it, "ecologically bored."

After a little digging, Monbiot realized that the Welsh landscape was not especially natural. As little as 1,300 years ago, according to the fossil record, most of the U.K. was covered in forest. Man cut down the trees and then filled the empty spaces with sheep, who browse anything green down to the ground.

"Heather, which many nature-lovers in Britain cherish, is typical of the hardy, shrubby plants which colonize deforested land," writes Monbiot. "I do not see heather moor as an indicator of the health of the upland environment, as many do, but as a product of ecological destruction."

What follows is an argument for the "rewilding" of the British uplands so as to reverse some of the environmental damage they've sustained and re-invigorate the people who live there.

Rewilding, according to Monbiot, "involves reintroducing absent plants and animals (and in a few cases culling exotic species which cannot be contained by native wildlife), pulling down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, but otherwise stepping back." Monbiot advocates rewilding only in areas "in which production is so low that farming continues only as a result of the taxpayer's generosity."

Readers may be wondering how Monbiot's ideas apply to the North American landscape. While we don't have sheep, we do have cattle ranches and a high density of deer in both rural and urban areas. And scientists and conservation officers across the country are currently asking some of the same questions Monbiot does on the value of maintaining (and in some cases reintroducing) keystone species such as beavers and wolves.

Unfortunately, Monbiot sandwiches his largely compelling arguments between chapters that detail his goal to live a life "richer in adventure and surprise." (In Monbiot's case that mostly seems to mean the times he nearly kills himself with his sea kayak.)

In addition, while Monbiot was likely motivated by beginning a family to write Feral, there is no denying that the risk-taking he describes is gendered. It is predicated on the fact that there is someone at home with the children who is not trying to kill herself with a sea kayak.

Combine those interludes with Monbiot's nostalgic recollections of his adventures in East Africa and Brazil and, well, you've got a very manly book.

Part of the posturing is probably due to the fact that Monbiot is a ‘radical thinker’ and not a lowly scientist or an academic. These stories are meant, at least in part, to establish Monbiot’s bona fides.

They’re also likely an attempt to inject some colour into a book where he mostly wanders through the woods, muttering bleakly about sheep.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

McAdam rises to challenge of species barrier

Winnipeg Free Press—PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

A Beautiful Truth 

By Colin McAdam 

Hamish Hamilton, 304 pages, $30

ONTARIO literary writer Colin McAdam's compelling third novel manages to be both violent and loving, eloquent and non-verbal. Which is apt for a book that features an ensemble cast of humans and chimpanzees.

Those readers shuddering at the prospect of another "animal novel" can rest assured. Like Newfoundlander Jessica Grant in 2009's Come, Thou Tortoise, and Toronto's Barbara Gowdy in her 1999 elephant novel The White Bone, McAdam rises to the challenge of writing across the species barrier, where before he'd settled for crossing class lines and the gender divide.

Structurally, A Beautiful Truth is a Canadian Museum for Human Rights whereas his previous books, Fall (2009) and Some Great Thing (2004), are roomy houses.

Rather than two or three main characters, for instance, here there are almost a dozen major and minor characters. The humans include Walt, a developer who adopts a baby chimp, David, a scientist conducting ape research, and Mike, an ambitious local politician who has an instinctive dislike of chimps.

The first half of the book is largely spent in the humans' heads, mostly with the easygoing Walt, as is evidenced by the novel's plummy opening sentence:

"Judy and Walter Walt Ribke lived on 12 up-and-down acres, open to whatever God gave them, on the eastern boundary of Addison County, four feet deep in years of rueful contentment."

McAdam has the childless couple rationalizing their decision, first, to import an exotic animal, and then, a dozen years later, dealing with the inevitable results.

By the time we're two-thirds of the way in, McAdam is narrating almost entirely from the point of view of the chimps, who are housed in different sections of a biomedical facility.

And as one of them, Looee, is dosed with antidepressants and anesthetics, and exposed to a variety of illnesses, we know there is no going back for either Walt or Looee.

The narrative complexity doesn't detract from McAdam's biggest strength: portrayals of ardent but bashful men who find themselves on the cusp of, and then in the middle of, episodes of violence.
And, like his previous novels, A Beautiful Truth is difficult but not dreary, because McAdam always carefully acknowledges that consensus and communion are possible.

He has even invented a word for the experience of these states, used in the chimp sections: "oa."
It is this kind of inventiveness with language, as well as McAdam's use of short, one-paragraph sentences, mimicking the keyed-in exchanges between researchers and subjects, that makes these sections especially effective.

McAdam has drawn on the results that came out of the first ape studies in 1960s and '70s, specifically the Nim Chimpsky and Washoe Projects. He also spent time observing apes at the Fauna Foundation, a Canadian chimpanzee sanctuary based in Chambly, Que.

Are there beautiful truths at the centre of A Beautiful Truth?

Many of us know that it is dangerous to try to make a child out of a chimpanzee. But what does it say about us that, like Walt and Judy, many pet owners describe themselves as "parents," and that doggy daycares cost more than human ones?

What does it say about us that we confine our closest relatives to zoos and research facilities?

Finally, what does it mean to be human? Are language and functional vocal cords the only things that separates us from dolphins and elephants?

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

What we see, or miss, when out in the world

Winnipeg Free Press —PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes 
By Alexandra Horowitz
Scribner, 320 pages, $30

NEW YORKER Alexandra Horowitz is a psychologist with a PhD in cognitive science. She's studied rhinoceroses, bonobos and humans, but it was when she turned her attention to dogs, specifically to her own dog Pumpernickel, that she found her niche.

The result was the international bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (2009), which combined Horowitz's observations of her pet with current research.

Her intriguing followup is about what humans see - and what we miss and why - when out in the world.

Horowitz begins On Looking by walking around her own block and describing what she sees. She then retraces her steps with a variety of experts, including a geologist, a sound designer and a blind person, as well as with her dog and infant son.

One of the problems with the book is that the conceit she sells early on - to the extent that she uses quotes from her initial essay as epigraphs for the essays that follow - is flabby.

While three of the chapters stay close to home, literally walking the walk, other chapters adapt themselves to Horowitz's companions' areas of interest. So we loiter downtown for our walk with the font nerd and experience the crowds of Broadway with the urban sociologist but also travel to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

And so readers lose the baseline of the original itinerary, trading the intimacy of Horowitz's block for Anytown, U.S.A.

And while Horowitz is an eloquent and affable host on these walks, she sometimes veers towards the precious, confiding in a footnote, for instance, that her footnotes are nowhere near as surprising and original as those of Oliver Sacks.

More troubling is her apology for using technical terms in this excerpt from her walk with Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History: "One risks, in writing about geology, numbing one's readership with the terminology. Schist, gneiss, phyllite; metamorphic, sedimentary, siliciclastic, schistosity. It can be dizzying. I sympathize. I hear 'Paleozoic' and I nearly drop right into a deep sleep."

It is counter-intuitive, almost bewildering, to hear a scientist apologize for talking science. Isn't that why we read books of popular science?

In addition, U.S. publisher Scribner has chosen to include some of the Horowitz's line drawings with the text, but their postage-stamp size means that they're too small to be of any real use as illustrations. And while it is lovely to see the paintings that came from Horowitz's walk with artist Maira Kalman, the two colour plates seem somehow out of place.

These quibbles aside, On Looking is a quietly illuminating study of how human beings process all the information available to them when doing something like going for a walk. Particularly interesting is Horowitz's analysis of how expertise changes the brain.

Of course, the answer to the question "How do I keep myself from missing things?" is "You have to spend time looking!"

But just as being able to guess the murderer halfway through a mystery isn't always fatal, it doesn't matter here either, because Horowitz reminds us of the specific wealth of what there is to see: animals and rocks and buildings and people, smells and sounds and textures.

Finally, as non-fiction devotees know, one of the pleasures of the genre is that even though you might not be wholly persuaded by the main thesis, you're certain to pick up nuggets of useful and novel information.

Like the notion that typhoid is supposed to smell like "freshly baked brown bread," and that rats produce a particular sound "to accompany pain or social defeat, and oddly, ejaculation."

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Keeping the Books Section

On January 19, the Winnipeg Free Press printed an editorial by Paul Samyn entitled It's your paper too, so what do you want to see? 

In his editorial, Samyn wrote that they are contemplating changes to the Saturday edition of the paper:

"We are starting with a blank canvas that will, in short order, become a new showcase section in your weekend edition of the Free Press. My only marching orders to our staff are to create a section that readers are prepared to fight for when they pick up the paper Saturday morning. But what are your marching orders as a reader? What do you want to read? What do you need to read?"

This means that the Books Section, which has always run in the Saturday paper, is in danger of changing format, or, worse, disappearing altogether.

Which, obviously, would be bad. But let's chat for a second about WHY I would specifically be impacted if the Books Section went away...

Under Morley Walker's tenure as editor, the Books Section reviewed titles that would be of interest nationally and internationally but also regional titles that might not get reviewed elsewhere. 

Not only that, but he included poetry in the mix, with a monthly poetry column.

As a female poet living on the prairies (i.e. outside of the major centres), publishing her first book of poetry (!) about pregnancy and mothering (!), I was worried that I might not get reviewed anywhere.

And so it was so so wonderful to have my book reviewed in the pages of the Books Section.

But my connection to the Books Section, as a writer and a reader is much older than that 2010 review. 

I started reviewing for the WFP in 2002. Prior to that, Morley was the arts columnist I loved to hate. But I was introduced to a different Morley via my freelancing for the Books Section. 

For all his impress-me-I-dare-you arts columnist bluster, Morley is one of the best editors I've ever had. 

I've submitted sixty-some-odd reviews to Morley over the past decade, poetry and fiction. He always told me what he liked about my reviews. And when he didn't like my reviews, he told me why and gave me time to fix them, without any jeopardy attached.

But in addition to our freelancer/editor relationship, Morley has invested a lot of time and effort keeping the Books Section going over the years and so I'm grateful to him for that, too.

So, if we're keeping a tally, the Books Section has helped build my career as a poet and a reviewer.

But more than that, Morley and the Books Section have contributed to the literary community in this city. We've got great writers in Winnipeg, of every genre, of every inclination, and that's partly because we're a place where discussions about writing of every genre, of every inclination, happen every weekend in the daily newspaper.

The Books Section doesn't only celebrate local titles. It also critiques them, which is far more useful to writers and readers than a review filled with puffery. 

So, please, let's tell the Winnipeg Free Press that we want to keep our Books Section. That we want to keep having meaningful, local conversations about books and ideas.

Here's what you can do:

1) Comment on Paul Samyn's editorial.
2) Send the editors an email at feedback@freepress.mb.ca
3) Send Paul Samyn a letter c/o the Free Press newsroom, 1355 Mountain Ave, Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6

Thanks!

Experimental novel a book and book-making project

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION 
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon 

Love and the Mess We’re In
By Stephen Marche
Gaspereau Press, 272 pages, $29

THIS Canadian experimental novel tells the curious love story of Tim and Viv and Clive and Viv and the enduring friendship of Tim and Clive.

Toronto author Stephen Marche tells it in fragments and asides and lyrical bursts. It reveals, for instance, both sides of a dinner conversation, the spoken and the unspoken, between (journalist) Clive and (novelist) Viv just before they embark on an affair: "Lying on the bed full of Tim / Clive steak guilt flight adultery / money rain."

It describes (ornithologist) Tim’s life in a mental institution after a sudden breakdown and Viv and Clive’s separate grieving of his loss.

But that’s only the story. The design of the book, its typography, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
The text is sometimes laid out sideways on the page. It occasionally undulates. It periodically runs in a circle. In one instance, it is interspersed with drawings of constellations.

All of which suggests a book of poetry, right down to the publisher’s choice of creamy, subtly textured paper of the kind often used by poetry presses.

But Marche writes novels. This is his third. So it must be approached as a novel as well as a book that is lovely to look at and hold.

Now its publisher, Nova Scotiabased Gaspereau Press, is already known for producing beautiful books, but Love and the Mess We’re In was a particular labour of love for Marche and his collaborator Andrew Steeves, Gaspereau’s publisher and an award-winning typographer.

Marche reputedly wrote the book in a year and then turned it over to Steeves, who spent two years laying it out in consultation with Marche.

This is not a typical production schedule. But neither Steeves nor Marche are known for being strictly conventional.

Take Marche’s first book, 2005’s Raymond and Hannah (Random House), an erotically charged story of a troubled relationship divided by faith and geography where the point of view shifts from paragraph to paragraph. Its marginal notes are often the only clue to who is speaking.

Steeves earned notoriety when Gaspereau was unable — or unwilling — to print enough books to meet the demand for Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists after it won the 2010 Giller Prize.

But no matter how many conventions Love and Mess We’re In subverts, the real test is whether or not it works as art. Is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Do the design and typography add to the power of the story or are they just elaborate window-dressing?

Well, mostly, yes.

Though the novel runs 272 pages, it lacks the nuance and the exhaustive examination of two people and their relationship that Marche specializes in. (Likely the word count would put it more in the novella range, which is a smaller canvas than March usually employs.) And while Tim, Viv and Clive are all compelling characters with an original tragedy to share between them, the fact that Clive and Viv are writers means that both our leads are excruciating articulate.

Also, Tim’s mental illness often seems like more of a plot device than real, lived experience.

But make no mistake. Love and the Mess We’re In is not a failure (or, if it is, it’s as grand failure as you’ll ever read).

It is a book and a book-making project that should appeal to visual artists, anyone interested in the book-as-fetish-object, readers of experimental fiction and poetry, and fans of both Steeves (and the rest of the crew at Gaspereau) and Marche.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer and poet.

Lyon's sequel bit bumpy, but what a ride it is...

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION 
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

The Sweet Girl
By Annabel Lyon
Random House Canada, 236 pages, $30

A sequel to her much-ballyhooed The Golden Mean (2009), B.C. writer Annabel Lyon's The Sweet Girl is also a coming-of-age novel.

The first explored the prime of the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, the second a tumultuous year in the life of his teenage daughter, Pythias.

The first is about striving for balance, the second, the struggle to survive.

Rest assured, The Sweet Girl - recently longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize -  has inherited its predecessor's marvellous ability to wheel between the mind and the body, between thinking and feeling. It is just as canny, just as agonizing, just as alive.

But in The Sweet Girl, gods literally walk the earth. They are not Aristotle's "metaphysical necessity ... remote and oblivious and lost in contemplation," but lurid and powerful realities.

Which, if you're keeping track, makes this both magic realism-tinged fiction and historical fiction.
In addition, where Aristotle's story featured a bipolar polymath forced to learn control, to find focus, Pythias's revolves around class and gender and is steeped in chaos.

Early in the novel, Pythias calls herself "Daddy's Shadow," and it's true, their household revolves around Aristotle's work and his (declining) health.

Pythias is both stubbornly intelligent and much-loved, a combination that allows her to resist the roles assigned to women in ancient Greece while her father is alive.

After he dies and the household disperses, Pythias must somehow step out from behind Aristotle's long shadow, lift her veil, and speak.

This means somehow reconciling her honeyed childhood with the rawness of life as a woman with no money and few choices.

Structurally, the Vancouver-based Lyon, who studied classical music, philosophy and law, has taken a few risks in The Sweet Girl.

The first half of the novel is business as usual, charting Pythias's childhood in Athens and her family's flight to Macedonia after Alexander the Great dies while on campaign in Babylon (what is now Iraq).

The second half is both more and less controlled. The grieving Pythias finds herself unwilling to return to Athens and live in the household of Theophrastos, Aristotle's protégé and successor at the Lyceum.

Theophrastos has opinions about the education of girls, which would mean Pythias's days would be spent at the loom instead of conducting dissections or reading.
So instead Pythias attempts to maintain Aristotle's household while waiting for the man her father wanted her to marry - an older cousin who is a soldier in Alexander's army -  to return home.

She fails, of course. She is 16, with no experience running an estate, no allies, and, most important, no money.

And so she becomes an acolyte at a temple of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and protector of young girls. Disheartened by the avarice of the priestesses, she becomes an apprentice to the local midwife/abortionist and then, briefly, a prostitute.

Pythias has just reconciled herself to the realities of her new life when her prospective husband arrives, battle-scarred and deeply exhausted.

She is lucky. Her fiancé doesn't care about Pythias's sexual history or her bookish pursuits. But like Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter in Winnipegger Joan Thomas's 2010 novel Curiosity, Pythias will never be able to truly transcend class and gender.

Though The Sweet Girl ultimately succeeds in telling a story that is both the same as and different enough from The Golden Mean, readers might find themselves wondering why Pythias considers prostitution to be a better option than a few months of safe boredom.

Also, the second half of the novel is both exhilarating and a burr under the book's saddle. It is both too formulaic and too bumpy.

But, oh, what a ride!

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

Maclear's risk-taking creates important novel

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

Stray Love
By Kyo Maclear
HarperCollins, 320 pages, $30

TORONTO writer Kyo Maclear's lovely second novel is set in present-day London and Vietnam War-era Saigon and tells the story an adopted son of a British foreign correspondent.

Marcel Laurence, despite his European name, grows up non-white in 1950s England, with no idea who - or where - his birth parents are. The one constant in his life is his adoptive father Oliver, who himself was orphaned by the London blitz.

Given all of that, it will surprise no one to hear that Maclear - the British-Japanese daughter of foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear - has focused Stray Love on issues of identity, loss and healing. Traditional Canlit tropes, right?

But it is Maclear's risk-taking, her willingness to write characters so close to her own experience and to put them through so very much that makes Stray Love an important novel. It also firmly establishes Maclear in the echelon of home-and-abroad writers such as Madeleine Thien and Karen Connelly.

Interestingly, while Maclear takes great pains to get Marcel - and her readers - to 1960s Vietnam, the majority of her novel's conflicts are domestic.

Oliver, though distracted by his work and its attendant demons, works hard to keep the details of the war - the zippo missions and hot zones he reports on - from his son.

He also works hard to keep the identity of Marcel's birth parents a secret. All Marcel knows is that his mother was briefly institutionalized and that Oliver loved her. Which isn't much help to Marcel, whose mixed-race appearance draws stares from adults and taunts from schoolmates in England.

Once in Vietnam, however, 11-year-old Marcel is left his own devices, which include drawing in his notebook and wandering the streets around Hotel Continental, the home base for Saigon's foreign correspondents.

Though everything around him is strange, Marcel is startled by how at home he feels in Vietnam:

"In Saigon, I walked lightly. I bore fewer questions, suffered less scrutiny and, consequently, felt more at ease. Everywhere I looked, I saw faces that resembled mine, Eurasian faces, Hmong faces, in-between faces."

Maclear's previous novel, The Letter Opener (1997) and the children's book Spork (2010), were similarly focused on identity.

Unlike Stray Love, which relies on the documentary evidence of Marcel's drawings and Oliver's newspaper clippings, Maclear's earlier work puts a lot of weight, metaphorically, on objects.

Maclear’s debut is told from the point of view of Naiko, a Japanese-British woman who works in Toronto’s Undeliverable Mail Office. The commitment-shy Naiko knows it’s all “just stuff” but finds it reassuring that objects can act as placekeepers for memories, how they are, literally, souvenirs.

Spork, written before the birth of Maclear’s first child, is the story of a piece of cutlery that “is neither spoon nor fork…but a bit of both.”

Structurally, Stray Love alternates between Marcel's insecure childhood and his middle age, where he is still uncertain about who he is, even if he now knows who his parents are.

Marcel is driven into memories of his childhood when his oldest friend, the Japanese-English Kiyomi, asks if he can look after her daughter Iris for a few weeks.

Iris drags out a suitcase of Marcel's mother's things, which Marcel must now deal with, literally and figuratively, before Kiyomi comes to pick up Iris.

Maclear can be forgiven for making Marcel's "baggage" manifest, after all the darkness that has preceded it. It's all "just stuff," right?

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.

A look back at the books of 2011

Free Press reviewers recall favourite reads this year
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

By now, all the awards have been handed out and the sales figures tabulated. The best books of 2011 have been chewed over endlessly in recent weeks, and so have the bestsellers.

This year, as a New Year’s Eve retrospective, we asked Free Press reviewers to choose a few favourites — titles they loved that might have been overlooked.

Here are their choices, with excerpts from their reviews, listed alphabetically.

Non-fiction

Cow: A Bovine Biography,
by Florian Werner
"Werner reminds us that bovines are inextricably linked to humans, and thinking more deeply about our relationship with them can show us a new perspective on our own humanity." — Julie Kentner

It’s So Easy,
by Duff McKagan
"The Guns N’ Roses co-founder and former bassist’s memoir is sobering stuff — and it makes for a compelling read." — David Jón Fuller

Poetry

Nobody Move,
by Susan Stenson
"The Victoria poet/publisher’s latest book is full of well-worn husbands, of sex and childhood and shaggy dogs." — Ariel Gordon

L’il Bastard,
by David McGimpsey
"McGimpsey takes a fun approach to a timeworn poetic form, with hilarious ‘chubby sonnets’ of 16 lines exploring a life filled to bursting with wit, wordplay, and tacos." — Jonathan Ball

Giving up

After two years co-poetry columning with Jennifer Still, this is my last review. We decided to give it up for Lent.

Neither of us is Catholic but it was a definitely a voluntary sacrifice writing the column.

So many months it felt like torture condensing my thoughts on a book and the years of thinking and feeling behind it down to 150 words. And then doing it again three times.

But at the same time, I was so grateful to be forced to read. And I felt so goddamn current: short-lists would come out and I'd have read/reviewed at least half.

It'll be a sacrifice to not be writing the column. I was SO proud to be writing the column, given the example of Alison Calder and Maurice Mierau. And it was good for me to have poetry stuffed up my nose month after month.

I'll miss it but I'm glad it/we're done. And Jonathan Ball, who will be taking over as of September, will do a bang-up job.

And if he doesn't, it's none of my concern! HA!

My thanks to Books Editor Morley Walker and to Jennifer Still, who will be touring that new book of hers this fall to points east.

Mooney's second collection offers depth, strange intimacy

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon

Jacob McArthur Mooney's second collection, Folk (McClelland & Stewart, 104 pages, $19), is a kind of archeology and anthropology of his childhood home and his current home - that is, Nova Scotia and Toronto.

But Mooney's poems are much more about placelessness as they are about place.

The first section, for instance, unpacks the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 in St. Margaret's Bay from the point of view of locals, which absolutely includes the kid in "Deterministic Error Chain," "who saw the sign at the saltwater pool that read / No Diving and thought, I should really draw a picture / of an airplane, there."

Folk's second section circles Malton, Ont., whose chief employer is Lester B. Pearson International Airport. And grounding the poems in this neutral location, in an anonymous point of departure instead of a known destination - a known outcome - lends the book depth and a strange intimacy.

* * *
Open Air Bindery (Biblioasis, 72 pages, $19) is also the second collection for David Hickey of London, Ont.

Hickey hails from the Maritimes originally, so here, too, we get prodigal poems, but Open Air Bindery is as informed by the poet's insomnia and his (perhaps concurrent) backyard astronomy as it is by any notion of homecoming.

Set on ferries and in hotel rooms and suburban neighbourhoods with their "collected sidewalk(s)" and "selected raccoon(s)," these poems are wry and tired and human.

Hickey might proclaim himself "lost in the staging / of the twentieth-first century. // And never sure / if it's my turn to sing" ("Short Lives"), but in this book he croons out into never-ending night, ignoring the demands of the day to come.

* * *
To date, more than 3.3 million people have watched Halifax poet Tanya Davis perform her poem "How to Be Alone" in a short film by Andrea Dorfman on YouTube.

The poem ends abruptly, appropriately, with the following lines: "You could be, in an instant, surrounded, if you need it. / If your heart is bleeding make the best of it // There is heat in freezing, be a testament."

Davis is also a singer-songwriter, so it is no surprise that she put out three albums of music before publishing her first book, At First, Lonely (Acorn Press, 72 pages, $18).

The genre-bending Davis is at her best when writing long prose-like meditations like "Lapsed Catholic" (on guilt), "Made in Canada" (on hitchhiking across the country) and This "Tear Is a Word" (on crying in public).

At First, Lonely is a brave little book, full of thoughtful consolations.

* * *
Gabe Foreman hails from Thunder Bay but lives in Montreal, where he manages the soup kitchen at a mission when not writing poetry.

But in his debut - A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Books, 96 pages, $18) - Foreman is less interested in documenting the disparities between urban and rural or rich and poor and opts instead for surreal soap opera.

Featuring a cast of characters that includes Shy Rhonda, the Oracle, the Colonel and Your Dad, Foreman contemplates "types" as varied as bargain hunters and organ donors, innocent bystanders and empty-nesters.

Think loopy libretto. No, think social network-as-poetry, with its attendant bad puns and empty threats, as in "Armchair Psychologists": "I'm the sort / of extrovert / who makes his own furniture / and forces people to sit in it."

Experimental poets are expected to write their way out of elaborate constraints, through fanciful conceits, and have whimsy to burn.

In Foreman's case, being faithful to the conceit - the encyclopedia format - apparently means including illustrations. They range from pie charts to Venn diagrams to doodles, but their effect is inconsistent and therefore distracting, especially as the poems are so very assured.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.