My Uncle Oswald (1979)

     Roald Dahl My Uncle Oswald (1979) I started this book some years ago, and found it again recently while trying to reduce the pile of books in the case by the bed. I won’t finish it. It’s silly and “clever” in the worst sense, like most of Dahl’s work. The plot of the novel is that Uncle Oswald discovers an aphrodisiac, and decides to use it for a spot of blackmail in order to get very, very rich. I think Dahl fancies himself as a writer in the Saki tradition, but he lacks the underlying moral sense of Saki, so that what should be black satire is merely nasty farce. Witty in places, and avoids the grosser kind of pornographic writing – which may not be a virtue. *

A Book of Courtly Cats (1986)

A Gentleman A Book of Courtly Cats (1986) Excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays and poems paired with portraits of cats in the style of Elizabethan miniatures. Not a book so much as an extended greeting card. I think Mum gave this to Marie. It’s a charming object. I recognised most of the quotations; the one I liked best is:
       If I could write the beauty of your eyes
      And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
      The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;
      Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
      So should my papers, yellow’d with their age,
      Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue.
     And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
     And stretched metre of an antique song.
However, I don’t know which sonnet it’s from, so I shall have to read them all over again. Unrated (not a book). But lovely to look at and read. (2002)

Country Vet (1972)

     Denis Farrier Country Vet (1972) The blurb claims this books is in the Herriot vein, but I wouldn’t know. Its publication date suggests an attempt to cash in on vet-lit. Amusing enough, but very light reading. A few rants about the realities of animal life and death are worth keeping in mind when confronted by animal-rights activists, a stupidly sentimental lot without any real knowledge of animals. Farrier relates a few tales about his youth, his student days, his life as an assistant, and his life as an independent practitioner. Sentimental he isn’t, but he is annoyed, to put it mildly, by the mindless shooting of birds. *1/2 (2002)

Five Legs (1969), and a digression on James Joyce

     Graeme Gibson Five Legs (1969) I’ve read bits and pieces of this book for several years. I should say I’ve tried to read this book for many years. It made a splash when it first appeared (my copy is a First Edition), but as it turns out the ripples dissipated very quickly.  It looks like Gibson tries to do a Joycean stream-of-consciousness, but he’s no James Joyce. Not that this is in itself a disability, but it becomes one when you want to write like Joyce. Joyce is overrated in my opinion; Ulysses is barely readable (another book I’ve read at over the years), and Finnegan’s Wake will forever be merely a time- and academy-bound curiosity. No amount of scholarly interpretation will convince me that it’s worth the effort of deciphering the book for myself. Why should I, when the scholars have done such a good job of it?
     A book whose interpreters do a better job of telling the tale than the author did becomes a mere puzzle, and when it comes to puzzles we all have our tastes. I prefer jigsaws and crosswords. If I’m told that Ulysses does in fact trace the ancient legend of the title in a modern life and setting, I’m left wondering why I shouldn’t read the original. Reading Joyce’s book doesn’t dispel that wonder, but at least the digressions and pastiches have a charm apart from Joyce’s Grand Theme. In fact, I think they are more important than the self-conscious imitation of an old Greek tale. Joyce’s earlier work is better, especially the Portrait of the Artist. Perhaps Joyce didn’t trust the stories he had to tell, and felt he had to make them obscure in the telling to demonstrate that they had in fact the significance he ascribed to them. They certainly did, and the technique doesn’t add to that significance. For most readers it detracts, because it interposes itself between the tale and the reader.
     I was unable to discern much of a narrative in Gibson’s book; the central thread seems to concern the narrators’ trouble with women, but just exactly what that trouble is isn’t very clear. It appears to begin with the failure to impregnate his wife. But he is difficult to empathise with, despite Gibson’s obvious attempts to make his anguish palpable. But broken syntax and allusive phrases merely reveal a typically fractured consciousness, not necessarily an interesting mind. As for interesting digressions, there ain’t any.
     Perhaps Gibson thought that an avant-garde technique would lend significance. Perhaps he thought that a common-place mind would be more interesting when its working is exposed. We do have a puzzle here, but as I said above, that’s not enough. The puzzle must be worth solving, for its intellectual difficulty and/or for the solution. I didn’t find the rewards of solving the puzzle on either count sufficient to keep me reading. The stream-of-consciousness becomes an irritating impediment, and the solution (insofar as I’ve understood it) is mere commonplace. No stars. (2002)
     Update 2013: The book is out of print. Amazon offers 6 used copies of Five Legs/Communion. Various online entries report his work promoting Canadian writing, as well as his enthusiasm for bird watching. His Bedside Book of Birds looks like it's worth reading.

Daughters of Passion (1982)

   Julia O’Faolain Daughters of Passion (1982) A collection of short stories, all previously published in magazines. It’s magazine fiction alright, designed to engage interest while waiting to do something else, briefly startling, mildly provoking, witty in places, prurient in places, sentimental. Some of it rises above this level, but none of it’s memorable. O’Faolain writes skilfully, plots well, and draws vivid characters. The faint and not so faint melancholy of her stories reminds me of Mavis Gallant, but Gallant’s stories seem drawn from a deeper well. These stories are clever in the sense that student’s work is clever: one wants to give them a mark. I started this book on our trip to Brownsville last year, and stopped reading it somewhere in Texas. I finished it this morning, and can barely remember the last story. ** (2002)

The Merry Heart (1997)

     Robertson Davies The Merry Heart (1997) A collection of speeches plus a couple of pieces written for publication, and a fragment of autobiography. Because Davies spoke many times on the same themes, there is some repetition of ideas and of even of whole sentences, but that doesn’t disturb the reader unduly. Anyone who has heard Davies, even if only on TV, can read these pieces with his voice in mind, and that certainly adds to their charm. But I think what comes through most strongly is Davies’ wisdom, which is not a heavy freight of solemnly declared platitudes, but a cheerful apprehension of the way life is, passed on to us with a twinkle in the eyes and the occasional sigh. Davies knows his and our darknesses, but he does not dwell on them and dislikes those writers who present us with horrors merely to fascinate. His insistence that fiction is a necessary grace in our lives, and his belief that the imagination serves to help us understand ourselves, may be suspect but still is necessary in our country, which looks on the arts as mere frills, and prides itself on a realistic approach to the difficulties of life. But Davies is right.
     A good book; but like all collections of occasional pieces a single reading suffices. It’s worth keeping on the shelf for possible quotation, though. *** (2002)

It Could have been Worse (1980)

     Peggy Holmes It Could have been Worse (1980) Chatty reminiscences of Peggy and Harry Holmes first and only two years on their homestead in northern Alberta. Peggy also tells of her childhood in England. Harry selected the homestead when he and three buddies went hunting up there, a romantically silly way to pick land. In the event, the Holmes's managed to prove the land, that is, clear the minimum amount and build a dwelling of minimum size, but they left immediately after that, and lived in Edmonton. The narrative is piecey, probably because it was cobbled together from stories Peggy wrote for and read on CBC Calgary.
      The events she relates are the usual mix of horror, tedium, and joy, and the book is interesting on that account. But Peggy’s lack of literary skill, evidenced in everything from poor organisation to flat and trite descriptions, takes away from the narrative. She is more of a teller of tales than a writer, which means that she was undoubtedly better on the air and in person. I don’t get a sense that I really know Peggy after reading this book: I know about her, and I speculate that she was a stubborn and wilful girl with a strong romantic streak, but that’s all. She had two miscarriages, but we don’t really know how these affected her, nor how it affected her relationship with Harry. I suppose she would consider inquiry after these matters an impertinence, but I want to know more than the facts of her life. It’s all very well to tell about the things you had to do to survive, but thousands of other people had to do the same things. What makes a life interesting is not what happened in it, but the person it happened to, and the people that mattered to them. Harry was Peggy’s great love, she says; but I get only the vaguest sense of what he was like. I still recall Susannah Moodie’s book, not just the events she relates, but Susannah as the personality that experienced the southern Ontario wilderness, and the fecklessness of her husband (who like Harry clearly had silly romantic notions about land). Peggy’s book is worth reading as one more record of the pioneer life, and that’s all. *1/2 (2002)