The Eternal Other

A marked-up, post-it-flagged copy of Marian Engel's Bear (1976) in the neighbourhood library box. Not so marked up to distract me from its great writing and wry wit, especially after I removed its multicoloured flags. As for the marked passages (underlines, in blue ball-point), some references to "Indian" or "Indians", though most of them focused on the protagonist's feelings, what it is to be a woman in a mid-1970s Canadian novel.

I enjoyed Engel's Monodromos (1973, re-released a few years later as One-Way Street), which I have learned over the years is the book Engel lovers (or Bear lovers) never get through. Bear is shorter and more contained than Monodromos, and more symbolic, if not more hallucinatory. Once Engel describes the island estate that her protagonist, Lou, is there to catalogue, it's pretty much the bear and the woman who wants him.

Lucy Leroy is the "old Indian woman" who appears on the island (suddenly out of nowhere, we are led to believe?) and whom Lou discovers "babbling" to the bear, who is half inside and half outside his shed.

"Lucy's face crinkled with some inconceivable merriment. She did not look one hundred years old, only eternal. 'Shit with the bear,' she said. 'He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you.'" (35)

The "eternal" other, right? Recall Ethel Wilson's description, via her Swamp Angel (1954) protagonist Maggie Vardoe (née Lloyd), of the Chinese in Vancouver's Chinatown: "... nearly all of them had the immemorial look which distinguishes their race." (18) 

Monodromos aka One-Way Street (1973)

Every few years Marian Engel's fifth novel Bear (1976) experiences a revival, for different reasons every time. The most recent revival noted the author's concern over the appropriation of Indigenous stories.

Something that is lacking in these Bear revivals is attention to Engel's other books, most notably her novel Monodromos (Anansi, 1973), renamed One-Way Street when it was re-published by Paper Jacks, an imprint of the equally-defunct General Publishing.

In Engel's Goodreads bio, all but Monodromos bears mention. I wonder why that is, for it is, to mind, her most resonant book. As far as Mediterranean novels go (novels that are set there), it ranks with Fowles's The Magus (1965) and Berger's G (1972) for imagination, insight and some very fine writing.

Marian Engel died of cancer in 1985. She was 51.

Monodromos is not included in Engel's Maclean's obituary, though it does mention a trip she and her ex-husband Howard Engel took to Cyprus in the early-1960s, which likely inspired the novel.

Here is an early paragraph from Monodromos: 

"The island has passed from hand to hand with history. Only Napoleon and Kubla Khan seem to have neglected it. It has been an adjunct to every other empire; it's out of its British phase now, waiting for history to clear and clot again, to see what it will become. It has a wan look in the winter sun: this desirable property to let. I hope the islanders are shrewd about the rent." (3)