The Outlander (2007)

Last year I posted something on Newfoundland-based writer Lisa Moore's excellent short story collection Open (2002) as an example of a book published ages ago that I finally got around to reading. The latest example is Ontario writer Gil Adamson's The Outlander, a gripping novel about a young woman on the run from her dead husband's brothers in 1903. Adamson's Mary is a cursor moving over the Western Canadian landscape, where each clicked-on encounter brings the secretive Mary into deeper relief.

There's lots of strong writing in this Cormac McCarthy-esque western, and the strength of it is Mary's strength, too, regardless of her reason or reasons for killing her husband (I have read up to Page 135, a third of the book). My favourite of Mary's many remembrances are those of her father and his mother, Mary's grandmother. Mary's father was a High Anglican minister or priest who left the ambiguity(?) of the clergy for the certainty(?) of law, much to the chagrin of his deeply religious mother, whose faith extends beyond Christianity to the occult:

"Her grandmother thought there was nothing so alluring as the unknown, a world revealed in seances, in art, and in the inscrutable code of the palm. It was written in tea leaves and cards -- all of it infused with Christian hope, because these things belonged to God, and He could always be appealed to. Her father, however, felt the mistake lay in the asking, in the infantile need for answers when there were none." (129)

Who Is Moses Bruce?

"Ms. Musgrave takes her readers from the strawberry fields of England to the West Coast of Vancouver Island and shows a rare capacity for myth-making. The British Columbia coast has its own mythology but Ms. Musgrave has chosen to take only a hint of it as her basis for construction. She has invented an Indian poet Moses Bruce to speak for her and in this way allows herself a brand new voice to express concepts that might not otherwise have been allowed to surface."                           -- Bill Thomas, The Martlet, November 9, 1973

While researching my as-yet-unfinished book review of Heather Jessup's This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture (Waterloo: WLP, 2019), I went looking for more information on some of the hoaxes I have carried with me since my undergrad days at UVic (anthropology).

Among these hoaxes is "Moses Bruce," an Indigenous man and resident of Kiskatinaw, whom Susan Musgrave and Seán Virgo conjured in 1972. As if to justify their magic, Musgrave and Virgo granted "Bruce" authorship of Kiskatinaw Songs. For his part, Virgo included some of "Bruce"'s poems in his book Deathwatch on Skidegate Narrows and other poems (Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1979).

Something I could not find (online) is any mention of Musgrave and Virgo speaking on their "Bruce" project. I wonder how they might talk about "Moses Bruce" today?

Leaving Be

Another rural house, this one from Alice Munro's 1994 story collection Open Secrets, the final paragraphs from"A Real Life":

"She doesn't often notice the house. It is just there. But once in a while she does see its cracked face and the blank, slanted windows. The walnut trees behind, losing again, again, their delicate canopy of leaves.

I ought to knock that down and sell the bricks, she says, and seems puzzled that she has not already done so."

Always good to see the national literature debated in the national papers. Pity these debates always take place within such narrow parameters. In this instance, the reactionary Barbara Kay lobbing softballs at novelist-first writers like Steven Galloway. At issue, lyricism versus narrative – again.

Kay’s provocation is hardly worth repeating, though I can assure you, unlike Kay with Lisa Moore’s February, I have read her articles and “have no apologies.” Galloway’s argument, on the other hand, provides the usual B+ response, setting in motion his own blindered outlook.

Where I take issue with Galloway is not his connoisseurial take on what is “neither a novel nor literature,” but his denial of new forms (radio, film, television, internet...) and their influence not only on the literature but as literature – a position typical of a novelist-first writer.

I have read novels (let’s call them fictions, too) “ripped from the headlines” (American Tabloid), just as I have read them as "sitcoms" (Pride and Prejudice), "action movies" (Heinlein’s Starship Soldiers begat Starship Troopers), and, sooner than later, tweets.

Because Galloway has reminded us that “[o]urs is not a homogenous literature,” I would hope that he might prove that to us one day by acknowledging this country’s post-genre, post-medium literary tradition. Until then, and in his words, “literature ceases to exist.”