2009 Giller Prize - part 2

On Tuesday evening, the winner of the 2009 Giller Prize was announced - The Bishop's Man by Linden MacIntyre. I am happy with this choice - it wouldn't have been my top pick, but it comes in at a close second on my list.

I set out to read my way through the short list when it was announced last month, and if it hadn't been for the tediousness of The Golden Mean, I would have finished the list before the announcement was made. If I was appointed as a committee of one, to select a winner from the short list, this is how I would have ranked the books:

1) The Disappeared

2) The Bishop's Man

3) Fall

4) The Golden Mean

5) The Winter Vault

I was pleased that neither The Golden Mean nor The Winter Vault won, despite the fact that they seemed to have the most momentum leading up to the announcement earlier this week. I found both books to be quite disappointing.

Referring back to my earlier post about this year's Giller, I was disappointed about the non-inclusion of Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood on the shortlist. Alice Munro had asked that her book not be considered in order to give up-and-coming writers a better chance, and Margaret Atwood's book was on the long list but cut from the short list. But if those two books were included on the short list, this is how I would have ranked them:

1) The Year of the Flood

2) The Disappeared

3) The Bishop's Man

4) Too Much Happiness

5) Fall

6) The Golden Mean

7) The Winter Vault

I personally disagree with Alice Munro's decision - after all, the Giller is supposed to be for literary excellence, not a "first book" or "young writers'" award. And I can't help but wonder if Margaret Atwood was left off the short list as punishment for some slightly catty comments that she made about Alice Munro's decision.

Anyways, as I said, I can live with the decision to award the Giller Prize to The Bishop's Man - it was a very good book that captivated me right from the first chapter, and left me worried as I neared the end that I would be stranded without a book to read (I was traveling at the time), and yet I couldn't put it down to spin the reading time out any longer. And very timely in it's subject matter. Now the excitement of waiting to see what the next year holds in books to read!

The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon

Unfortunately, the best thing that I can say about this book is that it is printed in a beautiful typeface. I often found myself getting distracted from what I was reading to admire an elegant question mark or a bold semi-colon.

I found this book very difficult to get through - the fact that it has taken me almost two weeks to finish a book that is only 282 pages should be a good clue. I have been flogging myself to finish it this week, and I missed my self-appointed deadline of finishing the Giller short list before the winner was announced on Tuesday.

I found the characters to be poorly drawn and inconsistent. I also had trouble keeping track of who was who (despite the list of characters at the beginning). And the plot was so disjointed that I had trouble keeping track of what was happening.

All of this is too bad, because it probably could have been a good book. It is a fictionalized account of the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. I admit that I don't know much about Greek history and mythology, but in the hands of a good story-teller, it probably could have come to life. But instead it was dry and wooden and contrived.

For anyone who is interested, this is what is printed in the back of the book about the type:

"The Golden Mean is set in Centaur, a typeface designed originally for New York's Metropolitan Museum in 1914, then adapted for general use in 1929. While a so-called modern face, Centaur is modelled on letters cut by the fifteenth-century printer Nicolas Jenson. Its italic, orignailly named Arrighi, was designed in 1925 and is based on the work of Ludovico degli Arrighi, a Renaissance scribe. Centaur is considered among the most elegant faces for book-length work."

So pick up a copy of the book in a bookstore, open it up to admire the type, then put it back down again without wasting the time to read it!

My thoughts on this year's Giller in another post.

This book was read for The Canadian Book Challenge at The Book Mine Set.

Fall - Colin McAdam

This was book 4/5 of my Giller read-athon, and not my favourite so far. Actually, I came away from it with mixed feelings (more below).

A quick plot summary. It is essentially a love-triangle set at a posh boarding school in Ottawa, in what I am assuming is pretty close to the present day. Noel (son of the Canadian ambassador to Australia) and Julius (son of the American ambassador to Canada) are roommates in their final year of school. Noel and Julius have a very complicated friendship, and not the least of the complications is Julius' girlfriend, Fall, whom Noel is also in love with. Things come to a head when Fall disappears part way through the year. I couldn't really relate with the characters or the setting, as I have never been a rich kid at boarding school; but I found the glimpse into diplomatic life interesting. I once had dinner with a British diplomat in Tanzania, and oh boy, is it a different way of life.

What I liked about the book. The character development for one thing. The chapters are told alternating between Noel and Julius, and there is a real distinction in style between the two of them. Noel is described as a sociopath, and really, he is almost a psychopath. He initially comes across as very articulate and sympathetic; however as time goes by, he becomes more and more creepy. The casual mention of cutting off the cat's tail because he didn't like his birthday present really upset me. He takes very strong dislikes to some classmates for the most random of reasons. I can just see him becoming a serial killer in the future. While Julius is a typical teenage boy, with his entire life focus centered between his legs (or at least, not having been a teenage boy, that is what I assume). And by alternating chapters between the two boys, you get to see each one as he sees himself, but also as others see him. I would have loved to have had some chapters told from the point of view of Fall as well. The book took a bit of time to get into, but once I got into it, it was an easy read.

It took me until the end of the book to realise that the boys were telling the story along a different time line. Noel is narrating events from 12 years in the future, and he tells the story beginning a year earlier, and ending some months after Fall's disappearance. Julius is telling things in the present tense, as they happen, from the beginning of term until the morning of Fall's disappearance.

What I didn't like about the book. There are a few random chapters thrown in as told by William, Julius' father's chauffeur (again, from the vantage point of 12 years in the future). These seem to have no bearing on the story. Also, the author seems very fond of the verb "to say". He said, I said, I say, she says... Some better editing needed, perhaps? Once I noticed this (in the first chapter), it seemed to be written in neon lights every time the verb appeared. As well, the ending seemed to be very abrupt and left too many loose ends for my liking.

So my conclusion - a very mixed review. I would almost like to see the same book written by the same author, but with 10 more years of writing experience under his belt.

One more Giller nominee left to go, and just over a week until the award is announced.

This book was read for The Canadian Book Challenge at The Book Mine Set.

The Disappeared - Kim Echlin

I actually finished this book a week ago (and stayed up far too late one night in order to finish it), but I've had a bad cold this week and have been indulging in L.M. Montgomery re-reads. I'm feeling better now, so time to get back on track with the Giller shortlist.

I knew going into it that a book set in Cambodia in the second half of the 20th century entitled "The Disappeared" wouldn't have a happy ending, but I didn't anticipate just how beautifully it would be written. The book is short (only 228 pages), and there is not one word missing or one word too many. And some of the sentences were so beautifully constructed that I would stop in my tracks and contemplate just that sentence. A lot of the beauty comes from the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas - for example: "The waiters watched and pretended not to see," or "The strangeness of my love for you is that it has made me dead in life and you alive in death."

The plot is very simple - a young girl in Montreal falls in love with a Cambodian refugee in the 1970s. The refugee returns home to Cambodia as soon as the border opens; she follows him 10 years later; they are re-united; and then he disappears. Love found; love lost; love found again; love lost again.

I have never been to south-east Asia, but with the beauty of the writing, I felt as though I had been transported there. Some day I will go, and discover if this book was realistic in it's portrayal.

One quibble with the writing style (and not only in this book, but it seems to be the case in many that are written these days). What is wrong with quotation marks? A simple punctuation mark that indicates external speech. Yes, your writing may then appear to be edgy and modern when the quotation marks are omitted, but it also becomes somewhat ambiguous and hard to follow dialogue. Hopefully this is a trend that will pass, and in the future, scholars will read books and be able to date them to this era by the lack of quotations marks (or other punctuation). And yes, I may be the only one that this bothers - after all, I am the self-proclaimed Queen of the Semicolon, and a Royal Pain in the 'S.

(Stepping off my soapbox now.)

On an unrelated note, I have been dared by my cousin to read Twilight. I have so far managed to avoid the hype surrounding the books/films, partly because the mass-marketing of them doesn't appeal to me, and neither do vampires in general; however there is now a $25 bookstore gift card riding on it. If I like Twilight better than anything else on my TBR book, I will pay up, but if another book is better than Twilight, she will pay me. Twilight will have to be quite spectacular indeed to surpass The Disappeared. I've placed a copy on hold at the local library - stay tuned here for my progress in this challenge.

The Disappeared was read as part of The Canadian Book Challenge at The Book Mine Set.

The Bishop's Man - Linden MacIntyre

I chose to begin my Giller Shortlist read-athon with this book, since it was one that I had previously looked at in the bookstore, and probably would have read eventually even if it hadn't been nominated. And I wasn't disappointed.

Basically, it is a fictionalized account of the abuse that happened in the Catholic church that came to light over the past 15 years or so. And talk about timely. The week before the shortlist was announced, Bishop Raymond Lahey of Antigonish (Nova Scotia), who had previously worked to negotiate deals for people who had been abused by priests, was charged with possession of child pornography. In the book, the protagonist, Fr MacAskill, the "Bishop's Man," is a priest who is the right-hand man to the bishop of Antigonish, and whose main job over the years has been dealing with priests who stepped out of line. Unfortunately, both in the book and in real life, dealing with these wayward priests usually only meant shuffling them to a different diocese, province, or country. The book deals with the fall-out of this, as what happened begins to become publicly known.

While difficult in subject matter, I found this book to be very gripping and easy to read. I was reading it over the Thanksgiving weekend while staying with my sister, and my biggest fear was that I was going to finish it before I got home, and be stranded with nothing to read! (I, in fact, finished it in the Toronto airport on my way home while waiting for my flight to depart.) Admittedly, some of the foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed, but it is balanced out by the fact that some of the foreshadowing was a red herring so I was surprised when the events unfolded. And I thought that the ending was just about perfect - all of the main loose ends tied up, with just enough ambiguity to make it realistic.

If I have one criticism, it is that the characters were a bit wooden and two-dimensional at times. Yes, Fr. MacAskill is an alcoholic, but you don't have to have him pouring himself a drink or two every second sentence. And he is a bit thick not to have recognized himself as an alcoholic, especially given his past work. And the people that he encounters don't get developed very far, with a few exceptions. But this could be because the story is told as a first-person narrative. If I were telling the story of my life, do I know the people around me well enough to make them come alive on the page? Were the characters in the book flat because the author couldn't make them rounded, or because his narrator isn't able to see them as rounded?

But it was a good read, despite all of that. And as I'm already half way through my next Giller book, so stay tuned for that review.

Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro

I love Alice Munro stories. In small doses. A single volume = a small dose. The summer I tried to read a 700-page (small print) "Selected Stories" anthology, I had to take a break 2/3 of the way through or else I would have become suicidal!

Too Much Happiness is her newest collection of short stories, and I was able to detect many familiar Munro-vian themes - loss of childhood innocence, marriage break-down, aging, inter-generational misunderstanding. However there are a few changes - I noticed more male protagonists (though I will have to look back through her other recent books to see if this is a new thing), and some of the stories end more optimistically than is her wont.

I think that what I love most about Alice Munro is her ability to draw you right into the mind of her protagonist so that you see all events happening from that character's point of view, and often to the point where you, the reader, are blind to the character's weaknesses. Then often there is a twist at the end (possibly a moment of self-revelation for the character) where you get a glimpse of them from the point of view of another.

My favourite story in this collection? "Wood." This is one of the stories with a male lead - an older man whose wife snaps out of a major depression in a moment of crisis. Just a beautifully told moment of every-day life that left me smiling at the end.

My least favourite story in this collection? The title story, "Too Much Happiness." I didn't enjoy this story as much, as it is not a typical Munro story. First of all, she took a real person (albeit one who lived more than 100 years ago), researched her life, and then told the story of the final days of her life with flashbacks to her earlier life. I think that the historical detail weighed her down too much as it was being written - it kept alternating with the very personal, character point of view that I mentioned above, with some paragraphs of bald, clumsy, fact-telling. And the title is definitely ironic, as the story does not end with the character experiencing too much happiness.

So I guess if you are a Munro fan (as I am), you will probably enjoy this newest collection; but if you are not a fan of hers, then you probably aren't going to pick this book up in the first place!

2009 Giller Prize

So the shortlist for this year's Giller Prize was announced today, and I'm none too happy. The 5 books on the list are:

The Disappeared - Kim Echlin

The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon

The Bishop's Man - Linden MacIntyre

Fall - Colin McAdam

The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels

Now of the books on the shortlist, the only one that I've read so far is The Winter Vault, but I picked up copies of the other ones today so will comment as I finish them. The winner will be announced on November 10 so I should be done reading the shortlist by then.

What I am upset about is the omission of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood which, if you read my review, you will see is one of the best books I have read recently. And with Alice Munro removing her name from the running (my review of her latest book should be up here tomorrow), the field is reduced from what it should be. The Giller Prize is given to recognize excellence in Canadian fiction, and I usually really enjoy the winning book, but if 2 of my favourite books of the year aren't on the shortlist... But I guess I have 4 more books to get though before I pass judgement!