Poetics of Dissent: The Fourth Canvas by Rana Bose

While reading a thriller, I anticipate — and usually get — a twisty, testosterone-ridden plot. If I’m lucky, there’s a strong female character; really lucky, a good sex scene. What I don’t expect: a theory of socio-political hegemony centered around the idea of dissent. But Rana Bose’s The Fourth Canvas is a novel of ideas as much as a thriller, with enough red herrings to make Agatha Christie proud, and enough progressive ideas to satisfy the most ardent activist.

 Claude Chiragi, a doctoral student at McGill, has just received a birthday present from his girlfriend Clara. To his relief, the large flat package isn’t an Ikea piece in malevolent wait for assembly. Rather, Clara has come up with the goods — a painting by the political philosopher Guillermo Sanchez, who also happens to be the subject of Claude’s research. Sanchez, who died in 1974, was the author of a few articles, and a book on Mexican history — slim pickings for a thesis. The hitherto unknown painting will provide Claude material for his floundering PhD.

The canvas depicts a city landscape full of characters seemingly in fear of an impending calamity. Only one woman seems exempt from the malaise; her face is calm, even eager. Hidden in the painting are the words “Two periods of rise, followed by two periods of decline.”

Apparently, a theory of empire has been painted into the canvas, which seems but one in a series. And if further incentive to explore the canvas’s provenance was needed — the calm-faced woman in the painting seems to be moving. And so Claude and Clara set off on a quest to unearth all of Sanchez’s canvases. First stop: Cuba, where they’ll meet a friend of Sanchez.

In the manner of all good thrillers, the adventure is also a voyage of self-discovery. This being The Fourth Canvas rather than The Fourth Protocol, Claude and Clara don’t realize an unexpected affinity for grenade launchers or a talent for blending into foreign locales. While Claude plunges deep into Sanchez’s intellectual argument, Clara rediscovers her Argentinean roots — her father and brother disappeared during the country’s Dirty War, and Clara had hitherto suppressed these memories in favor of a cool citizen-of-the-world Montrealer persona. As Sanchez’s theory of the role of dissent in the collapse of empires becomes clearer, Claude and Clara are unable to lead their former passive lives. The canvases have changed not just their worldview, but their notions of their own roles in the fight for social justice.

The Fourth Canvas also features several secondary narratives, including that of one Diana McLaren, a professor of political philosophy in Montreal who is Claude’s father’s partner, and another featuring Sanchez’s sister Lydia. Bose gathers these seemingly random threads together by way of an abduction, a misty mountain hop through the Andes, and a case of mistaken identity, through to a satisfyingly dramatic (and devious) denouement.

Rana Bose is an engineer, a magazine editor and playwright, and The Fourth Canvas showcases each one of his métiers. In his acknowledgement, Bose states that his theatre background leads him to “launch torrents of ideas on the stage,” and indeed, The Fourth Canvas at times is all but submerged under expositions on every possible idea or event, from the film Ghost Dog to The Beastie Boys to cricket. Many of these riffs are at best tangentially related to the plot, and often take place on the flimsiest of pretexts; the only reason I forgive the author such self-indulgence is because everything he has to say is so damn interesting. Consider Bose’s description of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris:

“If a cemetery could, however, be accused of name-dropping in a display of turf arrogance, this would be the place…Chopin has a muse weeping, Oscar Wilde has a winged messenger calling him away…[There] lie the graves of Laura Marx, Karl’s daughter, and Paul Lefargue, who committed suicide together in 1911.”

If this doesn’t send you haring off to Wikipedia, nothing will.

But Bose the novelist is perhaps closest to Bose the editor of the alternative webzine Montreal Serai, a publication whose stated aim is to give a voice to people at the margins. As a character in The Fourth Canvas says “Legitimacy is hogged by the mainstream. [But] the people on the periphery are just as legitimate.” Bose’s novel not only reinforces the importance of dissent, but presents a vision for a new wave of popular resistance that co-opts people from the peripheries of every country on the planet. That he’s chosen to convey his ideas in such an accessible literary genre is altogether fitting. Even thrilling.

 

(This review appears in the current issue of rabble.ca.)

Then Again by Elyse Friedman

Seldom, I believe, has a writer been as poorly served by her book covers as Elyse Friedman. Waking Beauty, a darkly thoughtful exploration of the unfair advantage beauty bestows upon the (unworthy) recipient, had a pink-and-white and-blonde-and-sparkly cover, thus dooming chick-lit fans to chagrin even as readers of literary fiction averted their eyes. 

Then Again, with a smart, punchy title that can be interpreted in at least two different ways in the context of the  plot, written with a precision that would make a watchmaker glow, features a split image of a pallid, glowering girl on its cover. Everything about it–the girl’s faintly repellent gaze, the gimmicky shot , the shiny stiff paper of the cover– begs that the book be tossed aside. Which I would have undoubtedly done had I not LOVED Waking Beauty.

Tom Robbins once famously said, “It’s never to late to have a happy childhood”.  What if someone took that to heart–a someone with the wealth and connections of a successful Hollywood screenwriter–and decided to relive his childhood for an entire weekend, literally? The reluctant participants in the scheme include the screenwriter’s sisters Michelle (the novel’s narrator), and Marla.  The trio’s parents are dead (natch), but Joel the screenwriter has arranged for a faux mom and faux dad. The Toronto house the siblings grew up in twenty years ago is recreated down to the avocado green carpet and the struggling tree out front.

What a setup. And Friedman has the prose skills and the sheer balls to carry it off.  The narrator’s voice alternates between syrupy sentimentality and hard-edged observation, and this pairing works beautifully with the theme of revisited adolesence. The novel’s pacing is impeccable, skittering between past and present till the two fuse in an explosive climax. The delight of such a book lies as much in the big idea as in the tiny details; I was reminded on more than one occasion of the film Goodbye Lenin .

I leave you with this image from the novel. “…Canadian movies, publicly funded and carefully crafted–like chilled white pie crusts, pinched and perfect…”  I’m going to tear off the miserable front cover of Then Again  and replace it with a gilded portrait of Friedman.  

This review-ish piece is my contribution to John’s Read a Canadian Book Month challenge.

Yellowknife by Steve Zipp

Your hunt for the most boring Wikipedia entry ever ends now. Type “Yellowknife” in the search box; you’ll hear the gurgle as the spirit is sucked out of one of the most intriguing cities on the planet. 

I mention Wikipedia because most non-Canadian readers of Steve Zipp’s debut novel Yellowknife will in all likelihood want need to look up the city. I’m providing some facts about Yellowknife in this post before I begin my review.   

First, a map of Canada.  Yellowknife is just above the big black C.

 

 

(This map is available at http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/index.html)

 

Yellowknife is the capital of the NorthWest Territories. The NorthWest Territories are almost twice the size of France. The population of the NorthWest Territories is about 41,000 people. All together now: Looonely! 

 

 In the 1930s, Yellowknife was discovered to contain sizable gold deposits, leading to a mini gold rush. The rush waned towards the end of the century, but save your sympathy for the Yellowknifers; in the early nineties, the area turned up diamonds. The city now calls itself “The Diamond Capital of North America.” 

 

 And in what is possibly the most redundant sentence in Canadian prose, I add that Yellowknife is very cold.

 

Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife is set in the eponymous city in 1998. It’s a delirious read, one that incorporates the region’s history into a truly zany storyline. Endeavoring to describe the plot any further is akin to eating soup with a fork–you get some bits and pieces, but miss the main meal. Picking up my spork: The book features an entomologist who offers his arm for mosquito bait, a conceptual artist who wanders around garbage dumps, a drifter who learns to live off dog food, and about twenty other oddball characters who come together to do their thing in Yellowknife.  

And what a city it is, in a region “so remote it’s almost mythical.” A restaurant menu in Yellowknife might include fried ptarmigan, sweet and sour bearpaw, scrambled caribou brains on toast, and detoxified bear liver.  There’s an annual  Caribou Carnival, where activities include tea boiling and log sawing; people sip frosty drinks “in glasses made of ice.” The local newspaper is called the Yellowknife Blade. A posh restaurant accepts diamonds in lieu of cash; waiters carry loupes on their person. Zipp assumes the reader is familiar with the region (or has a huge vocabulary); I for one had to look up “pomarine jaeger” (a sea bird),  mukluks (a type of boot), horsetails (a plant)…you get the idea.  At least I knew   Zamboni, thanks to my years in Canada. 

The real joy in this novel, however, lies in the sharp, acerbic writing. Zipp quotes from Kafka, Jack London and Bulgakov, amongst others, and his prose is notable as much for its intelligence as its humor. You read it here first: Zipp is blood brother to Tom Robbins.  There are many interesting and erudite passages to showcase; it is purely a function of this reviewer’s base mind that the quoted section deals with sex (or its lack thereof).  

Danny the drifter finally has a chance to get it off with the most beautiful woman in our dimension. But then she asks if he has a condom.

The answer was plain on his face. She might as well have been asking for a condominium. “Christ” she muttered and reached for her clothes
“No, wait, I can find something. A plastic bag. A rubber glove.”

No luck. Danny then tries to salvage the situation.

“No problem…I’ll pick some up tomorrow….Do you have a favorite brand?…Any particular color or flavor?”

 

 

If I have one quibble, it is that Yellowknife sometimes feels like too much of a good thing. It’s as though Zipp had a hundred great ideas, and he shoehorned them all into this 286-page book. The resulting read is breathless though manageable, but it gets sticky when it comes to the characters. There are so many appealing dramatis personae vying for the role of protagonist that ultimately, I wasn’t truly invested in any character. Just as I got into Danny’s adventures, bam! a new character squealing “Forget Danny, look at me!” would cavort on the page. I suppose I could have treated the book like the aforementioned soup and just enjoyed whatever came along, but I kept getting distracted, wondering where that tempting piece of pineapple lurked, and if the spongy object I was chewing on was a mushroom or a pellet of Bounty…

It is a sad, sad thing that Zipp’s novel, published by the small press Res Telluris, should languish in obscurity. I do not know the author (apart from exchanging a brief email correspondence regarding the timing of this review) and I have no hesitation in flogging his work in every possible way. Here is the publisher’s website, and here is the author’s blog. Do buy the book. Or, if you must, download it for FREE  from the publisher’s site. And don’t forget to send Zipp a mash note asking him to write another novel real soon.

:: ::

Sweetness in the Belly, Redwork, The Paper Bag Princess.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb:  Lilly, the child of British hippies, was was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in Morocco, and moved to Ethiopia when she was sixteen. When we meet her, she has lived in England for many years, where she is an oddity as a devout white Muslim in Thatcherite Britain. 

Although I had to refer to the Wikipedia entry on Ethiopia to fully understand the political situation, I found the story fascinating, driven as it was by Lilly’s quest to locate herself and her community. As someone who has lived much of her life as a transplant, the question of how we define “home” is important to me. Is it by ethnic origin? the place of birth? religious affiliations? where we currently reside? the passport we carry?  Sweetness… is a must-read for those who like to think about this sort of thing.

Redwork by Michel Bedard: Mysterious landlord. Curious teenage  boy. Strange old house. Bullies. Intelligent feisty girl. All the makings for a good story, but then Cass (the fifteen-year-old-boy) began to have strange dreams. Books where dreams reveal plot points should come with warning labels “predictable literary device inside”.  Redwork builds up a nice creepy atmosphere, but the climax was rather anti-climactic…heck, I’ll be rude and say boring. I can’t believe this book won the Governor-General’s Award for Children’s Literature. Aaugh!

 

 

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch: I’m probably the only participant in the Canadian book challenge who hadn’t read this one in her childhood. Kick-ass resourceful princess vanquishes the dragon and saves the prince.  Love it, love it, love it, so much that I’d like to do a Banksy and sneak copies into every known edition of Sleeping Beauty.

 

 

 

These three bring my tally for the Canadian book Challenge upto nine; four left to finish by the end of June.

At the Altar by L.M.Montgomery

I thought I’d read everything Lucy Maud Montgomery had ever written, but came across this one at the Ottawa Public Library book sale the other weekend. Apparently, several unpublished stories of Montgomery’s languished in her PEI house until Rea Wilmshurst stumbled upon them, grouped them by theme, and had M&S publish these collections. At the Altar, which deals with marriage, was published in 1994, and suffers a bit from the sameness of the stories. As assortments go, this one is sugary even by LMM’s standards; not an unhappy ending to be found in any of the eighteen stories. But like all sugary treats, this one too is addictive; I read the book in one sitting.

Upon reflection, I think the book suffers from the editor’s obvious devotion to LMM. The sole criterion for publication seems to be the authorship rather than literary merit, which leads to a wide variation in story quality. I looked for depth in ”Them Notorious Pigs” and in ” Miss Cordelia’s Accommodation” and came up disappointed. ”What Aunt Marcella Would Have Called It”, featuring a pining heroine and indifferent hero who is finally ensnared when the heroine pretties herself up, should have been buried in decent obscurity, IMO.  Of course the argument can be made that we are reading a record of the time, and ought not let our modern feminist sensibilities influence the process of selection in the interests of historical accuracy, but as far as I’m concerned, the weaker stories bring down the tenor of the whole book.  I wish some of these stories had been reserved for a scholarly compendium of LLM’s work aimed at academics or her die-hard fans. 

But when LMM works, she’s very good indeed, bringing to her stories a dry practicality that’s all the more appealing against the backdrop of rosy romance. “Aunt Philippa and the Men” was excellent, while “The Pursuit of the Ideal” and “An Unconventional Confidence” were rescued from their blatant predictability by LMM’s leavening touches of humor. The ghost of Anne of Green Gables runs through each of these tales, and if you loved Anne, you’ll warm to most of these stories. If, however, you liked Anne but can’t see what the fuss is all about, avoid this collection. Incidentally, Anne turned one hundred this April, and Margaret Atwood takes an affectionate, if mordant look at this red-haired orphan girl (and her hold upon Japanese tourists) in this article from The Guardian.  

And this one is my just-in-time April read for the Canadian Book Challenge.

The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery by Katherine Govier

I’d planned to read a book of short stories for the Canadian Book Challenge, and I finally picked Katherine Govier’s The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery, which I bought at a second-hand bookstore a while ago solely for its quirky title. (Okay, it was priced at ninety cents.) 

That promise of quirkiness was more than fulfilled in this collection of fifteen stories. This book is populated by eccentrics and misfits, not to mention surreal settings. One of the stories titled ”God is Writing a Novel” features Tling, an “ape who was political”, and who “had organized demonstrations against his government” in his homeland of Borneo, who moves to Toronto and has an affair with Ellen, a (human) professor.

Reading this book has confirmed what I’ve long suspected, that quirkiness is the asafoetida of prose; a minute quantity adds zest, but anything more provokes intense nausea.  Initially, I was alternately beguiled and aggravated by Govier’s zany characters, but, by the fifth story, I flung the book down in favor of the latest Canadian Tire flier–oh, the relief. (I had, by then, apart from Tling, read about a man who was writing about Toronto real estate with a flat-tipped “calligraphy pen in Mediterranean-colored ink from his fifty dollar bottle”; the article was destined for a time-capsule which would also hold “the video ‘Roger Rabbit’” and “a collection of restaurant menus”. )

I was also bothered by Govier’s self-consciously objective tone–I could never quite make out whether she was laughing at her oddball characters or with them. Perhaps what really upset me was the seeming lack of compassion on the part of the author for her characters, many of whom seem to have been created solely to entertain (of course they were created for the latter purpose, but surely the short story needs to do more than that?). Once I got the feeling Govier didn’t really care for her creations, it was fatal.  I quit reading –rare for me, for I think of abandoning a book halfway as a form of disrespect akin to wasting food, which, as anyone who’s ever lived in a third-world country knows, is right up there with matricide. But I digress. Perhaps I’ll try some of Govier’s other work, considering the paens to her writing on the back cover, but if anyone would like a free copy of The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery, please let me know.

The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar

Novels with overt political agendas fill me with suspicion; their crusading zeal often overwhelms the story to such an extent I’d rather read the pamphlet, thanks. So, without further ado: let’s hear it for David Davidar’s new novel The Solitude Of Emperors, which, despite its block, underlined WORTHY MESSAGE, never forgets it’s a novel.

Vijay, a young man from small-town south India, with “a second-class degree from a third-rate college”, lands a job as editorial assistant at a small Mumbai-based magazine called The Indian Secularist, which focuses on sectarian issues. The founder of the publication, the benevolent Mr. Sorabjee, is writing a history textbook for high school students. Titled “The Solitude of Emperors”, the book examines three famous Indian secularists — Emperor Ashoka (Buddhist), Emperor Akbar (Muslim), and Mohandas Gandhi (Hindu).

Vijay’s first real assignment is in a small town, Meham, in the Nilgiri hills in south India. Meham boasts a famous shrine called the Tower of God. But whose God? The tower is claimed by Hindus and Christians, and its convoluted history would seem allow either possibility. Even as Vijay reads Mr. Sorabjee’s manuscript for inspiration and ammunition for his fight against the local Hindu fundamentalist politician, the chances of a confrontation between the shrine’s Christian custodians and Hindu protesters escalate steadily. Pleas to the local authorities to intervene are unheeded in a manner evoking the Ministry of Magic’s reaction to the resurrection of one Voldemort; the town’s officials are busy growing fuchsias.

Meanwhile, Vijay makes friends with Noah, an eccentric vagabond who lives in the local cemetery and scrapes a dubious living smuggling rare flowers while professing his love for modern European poets. Noah, who has been apparently been everywhere and done everything, views Vijay’s apprehensiveness with amusement.

Davidar thus creates three distinct viewpoints — that of the innocent, the wise man and the cynic respectively — to articulate different sides of the argument for secularism. The characters are fleshed out well-enough to never seem like mere mouthpieces; I found Vijay’s voice, with its pared-down eloquence, particularly convincing. And though Davidar’s agenda is thinly disguised, the plot has enough momentum to keep readers turning the pages to determine the fate of the shrine. An additional twist is provided by questions dogging Noah’s identity — did he really attend school in America? And hang out with Dom Moraes in a smoky Mumbai cafe? And make out with the gorgeous Maya?

Davidar’s argument for secularism gains additional historical weight by the device of Mr. Sorabjee’s textbook manuscript, which, while occasionally impeding the flow of the plot, is so well-written as to pull in the reader within a few paragraphs. (I feel compelled to state here that no such book ever crossed my high school days in India — my history texts were deadly dull.) Now, if only Mr. Sorabjee’s manuscript could actually find its intended audience, I’d be a lot more cheery about the future of Indian secularism.

(This review appears in the Asian Review of Books.)

Update: I’m also counting this book for the Canadian Book Challenge since Davidar now lives in Toronto.  

The Assassin’s Song by M.G.Vassanji

M. G. Vassanji’s last novel was titled The In-between World of Vikram Lall; his new work The Assassin’s Song could just as well be titled The In-between World of Karsan Dargawalla. Vassanji’s domain is the third space — the territory that refuses to accept Manichean classifications of here or there — and the protagonist of his new novel is a man who fits no convenient, conventional box. Neither Muslim nor Hindu yet of both religions, Karsan Dargawalla is the heir to Pirbaag, a Shrine to a Sufi mystic worshipped by the followers of both religions. Karsan, as the elder son, is to be custodian at Pirbaag after his father; no other future can be imagined for the “Gaadi-varas” — successor and avatar of the keeper of the shrine.

But Karsan’s in-betweenness, while originating in his religious inheritance, underlies his entire life. On the one hand is the pull of tradition and faith, and his filial devotion, on the other the push of his own intellectual curiosity and adventurous spirit. An unexpected opportunity for escape from his destiny however arrives in an acceptance letter from Harvard, where Karsan gets a full scholarship.

At the start of the novel, Karsan has just returned from North America to visit his former home. It is the year 2002, and the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat that killed over a thousand people have also destroyed Pirbaag. Karsan’s father is dead, the Dargawallas’ neutrality in religion having provided no escape when rioters stormed the shrine, and Karsan’s younger brother has consequently embraced a militant form of Islam and gone into hiding. As Karsan considers the implications of his repudiation of his birthright, he recalls his childhood in 1960s India, and the sequence of events that ultimately led him to value intellect over faith.

Vassanji has the uncanny ability to isolate the one or two telling details in a scene which capture the entire drama and weight of the story. He pares away the superfluous — not one word is unnecessary in this novel — to reveal the emotional core of his characters; his restrained style is thus intensely intimate and moving. I lay awake at night pondering Karsan’s struggle to choose between duty and knowledge, between worldliness and divinity, and the way things might have been different but for chance. This book achieves a melancholic, haunting loveliness all its own. I’ve read several novels in the recent past that are beautifully crafted, but The Assassin’s Song is a much rarer find — a thing of beauty, birthed from the union of compassion and wondrous artistry. This novel appeals as much to the mystic as the aesthete in us: Vassanji’s words are equally prayer and poetry.

This review was written for the Asian Review of Books. I’m also counting it as my third book of the Canadian Book Challenge.

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

My second book for the Canadian Book Challenge is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. This novel deals with a subject I know very little about–the internment of Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government during WWII. I’ve read David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars which deals with the same theme but in America; I had no idea this practice was part of Canada’s history as well.

I believe this book is one of the pillars of CanLit, and deservedly so–Obasan is a very disturbing and powerful read, asking some searching questions about a part of Canadian history I suppose many would be only too happy to forget. Naomi, a third-generation  Japanese Canadian girl, is separated from her parents after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and consequently lives with her uncle and aunt (Obasan). At age 5, Naomi moves from her comfortable home in Vancouver to work camps for Japanese Canadians, first to the ghost town of Slocan in BC, and then to a sugar-beet farm in Granton, Alberta. The story opens in 1972, when Naomi has seemingly put behind her past and is comfortably assimilated in her Canadian environment. 

But another aunt, Emily, is seeking justice for the treatment meted out to Japanese Canadians, and her struggle forces Naomi to confront her memories. While Naomi doesn’t really find  ’closure’ (and thank goodness for that, for it would devalue the sense of authenticity the text carries) she is granted a deeper understanding of how the events of the past have affected her.  

This novel has received several negative reviews on Amazon (mostly from high school students forced to read it for a class assignment) and I can see why an impatient reader might find the book somewhat tedious. Kogawa’s style, especially in the initial third of the book, features a lush abundance of imagery that often seems to flow at the expense of the narrative. I also found some of the writing in this section rather clunky and repetitive, and some of the metaphors, like one about her tightly-knit family subjected to a warm-water wash, seemed rather contrived. But I was loath to quit, and by the middle of the book, found myself moved to the marrow by Naomi’s account of her life in the camps. Kogawa’s dreamy, opaque prose is revealed to be the perfect medium to communicate events so large and cruel they are almost unfathomable to the human brain. I am so thankful I read this book in my thirties rather than in my teenage years, when I would no doubt have declared it a slow book and abandoned it without a thought for what I might have missed.  

Update: In 1986, Kogawa adapted her novel into a children’s  book, Naomi’s Road. Read an interview with Kogawa about this book at papertigers.org

No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

My first read for The Canadian Book Challenge is No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. This one  has sat unread on my Billy bookshelf for 3 years; the last time I checked, it muttered ”But you had time to watch Snakes on a Plane” before curling its covers away from me. Now that I’ve finished it, I realize I should have read this sooner. Actually, I should have stolen an ARC and read it before the book hit the stores–it’s that good.

The story opens on a rather dismal note, with the protagonist Alexander MacDonald driving down to Toronto to meet his alcoholic brother. I initially braced myself for a duty-read–one of those where the writing is awfully good, but the subject matter so wearying to the spirit I need an antidotal Captain Underpants if life is ever to seem rosy again. But I unbraced myself very soon. Although this novel is shot through with tragedy (even more wrenching for being so precisely and understatedly articulated) No Great Mischief is curiously life-affirming. I think it’s because the burdens Alexander bears flow from the same source as his joys, namely, his love for his clan. The MacDonalds lead ordinary, hard-scrabble lives that are rendered special by the primacy of their loyalty to each other, which outweighs all other considerations. The reader cannot view events in isolation, but sees them as wrought by the workings of blood ties just as much as fate; sorrows and triumphs are first and foremost part of the weave of MacDonald family history. MacLeod has brought this clan alive for me; when I next see golden arches, I shall no longer make a sign to avert the evil eye but think about this novel instead.

One of the reasons I joined this challenge was to learn more about Canada–I moved here three and a half years ago, and for various reasons, haven’t travelled much around the country. This novel is my introduction to Nova Scotia, specifically Cape Breton. If I ever visit here, I shall look for the woods and whales and the lighthouses described in this novel, and see them through Alexander’s eyes. That’s how strong the sense of place is in No Great Mischief.  

I am so glad I read this book.