Whether it was the post-millennial letdown – expectations for a literary blockbuster in the century’s final year ran high – or merely a year of bookish diversity, Q&Q’s fiction panel was hard-pressed to choose the year’s top five fiction titles. Several judges recommended only three titles, yet in total, 17 were nominated. While the jury’s final selections include both first-time authors and well-established writers, the list is male heavy: four of the top five books were written by men. Selecting the best fiction of 1999 were: Mary Jo Anderson, of Frog Hollow Books in Halifax; Richard Bachmann, of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario; John Snyder, of Book City in Toronto; Q&Q contributing editor Stephen Smith, Toronto; Q&Q’s Montreal correspondent, Mary Soderstrom; Robert Wiersema, of Bolen Books in Victoria; and Q&Q columnist Lorna Jackson, of Victoria.
FICTION
No Great Mischief
Alistair MacLeod (McClelland & Stewart)
After a 13-year publishing hiatus, Alistair MacLeod produced one of the autumn’s most eagerly anticipated books – thankfully, it did not disappoint. MacLeod’s multi-generational family saga, narrated by an orthodontist who traces his roots back to Cape Breton, won the 1999 Drummer General’s Award. Richard Bachmann called the book “a finely measured novel of family and history, and the indelible sadness of humankind. Its assured narrative slowly builds, like the rhythm of the sea, the repeated strokes of physical labour, a heartbeat.” MacLeod’s book fell victim to a clerical error at M&S that disqualified the book (along with several others) for consideration for the Governor General’s Award. One can only hope that the GG mix-up was partially forgotten among all the rave reviews, including one from Stephen Smith, who praised the book “…for its slow rhythms, its remarkable synthesis of now and then, and the strength and serenity of its vision. No Great Mischief feels like a book that’s gone deep and means to stay.”
Summer Gone
David Macfarlane (Knopf Canada)
Stephen Smith also favourably reviewed David Macfarlane’s first novel. Of the Globe and Mail columnist’s Giller-nominated foray into fiction, Smith wrote: “Tender and plaintive, a beautifully rendered inhabitation of summer and its country of cottages, camps, and canoe trips. A novel, too, about time: what we’ll do to try to make it hold still, how we try to reclaim it when it’s past, how, every time, it breaks the heart.” Richard Bachmann concurred, calling Summer Gone “an unusually satisfying first novel. The pitch and timbre of the novel is perfectly balanced.”
All the Anxious Girls on Earth
Zsuzsi Gartner (Key Porter Books)
“Gartner wears the short story like spandex on a bicycle courier,” enthused Lorna Jackson in her starred review of Gartner’s debut collection of offbeat urban stories featuring a cast of eclectic characters. Jackson went on to say that Gartner’s book brings “a welcome cutting-edge to the Canadian short story.” Stephen Smith agreed: “There’s a line in one of these stories about ‘the deranged beauty of panic weed bursting through a seam in the pavement’ – that somehow evokes for me the whole scintillating collection. Deranged, beautiful, panicky – and, yes, definitely originally somewhere dark and fertile.”
Elizabeth and After
Matt Cohen (Knopf Canada)
The late Matt Cohen won a GG for his three-generation story of passion and subterfuge that unfolds in a small Ontario town. Cohen also received a starred review from John Burns in Q&Q. Burns began his write-up with an apology – “Sorry, dear reader, for the envy that infringes on the following; it’s hard to stumble along in review of such an accomplished work” – and went on to call Cohen’s work “compelling and sad and erotic and funny.” Lorna Jackson was equally impressed by Elizabeth and After – “it is the answer to the question ‘what is art?’” Robert Wiersema concurred: “I can add little to the critical acclaim this book so deservingly received, except to say that rarely have I ever seen characters brought so vividly to life, with such grace and skill.”
City of Ice
John Farrow (HarperCollins Canada)
One of the worst-kept publishing secrets of the spring season was John Farrow’s real identity – he is, of course, Trevor Ferguson, author of six novels including Onyx John, The Fire Line, and Timekeeper. Michael Bryson, who reviewed the 480-page literary thriller that follows a Montreal cop’s investigation into the biker bombings and the Russian mafia, called City of Ice “a page-turner stuffed with reportage worthy of a Tom Wolfe or a Charles Dickens.”
Honourable mentions
Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?, by Elyse Gasco (McClelland & Stewart)
Kit’s Law, by Donna Morrissey (Penguin Books Canada)
My Paris, by Gail Scott (Mercury Press)
Pilgrim, by Timothy Findley (HarperFlamingo Canada)
Truth and Bright Water, by Thomas King (HarperFlamingo Canada)
NON-FICTION
Call it the year of the memoir. Everyone, it seemed, had a family story to tell. Thankfully, the public were willing listeners, seeking out tales of dismal childhoods and family secrets, flawed fathers and sibling rivalries. Many of the books were nominated for awards, and five made it onto Q&Q’s list of the year’s best. Helping us to choose this year’s favourites were: contributing editor Stephen Smith; reviewer Robert Wiersema; Montreal correspondent Mary Soderstrom; Mary Jo Anderson, of Frog Hollow Books in Halifax; and Richard Bachmann, of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario.
The Closer We Are to Dying
Joe Fiorito (McClelland & Stewart)
A few years ago, National Post columnist Joe Fiorito spent three weeks at the hospital bedside of his dying father. His spare and clear-eyed account of that time, says Mary Soderstrom, is a “classic memoir, told in Thousand and One Nights fashion, in which a man accepts, if not forgives, his father.” In her starred review of the book, she describes Fiorito’s tales of his father as funny, touching, but mostly harrowing. “[They] paint for the reader a vivid picture of the passing of a talented, difficult, ordinary man…. Many readers will shed a tear.”
Other reviewers concurred. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Bronwyn Drainie gushed that Fiorito “writes like a rough-hewn angel,” and that his memoir “blossoms into a lavish bouquet of family stories that speak volumes about the power of myth to tell us who we are.” In a review in Montreal’s The Gazette, Guy Vanderhaeghe praised Fiorito for his “electric imagination,” noting that the author’s stories about his father “miraculously [merge] in a graceful stream of narrative.”
Baltimore’s Mansion
Wayne Johnston (Knopf Canada)
Newfoundland-born novelist Wayne Johnston was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for his generation-spanning memoir of life in Newfoundland. In wonderfully evocative prose that’s more a series of poignant – sometimes funny – scenes than a typical linear narrative, Baltimore’s Mansion skips back and forth over more than three centuries of Newfoundland history, juxtaposing events from the colony’s earliest days with incidents from Johnston’s own life and the lives of his father and grandfather. Of central importance is the 1948 referendum that brought Newfoundland into Canada, but divided the province and families – even Johnston’s own.
In his starred Q&Q review, Verne Clemence credits Johnston for creating a wholly evocative account of Newfoundland life. Says Clemence: “I’ve never been to Newfoundland, but at about the halfway point I began to smell the smells, hear the lilt, and experience a sense of the fierce attachment Newfoundlanders feel to their home, no matter where they live.”
Water
Marq de Villiers (Stoddart Publishing)
A timely and provocative exploration of our most valued resource, Marq de Villier’s thoroughly researched book covers the history and state of water resources, how they are currently threatened, and what can be done about it. In his starred Q&Q review, John Wilson says, “De Villiers has created a rare thing: an intelligently written book that is accessible to the general reader. Water serves timely notice of the crisis that may lie around the corner and deserves to be read by anyone who has ever turned on a tap.”
De Villiers was rewarded for his effort with a Governor General’s Award; the judges called Water “brilliantly researched and written in a taut, economical prose” and “studded with insights.”
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill
Charlotte Gray (Viking Canada)
The story of Susanna Moodie and her sister Catherine Parr Traill is a familiar one to many Canadians, but author Charlotte Gray fills out the picture considerably, drawing extensively on the women’s letters and focusing on their writing lives. The author contrasts the experiences of the sisters living in the backwoods of Upper Canada with those of their writerly siblings who stayed behind in England, and recounts how the publication of Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, which was dismissed at the time as “rude,” “crude,” and “savage,” created a rift that grew between the two halves of the family.
In her starred review, biographer Joan Givner notes, “The contrast between the author who is a celebrity in her own time but soon forgotten and the neglected writer whose works become classics is a recurring theme in the annals of literature. This version of it is one of the many delights of this superb biography.”
The Water in Between
Kevin Patterson (Knopf Canada)
The desire to escape his failings and a broken heart one day prompted writer/doctor Kevin Patterson to buy a sailboat and plan a trip to Tahiti. He recruited a like-minded travel companion, and together they set off for the South Pacific. The Water in Between is Patterson’s account of that tempestuous and lonely journey.
In his Q&Q review, Robert Wiersema paid Patterson a high compliment, calling The Water in Between “a graceful meditation on the nature of manhood and life, of escape and independence, and of finding a place in the world,” adding that this was “something much grander, much more significant” than the nautical thrillers of writers like Sebastian Junger and Derek Lundy. Wiersema says Patterson’s description of his own internal journey is “profoundly affecting,” and deserves a place on the shelf alongside other “much-loved voyages of loss, sadness, escape, and discovery.” Bookseller Mary Jo Anderson agreed, noting Patterson’s debut “captures the reader’s imagination” and contains “echoes of Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban.”
Honourable mentions
Paper Shadows, by Wayson Choy (Viking Canada)
The Triumph of Narrative, by Robert Fulford (House of Anansi)
A Life in the Bush, by Roy MacGregor (McClelland & Stewart)
Gabrielle Roy: A Life, by Francois Ricard, Patricia Claxton, trans.
(McClelland & Stewart)