For several years now the CBC has been running a competition called Canada Reads, in which a group of panelists (musicians, politicians, filmmakers, and occasionally, writers) decide which book Canadians should read. I’ve been avoiding it like the plague, afraid that, tongue in cheek though it is, the competition would fall victim to CanLit navel gazing.
And it has, at least twice. This year the winner was Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, which I haven’t read yet. Vanderhaeghe is a minor CanLit celebrity at the moment, which may explain his success. If this book is anything at all like his The Englishman’s Boy, then it’s a good, inoffensive read, but certainly not a powerhouse. Richler’s book should have mopped the floor with The Last Crossing, but alas old Mordecai was always a far cry from “inoffensive”.
The first year Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion took the prize (is there a prize?), and I have the dubious honour of having read that book twice. My friend Jon commented, upon first reading it, that “it’s good, but it sucks”, which may not sound like particularly intelligent criticism, but is in fact right on the money. Ondaatje’s prose is lovely and poetic, but for the most part that’s all it is. His characters are flat, his dialogue is terrible, and his complete inability to give his narratives any sort of structure is ridiculously annoying. I have said in other places that in literary fiction language matters more than anything else, and I will stand by that, but it does not mean that the other elements of prose fiction do not matter at all; Ondaatje, as evidenced by In the Skin of a Lion, would not agree. The circular nature of the book might be reminiscent of Finnegan’s Wake to some, but it struck me as more of an O’Henry shaggy dog story. It may also be an attempt at structure, but again it doesn’t succeed. Michael Ondaatje is like Margaret Atwood; he made a repuation early in his career, and his ability (as an excellent poet) to craft solid metaphors has allowed him to mask the fact that his prose fictions are essentially empty shells.
My opinion of this whole Canada Reads nonsense was very nearly changed by Zsuzsi Gartner’s essay on the process, which I think captured the nature of the competition better than the winning books do. I’ll be keeping a closer eye on the competition next year.
You can read Vanderhaeghe’s reaction here.
