Monday, 3rd December 2001, 12:03am
An opinion by: Rascal

 

Between Men by Katherine Govier

What is going on with Canadian authors? I keep stumbling across these great novels that make modern fiction from historical foundation. First (and still my favourite) there was Michael Ondaatje's Billy The Kid . Now there are The Englishman's Boy and Between Men. These two books follow a comparatively straightforward narrative form compared to Billy The Kid's impressionistic mix. They both interweave two stories, chapter by chapter. One tale is set in the "present", in which someone wishes to learn what really happened during a given historic event. This is good fun, there's nothing like a tantalizing mystery to keep one involved. In the discovery process, both books' protagonists find their own lives' are affected.

The Englishman's boy's past is uncovered by Harry Vincent, a Canadian working in Hollywood in the 1920s. He's being paid by a wannabe movie moghul to extract the life story from the last of the living cowboys, Shorty McAdoo, who carries a burden of guilt since he was just a kid, in the wild Canadian West. He recalls one time he escaped death at the hand of three Indian braves, humiliating himself and amusing them by wallowing in mud while snorting and squealing like a pig:

"There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.
  'Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so's to find their creature spirit,' he says. "That's where they learned it, in the wilderness.'
  I ask what he means by creature spirit.
  'Creature spirit,' he reiterates. 'Spirit they shared with some creature - grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.' There is another pause. 'What do you make of mine?'
  'Your what?'
  'You ain't been listening, have you?' he says."

This book is dense and engrossing, even if the denoument lacks punch in the surprise department. Instead, Shorty's shameful secret leaks out slowly, like air from a tire, leaving me similarly deflated.

But really I'm just being unfairly picky because Govier in Between Men does such a fine job of hiding her critical historic detail. And one hell of a shocking unveiling it is. Suzanne Vail Lives and teaches university in Calgary, Alberta. Her special pride is her historical research into a certain incident that occurred early in the city's history. Her interest in local history makes her an outsider in a faculty that primarily consists of imported academics, with specialties in the history of somewhere else. In addition, Suzanne' s research methodolgy is unconventional and quite groovy:

  "'I'm not a typical historian.' In graduate school, when her lecturers spoke of the fourteenth century's three crusades she said yes, but that's the easy part; what was really going on? That's the record, that's the observable fact, but haven't you left most everything out? What did the men discuss in markets? What did mothers teach their children, what games did they play?
  'I actually don't care about the coronations, the campaigns. I only care about real life.'
 He laughed. 'What on earth is that?'
  'I think politics and military matters are peripheral. More than that, I suspect them to be screens, flags thrown on the field to disguise the true events.' She dared him, hoping he'd bite.
  'Sounds like mushy revolutionary polemics to me,' said Simon.
  'No,' she said, although she had to admit she wasn't explaining it well. 'Maybe I want to be a time traveller. It's probably just a very advanced tourist bug.'"

The thing is, I found the present day part of the story to be thin. The character Suzanne is fleshed out but her friends are not quite there. I also found charm and humanity to be missing from the characterization of both her lovers. Hey, if I had were choosing between those two men, I'd say neither. The best parts of this book focus on Suzanne's historical research/conjecture... maybe that's the author's point. She certainly does a good job of making the past more compelling than the present. Kind of Oprah Winfrey Book Club-esque, but definitely worth it for the end, where a misunderstanding and a disgusting pastime lead to tragedy and horror.

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