Review: The Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

Opening line: She was not there.

The first paragraph of this claustrophobic, taut tale takes us, paradoxically, to the wide-open Utah desert, where Silas Pearson is searching for a missing woman. He knows his quest is likely hopeless. This expanse of red sandstone may look flat but it is creased with crevices, some of them hundreds of feet deep. An unwary hiker might break an ankle stumbling across a narrow rift and die of heat exhaustion under the sun, or fall into black depths and drown as the next rainstorm funnels through the gully. Yet Silas keeps looking, obsessively mapping the terrain a few days each week, marking off his search areas in 7.5 inch grid squares on the small-scale topographical maps that paper his living room walls. He has done this, we learn, for the past three-plus years, seeking his wife.

By the end of Chapter One, I shared Silas’ obsession, drawn in by his close observation of the rock itself, by his attention to every nuance of weather and geography that might offer a clue to her end. My desire to learn his wife’s fate, and to understand the web of emotions that drove his obsessive hunt, carried my eyes from sentence to sentence, page to page, while the sere landscape built itself in my mind.

The Slickrock Paradox takes us through terrain as unforgiving on the outside as Silas’ inner country is to him. This is a novel for those who love wilderness as passionately as they do a gripping, suspenseful mystery.

The Slickrock Paradox(2012)

#1 in The Red Rock Canyon Mysteries

By Stephen Legault

Touchwood Editions

Rosedale, with Tulips

What I'm reading in Rosedale: Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (a Belgian-American poet and novelist whose works began to be noticed by Women's Studies programs in the 1960s)

I woke today with a faint but spreading sense of anxiety. In four weeks this will all be over. The pressure to produce something of import is palpable, to make checkmarks on a list I cannot quite bring into focus on the inside of my eyelids. 

Across the room my springtime tulips assure me that ‘hey, everything is fine and isn’t it a grand day to be alive?’ Behind me are ample supplies of chocolate and teas of wondrous variety. Within reach are numerous books, dvds, and cds. There is a garden free to my wandering feet. Indeed, everything is fine here.

Beyond my patio doors is a car that can take me anywhere I choose to drive within a half hour of home – save for destinations up the Trans-Canada, where semis roar and belch their menace onto every nerve ending in my white-knuckled hands, their fumes filming over my heart and mind and skin. There are many destinations available on secondary roads in this end of the Fraser Valley, all lovely to view and peaceful to drive, if ever hurtling at 80 down a strip of asphalt can be peaceful. But why go there? Is it a good use of my time merely to go and look and feel? What is my purpose in turning left instead of right?

Time cannot be taken for granted when the limit is firm. Time is wasted going slow. Time ticks away, a march of moments lost, squandered, or made much of. Mortality lingers at the edge of each decision, unacknowledged like the panhandler on the corner you hope won’t manage to catch your eye, a blot on your idealized landscape of contentment. First thing I did here was let the ticking clock wind down. That kind of pressure I don’t need. 

Yet barely am I here, alone, settled, soothed, than the shadow of my leaving creeps across the room, footprints unseen in the pale pristine carpet. The tulips will last a week, a hopeful, cheerful statement of intent to revel, to enjoy, to delight in springtime, fading daily into the progression of moments lost, squandered, daydreamed away. Whether I replace them or no, their ending is an ending of seven days. Impossible not to see that thug, Mortality, sneering from behind them as they wilt.

Tulips were not on my list.

Loved Honor More by Sharon Wildwind

Review: Loved Honor More 

by Sharon Wildwind

Published 2012 by Five Star Publishing/Gale

“Loved Honor More” is the fifth and final book in the Elizabeth Pepperhawk/Avivah Rosen Vietnam Vets mystery series, written by retired army nurse Sharon Wildwind. It takes place in and around Madison County, North Carolina in 1975.

Set immediately following the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon, the opening chapter rapidly establishes the bewildered emotions felt by Vietnam veterans who survived their tours with deep physical and psychological scars and now believe it was all in vain.

Pepper’s longtime lover, Darcy, who was not supposed to be in Vietnam at all, is missing in the chaos. Complications arise for all the residents of Pepper’s rural homestead. Perils threaten both Pepper’s job as a nurse and Avivah’s as a police detective. Both women face personal demons and summon up reserves of strength when needed.

As the mysteries triggered by Darcy’s disappearance get tangled up with the lives, loves and families at the homestead, the author expertly unveils post-Vietnam social tensions between vets and anti-war protestors, ordinary citizens and the Vietnamese refugees who are settling in large numbers across the southern USA. This is a much a social history snapshot of upheaval in the wake of the war as it is a complex mystery of parentage, honor, and hidden identities.

With each of the previous books the relationships between the two roommates and their circle of friends deepened, yet a new reader starting with this book could get the characters straight pretty quickly and garner enough back story to be going on with. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself seeking out the earlier books. The full story of the friends’ post-Vietnam adjustment is well worth the journey.

Loved Honor More
 by Sharon Wildwind

Published 2012 by Five Star Publishing/Gale

The photo above is from the Calgary Public Library's archives. This picture was taken during "Library Hour" at a public school in the 1920s. Miss Hopkins, CPL's first Children's Librarian, started the program in 1914, bringing books to schools with no budget for books, and extolling the joys of reading. This "traveling library" was the first of its kind in Canada.

A Green Place for Dying - by RJ Harlick

 

Last night I opened ‘A Green Place for Dying’, the fifth Meg Harris novel by RJ Harlick, just released by Dundurn.

It's five a.m. and I’m still up.

This is one seductive book. It opened on a moonlit scene by still waters, with a group of mostly native women doing a renewal ritual. Before I knew it I was thigh-deep in soggy brush looking for a missing teenager. Then confronting an angry biker. Now someone else is missing, someone even more dear to Meg.

‘A Green Place for Dying’ is set along the Ontario/Quebec border, partly in bush and partly in Ottawa. The bush town of Somerset and the neighbouring Migiskan reserve are like the quaint, albeit murderous, village in the Louise Penny novels in that everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks they do. But here the village store sells venison pie and other wild-based foods instead of the designer dainties of Three Pines’ bakery, and the characters are more at home in jeans and deerskin jackets than in high-end sweaters. The story revolves around a touchy social issue: missing native women for whom the police don’t bother searching. There’s also a deeply unhappy local family with a black sheep brother and a missing daughter that Meg is helping to trace. An old secret in Meg’s past is rising to haunt her just when she needs to keep a clear head.

Not noir, and definitely not a cosy despite the lack of on-page violence, this novel is a traditional, suspenseful mystery in a non-traditional setting. The bush is an integral element, its sights, sounds, scents, and textures underpinning crucial scenes and drawing the reader deep inside the tensions and joys of the half-French, half-Native, half-English community with its crisscrossing lines of culture, language, and authority. 

You don’t need to have read the other books to really get this one; references to past events are understandable in their context. Highly recommended.

Sample the opening HERE

Kindle Quest #2

Still slogging along on my attempt to read 100 of the paper books already lying around here before succumbing to the lure of an e-reader on which I can load up a whole bunch of new purchases. I thought I'd posted the second set from last spring but I see not. Here goes with my spring reading, and maybe the summer's as well if there's room.


9. Beautiful Lie the Dead – Barbara Fradkin. 8th in the Inspector Green series. A bone-chillingly cold book set mainly in Ottawa and Montreal. It begins with a blizzard and almost every scene invokes the inimitable dangers of a Canadian winter both urban and bush. There are several narrators in successive scenes in the early chapters, something that can be annoying or confusing in less deft hands than Barbara’s. As with most in this series, family is the heart of the tale for both good – Inspector Green’s solid home life – and ill – the secret-burdened people scarred by their relationships to the woman lost in the initial blizzard. My best book of the week, and possibly the month.

10. Negative Image – Vicki Delaney. 4th in the Constable Molly Smith books. Set in fictional Trafalgar, BC, it has a cast worthy of a small town, including several sets of overlapping law enforcement personnel from different agencies. Score cards might be in order. The mix of narrators occasionally left me confused for several sentences as to whose head I was in. The villain wasn’t an equal match for all the investigators and could have been uncovered much sooner if all the cops hadn’t been distracted by their personal lives.

11. She Felt No Pain – Lou Allin. 2nd in the Constable Holly Martin series. Set in a fictional small town along the south shore of Vancouver Island, it follows Holly (mostly) through a series of small-town crimes and further clues to the disappearance of her mother. The setting and atmosphere were well done.

12. The Shetland Bus – David Howarth. Non-fiction account of his WW2 stint building and coordinating the British-Norwegian fishing-boat program that supplied materiel and instructors to Norway during the German Occupation. Inspiring what men can do when they simply acknowledge their fears and get on with what needs to be done. After all the reading I’ve done on Norway during the invasion/occupation – starting with that Grade Five book ‘Snow Treasure’ – I SO want to go to Norway and see that area for myself.

13. Dragonsdawn – Anne McCaffery. A re-read, but I got the previous read from the library and this one I own. I love filling in the bits of half-forgotten history on this favourite fantasy world.

14. Posted to Death – Dean James. On opening this book (purchased second-hand) I found I’d read it before and thought then, as now, that a vampire who takes pills so he can act like a normal person is really not changing the dimension of a mystery novel for me. So I quit and put this book into the ‘to good homes’ box by the front door. But it’s done. One more I can check off the Kindle Quest count.

15. Bones Gather No Moss – John Sherwood. Clearly forgettable, as I’ve forgotten it already. It didn’t annoy me enough to stop part way through. That, I’d remember.

16. Miss Melville’s Revenge – Evelyn E. Smith. An oldie but an irreverent goodie. I know next to nothing about this series but enjoyed the fast pace, tight pov, and the un-aware characters among whom Miss Melville moves.

17. The Withdrawing Room – Charlotte McLeod. A very early entry in the famous series, with layers of visually engaging images and surprising revelations in many of the characters’ lives, not merely in the one or two central to the murder. That sense of a whole cast of real people, rather than a few stars surrounded by what might as well be cardboard trees, is one of the ways this older series stands out.

18. The Night Inside: A Vampire Thriller – Nancy Baker (1993, Penguin Canada).  Older but interesting look at a vampire coming out of a 90-year sleep and getting mixed up with a young woman from modern-day Toronto. Well written and engaging despite some very graphic (to me) sexual violence. Too bad the next two books in this series are out of print. I found the second at a used book store but the third may elude me until/unless they’re re-released in e-book format.

19. The Water Rat of Wanchai - Ian Hamilton (2011, House of Anansi). This debut novel introduces Ava Lee, a Chinese Canadian forensic accountant who specializes in cash recovery where the sums are large and prosecution chancy because of international legal variance. While nobody cracks open a book about a forensic accountant looking for a thrill a minute, there are thrills to be had, especially toward the end. First, however, there's a lot of front-loaded back story about Ava to page through, and a fair bit of sitting by while she talks on the phone or checks into hotels.  The book is over 400 pages in trade paper, and feels it. The read would have seemed shorter if the heroine was more engaged with the world around her but she struck me as very detached even in the midst of violence. It's very cerebral for a thriller - lots of thinking and not much emotional engagement. Not to say I won't at least open the next one, as I'm a sucker for a travelogue, especially one that hits places where the tourists don't go, like Guyana.

20. The Grub ‘n Stakers Pinch a Poke – Alisa Craig. In this farcical mystery from the 1980’s, a community-theatre group stages a play based on the Robert Service poem about Dangerous Dan McGrew. Wacky eccentrics, romantic rivalries, and absurd attempts at murder and other mayhem make this a delightful light read to fill a summer afternoon.

21. One Careless Moment – Dave Hugelschaffer. (Cormorant Press)  This second in the Porter Cassels series sees the wildfire-fighting Albertan on loan to Montana. The opening chapters are a thorough and sometimes terrifying introduction to the behavior, dangers, and means of fighting a forest fire in rugged terrain. Porter soon finds evidence of arson and his investigation must navigate not only the highly hazardous fire environment but the equally unpredictable local tensions between residents, developers and squatters. The mystery was a page-turner, the insight into firefighting fascinating to anyone who lives, as I do, on the edge of similar terrain that is always at risk from fire. One thing that bugged me was the use of first-person present tense. It was done, no doubt, to bring immediacy to the narrator’s experiences during the fire and other dangerous situations, but I found it distracting. A good read nonetheless, and I will look for other books by this author.

22. Midnight Special - Larry Karp.  Third in his music-box collector series. This is first-person narration done as well: as if I were catching up on recent events over coffee with an old friend. Only as much back story as is needed at any point to orient me to a new character or situation, A steady, albeit descriptive, pace through each action scene. Fascinating tidbits about music boxes and automata sprinkled throughout.  I’m not too keen on the uni-dimensional sidekick or the reasons for Our Hero’s kindness to burglars, but maybe they would make more sense to me if I’d read the earlier books. The climax was a ‘Papa Poirot’ scene in which the suspects and other players were all gathered together to share their bits of the puzzle before the solution was revealed.

23. The Etruscan Chimera – Lynn Hamilton.  An earlier entry into her Lara McClintock series, this novel visits Paris (and environs) and Italy. Enjoyable, with lots of the expected fascinating facts about Etruscan history, pottery and so on. Way too complex, though, and I’m still not sure if the ‘Poirot’ ending (only in a tomb!) really made sense in light of all the killing and pot-passing. But it was a pleasantly erudite way to spend a few hours, and I’m sorry there won’t be more from this author.

From Bronte to Bosworth

Kate Bosworth, that is. The lead actress in the surf movie "Blue Crush." Or more particularly her character, Anne Marie Chadwick, a Hawaiian girl from the wrong side of the island who lives to surf but pays the rent for herself and her little sister by working as a hotel maid and teaching tourists to surf.

Struggling for money was something with which the Bronte sisters were more than familiar. What, after all, were their life choices pre-1850 except servitude as governesses, deepening poverty if they stayed home as unmarried women, or marriage to any man likely to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? Yet all three of the surviving Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, escaped their cheerless existence by exercising their imaginations and their intelligence, writing novels and poetry. 

 From left to right: Anne, Emily, and Charlotte  This picture of the three Bronte sisters was painted by Branwell Bronte. He had painted himself into the picture, but painted himself out later. There is still an outline of his form in the pillar.

Occupying my thoughts today are the overlaps and divergences between Charlotte's novel and Emily's, and the persistence of their themes into the present day.

In 'Jane Eyre', Charlotte Bronte wrote of the life of a governess and schoolteacher. She wrote what she knew - a harsh girls' school and harsher religious teachings, followed by teaching and governess jobs - but added to Jane a spirit of independence and pride that the girl's upbringing, unlike Charlotte's, would not have fostered. Add in a yearning to travel, to see the world beyond the confines of either the school or the secluded manor at which she is governess, and you have the seeds of a modern young woman's dreams, albeit without much opportunity to fulfill them (except by a good marriage).

Emily Bronte wrote of a young woman more at home on the wild moors than in polite company, and endowed her with a fond father who let her run wild in ways that sheltered, slightly fragile Emily (with two older sisters already dead of illnesses in childhood) could never have pursued. Catherine Earnshaw wants nothing that is not available within a few miles around her home.

Emily and Charlotte's mother died young, leaving her surviving children with only the vaguest memories of her. Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw lost their mothers at an early age.  Jane finds her way as Charlotte did, pouring out her intellect and spirit on other people's children. Emily's heroines have no such solace; they are bereft of mother-love almost at birth and brought up surrounded by men, much as Emily was, living at home with her father and brother while her more resilient sisters were out earning their bread.

The heroes - or perhaps the male leads is a better term, to avoid arguments over whether Edgar or Heathcliff is the more heroic in "Wuthering Heights" - are similar: masterful men capable of schooling their horses and their women, neither capable of seeing the world through anyone else's eyes. Where Mr. Rochester is softened by Jane, Heathcliff is hardened by Catherine. One is saved by love, the other damned by it.

Breaking no new scholarly ground here, the choices their heroines make 'for love' are a marked point of divergence. Jane Eyre falls in love with Mr. Rochester because he values her mind and her conversation. Although she leaves him rather than compromise her moral values, she comes back to him as his equal, not as a servant to be elevated by marriage. Catherine loves Heathcliff with a passion beyond reason, based on physical chemistry and certainly not for his intellectual attainments or his respect for hers. She marries Linton not for love but for lack of alternatives, and soon withers, leaving behind her own motherless daughter to the same narrow life in the same small space.

Divergent choices: Charlotte's heroine crying out  to be valued as a thinking individual and unwilling to settle for less than a full partnership in marriage, Emily's heroine caught up in passions too strong for her untutored rational side and coming to a tragic end that has enduring tragic consequences for the rest of her family.

(Might I insert here a plaint about the movies made of those novels? While the recent Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Wuthering Heights makes better sense of the psychology of the characters than did the torrid 1970's version I first saw in a cinema, there is still not much effort to explore the social or cultural themes underpinning the novel. It is presented as a tragic love story with a faintly optimistic ending. All the Jane Eyre adaptations I've seen, and they have been many, have focused too exclusively on the relationship aspects, overlooking or minimizing the social conditions of Jane's - Charlotte's - upbringing/education and especially failing to explore her expressed desire for equality in life and love. She is presented always as a woman of her time and station, only slightly more outspoken than normal for those circumstances. When will we see a truly human Jane Eyre?)

And so down the century-and-a-bit to Anne Marie Chadwick, bikini-wearing surfer girl in "Blue Crush". 

What, you may well ask, links her to the Bronte sisters' heroines? 

Mothers dying in childbed, or being absent early in their children's lives from other causes, were not uncommon occurrences in the 1800's. That is not the case in today's England, with improved maternal health and health care generally. 

Nor in Hawaii, where Anne Marie and her younger sister are nonetheless motherless, their mother having gone off with some man to California with apparently no intention of returning to take up her parental responsibilities again. Anne Marie, having left school early, is working at a menial job to keep food on the table for her little sister, trying to keep her sister in school and out of trouble. 

Our surfer girl has a chance to carve out her own life if she overcomes her fears and manages to win a surfing competition that will lead to sponsorships, self-respect, and financial freedom. But a handsome man is offering her a vision of a life of ease. In modern movie romance, 'Mr. Rochester' is represented by a pro football player who hires our heroine to teach him to surf. He soon is buying her clothes and encouraging her to spend his money in the luxurious hotel suite she was employed to clean until a few days earlier. The other football players all have kept women with them, women whose clear goal is to lure as much money, jewelery and physical enhancements out of their companions as possible before moving on to another free-spending athlete. 

While this modern Rochester does not hint that he himself will take Anne Marie away from her life of drudgery and poverty at the end of his Hawaiian vacation, we would have to be living under rocks not to see that she could have an easy life if she abandoned her sister's upbringing and her surfing aspirations to cash in on the succession of rich athletes and other male guests at the resorts.  

Jane Eyre's moral test was whether to become Rochester's mistress instead of his wife, and Cathy's challenge is to change the life she inherited from her passionate but unwise mother. Anne Marie's great moral test is whether she will repeat her mother's life choice of running out on her family responsibility and, equally important, turn her back on her own goals in favour of an easy escape from her present poverty. Will she be a Catherine or a Jane?

The night before that surfing competition, she faces the truth of what she wants in her life: enough money to pay the bills, her mother to come home, her sister to grow up without any disasters, and to win the surfing competition for herself. The only one of those her Mr. Rochester can provide is money, and that, by the nature of their relationship, is a temporary fix. Winning the surfing competition will provide two out of the four and increase her sister's chances of breaking out of the family pattern in her turn. She leaves him and goes home to prepare for the competition.

As Jane Eyre is rewarded for her virtue and high principles by gaining not only an inherited fortune of her own but an equal love with Mr. Rochester at the end of the novel, so, at the end of the movie, do we see Anne Marie rewarded. She overcomes her own fears to give the best athletic performance of which she is capable, earning her a sponsorship and the promise of not only income but support for continued training. Her other reward, very like Jane's, is to be treated as an equal by her modern-day Rochester, as a fellow athlete with a career of her own rather than as the servant girl he can (however temporarily) lift from her poverty. 

As Jane Eyre ended on the happy note of her marriage to and children with the man she loved - the ultimate reward for women in Charlotte Bronte's time just as Catherine Earnshaw's fate was the ultimate punishment for women who dared to love both deeply and unwisely - so Anne Marie Chadwick's movie tale ends on the happy modern note of rising career promise, improved income potential, and a future that includes her Mr. Rochester as a boyfriend who will understand the demands of her career and support her efforts.

And this, at bottom, is why Jane Eyre is still being read, taught, and re-visioned in books and movies for young women more than 150 years after Charlotte Bronte wrote it. We women may have come a long way, baby, but we still struggle with the need to be independent, to find our own financial security and to balance our career advancement with our relationship needs.

What does Wuthering Heights tell the modern woman? That's a story for another day, and I'm not sure I can think of a movie that makes a parallel.