Hope--and a Good Story--on the Other Side of the Great Derangement

 

  

The pre-historic village of  Bouldnor Cliff off the Isle of Wight is now completely submerged

Ian McEwan's What Can We Know was published just as I was putting the finishing touches on my Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years. I borrowed McEwan's book from the library without really know what it was about: his novels are always good reads, and that was just what I needed at a time when I was struggling to get my own story told

 

It was a delight to jump into McEwan's story which rolled along briskly.  A young scholar 100 years from now is trying to resurrect a poem written in honour of a poet's wife in 2014. Doing so requires a fair amount of legwork on his part as well as ferry rides around the British Isles which now are even more  of an archipelago, due to rising sea levels.  The picture he paints of what is in effect our current reality is somewhat off, as are his imaginings of both the poem and the people in the poet's literary circle.  We learn the truth of the latter in the second part of the book (spoiler alert.) but it's a mystery solved satisfactorily.  We are similarly assured that the scholar and his equally-scholarly girl friend are likely to live sort-of happily ever after.

 

But the thing I liked most about the book is its underlying premise: life will go on even after "the great derangement" brought on by climate change and international conflict.  Obviously, surviving all this has not been easy and life is far from as pleasant as it is now for a lot of us.  But we--a general, all-encompassing we--will survive. Furthermore people will want to remember what happened in the past and  will have the tools to investigate it. McEwan postulates a Nigeria that has become the global power house and which has been able to salvage all our electronic records: a conceit that seems a little far-fetched now, but who knows?

 

What I do know is that my message in Before We Forget is exactly that: memory, collective and individual is what we will need to continue as civilizations.  Hopeful thoughts as the seas rise faster than ever, and stupid, destructive war rages on and on. 

Barometer Rising: a Book about the First World War That Has Echoes Today

 

Barometer Rising was Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan's first published novel. It juxtaposes a rather conventional love story--Penny thinks Neil was killed in the Great War, Neil wasn't but is hiding because he's been wrongly accused of cowardice, they spend most of the novel yearning for each other--with the all-too-real explosion of a ship carrying munitions in Halifax harbour in 1917.

A new Penguin edition of the book has a photo taken in the minutes following the collision of the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo. The Mont-Blanc caught fire and its highly flamable payload exploded, creating the largest human-made blast until the A-bombs of World War II. But this does not occur until half way through the book, leaving one participant in a book discussion I recently led to express frustration at the slowness of the book's start.

MacLennan surely did this on purpose, because his aim was to write a story about Canada, its contribution to a war thousands of miles away, and its struggle to become a nation that is neither English nor American but something unique. As such, the characters' reflections are particularly pertinent today, when the country is trying to navigate its way through waters riled by Donald J. Trump. Prime Minister Mark Carney's several recent speeches about the importance of second-tier power working together can be read as direct descendants of the Canada MacLennan was writing about--a big country with much to give to the world. (Photo by Victor Magnus)

The Daughters of Shandong: Very Good Historical Fiction

 

istorical fiction sometimes has a bad rep. First of all, it can often get the facts wrong. Second, if it sticks too close to history it can be boring, lifeless, removed from the people who were making history.

That is why I approached Eve J. Chung's Daughters of Shandong with a certain amount of caution. It was suggested for a book club I belong to, and since I didn't have a better suggestion to defend, I went along with the group's choice. I'm glad I did because the book seems to skillfuly avoid both major problems of historical fiction.

The novel begins with Mao Ze-dong's Communist forces coming to power in Northern China, thrusting aside the Nationalists under Chaig kai-shek. The narratrice, Hai, is the oldest daughter in a wealthy land-owning family which the Communists want to punish. She, her mother and younger sisters are left behind when her father and other members flee. Girls don't matter, supposedly, and the excuse given for this act of cowardice is that they won't be bothered by the insurgents. Of course, that doesn't happen, Hai is nearly killed, becoming the scapegoat for the whole family. Only peasants who remember the kindness of Hai's mother help them, and so eventually they are able to flee.

What follows is a harrowing journey over two years (if I calculate correctly) that sees them go first to Qingdao on foot, and then to Hong Kong before ending up in Taiwan. I have not checked all the facts, but it appears that Chung did a great deal of research and avoids the trap of painting the Communists as devils and the Nationalists as the good guys. The truth is far more nuanced. What is portrayed as evil is th misogyny which favours men and denigrates women that pervaded China during this period.

A very good read, in short, and one from which the reader may learn a lot.