David Bergen
My immersion in a book can usually be measured in one of two ways: by the number of pages dog-eared and paragraphs underlined, or by the paucity of notes, which I've been too engrossed to make. Such is the case with Giller Prize-winning author David Bergen's latest novel, Leaving Tomorrow.
So, let's just say this: Leaving Tomorrow is pure pleasure. It doesn't parade its wit or its wisdom but is a sensitive, perceptive and disarmingly honest bildungsroman which deserves to take its place alongside such mid-western Canadian classics as Who Has Seen the Wind and A Complicated Kindness.
As in Bergen's bestselling Age of Hope, the novel follows the maturation of an apparently ordinary individual whose experience is both unique and resonant with universalities. Arthur Wohlgemuht's childhood home is a wrangler's cabin on a ranch near Tomorrow, south of Calgary; the ranch is owned by the wealthy Deweys, to whom Arthur owes his first encounters both with high art and social snobbery.
The sections describing Arthur's infancy recall the opening pages of David Copperfield – will Arthur, too, be the hero of his own life? – and establish a pattern of lost loves beginning with a Métis night nurse (on their separation, Arthur writes, "My small heart was broken into pieces, a suffering so acute and painful that for the rest of my life I have been aware of how a lover can pierce the soul and then take flight"). His sister dies in a tragic accident early on, and Arthur's older brother, Bev, is a fighter with little time for his bespectacled, romantic and painfully aloof younger sibling.
The child Arthur is a collector of arcane vocabulary who is increasingly disdainful of his peers and the prairies: if nothing brilliant could come out of such uncultured wilderness, he reflects with mounting fear, it would stand to reason that nothing brilliant should ever come out of him. On a rare visit to the Deweys' library, he discovers Stendhal's The Red and the Black and is inspired by the story of Julien Sorel, who educates himself out of his lowly peasant class. So begins a thematic leitmotif of circular ambition (Arthur informs us that ambire itself means "to go round"), setting our hero on journeys both literal and figurative.
As in most ordinary lives, little happens and everything happens, and Bergen infuses the mundane with searing psychological and emotional insight: we feel Arthur's ignominy as if it were our own when he turns up to Alice Dewey's birthday party with no gift but a leaking bag of buttered popcorn. (Alice, who later sacrifices Arthur on those precious library shelves, is the only character to lapse into caricature: the spoilt and adored girl next door who is more taken with Bev than the bookish, devoted Arthur.)
Crisis arrives when Bev signs up to fight the Viet Cong. "If I were making stuff up rather than telling the truth, I would have Bev killed in Vietnam, which would be more dramatic and create a conflict in our family," says Arthur – though of course, the greater fascination lies in witnessing the "uxorious love poured all over his absence" and the transformation of Arthur's adolescent envy of his brother into pity and embarrassment.
Bev is one of several characters who demand a starring role in another novel. The greatest of these is Arthur's tomboyish adopted cousin, Isobel, with whom he shares an exploratory physical relationship as well as a deep intellectual engagement. It is Isobel, not his fiancée Dorothy, that Arthur pines for when he moves to Paris (in one of Bergen's characteristically gentle ironies, he writes, "After I kissed Dorothy goodbye and was finally in the air, I was so relieved to be gone from her that I wrote her a letter telling her how much I missed her") – and Isobel who visits him there, only to trump Arthur at the French experience he so desperately, and vainly, pursues.
Dreams of an affair with a wealthy older woman are promptly thwarted, while Paris proves to be indifferent to Arthur's literary ambitions. Sartre does not reveal himself at Les Deux Magots, and Arthur's clumsy French renders his wit impotent. It is surprisingly difficult to reinvent himself abroad – and ultimately impossible to escape his brother's shadow and the pull of home. As Arthur's callowness cedes to humility, there is in his ability to move on a recognizable triumph.
Leaving Tomorrow is not a high-concept novel, but as Arthur reflects on a cherished book, "the style was odd, almost simple, and yet it moved me and created in me a longing for the skill to tell a story in that manner: plainly, with force and consequence." For this reader, David Bergen has done just that.
Trilby Kent's most recent novel is Silent Noon.