Anyone familiar with Sylvia Tyson’s place in Canadian musical history (as one half of Ian and Sylvia, one quarter of Quartette, a CBC broadcaster and industry activist) and her songwriting skills (You Were on My Mind among dozens of others) is likely to be slightly nonplussed at first, and then mightily enthused, by Joyner’s Dream, her first novel.
Bafflement and befuddlement arise, in the first instance, because one of the strongest female voices in the country chooses six male protagonists to narrate the sturdiest, more fully realized of the eight sections in her book. She then keeps readers off-balance by following quite a different path through the lives of musicians than might be expected of a veteran player who could easily have revenged herself on the fools and scoundrels she’s had to deal with in a career that spans six decades.
Like Kim Edwards’s bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Joyner’s Dream is a multi-generational novel that unearths one family’s secrets as a way of exploring how the future is a very odd fusion of the present and the past. Told in the words of the members of the Joyner-Fitzhelm clan, who start, continue, edit and end a secret journal between 1788 and 2006, Joyner’s Dream follows the lives lived and the music played by the fiddlers of the family, beginning with the public-house tunes and tales of the busker Blind France, preserved by his grandson in late-18th-century England.
Wherever they travel, the Joyner-Fitzhelms carry not only their music but two other inherited traits: a level of manual dexterity that makes cheating at cards and picking locks or pockets lucrative sidelines, and a pronounced tendency toward alternating bouts of mania and depression that make them both oddly attractive and difficult to love.
When George Fitzhelm, the novel’s most fully fleshed character, brings their story to Halifax in time for the Explosion, and to Toronto in the ’20s, both music and lives escape the limitations of the English class system and upend Upper Canadian pretentiousness. Smitten by the jazz of Joe Venuti and Django Reinhardt, George becomes bandleader of the racially integrated Hot League and the owner-operator of a private club in downtown Toronto.
Wherever musicians gather, thievery abounds. That’s an old story, but Tyson breathes fresh life into it with power and acumen and a firm grip on the age-old but endlessly fascinating knavery of business managers and their henchmen as they prey upon those engrossed in making life more interesting than lucrative.
HarperCollins is overselling Joyner’s Dream by comparing its pleasures to those found in reading Dickens and Hardy. Sylvia Tyson isn’t in the same league as David Adams Richards (“our Dickens”) or Donna Morrissey (“our Hardy”), but she takes on Robertson Davies on his own turf and gets the better of all of his novels except Fifth Business. Her fiction is as populist (rather than pop) as her songs: She knows people, sees them whole, and allows readers to judge them for themselves.
What makes her writing soar over so many contemporaries is her ear, as she recreates the diction of men and women of varying social circumstances in diverse times and places. Her characters may be eccentric but they are more than a hodgepodge of Masterpiece Theatre drawing-room tics and bedroom tricks: They speak to us as individuals with small, fragmented stories to tell and, ultimately, as a chorus interweaving universal themes orchestrated by a master harmonizer as time past is made time present in thoroughly satisfactory ways.
Contributing reviewer T.F. Rigelhof’s most recent book is Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984.
Joyner’s Dream, a companion collection of new music by Sylvia Tyson, is available online at www.zunior.com.
