News

Sandra So here we are again, a few days before the gala, jump-starting the Giller Prize debate by making our own choice about which of the five books on the short list should win the prestigious literary award. Usually we start off with the book we think is not going to win and then we work our way through to which book, or books should or could win, and if they could possibly be the same book.

John Do we want to single out a book we don't think will win? That seems slightly churlish

Sandra Aren't we journalists?

Alison This will be hard to do this year. There isn't one that screams it's absolutely going to win. And there isn't one that makes you wonder, what's this doing on the short list?

John There are books on this list that are not better than Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, and the fact she's excluded throws the credibility of the judging process in question. Especially now that I've read all five, this strikes me as being a talking point.

Sandra Are there any other books you think should have been on this list besides The Year of the Flood?

Alison I was surprised not to see Michael Crummey's Galore get on the long list.

John Crummey's book was good but it's very folkloric, it has the jig and the reel about it, which I think somewhat disqualifies it as serious literature in the eyes of these sorts of juries.

Sandra Well, it also depends on who is on the jury. Victoria Glendinning is clearly British, Russell Banks is almost Canadian – but he's an American – and then Alistair MacLeod is of course from Cape Breton. I suspect MacLeod might be behind the Linden MacIntyre, The Bishop's Man.

The Bishop's Man

JohnThe Bishop's Man is the one people will enjoy most if they buy it. The thing I really liked is knowing MacIntyre as a top senior journalist, a guy with his face right up against the information for a long time, stepping back and adopting an entirely new voice and doing it so successfully. It's the good thing about the book, it's also the bad thing about it and, in the end, he's too soft on his characters.

Sandra He's so objective as a journalist, maybe as a novelist too?

Alison It's also seen through the eyes of a priest, so there's a little more empathy. It was a great character study and I thought the plot was fabulous. It was really structured well.

John It's bound to grab people's attention because the bishop's diocese he was talking about is in Antigonish, whose bishop was just arrested in September with alleged child pornography on his laptop. That makes you want to know these people, and this is the book that will help you know these people.

Sandra It's incredibly topical now. He couldn't have predicted that bishop would be arrested just as his book is short-listed for the Giller Prize.

John But MacIntyre's bishop is merely complicit, right? His bishop is not walking around with a truckload of porn.

Sandra No, his bishop is just wanting to keep the ship afloat, but one of the themes in this book is that everybody has a secret. It's about how this enterprise, the Catholic Church, keeps itself going by suppressing all these things, and this is one time when it can't. I liked the book too, but there were too many other novels lurking within its pages.

John Well, it rambles like a good Cape Breton tale. It's interesting to compare it to the Michael Crummey book, which is fantastic in the same terrain. MacIntyre is much more disciplined and rigorous in his handling of that same folkloric oral culture.

Alison Sentence by sentence, this isn't the best writing of the five. But the way the plot moves along was surprising to me. On its most basic level, it's about a guy with a mid-life crisis who has lost faith in his institution, and that is mirrored by these Cape Bretoners who can no longer fish and the coal is gone and the whole culture is changing. I thought it was great.

John Yes, it has sympathy for the culture without romanticizing it in any kind of a way.

The Fall

Sandra Okay, so we're not eliminating The Bishop's Man. How about Colin McAdam and Fall ?

Alison This is set in a private school in Ottawa, and it's focused on three people. There's Noel, a quiet loner who ends up bunking with the most popular kid in school named Julius, and Julius has this girlfriend named Fall, or Fallon, whom Noel becomes increasingly obsessed with. We have Noel telling the story from years later – because it's a psychological thriller, really – and then we have the stream of consciousness of an 18-year-old, who would be Julius, and their quite disparate ways of telling the story. But I'm not always sure that the 18-year-old worked for me.

Sandra Yes, I got really tired of him.

John Well, I'm of a certain age; I'm sorry, I'm not interested in a boys' school novel. Now McAdam's got chops. No question this kid knows what he's doing – he's probably not a kid.

Sandra He's 38.

John Multiple points of view, very deftly handled, the structural strategy is consistently good, the characters are all well-drawn. My question is whether I care about it at the end. The narrative by the happy, well-adjusted victim is the most skim-able thing I've read in a long time.

Alison Maybe that's what 18-year-olds think about, but there was that one passage where he starts talking about, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to fart, I farted. For the long extended passages, it's not rewarding reading.

Sandra I agree that Colin McAdam is very clever, perhaps too clever. He's flashing every trick in the book and it's dazzling, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. Fallon, the centre character, is really obscure, and what happens to her is also very opaque.

Alison I really enjoyed the narrative by Noel. The other part wasn't as strong, but I also want to give him bonus points for making the sociopath now work at the CRTC.

John Yes, that was very good. I don't know if we can give away too much on that but one thing that threw me about this book: We're accustomed to outsider narratives and very often, the outsider has been the good guy and the well-adjusted, happy, shallow people have been the tormentors. Here, it's turned around and that took me aback. I'm not sure I approve of what he's done. Basically, the message here is, watch out for the quiet ones, they're the real sinister characters. He makes a good case.

The Golden Mean

Sandra We've actually by chance discussed two books by men and there are three other books all by women and these three are my favourites. The Golden Mean is a first novel by Annabel Lyon. When the Twin Towers were toppling in 2001, she immediately thought of Aristotle and the golden mean, which is one of his great gifts to philosophy and to life: the idea of living in moderation between the forces that control your life. It explains Aristotle in ways that I certainly hadn't thought of him before – not that I've made an earth-shattering study of Aristotle. But it's also very much a domestic drama in a way.

John I'd purged the word “domestic” from my vocabulary because I thought that might have been considered a sexist comment.

Sandra Aristotle may be intelligent but he doesn't know a lot about women, and I thought it interesting that women do teach him a few things.

Alison And he curses like a sailor!

John I love the way the slave speaks: Hey, fuck you, hey, fuck you.

Sandra I poison you! I poison you!

Alison Lyon is a really good writer. My first time through I had to go back because there are so many names and it takes a while to figure out where she's going, but I liked it a lot. I would have liked to see a little more character development.

John I didn't know what the golden mean was at the beginning and I don't know what the golden mean is at the end. I know at some point she has Aristotle saying: “I'm not just a compromiser. I don't mean you have to take the middle way.” I don't think it's very successful as a way of explicating Aristotle's thought.

Sandra I thought that the golden mean was explained. It's certainly not an intellectual's look at Aristotle. …

Alison Thank God for that.

John There's a battle scene where she puts Aristotle in a campaign of Philip of Macedon working in the medics' tent and it's just a stunning piece of writing. And when you look in the acknowledgments you see that's probably the only the real fiction she's dealing with. She apologizes to scholars for putting him in this battle scene. That's sort of the tension of the book, I think: What she's made up is perhaps more interesting than the documentary aspect of the book.

Alison Lyon's is the only one that has the three nominations (it's also nominated for the Governor-General's and Writers' Trust fiction awards) this year, which is a bit of a curse.

Sandra It certainly was for Rawi Hage ( Cockroach ), last year. But we'll see.

The Disappeared

John Let's move on. I have something to say: I would bump Kim Echlin's The Disappeared off the list in favour of Atwood's Year of the Flood. As a technical achievement, The Disappeared is a very flawed book.

Sandra Tell me why.

John Well, there's two books here. One is a love story and the other is a documentary account of what happened in Cambodia 35 years ago and clearly she's trying to take what seems to be a contemporary story, and use that to gain an imaginative insight into what happened back there. That's a reasonable convention, but one is like a high-end documentary of what happened, of historical horror, and one is a love story of the sort that I would expect to find in more of a romance than a serious literary novel.

Alison Because she was reflecting back on this teenage love, I wondered why it was never analyzed or questioned or changed beyond this inexplicable passion.

John Yes, it's just like this bolt from the blue – now we're in love and we're in love forever and that's that.

Alison There was some really good writing in there, I have to say.

I was with her in Cambodia and I liked how at the end she branched off to contemplate the Disappeared, but there were times it did feel a little bit that we were using these people so we could learn about Cambodia.

Sandra I totally disagree with both of you. I think it's a beautiful novel and the two parts are fused seamlessly. What often happens with these teenage loves, the first time you're in love like that, you don't question it. It's a no-choice situation. Now, I'd look at a partner differently – I'd count his teeth, for heaven's sake. The narrator has gotten so caught up in what has happened to this guy, how he's been taken from her, her father's complicity in not passing on the letters. … This is a story of terrible loss and mourning and it's parallel or part of the stream of what happened in Cambodia. And I think the use of the second-person voice is totally appropriate: It acts as a testimony, a victim-impact statement almost.

John I had an editor once who used to revile purple writing by describing it as ‘saffron-coloured monks riding tiny donkeys down narrow alleyways where the sun never shines' and there's quite a bit of that in this novel.

The Winter Vault

SandraThe Winter Vault by Anne Michaels. Who wants to start on that?

Alison That's a tough one. I went to the International Festival of Authors on the Giller reading night, and they're all introduced with a description of their book, but when they got to Anne Michaels, they introduced her as the author of Fugitive Pieces.

John It's a good value. It's 30 per cent off at Indigo as we speak. This is a remarkable book. It's difficult to describe, but not to read. It's a novel that pushes you back as much as it drags you in. There's not much point in describing the plot because not much happens.

Alison It's more of a meditation than a story.

John It's about how people inhabit the Earth, what they build on the Earth and what they end up being at the end of their life on Earth. It's so fundamental; it's a profound book.

Alison And she does focus on the rebuilding of a temple in Egypt in 1964 where they have to take it down, brick by brick, and move it.

John For the Aswan High Dam, which was being built at the time.

Sandra It's about progress, in a way, and the cost of progress, the loss of villages in the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the loss of the Nubian civilization in the building of the Aswan Dam. And then there's this incredible loss of Warsaw, what has happened in the war with the Germans, and then the Soviets just destroying that city, and then it's rebuilt. And it's true. I don't know whether you've ever been to Warsaw, but it looks like a stage set. All these beautiful, pristine, totally recreated buildings and you wonder if they're just going to flop because there's nothing behind them. And of course, once again, as in The Disappeared, there is a stillborn baby girl.

Alison Her description of that was just wrenching. I know a couple of people who thought the second half fell apart, and I wonder if it has something to do with whether you're interested in that part of the world, because I've been to Warsaw, I have family in Warsaw and I loved that character.

Sandra Well, it was hard to … it's almost another story. But I really liked the ending where Avery and Jean try to get over their loss and find a way to live together in a loving way with each other. I thought that was extremely well done because there was nothing sappy about that. It isn't easy to get over something like that.

John And what that is, is the loss of the child.

Sandra The novel is a very expandable thing. It can be used however anyone wants to use it. There are many, many forms.

It was almost as though The Disappeared was a spoken book, an oral book, and I would say The Winter Vault is a written book.

Alison Is it ever. You can't hear the dialogue. It's the opposite to Colin McAdam's Fall. These people with their intelligent soliloquies. …

John It's so unnatural. But Tom Stoppard plays are unnatural too. I like Michaels because she's not trying to create some sort of false pattern of kitchen-sink realism. It's not really a novel and that's what I like about it. We don't need a narrative arc.

Alison And she has some great images that resonate, like when she's talking about the displaced, when they would go on their boats back to the place where they once lived.

Sandra The image, apparently, that she had first when she started writing this book was of Avery painting landscapes on Jean's bare back, which I found very moving.

John The novel ends with her painting on his back.

Sandra Yes, so it's tied up, it's very intricate that way.

John There's some beautiful writing. There was a passage in which she named the native flowers in Southern Ontario that read like a passage from Milton.

Sandra Well, she is a poet. The only bumpy part for me was some of that driving back and forth, and that straining to keep Jean and Avery connected when she was having that fascinating interlude with her Polish lover.

John I didn't understand any of that at all. I figured, okay, this is happening now.

Alison What, the Polish guy?

John Yes. I mean, I don't even know what they did. I mean, speaking of no laughs, there's no sex either.

Sandra With the Polish guy? Sure there is!

John She's always got her clothes on.

Alison No, they have baths together.

Sandra No, she doesn't.

Alison She takes her clothes on and off. We don't see any. …

Sandra Well, they have no heat in the house.

John It showed, I felt it.

The verdict

John Okay, We have to make a decision. So let's assume [Giller Prize founder] Jack Rabinovitch is knocking on the door. Which one should win, and then which one will win? I say Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault should win. It's the most ambitious work here and I think people just have to be rewarded for taking chances and doing things that are new and unrecognizable.

Alison Based on my own bias for character and plot – I think Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man should win.

Sandra I would be happy if The Disappeared, The Winter Vault or the Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean, won. But the one I'd like to see win … hmm. …

John The tension is rising.

Alison It's hard.

Sandra The one I think should win is Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, which I know neither one of you will agree with. Okay, so which one do you think will win?

John I think Anne Michaels will win.

Sandra I do too. And I would not be unhappy.

Alison I think she will too. Sometimes I think Annabel Lyon, but mainly I think Anne Michaels.

Sandra Okay, so we think Michaels will win. Now, we're always wrong.

Alison We completely ignored two people.

Sandra Well, I think the girls should take it. One of those girls has got to take it this time, that's what I think.

Alison You never know.

John Oh, all this domestic stuff!

The winner of the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced at a gala on Tuesday night in Toronto.