AUGUSTINO AND THE CHOIR OF DESTRUCTION
By Marie-Claire Blais
Translated by Nigel Spencer
Anansi, 220 pages, $21.95
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HOW TO BECOME AN ANGEL
By Jean Barbe
Translated by Patricia Wright
McArthur & Company,
330 pages, $24.95
Judging by their new novels, two prominent Quebec writers seem to believe that history has a tendency to repeat itself, resulting in a chaotic and insecure society, full of guarded individuals.
How to Become an Angel is counterpoint to Jean Barbe's last novel, How to Become a Monster, which followed the life of an itinerant lawyer who ends up defending a war criminal. Using "on this date in history" chapter introductions to contrast modern-day ills with those of the past, Barbe tells the story of three friends over the course of their 20-year friendship.
Augustino and the Choir of Destruction completes the trilogy that Governor-General's Award-winner Marie-Claire Blais began with These Festive Nights and continued with Thunder and Light. The cast of characters surrounding Augustino, a somewhat psychic young writer, on his Caribbean island are the same, including his grandmother Mère, his brother Samuel, the Lady of the Bags, who lives in New York skyscrapers and makes predictions of doom, and the worldly and now aged artist Caroline, who recounts her triumphs and tries to make sense of her losses.
Foretelling doom and living among chaos may be similar themes in these two novels, but their form is quite different. Barbe's is straightforward, compelling storytelling, whereas Blais's writing is the more challenging but highly skilled stream of consciousness, the complexity of which only a seasoned writer could pull off, and which demands careful reading.
In the opening pages of How to Become an Angel, we meet François, Fred and Provençal, university students and roommates. Fred is a layabout committed to neither work nor school, Provençal is a history major, and François, the story's narrator, is an aspiring writer/journalist, who leaves his studies to take a job at a local paper administering a contest for "most extraordinary person." He comes across three similar entries praising a saint-like figure that goes by several aliases. Eventually, he finds the man, Victor Lazarre, an enigma whose presence has a calming, changing effect on those he meets. That is, if they are susceptible.
The three friends are all broken in their own ways, and though François has often witnessed Victor's magic, he doesn't employ his help for them; at least not right away, or consciously. After the untimely loss of his parents in a restaurant fire, Fred leaves the trio and descends into drug addiction. Provençal, whose parents died when she was a child, never quite recovers from Fred's departure. Her obsession to prove the undeniable existence of pain eventually lands her in the hospital in a coma after attempting to "fly" off the roof of their apartment building.
François returns from Mexico and searches for Fred, whose return helps coax Provençal back to health. Attempting to fly, or fear of flying, seems to be the symbolic backdrop to Barbe's story, from the first sighting of the angel statue directly in their sightline on the roof. Over the course of their lives together, the statue variously taunts and inspires.
"On the other side of the park and trees, on the flank of the mountain, facing us exactly from the top of a pedestal, stood the monumental statue of a winged woman. She appeared to wave to us with her left hand. She had a foot resting on a glove and seemed ready to fly away, to tear herself from the stone in a greyish-green flapping of her bronze wings."
Marie-Claire Blais, who has enjoyed nearly 50 years of publishing success, is a deliberately challenging writer. For one thing, in 220 pages of prose, there are hardly any periods, no paragraph or chapter breaks, and no quotation marks to distinguish between thoughts and dialogue. The stream of consciousness travels back and forth among a collection of characters, fictional and historical. It's slow going, and the tendency is to get lost in the prose, which is not an entirely bad thing since it will circle back around to understanding. This repetition strengthens the stories.
The present action of the novel is a birthday celebration, but much activity also occurs in the thoughts of the characters. Weaving in and out of the past, the topic of a great deal of the thought and conversation is a lamentation over past world wars, political and social strife, and worry over more recent acts of terror, and its affects on the world - globally, locally and personally. The "choir of destruction" seems to refer to the various characters and their thoughts, as well as the outside forces Augustino feels swirling around him.
"Augustino got up early like his father, often before dawn, and wrote, reading the words he had written from a screen placed up high where he could see the ocean, an invisible choir of destruction, I'm convinced that there are strategic missiles on this island, but no one really knows ... you can't see the missiles, Augustino had written, but they're here everywhere in the light of dawn and on the water, in the lukewarm colours of the sky, though he felt too inexperienced to describe the hold of outside forces on his life, inexorable as they appeared to him, living sheltered from all outer conflict in his family's home, and this further jumbled his thoughts, it was this dream, so real and palpable for him, this story of missiles he was writing, the weight of this dream that he could feel beneath his eyelids."
Carla Lucchetta is a writer and TV producer. She is working on a book about how young adults experience and express their sexuality.
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