2004: The Year in Canadian Books

Heavy reading: At 1376 pages, Paul Anderson's novel had significant heft. Courtesy Random House Canada

Although Canadian letters enjoyed a banner year, the most significant story of 2004 was one of sorrow. On Dec. 1, the country lost Pierre Berton, one of its most august chroniclers, and by far its most prolific. He was 84. Berton’s journalistic achievements seem almost comical in their enormousness. A tireless analyst of the Canadian psyche, Berton authored 50 books – most of them earnest, scholarly works (The Mysterious North, The Last Spike, Vimy), though some decidedly less so (Cats I Have Known and Loved). Concerning Berton the man, opinion is divided on whether he was an avuncular storyteller or a patronizing blowhard. But no one could gainsay his passion and patriotism, two qualities often said to be lacking in the rest of us Canadians.

Peter C. Newman, the only person who could challenge Berton’s mantle as Canada’s Historian, marked 2004 with the release of Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion, and Power. Ostensibly a record of the politicians, businesspeople and other scoundrels he’s interviewed in the last half-century, the most captivating story to emerge is that of the author himself, an indomitable survivor who went from outrunning the Nazis as a child in occupied France to becoming one of Canada’s gutsiest reporters.

A country’s history can also be expressed in pictures, a point marvelously illustrated by two strapping coffee-table tomes. Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada 2 culls such prosaic objects as Terry Fox memorabilia and the now-defunct Eaton’s Christmas catalogue and elevates them to the status of, well, not art exactly, but artifacts of our recent past. Taking a similar, though slightly more studious tack is Charlotte Gray’s The Museum Called Canada. Gray examines rarefied relics like a Beothuk pendant and an anti-Confederation poster from 1940s Newfoundland to recount the most crucial chapters in Canada’s ongoing narrative.

Alice Munro won the 2004 Giller Prize for her latest anthology of short fiction, Runaway. Photo by Derek Shapton Courtesy McClelland and Stewart

Readers and retailers would agree that it’s always a good year when Alice Munro publishes a new story collection. But for the doyenne of short fiction, 2004 must have seemed even better than most. The Canadian press received her latest anthology, Runaway, with unanimous awe – no surprise there. The American literati responded in kind, with Jonathan Franzen lawyering on her behalf in The New York Times Book Review, arguing that she was criminally under-read in the U.S. despite having “a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.” Munro triumphed in early November, nabbing her second Giller Prize (the first was for 1998’s The Love of a Good Woman). But her perfect record for the year was slightly tarnished a week later, when Winnipeg’s Miriam Toews took the Governor General's Literary Award for A Complicated Kindness, her clever picaresque novel about life in Mennonite Manitoba.

Canlit also generated a lot of newcomer buzz. David Bezmozgis’s collection Natasha and Other Stories turned seemingly guileless lives along Toronto’s Bathurst corridor into the stuff of Great Jewish Fiction; Colin MacAdam’s Some Great Thing exploited the housing boom in 1970s Ottawa for a meditation on broken homes and thwarted dreams; while venerable journalist Trevor Cole delivered Norman Bray, In the Performance of his Life, a delightfully caustic first novel. All three rookies were nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award.

Although absent from award lists, Paul Anderson’s debut novel Hunger’s Brides was literally the biggest release of this year – and a potential murder weapon if thrown with enough gusto. The Calgarian’s book, about a 17th-century Mexican poet named Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, has a gripping story – and a remarkable back-story. The first draft came to Random House editor Anne Collins at a thousand pages. Instead of asking the writer to prune the original manuscript, as is the wont of most editors, Collins was so taken with the narrative that she asked him to extend it – by 400 pages. More than just an exercise in logorrhea (or a ploy to keep tree planters busy), Hunger’s Brides is a rigorous, enriching tome that (almost) justifies its length.

Speaking of big… Greg Gatenby, the founder and former director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors (IFOA) at Harbourfront, decided to auction off a colossal chunk of his home library this year. His cache contains more than 25,000 signed first editions appraised at $2 million. Although he was rather mum about specific titles, he revealed that his collection included an inscribed first edition of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Gatenby’s spotlight was dimmed, however, when Harbourfront declared that many of the books in his collection were acquired as gratis review copies while he was in their employ, and thus rightfully belonged to them. Gatenby admitted that a quarter of the books were Harbourfront freebies, but said there was no chance in hell that he would give them back.

One book Gatenby is unlikely to have kept – or even read – is Rebecca Eckler’s Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-To-Be. Adapted from her milquetoast musings in the National Post, the memoir details the party girl’s defiant struggle to experience pregnancy while meeting the demands of her teeming social life. What readers discover: Eckler’s resentment of singletons, her casual loathing of her partner (i.e. the father), her naming dilemma (she opted to call her daughter Rowan, but only after Gwyneth Paltrow stole the name “Apple”) and other problems that billions of mothers have managed to surmount in dignified silence. The commentariat couldn’t decide which was more galling: Eckler’s lamentable prose or her brazen immaturity. Hmmm, that is a tough call.

From a self-appointed hero to the real McCoy: Romeo Dallaire, the stoic witness to the carnage in Rwanda a decade ago, published his greatly anticipated memoir. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda is an unflinching account of the genocide seen through the incredulous gaze of the commander of the UN peacekeeping mission to that African nation. The book is a devastating testimony to tribal hatred, international negligence and one man’s struggle to find psychological peace after seeing mankind at its least humane.

Politics is no place for politesse, as we were reminded in Sheila Copps’ book Worth Fighting For. The former MP and Chretien loyalist has had a long-simmering resentment towards Prime Minister Paul Martin: not only did he trounce Copps in her quixotic tilt at the Liberal party leadership, but once Martin was anointed, he dropped her from cabinet and threw his support behind another Liberal in Copps’s home riding. That smarts, and Worth Fighting For was her chance to get even. Laced with allegations of the current PM’s duplicity, this strafing tell-all asserts that Martin came close to sending Canadian soldiers to Iraq and that he considered rescinding the Canada Health Act in 1995 to accommodate more “flexible” health-care delivery. Worth Fighting For is too short on introspection to succeed as a memoir, but as a work of bilious, unadulterated contempt, it’s a triumph. Like Pierre Berton, Copps has no interest in playing the role of the shy, inhibited Canadian.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.