2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 1

Posted 29 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize |

Effigy, by Alissa York. Random House Canada, $32.95 cloth, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-0-679-31472-1.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: None

Other awards: 2001, John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer

Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher (Any Given Power)

1999, Journey Prize (”The Back of the Bear’s Mouth”)

1999, Bronwen Wallace Award (Short fiction)

From the publisher: “Set on a Mormon ranch in nineteenth-century Utah, and inspired by the real events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, Alissa York’s Effigy is a haunting story of a polygamous family united by faith but separated by secrets.”

From reviews: “Exquisite detail in Alissa York’s historical novel Effigy ensures that readers are transported to 19th-century Utah, specifically the ranch of a polygamous Mormon family, where seething tensions do not remain below the surface.” — Globe and Mail

“York’s writing is graphic and impressionistic, sharp-edged and sensual. Though both style and landscape at times bring to mind Annie Dillard and Cormac McCarthy, York’s voice is very much her own.” — Quill & Quire

“York writes with severe precision, each word pounded into place, no give to the language. This makes for slow-going sometimes — Effigy is not an easy read — but it also allows her to capture the casual brutality of frontier life with particular force.” — National Post

Representative passage: “The scene beneath the outcropping entered him with the slow-flowing force of a dream. The pack horse hauling back into its haunches, the black giant thrashing, all hooves and whipping spine. For now, the fight was enough to keep the cat from biting, working its long teeth between bones to snap the hidden cord. It was holding on tight, though, a fat, cream-coloured saddle with a glaring face. Spotting the Tracker, it added its own voice to the squealing song of its prey. The black horse rocked forward, baring the cat’s white chest. On the back-surge the mare’s head and breast obscured the shot. The trick was in the timing. Crooking his finger, loosing the ball a hair’s breadth before the next plunge.

“It was a kill for the telling, the first shot rendering the second one unnecessary. Claws let go, retreating into their sheaths the moment the Tracker’s ball met heart. The lion was airborne on the following buck. It landed in a crease of the outcropping, both horses dancing in the wake of its death. Hammer broke upon the aftermath through the thin smoke drifting from the Henry’s muzzle.”

My assessment: Notwithstanding its Utah setting, Effigy may be a quintessentially Canadian novel. It’s set in the past, on a ranch; it’s about familial strife; it uses animals for metaphorical resonance (in this case, wolves, horses, and crows); it’s relentlessly bleak and depressing; and it privileges a precision of style over a compelling story.

There’s no question that York’s writing is impeccable; she is a master of voice and her polyphonic approach involves numerous shifts in points-of-view, at times incorporating everything from dream narratives to a mother’s letters to her daughter. (York’s stylistic flourishes are often subtle; it took several letters for me to realize that the mother never uses commas.)

However, while the prose is crystalline, it is also — like crystal — inanimate, devoid of life’s seething essence. One telling experience occurred while I was reading this novel: as I opened the book, my bookmark slipped from its spot and fell to the floor, losing my page. I flipped back to what I thought was roughly the spot I’d stopped reading and took up the story. After about three and a half pages, I came across a single sentence that I recognized, and realized that I’d read the entire passage already, but save for that one particular sentence I had absolutely no recollection of it.

This is a dilemma that seems to pervade much of what is lauded in Canadian fiction: although the prose is burnished to a fine sheen, there’s no life to it. It’s all irredeemably beautiful, but in its very beauty the muddiness that is life’s essence goes missing. I’ve quoted Virginia Woolf before, but it seems appropriate to do so again:

We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh — Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? … Life escapes: and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.

Woolf was writing about the novels of Arnold Bennett, but she could as easily have been writing about Effigy. It is appropriate that one of the main characters in York’s novel is a taxidermist for, like the animals her husband brings home to be stuffed, the novel has the surface veneer of life, but none of life’s animating spark.

Next up, Divisadero.

5 comments to “2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 1”

Nathan, October 29th, 2007 at 3:37 pm:

• “This is a dilemma that seems to pervade much of what is lauded in Canadian fiction: although the prose is burnished to a fine sheen, there’s no life to it. It’s all irredeemably beautiful, but in its very beauty the muddiness that is life’s essence goes missing.”

  Nicely put, Steven. What you see as a flaw, however, most editors see as a plus - if it’s pretty and elegant and just a little ole-timey, it sounds like literature from five steps back, and that’s exactly the effect being sought.

Kerry, October 29th, 2007 at 9:34 pm:

• Very interesting. I’ve not read this, but enjoyed your review. Looking forward to reviews-to-come. Nice work.

James, October 30th, 2007 at 3:26 pm:

• “Effigy may be a quintessentially Canadian novel. It’s set in the past, on a ranch; it’s about familial strife; it uses animals for metaphorical resonance (in this case, wolves, horses, and crows); it’s relentlessly bleak and depressing; and it privileges a precision of style over a compelling story.”

  That pithy observation, and the passage that Nathan pointed out, can be filed under “Why So Few Readers Bother with Canadian Fiction, Part XXXVIII.” I don’t know any savvy readers who waste their few reading hours plodding through yet another Extended Canadian Heritage Moments any more. I’m sure my own circle of associates are not alone, which leads me to wonder how many of the few thousand copies of these exquisite, soulless novels actually get read, even by the people who buy them. In many cases, the novels are bought as gifts for that hard-to-please relative “who listens to the CBC and likes difficult books and the opera” or as high-culture chachka for the living-room tables of Victorian fixer-upper houses. Surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that less than half of lit-fic novels purchased are actually read by anyone, though I’m inclined to believe that those numbers are optimistic. Maybe I run in the wrong crowd, but I have yet to meet anyone who breathlessly awaits the publication of the next novel about the opening of the Canadian West. And it’s not the subject matter or setting that I’m talking about here, but the dreary, joyless, earnest tone with which the themes and settings and characers are treated (”smothered” would be a better word, actually).

  And speaking of smothering, good luck with Divisadero. I haven’t seen so much treacle in one place since the last British Pastry Chefs Bake-Off.

jpz, October 30th, 2007 at 3:49 pm:

• A really good summation of what’s–for lack of a better word–wrong with a lot of Cdn fiction. Read that pearl of a sentence and smile wistfully into your cup of herbal tea, the publishers and polite book clubs say.

  zzzzzzzz . . .

Finn Harvor, November 4th, 2007 at 5:19 am:

• “Nicely put, Steven. What you see as a flaw, however, most editors see as a plus - if it’s pretty and elegant and just a little ole-timey, it sounds like literature from five steps back, and that’s exactly the effect being sought.”

  Nathan: This preference for the bland in Canadian letters is nothing new; a while back, a friend read me a poem written by Irving Layton during the 1960s or 70s tearing a strip off the complacent conservatism that has played a role in keeping English Canadian culture quasi-colonized. This complacent attitude — this “thanks, but not quite for us”-ism — is one of the most exasperating aspects of our culture. And it’s misplaced. The harsh reality is English Canada has by far the weakest national culture of all the industrialized nations. Perhaps characterizing our culture as quasi-colonized is letting it off too easily — maybe it would be more accurate to describe what we have as neo-colonized.

  In any case, what the Layton anecdote shows, I think, is the problem has been around for a while. The question is — and a question I’d like to address to you in the hopes you’ll offer a response — is what to do about it.

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