Review: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Kudos to Hilary Mantel for winning the Man Booker for both this novel and (more recently) for its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. And kudos to her for tackling such a shopworn and over-exploited topic in Wolf Hall: the role Thomas Cromwell played in securing the marriage of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in defiance of the Catholic Church. It’s no overstatement to say that this was one of the most pivotal moments in not just English history but in all of Western civilization. The marital machinations that transformed England from a papal fiefdom to a modern state have spawned a whole host of trashy historical novels, and what Mantel has done here is a cut above.

Still and all, I don’t get it. To my eye, Wolf Hall possesses the bloated heft of a dramatic exposition rather than the sinewy nimbleness of a novel alive to its time and place. Too often, this book gets overrun by talking heads devoid of a physical environment and used exclusively for the dissemination of historical data. As the novel’s key characters—Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Stephen Gardiner, Thomas More—engage with one another over 650 pages, I kept asking myself: where are they, physically, as these interactions are happening? Why do we not have a sense of the space they occupy as they rattle on and on in these long expository exchanges? Things do improve as the novel builds to its climax, but it takes a long time before you really get a sense of the corporeal reality of living in 16th century England.

Make no mistake: Mantel is a superb stylist and there are passages in Wolf Hall that left me breathless by their sheer poetry. What’s more, the fall of Wolsey is handled with such passion and heartache that I had to put the novel down for a day or two to collect myself. Still, these strengths could not overcome the long and disembodied tedium that I found through most of the book. I wanted Wolf Hall to grip me with the implicit significance of its characters and plot. Instead, I found myself at a lost to understand what makes this novel a novel.    

Event: Black Thursday: Anthology, Contest, and Issue Launch

Okay, so the details for The Puritan's big bash to launch its new issue and best-of anthology, which will include my winning poem for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, have been announced. They are as follows:

When: Thursday, November 22, at 7:30 pm.
Where: The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto.
Who: Readers will include:

Gary Barwin
Nancy Jo Cullen
Jenny Sampirisi
Mark Sampson (me!)
Suzannah Showler
Matthew Tierney
Daniel Scott Tysdal

So if you're in Toronto and free that night, please come out and help us celebrate. It would be really great to see you.

M.

Acceptance: PRISM International

I'm very happy to report that PRISM International has accepted my short story "Going Soft through Luxury" for publication in its next issue, number 51.2. Needless to say, I'm really stoked about this news, as I've been submitting regularly to PRISM for at least 10 years now and I'm so pleased that I'll have something included in its pages. I'm also excited because this is the first of the new batch of short stories I've been working on over the last 13 months to be accepted for publication, so it's a nice little piece of validation that I'm on the right track.

I'll send out more details when they become available.

M.

Winner: Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Literary Excellence (The Puritan)

So I'm very excited to announce that I have been named winner of the inaugural Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Literary Excellence in the poetry category, put on by The Puritan literary magazine for my piece "Seasonal Sonnets." I got the news late last week and it was announced publicly this evening. I'm very excited that my poem will be appearing in the pages of The Puritan, a journal I have submitted to a number of times before and which has, over the years, published several writers I greatly admire, including J.J. Steinfeld, Catherine Graham, Daniel Scott Tysdal and my lovely wife Rebecca.

The issue will be online and in print next month, and word is there will be a launch on November 22 here in Toronto (details coming soon). If you're in the city and can make it out, I'd love to see you. I'm also looking forward to reading the works of the other writers who placed in the contest.

M.

Review: In This Thin Rain, by Nelson Ball

Writing good minimalist poetry is hard to do, so when you find poets who can do it you just want to savour their work as much as possible. This was certainly the case when I read Nelson Ball’s new collection In This Thin Rain, a book that contains the kind of brief, meditative observations that deserve a slow and—in my case, at least—out-loud reading. Ball has honed his talent for minimalist verse across more than two dozen poetry books since the 1960s, and his latest shows his abilities at their full strength.

A lot of the power and momentum behind these pieces arise from Ball’s uncanny skill with line breaks. He understands not only how to leave space for poems to breathe but also how to leave space for our brains to breathe. The rhythm of these poems are tailored to the way the contemplative mind works, how it mulls over notions or images in a microsecond before moving on, craving reinforcement or paradox. Take for example the deceptively simple poem “Obituaries”:

Lately
I’ve been reading obituaries

don’t quite
know why

lives are
always ending

always

The genius is in that incredible “don’t quite/know why” enjambment. A lesser poet might have written the simpler “don’t know why” and done it as one line, but here Ball is wise enough to understand the staccato nature of human rumination. The repeated “always” is just the right amount of closing emphasis on an idea about bleakness and inevitability. It’s amazing how much verve Ball can squeeze into just 14 words.

Or take the piece “Walking”, where the line breaks and careful word choices create a wonderful verisimilitude of ambulation:

Early
October, mild

walking
at The Ponds

sunny
no clouds

breeze
enough to make

trees
restless

as
I am

some
leaves

are
falling

Again, line breaks add momentum and punch, and here they work in congress with a carefully chosen simile (trees as restless as the poet). And do I need to I need to point out the quiet genius of those one-word lines that end the poem?

Another strength of In This Thin Rain is the way that Ball is able to work in reoccurring tropes and images without making them feel heavy handed. The collection is full of windmills, of houseflies in their death throes, of rain and pine needles floating on water. In true minimalist fashion, the poems don’t force us to make connections between these repetitions or see some greater significance in their use. Rather, Ball presents these as what they are—quotidian observations that do what true observations do: crop up again and again.

The book’s acknowledgements page points out that Ball lost both his wife and his mother inside of 18 months during the writing of this collection. This fact lends an unmistakable (and unsettling) tension to the book upon rereading. The passage of time and the slow accumulation of images build not so much to a climax as to a searing realization: that grief can come fast and hard, and cannot be skirted. But also this: that grief is, in the end, just another part of the natural experience of living and can, if you are wise and attuned to the heart's honest voice, be expressed briefly through a poem. Briefly, and with truth.

Review: The Beggar’s Garden, by Michael Christie

Writing about misfits through fiction is incredibly hard to do. When it comes to portraying the foibles of drug use, free-and-easy sex, counter-culture lifestyles and ne’er-do-wells with quirky stories to tell, a lot of writing can come out as either gloating and glorifying. When writers want to be perceived through their fiction as hip, urban, and more than a bit self destructive, it can often breed a prose that is at once self-conscious and a touch disingenuous.

Which makes Michael Christie’s debut collection of short fiction, The Beggar’s Garden, all the more refreshing. When he portrays the weird and the down-and-out, the slackers and the druggies, you get the sense that he comes at these characters and their experiences from a deep well of close observation and personal reflection. There is nothing in The Beggar’s Garden that is false or for show. Everything is real and painfully three-dimensional.

The nine stories in this collection are set for the most part in Vancouver’s troubled east side and really do feature a motley assemblage of delightfully weird characters. We have drug addicts (“Goodbye Porkpie Hat”), a woman who calls 911 strictly for companionship (“Emergency Contact”), a man who becomes a financial advisor for a homeless man (the title story) and a troubled mental patient (“King Me”). In each case, Christie is able infuse his writing with humour, sensitivity and an unflinching authenticity.

Take for example, his piece “The Queen of Cans and Jars.” This story features a woman named Bernice who runs a thrift shop and often helps out her homeless clientele when they can’t pay even the store’s marked down prices. Bernice’s interaction with her at-risk customers, her care in looking after the shop, and even her entire value system and worldview is pitch perfect for the purposes of the story. You can see and feel the realism of the store; you can sense her struggles with the everyday reality of her community. Christie knows his material so well and expresses it beautifully.

My favourite piece in the collection has to be “The Extra.” Here, a man who may or may not be suffering from a mental disability is living rough in an unfinished basement apartment with his friend Rick when they are both cast as extras in a movie being filmed in Vancouver. The relationship between the narrator and Rick is akin to George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, with camaraderie and exploitation being irrevocably intertwined. Christie hits so many perfect notes in this story: the unreliable narration, the well-chosen details of the men’s basement dwelling, and the complex relationship we can have with both our closest friend and our sense of ourselves.

Christie’s book was praised far and wide when it was published last year, and rightfully so. It is a sterling example of a well-measured collection of stories honed by a newbie who writes like a well-seasoned pro.

My Quill and Quire review of The Age of Hope by David Bergen...

is now online. I really loved the other books of Bergen's I've read (see my review of This Case of Lena S. here) but this new novel is a serious misfire. While I admire Bergen's attempts to inhabit a protagonist so very different from himself, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. What do other people think? Anyone out there enjoying The Age of Hope? Let me know.

M.