thorns

Hey all,

Here's another review, published today in slightly different form in The Winnipeg Free Press' Books Section. Hopefully, I'll see Sandra Birdsell read from this book at the upcoming Winnipeg International Writers Festival, Sept. 18-25.

My very first reading, when I was nineteen, was with Birdsell. I was working at The Uniter, the U of Wpg student paper, and an older co-worker was on Zygote Magazine's editorial board. I'd been bringing him stories for months when he asked if he could take the latest one to Zygote, because he thought it was worth publishing.

An invite to read at the launch of that issue soon followed.

Strangely enough, when I was at The Banff Centre last fall, my final breakfast there was with Birdsell and folk singer Connie Kaldor. Kaldor was there for the writers' festival but Birdsell was working in the Leighton Studios, most likely finishing up this novel.

All of which might suggest that I have a relationship of sorts with Birdsell and that I would automatically write a good review...but while she was polite and pleasant at breakfast, she didn't remember our long-ago reading and I didn't bring it up.

The encounters make nice book-ends, though...

Yours,

A.

* * *

Children of the Day
By Sandra Birdsell
Random House, 405 pages, $35.95

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

Winnipeg has always dominated Manitoba’s history but it is the fictionalized histories of rural Manitoba that have dominated our literature, from The Stone Angel’s Manawaka to A Complicated Kindness’ East Village.

Readers can now add Sandra Birdsell’s Union Plains to the list of fictional Manitoba towns with the publication of the former Winnipegger’s kitchen-sink drama Children of the Day.

Union Plains is, in fact, Birdsell’s second fictional community. Her first, as seen in the short story collections Night Travellers (1982) and Ladies of the House (1984) was Agassiz, which canny readers knew was a stand-in for Morris. Union Plains, as it turns out, is located just down the highway from Morris and is most likely modelled on Silver Plains.

And while the main characters in the Agassiz stories, Mennonite Mika and Metis Maurice and their seven and counting children may bear more than a passing resemblance to Children of the Day’s Mennonite Sara and Metis Oliver and their ten children, this novel is the work of a much craftier writer, in both senses of the word.

First of all, this is not a stand alone novel but a sequel of sorts to the Giller Award-nominated The Russlander (2001) that featured Katya Vogt’s story. Sara is Katya’s younger sister and, like Katya, is only one of three survivors of a massacre by Anarchists during the time of the Russian Revolution. Sara was very young at the time of the tragedy that saw seven of her family members murdered, but it has left its marks on her. For instance, though middle-aged when Children of the Day opens, she has never cried, and her ambivalence towards her children, her moodiness and temper could, theoretically, be located in that harrowing experience.

Secondly, though Birdsell has always been interested in both her Mennonite and Metis heritage, writing (and, one suspects, researching) The Russlander, with its exclusive focus on Mennonite history and culture, seems to have given her understanding of both groups a greater depth.

Children of the Day is also Birdsell’s eighth book, written at a time when she is clearly in command of both her subject matter and her metier.

That said, its ragged realism may come as a bit of a shock to those readers only familiar with the lyricism of The Russlander. To borrow an image from that book, Katya’s story feels like an expanse of silk, while Sara’s is something rougher, something you reach for then retreat from, stung.

As such, Children of the Day harkens back to Birdsell’s earlier novel The Chrome Suite (1992), with its entirely sympathetic main character Amy, who in the last third of the book is forced to give up her son because she cannot stop herself from abusing him.

In a way, the roughness of the novel is what makes it stronger than The Russlander, which smacked of that mid-career rite of passage for novelists, the historical novel. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, for instance, set in the mid-nineteenth-century and featuring a gruesome murder, won her the 1996 Giller Prize. Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan, set in the 1930s and written from the point of view of a pregnant unmarried schoolteacher, earned him both the Giller and the Governor General’s Award in 2001.

But however many awards historical novels may garner their authors, the question to ask is, are they true? Do they ask the hard questions about what it is to live in the world or do they only provide an impression of what was?

No matter what side of the debate readers fall, in Children of the Day Birdsell returns to what she writes best, the near-misses, the uglinesses, and the inevitabilities of day-to-day life.

The day-to-day in question here is June 14th, 1953, which begins with Sara refusing to come down from her bedroom. The night before, Oliver fired his rifle in the house and visited his mistress with two of his children in tow, and Sara is furious. Unbeknownst to her, Oliver has just learned that his job managing the hotel in Union Plains will soon end and is wondering how he will support the family. Their ten children also weather their share of trials and tribulations over the course of the day, both as witnesses to their parents’ drama but also as participants in their own, but the story really revolves around Sara and Oliver.

By the end of the day, Sara has learned how to cry. Though as Oliver notes “its sound was as rough as the splintered doorsill [and] bitter as the taste of earwax,” Sara’s tears and the story of her life with Oliver evoke sympathy and also the sense that all their struggles were somehow worthwhile.

As creating and evoking sympathy for rough characters is what Birdsell has always done best, shrewd readers should know that in this novel they’ll get a fistful of thorns but also a sweetness they can savour long after they’ve finished the last page.