The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

with equal equanimity and wit. The desire
to know the truth, as evidenced by her continual
analysis of dreams, desires and symbols,
is itself the quest for happiness, and
packed lunches will not suffice for the narrator
as they do for her anti-hero.
Sarah's forte is characterization, but she is
also adept at creating vivid imagery. The
bored housewives who toss off their colorful
garments in an arc against the sky to
wallow in quicksand-mud like their children.
The man with eyes like an Irish family-run
tavern door: only the invited may
enter. The gazebo with its human presence,
of a girl with a crown of braids, playing
alone and singing. Many of the stories lack
this poetic quality, relying instead on the
fundamentals of plot and character to keep
our interest. But the stories that do sing like
"a small girl playing alone" produce an "aha!"
of recognition: the title story in particular
exhibits mastery of the short story form.
The Prison of the Self
W.O. Mitchell
For Art's Sake. McClelland and Stewart $27.99
Reviewed by Dick Harrison
For Art's Sake has a more adventurous plot
than Mitchell's other novels. Its protagonist,
Arthur Ireland, sets out to restore art
to the people and to its higher purpose by
stealing paintings and sculptures from private
collectors and later letting them drift
back into the hands of the insurance companies,
who will eventually sell most of
them to public galleries. Ireland, as the
punning title suggests, has a passionate
faith in the transcendent value of art. He is
a kind of Gulley Jimson figure, defying the
materialist establishment, but, unlike
Jimson, inclined to sermonize about his
mission and "the sorry state of all art
today." On one level the novel can be read
as a modernist declaration to a post-modern
world that the old essentialist convictions
about truths universal and eternal
were not in the service of bourgeois power
structures. On another level it resumes the
themes of Mitchell's other Livingstone
University novels, Since Daisy Creek and
Ladybug, Ladybug.... Again, an older man is
mistaken in his attempts to deal with his
mortality and the isolation Mitchell has
identified as fundamental to the human
condition. That isolation is again manifested
in his severance from the university
and in the death of a beloved wife. The pattern
suggests isolation from female humanity
in particular, but Mitchell is careful to
block out the complications of sexual
union as a solution. Like Colin Dobbs and
Kenneth Lyon, Ireland finds his way back to
community through the agency of a daughter
figure, in this case an artist/policewoman
who helps to apprehend him.
Ireland has, of course, been wrong. He
can find grace only when he recognizes that
his rebellion, however principled, was selfcentred
and careless of the welfare of the
young artists drawn into his scheme. His
violation of community is of an aggravated
sort: dereliction of the parental duty the old
have toward the vulnerable young. In
prison his modicum of grace is signalled by
a break in his five-year "artist's block" when
he begins a series of "inscape" paintings
with an "inner genesis."
The location of Ireland's success is suggestive
in two ways. Literally, it completes a
vein of satiric commentary on the university,
suggesting that a penitentiary is better
adapted to nurturing the arts.
Metaphorically it speaks of the artist's need
to face the prison of the self and begin
working creatively within it to build
bridges to other lonely, isolated selves.
Readers may find that this central theme
of Mitchell's has less resonance in For Art's
Sake than in some of the other novels. One
of Mitchell's strengths is his ability to render
his fictional world in both lyric and