The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

was the silence
of the angels who sweep.
("The Angels who Sweep 11")
Of the three stories in The Last
Landscape, "Klara and Lilo", "The Writer",
and "The Bouquet", only the first seems to
belong with the poems. But if this is truly
the "last landscape" (Waddington is now in
her mid-seventies) that is perhaps sufficient
reason for including them. And surely it is
also time for a reassessment of Waddington's
substantial contribution to Canadian
literature—her stories, her critical studies,
and her thirteen volumes of poetry.
In Pain
Anne Cameron
A Whole Brass Band. Harbour Publishing $16.95
Lee Maracle
Sundogs. Theytus Books $12.95
Reviewed by Robin McGrath
Anne Cameron's new novel, A Whole Brass
Band, is the story of Jean Prichard, a single
mother who loses her job, her apartment
and her father all in one devastating week.
Instead of giving in to despair, she packs up
and heads back to the small B.C. fishing
town where she was raised. Despite some
initial resistance from her children, the
family settle in and start rebuilding their
lives. The death of a daughter, and a crippling
accident, slow down Jean Prichard's
progress towards a better, fuller life, and by
the end of the book she realizes that there is
no way to escape the pain of living, nor
would she want to.
One of the more disappointing aspects of
this novel is that we get none of the documentary
detail that can make fiction so
compelling, even when the plot and the
characterizations aren't particularly gripping.
Here we have a primary character
who runs not one, but two fishing boats,
and we learn little or nothing about fishing,
although learning to fish is central to
Prichard's development and the strengthening
bond within the family. The wharfs
and the boats that are so central to a fishing
community here are as vague and unrealized
as fuzzy photograph, but you always
know what people are eating. We are given
recipes for hot chocolate, fancy mashed
potatoes and 30 second Italian salad dressing,
all of which which suggests that the
author might be more comfortable in the
kitchen than on the high seas.
Language and dialogue have been identified
as Cameron's strengths in the past, but
here, too, there is little to praise. All the
characters sound alike, with the exception
of one daughter who irritates her family,
and the reader, by "speaking in italics " all
the time. The compound words the author
is so fond of (helluvan, buttinski, buhzillionaire,
etc.) fail to snap, crackle or pop,
and the tired, cliched spoonerisms slide
from the pages in exhaustion. Nor do the
endless stream of "folkisms", the farts in the
mitt, and the shit on the stick that made an
earlier appearance in Kick the Can , have
any life left in them at all.
According to the publisher's biography
that accompanied the review copy of A
Whole Brass Band, Anne Cameron began
her career at the age of twelve by writing on
toilet paper. How appropriate for an author
whose aim, in this book at least, seems to
be to identify a hundred and one ways to
say "shove it up your ass". Cameras, toilet
brushes, shotguns, sand, tranquilizers, the
list of items various characters are invited
to insert in their anuses seems endless. If
every "fuckcrapChristfrigginfartshit" were
excised from this book, the work would be
shorter by about one third its length, and a
good thing too. Certainly we hear language
like this in the streets and in our homes
every day, and it adds to the realism of the
dialogue, but in A Whole Brass Band, even
the third person narrator averages about
three obscenities a page and it gets incredibly
tiresome.