Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

voluntarily shut up. Bind him. Gag him.
Drop him aboard a freight train. Ship him
Parcel Express across the continent and
he'd be back talking a blue streak. The
word was out that the new man would
drive them mad and mad they would
become in the confines of their camp in
the depth of forest and winter's dark prevail.
Joining В & В Gang 4, Kitchen enters the
rather stereotypical world of the ordinary
Western novel, where women, Indians, and
Asian immigrants are marginal, if occasionally
provocative characters. The workers,
transients, and members of the local
crime ring are all essentially good- or evilhearted,
with the possible exception of
Yellowhead Don McBain, an ambiguous
railroad detective who forces Kitchen to spy
for him.
The success of Ferguson's novel lies in his
vision of an erudite, wiry, potentially insane
and extremely unlikely hero who manages
to walk felicitously through that frontier,
and in Ferguson's precise, original, and
highly entertaining use of language. Reed
Kitchen's perverse addiction to storytelling,
pontificating, and just plain mouthing off
is a consistent source of pleasure to the
reader and energy to the novel, and even
the simplest passages of description are
lively and clever in Ferguson's hands; a forest
fire, he writes, "sashayed down to the
river in its arrogant wigglyassed conceit."
The Fire Line concerns the crossings
between many lines—honor and depravity,
sanity and insanity, and perhaps most
important, myth and reality. Reed Kitchen,
presented with a ticket to nowhere at the
beginning of this tale, comes to confess to
his friend Van Loon: "I wish to cross a line
also. Into the human realm." Ferguson has
skillfully created a hero who stands with
one foot in reality and the other in myth.
With a style that moves quickly and easily
from mimicked Biblical discourse ("He
spoke after that in a comical voice that
made all men laugh and even he did smile
with the sound of himself although smiling
was hurtful to him. There was peace the
second night") to hyper-realistic scenes of
violence à la Sam Peckinpah, Ferguson
offers an engrossing, witty, somewhat disturbing,
and well-crafted book about the
landscapes of the dispossessed.
Stage Voices
Cynthia Zimmerman, ed.
Taking the Stage: Selections from Plays by
Canadian Women. Playwrights Canada n.p.
Joan MacLeod
The Hope Slide/Little Sister. Coach House $14.95
Reviewed by Ruth Panofsky
Taking the Stage is the result of an ambitious
project undertaken in 1993 by the
Women's Caucus of the Playwright's Union:
an anthology that reveals "the diversity of
women's playwriting in Canada," its variety
of forms, subjects, and theatrical styles. The
intention was to present the breadth of
contemporary writing, and women from
across the country were invited to submit
their work. The Caucus solicited material
from new as well as established writers,
from members and non-members of the
Playwright's Union of Canada, from
women of all backgrounds, cultures, and
colours. A project coordinator, a collective
of five regional editors, and Senior Editor
Cynthia Zimmerman selected from among
the 125 submissions they received. Taking
the Stage, the work of 45 playwrights,
reflects the spirit of initiative in which the
project was conceived and confirms its editors'
"commitment to theatrical, emotional,
and geographical range."
With few exceptions, the pieces included
here were written and produced in the
nineties and vary in theme and theatrical
style. Women's issues, both personal and
political, are foregrounded in these selections
that include characters from all stages of life,
including childhood, adolescence, adult -
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