\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

termines his choice of career as keeperof the island asylum. The narrator relieson him. As the novel progresses and shebecomes conscious of her femininity, sheunderstands her mother better. But thestory is really an explanation written toa father whom she has lost. He hashelped the mad Hebel kill himself, andhas consequently been incarcerated.Penumbra is, then, a daughter's effort to"talk" to her father, words "squeezed outof darkness."This is a moving, if occasionally tooconsciously obscure, novel, written withconsiderable sensitivity. The balance betweenthe real and the dream-like ismaintained successfully throughout sothat the language and imagery are poeticrather than prosodie. Unlike Out On thePlain, with its often comic vision, itsshifts of genre, and its theoretical underpinnings,Penumbra assumes a tragicperspective that condenses the mad andthe sane on an island of dreams. Thus,in spite of a number of thematic similarities,and their self-consciousness aboutwomen's, as opposed to men's, lives, thetwo works present quite different visionsof the imagination. Finn is concernedonly with the female imagination; Kerslakewith a much more general aesthetics.Kerslake's is the more moving book.Yet Out on the Plain deserves seriousattention, not least because it simultaneouslyannotates and demonstrates, withconsiderable wit, a variety of problemsimportant to the current gender revolution.LORNA IRVINEINITIATIONSBOOKS IN REVIEWLESLEY CHOYCE, Billy Botzweiler's Last Danceand Other Stories, blewointmentpress,$7-95-HUGH COOK, Cracked Wheat and OtherStories. Mosaic Press, $7.95.LESLEY CHOYCE'S Billy Botzweiler's LastDance is both a unified and an unevencollection. The setting plays a unifyingrole, although it is not particularly foregrounded:the stories seem to be set inor around Halifax. Then, too, all theeight stories (including the three whichare not written from a first-person pointof view) focus on male protagonists confrontedwith problems attending youthand early adulthood. The texts seem tobe arranged according to the presumedage of the protagonist. So readers willfeel they are following a particular typeof character from his appearance in thecontext of a male peer group of roughyoungsters and in the father/son relationishipin the first story, through hisunsettling initiation into sex with anolder, married woman, his experiences ofdrugs and drinking, of jealousy and unrequitedattraction to stories showing theprotagonists against the background oftheir work and in their problematicrelationships to their lovers or wives. Thebook builds an atmosphere of increasingweariness and frustration.Other preoccupations of Ghoyce'scharacters include band music and cars,quarrelling and fighting, courage contestsand bragging contests. Such topics, aswell as the attitudes and conflicts Choycedeals with, are well-known, perhaps toowell-known. They will appeal more tothe younger than to the more sophisticatedreader. Several of the stories usean adolescent voice (not necessarilythose stories which deal with adolescents). The weakest of the pieces includethe title story, "Local Heroes," and173