A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Books in Reviewevents and the storytelling event:The Island Highway was still a strip ofpleasant tarmac in the year of Glory'sfuneral—1956. A whole half hour mightpass between cars. More than three hoursof driving and two hours of steamship away,Vancouver could have been in a foreigncountry. You expected to see it two or maybethree times in your life: optometrist appointments,the Exhibition. Ferries hadn'tyet been built to haul tourists by the thousandsevery hour across the Strait and setthem racing up our roads, trucks andWinnebagos nose to tail from dawn till night."Rusty's "our roads" reveals Hodgins'snarrative intent. Historically, islanders havetended to feel a sense of community. Theyhave seen themselves, like their islands, asself-contained and independent from theoutside world. By seeing themselves as separatefrom the rest of humanity they havebecome closer to their fellow islanders.Population influx brings a contradiction: asmuch as islanders want to stick together,they tend to distinguish between nativesand those who are newly arrived, betweenthose who belong and those who wish tobelong, between those whose island this isand those whose it is not. This sense ofcommunity available to islanders is severelychallenged in an era of satellite dishes, theChunnel, and high-speed catamaran ferries—theuniverse is made up of very differentstories in 1996 than was the case in1956. Jack Hodgins wants his readers toreflect upon the difference, and to extendthe analysis beyond Vancouver Island toour culture at large. As an edge-walker ofthe continent he shows us how preposterouslyour culture has become tangled in thecentury's and the centre's glitter.The imbrication of Rusty as narrator andHodgins as author shimmers throughoutthe novel. Rusty's maturation necessitateslearning to valorize the local, an approachhe predictably rebels against as a youth. InJuly 1956, about to turn eighteen and anxiousto leave Vancouver Island for "the farside," he wondered whether "the world outthere had much in common with us." Theold hotel, which once provided his childhoodimagination space to try out variouslives, becomes naked and skeletal:"Somewhere along the way I'd stoppedbelieving." Hodgins has stated that his parents,like Rusty's, started their marriage inan old, abandoned hotel and that as a smallchild he would wander through that hoteland imagine all the stories that had takenplace there: "I knew I had to do somethingwith that image and as I wrote the book, itcame to be a symbol of opportunity." Thestoryteller in the novel, by implication anolder and much wiser Rusty, understandsthe hotel as a symbol for the culture of theextended family which the Mackens represented.He keeps "busy at narrative" inorder to poetically reconstruct that hotel,and by extension, all the stories and livesthat can take place there.Key to appreciating The Macken Charm—and this is equally true for Hodgins's tenother books—is a certain degree of comfortwith the sense of "opportunity" that pervadeshis writing. Which isn't to say that histhinking is grounded in some sort of positivismwhich excludes speculation uponultimate causes or origins. His criticisms,however, often seem if not muted then perhapsoverly subtle. One example: a welcomecritique of British Columbia'slackluster forestry policies is woven into thestory. The passage quoted above continues,"Developers hadn't yet begun to replacestands of timber with cement-walled shoppingcentres"; later the storyteller expressesunease with his youthful dream of "ridingon horseback over logged-off slopes"; atanother point he ironically observes thatduring a ceremony a dignitary (representingthat centre of exploitation, BuckinghamPalace, no less) "planted two small trees inland where every effort was being made toget the trees out"; and, while driving140