SANDRA BIRDSELL'S The Missing Child, published by Lester and Orpen Dennys, is the winner of the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1989. Birdsell has published two collections of short stories: Night Travellers in 1982 and Ladies of the House in 1984 (both Turnstone Press). The image of rising flood water that is central to The Missing Child has occurred before in Birdsell's fiction (once in the opening story of her first collection) but never so powerfully as it does here. It comes out of her early memories of the Red River in flood and the destruction the water left behind. She remembers, too, being told as a child that the valley her home town was built in was the dry bed of the ancient glacial lake ?? Lake Agassiz that covered much of southern Manitoba 50,000 years ago. In the novel, she says, it represents "the danger we live with, the great changes that are occurring in our society, especially for children, and the violence that seems to be rising to inundate LIS. The move from short fiction to the novel was a natural one for Sandra Birdsell and one that she has been preparing to make for some time. In fact, she has written a novel before, which she describes as "a learning novel"; she has no plans to publish it. The Missing Child grew out of two short stories that could not be contained within the shorter form. "The voice of Minnie Pullman asserted itself in a 150?page novella," Birdsell explains. But she was not satisfied with it, and set it aside to work on a story involving Mennonite characters. It, too, grew into a novella, and when she realized the two stories belonged together, the novel was born. Birdsell has begun a new novel. "it started happening at Christmas," she says, "and I've cancelled all my commitments, so I can work on it." THE JUDGES' choices this year resulted in an unusual four?way tie, and Doris Cowan, the editor of Books in Canada, was called upon to cast the deciding vote. Her comments follow those of the judges. Nigel Berrisford: I chose To All Appearances a Lady, by Marilyn Bowering. It is a well written, well plotted, and intriguing story. It is obvious that Bowering is a poet: her images and descriptions are vivid and dramatic. The story is epic in character, crowded with characters, and covers a very interesting period. It is a remarkable first novel and one that allgLirs well for her career as a novelist in addition to her work as a poet. This seems to he the year for poets to write their first novels. Barry Callaghan's first novel, The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, explodes with poetic images and style. His story of Adam Waters, a photographer, is full of intricate, tough, and funny prose, with many passages you want to reread immediately. His book would have been my first choice, except for the excellence of Marilyn Bowering's book. I found Sandra Birdsell's The Missing Child interesting and well written, but extremely difficult to follow. The story weaves in and Out of the real and the imagination, dreams and craziness. Its imagery and characters remind me of some of the writings of Margaret Laurence. The characters and plot can only he characterized as bizarre, and I was never sure where this book was going or where it was intended to 90. 1 found it confusing and difficult to read, but had to admire the quality of the author's prose. There are many sections of dialogue that leap off the page, and all in all it is an excellent first novel, but I think it could have done with some sympathetic editing. The other three books on the short list I did not find up to the standard of these three books. All had qualities of imagination and good writing, but none, in my opinion, make it as complete novels. Katherine Govier: This was an impressive array of books, mostly ambitious and credible novels. One was a standout, but all the novels had strengths, and the authors were trying to do very different things. My choice for the award for 1989 is Jacqueline Dumas's Madeleine and the Angel. It is a Sandra Birdsell book that shocked and moved me as no novel has for a number of years. The subject matter is almost insurmountably horrifying ?? the story of two FrancoAlbertan girls caught in their parents' folie a deux, a cycle of sexual abuse and religious excess. Yet the book is compassionate, restrained, direct, and compulsively readable. I admire Ms. Dumas's tone, her spare and unerring prose, as much as I do her handling of this complex, nightmarish material. It is a story that did not let me go, the pathos and even humour in the narrator's tone earning my trust as I followed her through her own journey of unwinding a painful past. This is an intense, shorter novel, but unlike many "poetic" novels it is clear in its direction, and plays no games with the reader. The tragically deluded mother, Madeleine, and her violent husband come convincingly to life. Grandparents, boyfriends, and neighbours whose "normal" existence the girls reach out for fail, for all the simplest reasons, to help them. But they do survive, and escape, and, we are made to feel, become whole chiefly because of their relationship as sisters. It is a strong, courageous book, its passion in no way precluding polish. If asked I would have guessed that the author was a much more experienced writer. It is a cri de coeur, and yet more than that, for there is a distance and objectivity built into the structure. If I had any criticism of this novel it would be that there are two endings, one understated, and the other macabre, when Madeleine murders "the Angel" by splitting his head with an axe. To me this was the only occasion where the author succumbs to melodrama. Even so, in my view, this was the most successful of the six novels. The Missing Child, by Sandra Birdsell, is a novel that is well written, in fact beautifully written, in many individual passages. Birdsell has drawn a week in the life of the fictional town of Agassiz, before it disappears Linder flood water. The cast of eccentric and highly individuated characters ?? a memory?damaged woman with two children, a woman dying of cancer, a Metis, Mennonites, a crusty original town father ?? might have been chosen as one?of a?kinds to board some Noah's ark destined for extinction. Birdsell, skilled at dialogue and at creating a feel of immediacy, makes the days and the moments sing. My problem with the novel was that it would not flow. No matter how I tried, I could not get it to move. Episode after episode stopped, and stood, on its own, refusing to contribute to any forward momentum. There were perhaps too many equally weighted problems, with a tortured preacher, a murdered young woman, a lost boy who quoted scripture, and a man's decision to leave his wife, to name only a few. All of these had to be resolved, and were, before the water flowed in and drowned the village. As a kind of Doomsday Book it was affecting, but it had a static quality, a lack of cohesion, which was ultimately disappointing. Kenneth Radu's Distant Relations, on the contrary, is a fluid, easygoing novel that takes the reminiscences of the elderly Vera, who is blind in one eye from a childhood accident, as its form. Radu is an excellent writer and fills his novel with brightly painted scenes and telling detail. At times reminiscent of Hagar in The Stone Angel, Vera is angry, with reason, and unrepentant. The family is Romanian, having come as farmers to the prairies, though the farm is now lost. Perhaps it was the familiarity of this story that made me feel that, though well crafted and sincere, it was not as good as it might have been. Ultimately Vera's monocular vision is somewhat confining in telling the tale, and as a character she does not succeed in winning the reader. The Prowler, by Kristjana Gunnars, is a slim, poetic novel that makes few concessions to commercialism and remains a stimulating, refreshing read. Gunnars has an affinity for Marguerite Duras, acknowledged with a quote from Duras's The Lover. Her prose is lean and stripped of emotive words; her logic elliptical. The story, of hungry Icelandic "white Inuit" who go to the United States and then Canada, is less a story than a collection of images and strange occurrences. The prowler thief, voyeur, writer, reader ?? is both device and theme. Deceptively simple, this novel delivers on a great deal of its promise and yet, in comparison with Dumas's hook in particular, seems slight. Both Barry Callaghan and Marilyn Bowering are writing full?size, fleshed?out, plotted novels ?? a more difficult thing to do well. Neither of them succeeded in drawing me into the world they created this time, although I suspect both will write more and better books. In The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, Callaghan antagonizes the reader with a precious, overworked prose style that sacrifices vision for chic. I was frequently disoriented, and not productively so, when the action is yanked without rhythm or logic from a Toronto childhood of the '40s to an African jungle state at war today. Bowering, oddly for a poet, seems to have a tin ear; many of her sentences clunk and rattle, choke and stall. In To All Appearances a Lady, a good story is lost because the novel 'is packed with the exotica of Vancouver's Chinatown at the end of the last century, whaling lore, and other information that is not fully integrated. Wayne Grady: Although all six books on the short list were good novels, for me the two best were The Missing Child, by Sandra Birdsell, and To All Appearances a Lady, by Marilyn Bowering. Of these, I chose The Missing Child. But it was a near thing, and I will confine my comments to these two books. Bowering's novel is a powerful one, with a wealth of colour and a fine sense of drama. It is positively Conradian, not only in its nautical lore but also in its epic sweep, encompassing as it does the early history of Victoria as well as the contemporary lives of its (sort of) surviving main characters. It is, quite literally, a Victorian novel. Bowering has seamlessly interwoven fascinating historical research and a modern voyage around Vancouver Island. Her descriptive passages seem fresh and true and very well written. The dialogue is real. The characters are alive: she makes us care about them. And, by and large, we accept their idiosyncrasies as driving forces in the novel's structure. Until the last 50 pages or so. All novels are contrivances, but in To All Appearances a Lady I became too aware that Bowering had twisted her protagonists into certain actions not because their characters demanded it, not because their behaviour was consistent with the personalities she had given them, but because she needed to keep the novel going. Or rather, because she needed to end it. The whole novel is a long build?up to a promised cathartic revelation ?? the identity of Robert Lam's father ?? but when we get there we find ?? what? That it is not the fathers identity that is important after all ?? he turns out to be a minor character about whom we know relatively little ?? but Lam Fan's guilty secret, which is the most improbable action of all. I suppose if you like Victorian novels, with their heavy reliance on coincidence and the supernatural, their dealings in dark symbolic elements at the expense of verisimilitude, then these things won't bother you too much. But I've never been a big fan of Victorian novels. Enter Sandra Birdsell. The first word that comes to my mind in connection with The Missing Child is "lightness." The second is "consistency." Birdsell has a sure touch when it comes to melding plot and character ?? the novel is driven by her characters rather than the other way around. In Bowering's novel I felt that what she really wanted to do was just go on writing about Victoria at the turn of the century, but that she had to pinch off the story at around 300 pages because it was a novel. In Birdsell, the end of the novel is contained in the beginning, as it should be. The melting of the glacier beneath Agassiz is an objective correlative of character by which I mean the cumulative character of the town itself rather than a narrative device imposed upon a body of research. Both novels end with a twist, but in Bowering's I found myself saying, "What??" In Birdsell's, I said, "Of course!" The Missing Child is a novel about community, a surreal mixture of Hardy and Hodgins. Agassiz is the true protagonist; its residents, for all their caring about their own and each other's fates, are really players in the drama that ensures the continuance of the community. Affronts to the social order are punished far more swiftly and seriously than are insults to individuals, and assaults on the social order (the conflict between divine revelation and organized religion, for example) presage the destruction of the town. And yet it is the invidividuals who draw and hold our attention. Birdsell clearly loves her characters. She has their intricate movements mapped out in her head at all times, and follows them around without jump?cuts (if it were a movie, it would be shot in one long, continuous scene rather than a series of fade?to?blacks), as if she is afraid of missing a single nuance or gesture that would mean a dropped stitch in the fabric of her story. The Missing Child is a brilliant, sustained, and perfectly constructed novel, and clearly a winner. Merna Summers: The question of how literary competitions should be judged has received more than usual attention this year, and it was a question that concerned me when I set out to read the six books short?listed here. How do you stack one book up against another? How do you compare a book that is large in scope, that has both impressive strengths and noticeable problems, with a book that attempts less, avoids risks, comes in tidy? A writer of limited technique can sometimes move us deeply. A writer of great gifts can be led astray by the demands of a literary form not perfectly suited to subject matter or temperament. And then ?? oh, joy! ?? there is the book in which everything comes out right, in which technique is equal to task, in which something wonderful is attempted and achieved. There is something miraculous about a perfectly realized novel, one that makes us care deeply about a character and his or her situation, that keeps us reading, if need be, late into the night, as we find the character's life temporarily more important to us than our own. Or it may be the music of the novel that carries us along. Entrancement is a state that has no prescribed method of delivery. Whatever it is, the good novel satisfies a need we all felt when we became readers in the first place: a desire to have our con sciousness captured, to become, in the words of Victor Nell, "temporary citizens of other worlds." At the same time, as members of respectable literary circles, we want a book to measure up, to have something important to say, and to be defensible in terms of its techniques, its over?all literary quality. We look for reach, authenticity, impact. We ask, also, for the sense that no one else could have done this particular book better. We want a book to give us the sense that we are "on to something," that its insights are worth paying attention to. We do not want to feel that there is a con job going on. (There may in fact be a con job going on ?? since literature is not life but we do not want to feet there is.) A respectable standard of artistry combined with the old entrancement: as readers, we want it all. And happily, occasionally, we get it. There was no writer on the short list whose work I do not admire, but there was one book, whether measured in terms of literary artistry or my own sense of entrancement ?? of zing that came out a clear winner. Kenneth Radu's Distant Relations is a book to which you may apply all of the good things I have said above. Vera Dobriu, its principal character, is a wonderful creation. Born with "one foot in the manure," she now worries about chemicals, robots, bankers, and Disneyland, all the while preparing for a reunion with children she has no particular desire to see. We see part of a culture (probably Romanian) through the eyes of this highly individual member of it. Vera is tough, tender, and contrary, with islands of wilful blindness in her makeup. She comes off the page as a real live human being, in all her complications and contradictions. Distant Relations is a novel that invites comparison with The Stone Angel and My Antonia, and it is not out of place in this company. Radu is a wonderful writer. This is not a competition in which second choices count for anything ?? in the event of a tie among first choices an extra judge is called in ?? and so I am not going to make one. Marilyn Bowering's To All Appearances A Lady is a novel of large virtues and moderate problems. Its virtues have to do with the sense of reality created by Bowering's seemingly meticulous research into the worlds of sea and port, and into anti?Chinese prejudice on the B.C. coast in the last century. It is possible that its problems have to do with the same thing. In a novel of such richness, pacing is no easy task. The story proceeds on two fronts at once: one story happening in the present, another unfolding in the past. These stories interrupt each other in what become predictable patterns ?so much description, so much present action, so much reflection, so much past unfolding ?? and sometimes there is a sense that a little too much research has been fitted in, however deftly. Sandra Birdsell is a writer whose work I admire greatly, but The Missing Child is a novel that didn't quite come together for me. There is, as one would expect, much to admire here. (A wonderful prologue, images that burn themselves into the mind.) The Missing Child is a bold, ambitious, attention?getting, nervy sort of book. All of which I applaud. What troubled me was a feeling that there was perhaps something cold at the heart of it. It was as if the author felt the need to give the reader a jolt every so many pages, and as if this orchestration of jolts took precedence over the integrity of characters and their stories. Sometimes it seemed that the characters were simply being manoeuvred into position for the next jolt. Magic realism is a mode of story?telling that has given me enormous pleasure over the years, but reading this book, which employs some of its techniques, made me wonder whether it is a mode that puts some pressure on the author to startle, to keep coming up with new jolts. if so, it suits some stories and some authors better than others. Many critics have written glowingly of The Missing Child. For me, it was an example of a greatly gifted author on an off book. The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings is that rarity in Canadian fiction, a novel that concentrates on the sexual part of a sexual relationship. It is a novel about people who are both present and absent in each other Is lives, and Barry Callaghan is extraordinarily good at evoking the sense that we all have of living in past and present simultaneously. The novel moves between Toronto, Puerto Rico, and the African bush, and the prose, often, is lush and tropical. The book is punctuated with crazy epitaphs and athletic love scenes. And talk. There's a lot of talk. There is a character in the book who writes his thoughts down in notebooks and one somehow imagines Callaghan doing this: writing down his thoughts and then working them into the novel. "That's what my father always told me," the viewpoint character says. "If you like it, write it down." I liked this book for the strength of its images, some of which recurred in a dreamlike way throughout the book. And for some fine, pithy observations. Some books have particular value because of their subject matter. They tell us about worlds we do not know. For some reason, the past few years have seen a surprising number of novels and memoirs that deal with the painful subject of incest, that explore the pathology of families in which it occurs. Jacqueline Dumas's novel, Madeleine and the Angel, is one of these, and it makes its effect not through explicit detail, but by understatement and by the grace of its prose. Dumas is interested in exploring both the madness of the incestuous father and the complicity of the mother, in this case justified in her own mind by some extraordinary religious fantasies. Dumas is the least published of the writers on this years short list, but her book is brave and moving, and worthy of attention. The title page of Kristjana Gunnars's book, The Prowler, declares it to he a novel, and I am not about to argue about that, even if it is somewhat less than 20,000 words long, and even if what it appears to me to he is part memoir, part meditation. The meditation is a prowling through such matters as growing up Icelandic, and certain literary questions, including the way in which what is being written has a mind of its own. I enjoyed this book a lot. When I am reading, I rip off little pieces of paper and insert them between pages that I want to read again, or perhaps copy into a notebook. Gunnars's book was well feathered with Such scraps when I finished reading it. Nevertheless, I cat* help feeling there is something unfair about comparing a work like this ?? limited in scope, and very short ?? with the big, bold novels of, say, Bowering or Callaghan. It is easier to avoid missteps in such a book than it is in novels in which the authors go for broke and lay their whole selves on the line. I will treasure Gunnars's book, even as I honour the big, hold attempts of Bowering and Callaghan and ?? in spite of the reservations expressed above ?? Birdsell. But imagine having Such choices to make! What a year! Doris Cowan: Although these four hooks are all impressive in their very different ways, I have no hesitation in placing The Missing Child At the head of the list. Madeleine and the Angel has deeply felt emotional force and conviction; To All Appearances a Lady has both grandeur and exquisite detail; and Distant Relations has Suppleness of narrative and harshly truthful characterization. Yet to my mind The Missing Child has all these strengths, and more. The fictional universe it portrays is gentler, quieter, and more humorously observed than the worlds of the other three books, but Birdsell knows how to orchestrate the undercurrents of tragic foolishness and inevitable disaster, and the deeper notes are sounded when she needs them. The narrative structure, which involves a large and varied cast of characters, is complex but never tangled. Like a poem or a song it moves its story forward verse by verse, and the rhythm and melody are as important as the words. Although nothing is hidden, there are secrets and surprises twisted into the fabric of the book, some of them only to be yielded up on rereading. A whole society is here with its crisscross of loyalties, grudges, love, and hate. A generous spirit pervades The Missing Child, but it is not a spirit of sentimentality. The grotesque, the cruel, and the absurd are seen for what they are, but there is no caricature: they are fully human. A brilliantly imagined and beautifully written book.