Given that eighty percent of the fiction sold in Canada is purchased by women, it seemed fitting, and just about right that the 2005 Giller Prize jury (Warren Cariou, Elizabeth Hay, Richard Wright) picked four novels by womenùJoan Barfoot's Luck, Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly, Lisa Moore's Alligator and Edeet Ravel's A Wall of Lightùfor its shortlist and then added David Bergen's The Time in Between. It seemed especially fitting since the previous twelve months saw such an abundance of books from women who are particularly adept at capturing both a wider range of erotic impulses and a greater complexity in the perceptions of their characters about how the world actually operates than the majority of talented younger men writing today. The jury for the Governor General's Award for Fiction (Caroline Adderson, Bernice Morgan, Russell Smith) put their finger on the same pulse when they shortlisted three quite different works by womenùGolda Fried's Nellcott Is My Darling, Charlotte Gill's Ladykiller, Kathy Page's Alphabet, in addition to Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road, and David Gilmour's A Perfect Night to Go to China. There was no overlap between the two, and only Boyden's novel made the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award shortlist, which included Michael Crummey's The Wreckage, Lauren B. Davis's The Radiant City, Allan Donaldson's Maclean, and Rabindranath Maharaj's A Perfect Pledge. This serves only to indicate the breadth and depth of Canada's literary talent, as does media grumbling that some wonderful booksùSteven Hayward's The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke, Steven Heighton's Afterlands, Donna Morrissey's Sylvanus Now, and Emma Richler's Feed My Dear Dogsùdid not make even one shortlist. Even though Joseph Boyden got some of his just rewards when the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction jury of Anita Rau Badami, Lewis DeSoto, and Mary Swan chose Three Day Road for its award, what still seems wrong, unjust, and unfitting was the subjectivity of a Giller jury that found no space for Boyden's Three Day Road and gave its prize to David Bergen rather than to Camilla Gibb or Lisa Moore (whose Alligator beat out A Perfect Pledge, Sylvanus Now, A Wall of Light, and Jane Urquhart's A Map of Glass in the regional rundown to the Commonwealth Prize).
In my review of Three Day Road in The Globe & Mail (April 23, 2005), I asked rhetorically: Is Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road going to supplant Timothy Findley's The Wars as the great Canadian novel about the First World War on college and university curricula? Is it likely to rival Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers in sales? I noted that a lot of smart money was betting on it to do both: Penguin Books Canada won the Canadian rights at auction against other major publishers with a six figure advance and Boyden's manuscript created a sensation at the London Book Fair where foreign rights were gobbled up by American and overseas publishers. Prepublication buzz was followed by an extraordinary marketing campaign. But the principal reasons, I suggested, that people would be hearing a lot about this book were that it's a gripping, wrenching, eye-opening, illuminating, stirring, moral (not moralistic) fiction rooted in closely observed fact.
Joseph Boyden grew up in Willowdale in the '70s, the son of Dr. Raymond Wilfrid Boyden, Canada's most highly decorated medical officer of the Second World War. Part Metis, part Miqmaq, part Scots, part Irish, Boydon is also the grandson and great-nephew of veterans of the First War. This merely suggests but doesn't fully explain the familiarity and intimacy with which this first-time novelist handles military and native materials. Unlike Findley and Urquhart, both of whom were in mid-career and top of middle rank when they wrote of the Great War, Boyden never demands credulity of his readers. Well-informed but non-specialist readers won't find themselves wondering whether details are right or feeling distracted by the obviousness of underlying research, or shaking their head over improbable coincidences. Although the voices of both narrators seem at first too cultivated for the characters and somewhat unconvincing, Three Day Road quickly takes on the texture of lived experience and feels uncannily as if its author has known these people and traversed both the Canadian wilderness and the killing fields of the Western Front with them.
Boyden is thirtysomething, and like the young Homer of The Iliad is precise and unflinching in his descriptions of the ways in which soldiers fall in battle. Men die in agony: they drop screaming, writhing, bleeding, spewing, gasping, clawing the ground, reaching out to beloved companions; they die bellowing, weeping, whimpering, roaring. They are barraged, gassed, machine-gunned, knifed, bludgeoned, blown apart by mortars and grenades, left to bloat and stink in the wastes of no-man's lands, or to feed trench rats and wild dogs. And death is their end: there is no comforting vision of life beyond the grave, no blessedness, no great promises fulfilled. Darkness engulfs them.
Given that death and grief are the common thread uniting the five books the Giller jury actually picked (Moore and Barfoot deal with grieving wives, Ravel and Gibb with grieving daughters, and Bergen with the aftermath of war), it's all the more astonishing that Boyden's account of multiple horrific deaths left them untouched. What factors drove this Giller jury away from Boyden's work towards Bergen's? Their choice of A Time in Between as winner didn't puzzle Susan Swan, who was quoted by Michael Posner in The Globe & Mail on the day of the award dinner as saying that Bergen's fourth novel is "haunting and absorbing and, going on the theory that all juries pick writers who write like them, I think it will win because it is so like the writing of both Hay and Wright." If that was the case this time, and if Swan's theory truly embodies the fundamental principle according to which writers select winners, then Carolyn Weaver, host of television's Fine Print, was absolutely right to tell Globe's readers that it's time to change the Giller jury's composition to include booksellers and book critics. "The Governor-General's Awards are about literary heritage," Weaver said, "but the Giller winner should be the novel that just grabs people, the one book clubs want to read. Commercial consideration should come into play."
Are the things that grab readers necessarily hostile to our literary heritage? Noah Richler, praising Lisa Moore's Alligator in Posner's piece, doesn't see a conflict: "There are wonderful qualities to all of these books but if you follow the mandate of the prize, which is to pick the best book, what really matters is plot, style and sense of location. That's why we read novels, not for some higher message. And Lisa has all of these things in abundance. She doesn't have an obvious protagonist and that's daring, but there's a couple of younger jurors and they may take a risk on an author who takes risks." Although some people do read novels for more than reasons of plot, style, and sense of location (to develop, say, an instinct for life that transcends theories of right and wrong), I shared his preference for Alligator among the books up for the Giller, but Gibb seems to have been the first choice of just about all the university people Posner surveyed. Susan Swan of York University said of it, "She has done a very good job of imagining the other, a white woman living in a Muslim culture." And John Ball of the University of New Brunswick said, "It wasn't perfect, but I was quite taken with it. She deals with issues of rootedness and the building of human communities by displaced people." Aritha van Herk of the University of Calgary wavered, "Moore and Gibb both wrote brilliant booksùand the others are really good as well. It's so good to see the committee making choices based on literary quality rather than name recognition." Van Herk, however, expected Bergen to win, "since the odds are far higher on a man winning."
What makes a novel praiseworthy (and prizeworthy) is its ability to translate the instinct for new life, a moral impulse, into artistic terms and not legal articles or moralistic nostrums. Since such fiction deals with new feelings in new ways, no single jury is likely to pin down all the worthwhile books of the year in a list of five in a literature as broad and deep as our own currently is, but jurors can and must do as best they can to take risks, go beyond themselves in gender choices, sensibilities, and stylistic tics. They should seekùas readers who write and not as writers who readùworks that grab and hold us through subtle and complex kinds of awareness, works that are spontaneous not sentimental, works that do not strive and strain and force themselves upon us with their own cleverness but struggle in truly sophisticated ways to recover the nanve, the innocent, and the purely physical that gleams and glimmers whenever and wherever falsity is upturned and truth is revealed.
To see this kind of courage in action in a prize jury that did its best to pin down the best and make brilliant choices, just look at the work of the 2004 Governor-General's English-language jury for fiction. After AndrT Alexis resigned on a point of honour, Lynn Crosbie and Kathy Page, the remaining judges, selected two first novelsùColin McAdam's Books in Canada/Amazon.ca First Novel Awardûwinning Some Great Thing (Raincoast) and Trevor Cole's Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life (McClelland & Stewart)ùas well as David Bezmozgis's debut Natasha and Other Stories to appear alongside the two slam dunks of the literary yearùAlice Munro's Runaway and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness. In doing this, and then going the whole distance by giving the prize to Toews for all the right reasons ("Toews . . . is electrifying, exciting and exact . . . hilariously cynical and sweetly compassionate. . . melancholic and hopeful, as beautifully complicated as life itself"), they captured the changing of the guard in Canadian fiction that the Giller jury almost completely missed. The 2004 Giller crew of Charlotte Gray, Alistair MacLeod, and M.G. Vassanji had also nominated Munro and Toews but added the quartet of Paul Quarrington's Galveston, Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw, Wayson Choy's All That Matters, and Pauline Holdstock's Beyond Measure.
"All comparisons are odious," says Don Quixote. I wouldn't go that far, but I'd end up not liking the smell of myself very much if I had to rank the achievements of Cole, McAdam, and Toews in anything other than alphabetical order: Toews has broad appeal, McAdam large ambition, and Cole literary complexity. I get a frisson seeing them lined up one against the other on my book shelf, and a deep satisfaction from having read all three in the same year as Catherine Bush's Claire's Head, Russell Smith's Muriella Pent, and Michael Helm's In the Place of Last Things (any of which would get my vote over Natasha and Other Stories, which is competent and New Yorker-approved and breaks no new ground.) Smith, Helm, McAdam, and Jeffrey Moore for The Memory Artists were shortlisted along with Alice Munro for the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, which was awarded to Munro's Runaway by a jury of Zsuszi Gartner, Sylvia Fraser, and Michael Redhill.
For the past five years or so, it has become more and more evident that almost all the really interesting fictions written about contemporary Canadians at home and abroad are being created by writers born after 1960. There's no great surprise in this: as Ronald Wright notes in his splendid A Short History of Progress, "few people past fifty can keep up with their cultureùwhether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or technologyùeven if they try." What is surprising is how very good the current crop of younger novelists is at absolutely nailing the idioms, attitudes, tastes, and technophobias of their parent's generation. Trevor Cole's great achievement in Norman Bray is (in the words of the GG jury) "to write seductively and sympathetically about someone as narcissistic and bullying as is actor Norman Bray, leaving the reader in a wonderfully uneasy state of delight and horror."
Everybody knows at least one Baby Boomer who is very much like Norman Bray. He's ubiquitous. No, he's not Everyman. Au contraire, the Norman Brays of our world are anything but common. As they are the first to tell you, they are precious, very precious. Why? Because to their way of thinking (and their way of thinking is the only one that really matters), they have superior talent, finer sensitivity, and more refinement in clothes, drink, and music than the rest of the world. They are artists who never compromise, and the rest of us are not. To most of us, most of the time, they are something else entirely: lazy, lecherous monsters of self-absorption, petty moochers and annoying time-wasters, addled and raddled misfits who never quite connect with our everyday world of earning a living, paying bills, establishing and maintaining reciprocal relationships. We'd ignore them if we could, but they won't let us. They insist on making their larger-than-life presence felt in the smallest of circumstances. Besides, they do have a talent to amuse and charm in small and endearing ways even if we only ever get their full attention by putting their name in front of whatever we have to say to them.
Stylistically, Trevor Cole is more than a little reminiscent of England's Nick Hornby. Cole has a similar eye for the physical and emotional minutiae that obsessive-compulsives feed upon, but he has ingested the much richer fare of Cervantes. Norman Bray is a subtle work that transforms the story of a mundane actor into something older and less fathomable than a trendy tale of self-redemption among the self-absorbed. By having other characters demand answers from him that he's ill-prepared to give, Bray increasingly senses the limits of his own awareness, and is led (and readers with him) to ask questions "he can't remember ever asking before." As the actor grudgingly wins a little admiration and affection from us through his resiliency, we "confront a reflecting mirror that awes us even while we yield to delight," as Harold Bloom says of Cervantes. This is a book to be cherished both for the depths of its ironies and the breadth of its responsiveness to a difficult and defiant protagonist. Literary life is unfair: on his first outing as a novelist, Trevor Cole comes closer to rivalling Kingsley Amis (and Anthony Burgess in the Enderby books) than Russell Smith has managed in three tries.
If you didn't know from the cover copy that Colin McAdam is the son of a Canadian diplomat, has lived in Hong Kong, Denmark, England, and Barbados as well as studied at the University of Toronto and McGill and holds a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University, you wouldn't guess it from the first hundred pages or so of Some Great Thing. We're mostly inside Jerry McGuinty's story of his place in the '70s construction boom in Ottawa, but we could almost be in any doughnut shop in this country any morning of the week when any self-made man with a pickup truck parked outside is motor-mouthing his way through his profanity-laced "success story" for all the willing and unwilling listeners in the place:

"Thirteen neighbourhoods, five thousand roofs, thirty thousand outside wall, and a rock-hard pair of hands. That is what I have built . . .
My father was a plasterer. His father was a plasterer (and plastering was the death of his father). I, my friend, am a plasterer. Lean forward here and I will show you my card. I am a member of the Plasterers' and Cement Masons' International Association of the United States and Canada. There are fifty thousand members and I am the best. My father was the best. His father was the best . . .
I own my own company. I have heard and told 10,000 filthy jokes . . . When I was in the middle of it I didn't realize what I was in the middle of. It took me a few years, a few sleepless smelly years, to realize it was the greatest boom this land has ever seen. One of them, anyway. We couldn't help but make a fortune."

I did say almost, didn't I? McAdam's McGuinty in full flow is as close as any younger writer is likely to ever get to replicating Mordecai Richler's sense of the immediacy, the here-and-nowness in a raw and grasping but decent character. The voices of urban men who actually build things and suffer in the process are rare in Canadian fiction. If Some Great Thing contained nothing but this hyper-realistically detailed and ruefully comic tale of a plasterer-turned-developer, it would still be something special. But alongside McGuinty's story, there's another story told from further up the social scale: Simon Struthers is the son of an MP, a career civil servant with the federal agency responsible for planning Canada's capital, a developer's worst nightmare. Simon knows that success "in the public service was achieved by saying nothing to the right people" and suspects that "true power . . . was not just in a name, but in one's knowledge of one's colleagues." As Simon gets to know his colleagues (and his knowledge of the women among them is as carnal as he can persuade them to be astride a desk) and exercises his power over land use in the name of heritage, values, and culture, his story begins to intersect with McGuinty's until both spiral to ends that aren't predictable.
The sum of this book is so much larger than its two parts that it was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States with considerable fuss. McAdam is one of Anne Carson's satellites and Some Great Thing was edited by Robin Robertson, the notable Scots poet who is one of the trustees for the Griffin Prize. There is poetry in his prose, but McAdam's style owes everything to the wide-eyed wonder at human folly and the satirical thrust of Aristophanes and his descendants, and nothing to Ondaatje or Urquhart. Those who read this book at the same slow pace as The Polished Hoe requires will find it as penetrating a meditation on greed and the abuse of power as Austin Clarke provides. Like Clarke, McAdam is self-indulgent and indulged by his editor. There's a false start that makes the first twenty pages dispensable and there are longeurs in Struther's amatory adventures, but Some Great Thing is as smart, as wickedly funny, as unexpected, and as good as a couple of the very best of the Giller prizewinners: Jerry McGuinty is as oddly endearing as Richler's Barney Panofsky or Clarke's Crown Sargeant Percy DaCosta Benjamin Stuart.
If novels are to have a future that's continuous with their past, they've "got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; [they've] got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut," to quote D.H. Lawrence. The question of which book wins which prize and the reasons for it doing so matter deeply because they're inextricably linked to questions of courage, of taking necessary risks on behalf of permanent human concerns in just the ways that the novels of Joseph Boyden, Trevor Cole, Colin McAdam do. ò

An extended version of this article will be included in T.F. Rigelhof's essay collection The Shape of Fiction to Come, his current work in progress.