Fiction Reviews

Julia W. Cooper

The Wanton Troopers
by Alden
Nowlan Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2009
297 pp. $19.99

In a rare twist of literary archeology, the final page of Alden Nowlan’s The Wanton Troopers (1960) has been unearthed from its carbon copy interment at the University of Calgary Library and published in a second edition by Gooselane. The Wanton Troopers’ first edition, published posthumously in 1988 with the last page unwittingly missing from the copy text, had itself been resurrected thirty years after initial rejection from the two publishers Nowlan submitted it to. Seemingly fated to never reach a readership, with near-sighted publishers in 1960 and the later misfortune of simple human error, the acclaimed poet’s first novel may finally and fully be read fifty years after its creation. And perhaps five decades is exactly what is needed to appreciate the subtleties of a writer like Nowlan, who wrote of rural New Brunswick before the rest of Canada knew there was anything worth saying about it.

The Wanton Troopers, part autobiography, part unrestrained poetic imagining, is a novel steeped in the lucidity of a young inchoate artist who examines the broken family and poverty around him with ingenuous bewilderment. A novel of the earth and of the flesh, The Wanton Troopers is a work whose distinctly aural and olfactory descriptions also make it a novel of gritty presence. The animals, the mills, and the changing seasons are so entwined with the characters’ appetites and angers as to render them inseparable, creating a cyclical struggle of need and sustenance between man and his land.

The early years and adolescence of protagonist Kevin O’Brien’s life unfold in a poor New Brunswick town, in a home both literally and figuratively falling apart. With an alcoholic, mill-working father, a mother whose big city desires do not fit in her small town life, and the insistent biblical incantations of a decaying grandmother, the subtle registers of the cacophonic world are absorbed and recorded by Kevin.

What Nowlan captures so intimately and with great skill is a twofold awakening of sexuality and consciousness within the young Kevin. The simultaneous development of each attests to Nowlan’s astute understanding of the sexual impulses and sadistic wishes that are innate to childhood yet rarely acknowledged. The Wanton Troopers reckons with the Oedipal struggle of the O’Brien triumvirate, testing the limits of love, taboo, and fidelity, not solely within the singular plight of a poor family but as a part of the human condition.

In the novel’s afterword, acclaimed novelist and fellow New Brunswick writer David Adams Richards lauds Nowlan for “the overflowing grace and human care of an artist determined to reveal at any cost those few elusive moments of tenderness among many terrifying hatreds” (252-53). As if aware himself of these hard-won moments of love, Kevin reflects near the novel’s close: “These thoughts were almost, but not quite, destroyed when one tried to put them into words. Trying to fit these thoughts into words was like trying to dip up the ocean in a basin” (218). Yet here they are intact, the moments of tenderness among the hatreds, defying the elusiveness of language in a beautifully crafted first novel.

Although innocence may be relative in The Wanton Troopers, love is not, and as cursed and hateful as the world may seem to be, there is a contumacious refusal in this novel to break with forgiveness and love. It is this message above all that is handed to us now, the first readers of the complete, published novel. The final chapter of The Wanton Troopers still begins with Kevin’s sense of the world’s overwhelming indecipherability, but with the closing images Nowlan intended, the boy’s loss of direction is tempered and honed by a faith — albeit of ambiguous ends — but a faith no less.

Step Closer
by Tessa McWatt
Toronto, ON: HarperCollins, 2009
340 pp. $32.99

Like Emily, the storyteller of Tessa McWatt’s fourth novel Step Closer, I grapple with where to begin. With a story spanning so many geographies, so absorbed in their changes and shifts, it seems almost pedantic to choose a solitary point of origin. Pamplona, Santiago, London, Scotland, and Ontario are the names of these geographies, but the spaces they inhabit in the characters’ various memories lack such precision. Space and time are instead measured by the calamities and coincidences that fill them; those that can be measured on a Richter scale or by seismic shifts and their subsequent swells, but also the smaller versions of those that happen within us, the changes and unprecedented surges that steer us off course and toward disaster.

McWatt is an author of diverse origins herself, born in Guyana, raised in Toronto, and currently living in London, England, her novels are concerned with the in between spaces of migration, family, and memory. McWatt’s second novel Dragons Cry, commended as “a lyrical evocation of history and memories” was shortlisted for the 2001 Governor General’s Award amidst the good company of Yann Martel, Jane Urquhart, Thomas Wharton, and Richard B. Wright.

Step Closer is another lyrical evocation of sorts, yet one with engrossing attention paid to the role of writing in the retrieval of memories. McWatt reconstructs from Emily’s unwilling memory the story of two men’s journey along the pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostela. Traditionally, the trail of the pilgrim is circular, beginning and ending in the same place and whose steps have delivered with them a spiritual transformation. Yet Gavin and Marcus’ walk along the Camino follows its own trajectory, and loath to be called pilgrims, they have little interest in the awakening of faiths.

The story of Marcus and Gavin itself spans twenty years. Marcus, a man willfully trying to forget himself after assaults of racism and bad luck, is wedged in a liminal space of identity. He is in many ways a chameleon of multiculturalism, a dark-skinned child of West India and England cum Spanish rogue with cockney accent. Marcus exudes an alluring exoticism that makes him at once appealing and perpetually excluded, only a slight evolution from his childhood as a cultural and racial outsider. Gavin on the other hand, is dying for courage and absolution, haunted by a history of cowardice and guilt that brings him in search of Marcus.

The history between Marcus and Gavin remains intentionally vague throughout the opening chapters of Emily’s narrative. The wandering and uncertainty of the men’s story coincides with the watery tumult of the 2004 tsunami, offering a frame for Emily’s narrative which also brings her partner Sam, a virologist, into its fold. Amidst the natural catastrophe and its looming threat of water-born diseases, Emily, with a sense of the ominous, describes the difficulties of telling the story of Marcus and Gavin. It is a struggle, we are told, to cast vanities aside, to not dwell on her own part in their story, and to build from the clutches of memory a summer of atonement, betrayal, and belonging. Emily is intimately implicated in this tale and with every chapter and every divulgence she moves forward with an understanding of the past that will ultimately allow her a fuller understanding of the present.

Sam is the man of Emily’s present, and although he proves a more complicated character than even she first believes, he is the scientist and pragmatic thinker. Sam represents to Emily the reprieve of straightforward problems and the comfort of methodic exploration of life’s mysteries, natural and man-made. However, he also embodies the failure of science, or at least the failure of an insistence on pragmatism that moves from disaster to disaster with an almost willful amnesia. When the threat of disease dissipates in the aftermath of the tsunami, science moves onto the next threat, but what, McWatt asks, of the unseen wounds? How can one attest to the effects of trauma?

Writing. Remembering. Forgetting. All of the novel’s characters are engaged in these labours, engaged in the painful process of looking back. It is from this prolonged backward glance, steadfast in its arrest of time, that Step Closer asks several good questions: “How does a life get saved?” (7) Is everything that happens on the planet coincidental? “Coincidence goes against our experience of events, doesn’t it?” (2) Who do we need in our lives? Who do we know? How do we love? Fortunately for us, the novel’s end offers answers to some of those questions. Most compelling is Emily’s simple axiom: “Our need brings language” (338), attesting to a primordial compulsion toward expression, a fundamental need to communicate with one another which as a result brings us, the novel’s other pilgrims, a step or two closer to each other.