True Grit

The novels of Charles Portis are alike in their southern voice and setting, their humorous dialogue and eccentric characters. Where True Grit differs from the others is that it takes place in the past -- during the 1870s after the American Civil War.

It's an anti-western.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father has been shot down by a hired hand named Tom Chaney. She sets out after him with a Texas Ranger named LaBeouf (pronounced "LaBeef"), and a one-eyed federal marshall named Rooster Cogburn, who eats corn dodgers and drinks "double-rectified busthead."

On one level the book reads like a YA novel, particularly at its climax, which involves a cave inhabited by bats, snakes and a skeleton. But it is rescued from this one misstep by great dialogue, Mattie's pungent observations, and an ending that is far from treacly.

A sample:

I sat at one corner of the table between her and a tall, long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth. He and Mrs. Floyd did most of the talking. He traveled about selling pocket calculators. He was the only man there wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. He told some interesting stories about his experiences but the others paid little attention to him, being occupied with their food like hogs rooting in a bucket. "Watch out for those chicken and dumplings," he told me. Some of the men stopped eating. "They will hurt your eyes," he said. A dirty man across the table in a smelly deerskin coat said, "How is that?" With a mischievous twinkle the drummer replied. "They will hurt your eyes looking for the chicken." I thought it a clever joke but the dirty man said angrily, "You squirrelheaded son of a bitch," and went back to eating.

The book contains laudatory quotes from Esquire, The New York Times, The Saturday Review and from Jonathem Lethem, Roald Dahl, and Walker Percy (the man who saved A Confederacy of Dunces from oblivion).

The Museum Guard

Set in Halifax just before WW2, this is a novel about lost souls. The narrator is a museum guard who has already lived through one tragedy, the death of his parents in a zeppelin accident. He has sweet but flawed relationships with his uncle, an engaging dissolute rogue, and a cemetery worker who believes she is a woman in a Dutch painting.

Several of the characters, underlining their rootlessness, live in hotels with bellhops their closest friends. Perhaps the many odd names are a reflection of this -- DeFoe Russet, Imogene Linny, Altoon Markham, Ovid Lamartine, Joop Heijman, Pinnie Oler, Madison Alt, Fordy Unterberg.

The plot swerves in interesting directions, the prose is spare, cleansed of adjectives, and the dialogue is very good. But once the uncle departs the story and the girlfriend sails into the maw of history, the novel loses some of its vitality. The denouement is described by the museum's curator in several letters that occupy the final 40 pages in a somewhat laboured manner.

Still, the novel was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. Two of author Howard Norman's earlier novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were finalists for the National Book Award. He also wrote a non-fiction volume that I liked very much: My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations

We Were Not the Savages

Collision between European and Native American Civilizations

The first half of this book is a history of colonial Nova Scotia from a Mi'kmaq point of view. The second half is post-Confederation. It dissects the Indian Act of 1876, and charts the hardship, discrimination, and ignominy the Mi'Kmaq have suffered during the 20th century.

The anger and frustration of the author permeates the book. He uses such ugly terms as "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "white supremacist;" and accuses the Dept. of Indian and Northern Affairs (where he worked for many years) of being a racist organization. He supports these allegations with personal anecdotes and extensive historical evidence.

This book is now in its third edition. The author, Daniel Paul, is a distinguished Mi'kmaw scholar who has been awarded the Order of Nova Scotia, the Order of Canada, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Sainte-Anne.

If you visit his website you can sign a petition urging Nova Scotia to remove the name of Cornwallis from the many public places where it appears. Cornwallis was the founder of Halifax, first colonial governor, and issuer of a bounty on the Mi'kmaq. His name is shamefully plastered all over the province.