This is my last edition of Best Canadian Stories. I am putting myself out to pasture where I will sleep in the grass and dream of all the wonderful stories I have discovered over the past decade. Believe me, they are the stuff dreams are made of.
This year I am pleased to have Matt Lennox’s “Men of Salt, Men of Earth.” It’s his first published story, and the bio note included in The Danforth Review where the story appeared indicates that, at loose ends, Lennox is thinking of joining the army. I have two words of advice: Think again. Already Lennox is an artist with huge narrative drive and a knack for oddly precise diction. A wild boar, trapped in the Australian outback and about to be slaughtered, is “a slobbering and growling trifurcate of living flesh, rolling in the red dust.”
I would have put Alice Munro in the book every year if her editors had let me. This time we have “The View from Castle Rock,” a gorgeous story about three generations of a Scots emigrant family crossing the Atlantic in 1818 to come to Canada. Brilliant characterization and thematic weaving render the family a microcosm of Old World culture shifting to the new.
I also found in the quarterly Exile a humanely generous and witty little story by the poet P.K. Page. In “Eatings,” a well-meaning diplomat’s wife from an unnamed African country makes a gloriously comic shambles of new customs and protocol.
Patrick Lane contributes “Wasps,” a tour-de-force one stunning sentence long about a boy finding wisdom and mystery, death and perhaps a vision of God, in the wild mountains of British Columbia.
Leon Rooke’s “Balduchi’s Who’s Who” is a frothy mix of Kensington Market cityscape, sex and inspired metafiction: three great story writers, Guy de Maupassant, Isaac Babel and God, squabble and grouse in an Odessa bar.
David Helwig does a romantic turn in “Wakefulness,” the story of a war-blinded old man who dreams of a naked woman in a gondola. Waking up, he recalls the real story: how a mysterious woman known as Milady found him broken and forgotten in a military hospital in England and contrived to take the wounded soldier on a journey through an exhausted Europe to Venice to heal him with her love.
Bill Gaston’s story “The Night Window” is about a disaffected teenage boy who wanders off into the British Columbia forest to escape his love-addled mother and her new boyfriend. Astonishingly, the boy finds camaraderie and even wisdom in the form of a pair of funky country musicians turned pot growers.
“Bix’s Trumpet” by Dave Margoshes follows the sad, downward spiral of a brilliant, promising drunk whose father once won Bix Beiderbecke’s trumpet in a crap game.
In André Narbonne’s Conrad-esque “The Advancements,” an oil tanker is trapped in the ice off Newfoundland with a polar bear hunting nearby and a melancholy wheelsman bent on suicide. “The Advancements” is a lovely amalgam of Arctic mystery, shipboard claustrophobia and human misery, the death in life of those who have already given up.
And, finally, a piece of vintage Mark Anthony Jarman, one of the wild men of Canadian fiction: “Winter Coat, Winter Count (Assiniboia Death Trip)” is a phantasmagorical account of the Battle of Little Big Horn, nineteenth-century hat fashions, the death of Crazy Horse, love and much more.
Douglas Glover