Margaret Atwood still has it.
November 9, 2019
Yesterday I picked up a copy of Testaments in Costco. At the cash I commented that the experience would be more complete if a stern woman with glasses were on hand to sign my book. The cashier grinned, told me she is often accused of a stern gaze, but segued into an account of the last book signing she remembers in the Kingston store. “It was a hockey player.”
To my surprise I read the first half of the book last night. Lady Atwood can keep the reader turning the pages, and regularly drops these memorable one-liners which leave me wishing I had a pencil with me while reading her work.
Part of the book’s appeal is the short attention span required to read it. It’s epistolary in structure, and the diary entries are only a couple of pages in many cases. Perhaps Atwood had the world she wanted to create in mind and put together bits of the tapestry in each day’s writing. In any case, the narrative is masterfully done and quite accessible to the casual reader.
In The Handmaid’s Tale Canada was the unformed idea of escape from theocratic tyranny. Perhaps as a nod to the success of the television series, Testaments moves many of its scenes to Toronto. Offred’s dream of escape becomes a later-day underground railroad with complaints about the porous border in this case coming from the theocrats to the south, rather than the Conservative Party of Canada.
And that’s about as far as I have read so far. The Testaments is a fine read, and I’ll complete this review later.
UPDATE: 14 November, 2019
It’s frustrating not having the book to enjoy any more. I won’t spoil it with too much information at this point, so I’ll just stress that it has a number of vibrant and contrasting characters, there is a bit of run-and-duck adventure narrative, as well as a rich dollop of political intrigue in this sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
The novel has deserved its accolades. It will not disappoint.
Coolant pipes diary: Day 2
April 1, 2018
NOTE: The passenger side is right, the driver’s side is left for the purposes of this article.
8:00 a.m. Restless and anxious to get at the project, but must wait for son to arrive. Make work. Build fire in auto shop. Brush the dog. Clean car mats.
Enough of this. I want to wrench. I decide to pull a spark plug to see their condition. The easiest access is the second cylinder from the front on the left. The coil has a 3″ split in the plastic tube, so I pick a new one out of the box and install it, but of course I can’t test it yet.
12:00 p.m. Charlie, Roz and Ada arrive.
1:00 p.m. We start in on Ruby. Charlie scopes and photographs, and we eventually agree there’s little point of further disassembly.
Charlie spends an hour trying to get the rear right screw into the fuel rail.
2:10 p.m. We partially remove the manifold to allow the installation of that damned screw. Now I understand why techs leave the fuel rails on the manifold, and remove the whole unit. The right rear screw is otherwise impossible.
Things go back together well. Charlie understands the strange packages with air running through them on the top of the engine. I content myself with putting on covers and clipping on injectors. Back go the fuel pump fuses, and Ruby fires up. There’s a slight miss which we decide to deal with after Easter Dinner.
4:45 p.m. The OBD reader shows P0202. That means the injector on cylinder 2 is misfiring. That’s the second one from the front. I quickly tear in to the coil I had replaced this morning, second from the front. No amount of abuse of the coil and the injector on what turns out to be cylinder #6 helps the problem.
Eventually I call up a diagram, realize I have been working on the wrong side of the car, take off the right air pump, loosen the air pump holder, remove the motor mount shaft and the notoriously fragile beauty cover which fingers in among these obstructions, only to discover an injector wiring connector which is loose under the fuel rail and an awkward clump of wiring. Ten minutes later it clicks into place. Ruby fires up smooth and powerful. I put the car back together, vowing to post a diagram of Ruby’s engine on the shop wall so I will always know where cylinder #2 is.
6:00 p.m. All better. Test drive is a quick, one mile sprint, and home.
Story, an excerpt from Anathem
December 17, 2008
If your favourite quote is Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” you’ll probably like the following.
Rod
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The way in which Yul had decided to join us on our journey north was strange to me. There had been no rational process, no marshaling of evidence, no weighing of options. But that was how Yul lived his whole life. He had not-I realized-been invited by Gnel to come out and pay us a visit at the fueling station. He had just shown up. He did a new thing with a new set of people every day of his life. And that made him just as different from the people in the traffic jam as I was.
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.
Neal Stephenson. Anathem. HarperCollins. 2008. p. 414
Summer Reads
July 29, 2008
A tall pine overhanging a dock, a comfortable reclining chair, a glass of something cold, and a soggy dog asleep at one’s feet. Anything missing? The book. Where’s the book?
Few pastimes in summer are as pleasant as an hour or two spent with a book under a favourite tree. Of course the attempt to match an unseen reader to a list of books brings to mind the futility of installing a set of roof racks on a boiled egg, but it doesn’t pay to let one’s reading list go stale from a lack of innovation, so here’s an attempt.
First I should mention the books which won’t do for dock-side reading. In the summer of 1974, Jaws made everyone stay out of the water. Speedo almost went bankrupt. By definition this does not make for a good summer book. Others are merely too delicious to put aside, and I tend to devour them the evening they arrive. Karl Hiassen’s novels lead this category for me. I reread his list about every two years. Double Whammy, a satire of pro bass fishing tournaments, stands out.
Elmore Leonard’s novels don’t keep, either. The same goes for Ken Follett, but I can recommend Pillars of the Earth, a historical novel about the emergence of a medieval village in England, as well as his spy novels.
The stories of Patrick McManus carried me through many a slack time in English class. McManus’s second novel Avalanche is currently available in bookstores. The retired professor and columnist for Outdoor Life and Field and Stream has a very light touch when it comes to sex, but the passage where the hero must carry an immobile but unembarrassed young woman clad only in a bedsheet up a cliff before a rising flood stands out as one of the more amusing chapters I have read since hitting middle age.
The list of books which will keep for summer begins with the novels of John LeCarre. I have always found his books hard to start, but very satisfying, once read. Single and Single had somehow escaped my notice until this month, but went down well.
My wife brought me home some books by Henry Porter, and I agree that he seems to have inherited the mantle from LeCarre as this generation’s master of the spy novel. A Spy’s Life (2001) is a good place to start.
Bet’s current favourite is Ian Rankin, a young British crime writer. I overheard her comment in a bookstore this week: “He’s young, so he should have a quite a few more good ones left in him.” She’s letting me read her copy of Witch Hunt at the moment.
Guy books:
Neal Stephenson’s novels. Start with Snow Crash, an action-packed skateboard epic, or Cryptonomicon, a novel about the development of the first computer for code breaking based upon a pipe organ and driven by steam. It’s a great big guy book.
In the sneakily funny Virtual Light, Vancouver writer William Gibson concentrates upon a reality television program Cops in Trouble, private security companies, wacko religious cults, and his series heroine, Chevette, who is a very engaging bicycle messenger and cat burglar.
Books women made me read:
Don Coyote, by Dayton O. Hyde. This book is about coyotes, but the American Library Association in 1989 named it one of the ten best books of the decade. I was astounded at how good a read it was.
A classmate insisted that I buy Edward Rutherfurd’s Sarum: A Novel of British History. I’d always avoided historical novels, but once started I very much liked it. London and The Forest are outstanding reads, as well
The Blind Assassin. Margaret Atwood tells a complex and deceptive story in this difficult but hugely entertaining read. It’s set in upper class Ontario (yachts, mansions and factories) between the wars.
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. Wonderful book. The nurse is a well- developed and thoroughly loveable character. The Indian bomb-disposal engineer offers an intelligent, non-European perspective on the war which puts the bombing of Hiroshima into an entirely different context. Hollywood wasted a movie gushing about the Raphe Finnes and Kristin Scott Thomas affair, but the French-Canadian nurse and the Indian engineer are the heart of the novel.
Jose Saramango won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 for Blindness. He earned the award. This is one of the best novels I have ever read, but it is not for the squeamish.
Roz contributed these non-fiction selections:
In The Song of the Dodo David Quammen gives a historical account of how islands (and the weird animals that live on them, like lemurs and komodo dragons) have contributed to our understanding of speciation and extinction, while recounting his own journeys to Madagascar, Indonesia, and the Galapagos to witness island biogeography for himself. This is a popular science book that is certainly entertaining enough for the dock. Another good one by Quammen that she finished recently is The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.
Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food deals with the problems with the modern western diet, and how the processed food industry figured out how to use nutrition science for profit at the expense peoples’ health.
UPDATE: Bet’s been at it again. This time she brought me Leaven of Malice, by Robertson Davies. It won the 1954 Leacock Humour Award. Set in and around a small-town newspaper editor’s office, the plot concerns a spurious announcement of the engagement of two prominent citizens and the libel action which follows. I would not have picked this book up on my own, but it proved once again that intelligence and wit don’t go out of style. The book is as funny as a Hiassen novel, only with more agreeable characters.
the Walnut Diary 