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Art & Books

Going for Giller

The Giller Prize short list made me happy for two reasons: Anne Michaels and Kim Echlin. Both scored spots on the list for their superb books dealing with trauma and loss, The Winter Vault (McCLelland & Stewart) and The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton), respectively.

Hamish Hamilton also lucked out when Colin McAdam landed a spot on the list for his novel Fall. I say lucked out because the book features a big fat plot point explosion that the narrative has in no way earned. McAdam can write but I found the major moment laughable. Weird because I usually love a book (or anything else, for that matter) set inside a private school.

I don’t like to play a guessing game with the jury’s motivations but I have a feeling Linden McIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man got a Giller nod for political reasons. It deals with the highly charged issue of sexual abuse inside the Catholic church and, God knows, that issue’s blowing up huge right now.

On the other hand, Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean (Random House) meditates on the ethics and the life of Aristotle and, though morality is always relevant, a book about classical Greece is not exactly hitting hard at current issues. But, speaking as someone with a Classics degree in Greek and Latin, I’m really glad to see this one on the list.

Back to Echlin and Michaels, Echlin’s book has seriously divided readers. Some, like me, find it hauntingly beautiful, others find it too heavy. Some have even argued that books shouldn’t try to deal with cataclysmic political catastrophes, like this one in Cambodia. I don’t quite get that – that’s what literature’s for, isn’t it? It’s supposed to confront trauma whether it happens on the personal or national level.

But really, none of these four books comes close to Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault. Though it takes a little dip when the action moves to Toronto and recent immigrants from Poland Polish, for most of the novel, Michaels looks at loss and memory and the meaning of moving whole populations in ways that reach epic and poetic heights. Read it and you’ll see what I mean.

The Giller Prize will be awarded at the big gala on November 10.

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