Book Reviews

First Engagements

Heather Burt (Author)
Adam's Peak. Dundurn Press
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C.S. Richardson (Author)
The End of the Alphabet. Doubleday Canada Limited
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Reviewed by Andrew Bartlett

In Adam’s Peak, we alternate between the perspectives of two thirty-something Canadians. Rudy Vantwest, born in Sri Lanka but raised mostly in Canada after his family emigrates in 1970, has returned to the “exotic” homeland to teach English and search for a sense of roots. Clare Fraser, the only child of Alastair and Isobel, Scots who emigrated in 1964, has a degree in music but works as an uninspired clerk in a music store. Although they grow up across the street from each other in the West Island of Montreal, Rudy and Clare know next to nothing of each other. But they similarly lack self-orientation; they are each troubled by broken family ties. Rudy, adrift, evasive, feels guilt over having failed to reciprocate the affections of his younger brother, Adam. Clare, frustrated by sexual inexperience, extremely shy, feels stuck at a great emotional distance from her mother, friends, and co-workers.

Meanwhile, about a dozen textual segments with month-year titles add historical depth to the main narrative. Three segments titled “April 1945” show Alec Van Twest (the father of Rudy and Adam) as a boy in Sri Lanka, betraying in a way his elder brother. This brother appears decades later as the Uncle Ernie who treks with Rudy up Adam’s Peak. Three segments set in May and June 1964 narrate the graceless conception of Clare Fraser, the circumstances that impel Isobel into marriage with Alastair and emigration to Montreal.

If the mark of successful fiction is its getting the reader to feel attached to the characters, then Heather Burt’s first novel is an unequivocal success. One anticipates the end, mourning that there will shortly be no more of Rudy and Clare, partly because the characters are very young in spirit when the story ends, but also because they have only just been freed from their traps, but we must part with them. The story is also deftly plotted work: one quest goes eastward back across the Atlantic with Clare, the other goes across the Pacific with Rudy, ending when he climbs Adam’s Peak. Overall, the accidents and acts of awkward kindness that bring the Vantwest and Fraser families together form a credible sequence while managing to be oddly moving. Oddly moving because it is a strangely spectacular ordinariness that tips over into the transcendental here. Even though there is nothing at all “distinguished” about either Rudy or Clare (quite the contrary), the final pages actually evoke a sense of joy—joy is rare in the earnest gloom of much contemporary fiction.

Heather Burt has studied the human risks of communicating face-to-face, but she eschews the sentimental when getting her characters to take those risks, even in scenes overloaded with opportunities for violins to come in. She defies current fashion in her handling of Clare’s decisive first-ever-and-one-time-only meetings with her Scotland connections as she does in Rudy’s reflections at the top of Adam’s Peak, neither tossing out scraps of deflationary sarcasm nor getting pretty with language so as to distract from the mundane that compels our attention. Burt gets right a certain realism of human entanglement with “fate.” From a distance, at the airport in the novel’s closing encounter, Clare sees of all people her neighbour Rudy. The coincidence “might be fate” she thinks, but certainly neither the punishing fate that incites futile resentment nor the delusory necessity to which some resign themselves in life-negating self-denial. It is instead “a sort of inexorable energy that organize[s] circumstances a certain way—not for the best, not for the worst, but simply in ways that [make] sense.”

In The End of the Alphabet, Ambrose Zephyr (husband, an advertising executive) and Zappora Ashkenazi (wife, a fashion magazine columnist), called Zipper, are shocked to learn Ambrose, only 50, has but 30 days to live. Ambrose decides to travel, one place per day for 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet: A for Amsterdam, B for Berlin, C for Chartres. After crisscrossing the European continent for a brief while, Zipper gets him to return to Kensington (K): his hand has been shaking as he shaves. Back home, for J, they visit his tailor Umtata in “Old Jewry,” the dear tailor who did their wedding garments and who now outfits him with a linen shirt to fit his wasted-thin body.

It would be unjust to attribute to the plot point of the terminal illness alone the immensely compact energy of C.S. Richardson’s beautiful text. The pacing is not only shatteringly elliptical (the ellipses evoking the speed with which Zipper witnesses Ambrose dying), but also punctuated with crisp pictures and briefly pleasing insights. Ambrose, who has always just liked what he likes in art and literature, remonstrates with out-of-character enthusiasm is poetic prose without a wandering word or stray phrase. We are compelled into an enchanted respect for Ambrose and Zipper after studying Rembrandt’s The Night Watch up close. Zipper, annoyed by his claim he can “see” things nobody else can, does herself finally see England on the sea-line horizon just where Ambrose had been pointing at it.

One can read The End of the Alphabet in a single sitting. But having finished, one wants to start over. This (and about as far away from the voyeuristic pity of the tear-jerker as one can get). For Richardson keeps them in their crisis at a distance from us. They are different, eccentric, odd: the point is partly that their love is of that type which makes two people just right for each other, excluding all others. The intimacy is one with the vulnerability of the intimacy, for the beloved without any rivals on the horizon will never be replaced. This elegant, brilliant novella might even be said to test the merit of the DeRougemont thesis: here we have married love in the Western world, fearless in its loyalty and mighty in its tenderness.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #196 (Spring 2008), Diasporic Women's Writing. (pg. 128 - 129)

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