Book reviews

Dennis Lee, Yesno, House of Anansi Press, 2007

Dennis Lee is well-known (and deservedly so) as a children’s poet, the author of Alligator Pie among other books. A rather smaller number of people know that he is also a significant writer of poetry for adults, poems marked by a preoccupation with the civic and social community of Canada. His two most recent books, Un and Yesno, are linked volumes exploring, through a radical deconstruction and partial reconstruction of language, our current environmental crisis, a crisis which Lee follows back to our own souls and our understandings of our selves and our place in the world. Un, published in 2004, was a very dark book (the cover was plain black), ending with a projection into a possible future of planetary extinction, “terminal ought and deny”. In Yesno, published this spring, Lee is searching for a way to balance pessimism and hope, and, more than in the earlier book, works with theological concepts to do so; his frame of reference is wide, and he references writings and ideas from many faiths, but the central metaphors tend to be drawn from a Christian context, with the images of the saviour-child and the “carnival logos” recurring throughout, undoing and remaking being, rewiring our selves from the building blocks of the word.

Yesno is not on any level an easy book—it asks of the reader both a level of comfort with experimental poetry, and enough knowledge of a very wide range of literary and religious texts to recognize and play with references and etymologies. But as an example of a very vivid, immediate and challenging use of Christian (and other) traditions to address the world as it is, Yesno is outstandingly important.



Andrew O'Hagan, Be Near Me, McClelland and Stewart, 2006

Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan has a wide and curious range of interests; his previous books have dealt with subjects including missing people in Britain, and the anorexic pop singer Lena Zavaroni. His latest novel, Be Near Me, sounds rather familiar on the surface—a Roman Catholic priest in a small town in Scotland gets himself into rather serious trouble with a young man in his parish—but O’Hagan handles the material with uncommon skill.

It is clear from the outset that Father David Anderton’s troubles are going to have a great deal to do with a clash of cultures. Though born in Edinburgh, he has spent his life in England before coming to Dalgarnock, a small and economically depressed Scottish village, and in some ways this is much more of a problem for the community than his sexual orientation or behaviour; the (largely unjustified) campaign against David as a “paedo” may be in significant part a cover for a campaign against the outsider, the colonizer, the “English” man.

O’Hagan’s most interesting achievement, though, is the character of David himself; fussy, pedantic, self-absorbed and childishly self-satisfied, but so carefully observed and fully drawn that we cannot help but sympathize with him. And his background is also not quite what one might have expected—eventually, we learn that David, at university, had a serious romantic relationship with Conor, a student activist. (This was evidently a publicly acknowledged romance; his mother still displays a picture of the two of them together). It was only after Conor’s death in a car crash that David decided to join the church, his vow of celibacy serving as a sort of overwrought youthful tribute to his dead lover.

It is not, then, so much that the church has forced David to suppress a profound part of himself; it is rather that he embraced that suppression, that he ran to the church as a refuge from adult sexuality, and from complication, from the loss and the acknowledgement of mortality that are also part of love. And O’Hagan makes it quietly clear that this has damaged David not only as a person but as a priest—that he is a poor pastor, superficial and disengaged (“addicted to sweet thoughts,” his mother says), because he has never really let himself grow up.

O’Hagan is quite good at turning stock characters into real people—David’s housekeeper Mrs Poole becomes a sort of tragic hero of the book, and Mark, the delinquent boy with whom David engages in a fairly silly flirtation (it is never much more than that) is oddly complex in his rages and ambiguities. While the book is quite specific to the cultural context of the post-industrial Scotland, O’Hagan’s people are rich enough, and complicated enough, to speak well beyond that.

Maggie Helwig, Toronto