Lynda Reads

Hal Friesen about book by Mark Shegelski

2009-05-19T08:08:00.004-07:00

The professor under whom I did my undergraduate research just published his first science fiction book, and I thought I'd let you know about it. As one of the readers who helped him edit I can tell you they're worth checking out! You'll find the info below.

-Hal

Title: "Remembering the Future"
Author: Mark Shegelski
Publisher: Scroll Press
Retail Price (Canadian): $19.95

You can see the cover of the book and the description that is on the back of the book
by going to amazon.ca or amazon.com. Note on the back cover the strong endorsement by Robert J. Sawyer (Canada's leading scifi author)

"Fascinating, inventive stories from a stunning new talent. You'll remember these futures."

--Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo award-winning author of Hominids

Here is the link to amazon.ca:

Remembering the Future.

Michael Armstrong May 8, 2009

2009-05-10T09:37:00.004-07:00

Tegan and I went to see Michael Armstrong perform poetry to jazz at Books & Company, May 8, 2009. He's still got the stuff. I treasure the poems on his CD, backed up by the same band, which I've played many times in the car. Tegan remembers King Snake and the one about the monkey the best. The images of the frozen words sticks with me, too. And the father/son remembrance bound up in a game of catch where so few and so ordinary words ultimately mean so much, and yet are never quite enough. I wish the poems on his CD a long life and wish it was available somewhere commercially. I don't think it is. Gathered around Michael in the image above are some of the thirty or forty folks who turned out to cram Cafe Voltaire on a Friday night. After Michael's set there was a radio play I missed out on due to other committments.

The Annual Magazine Caravan April 19 2009

2009-04-29T07:45:00.004-07:00

Text adapted from The Pulse

April 19, 2009. A literary cabaret featuring Rob Budde, Dee Horne, Sarah de Leeuw, Betsy Trumpener and Gillian Wigmore who read from their recent works published by BC book and magazine publishers.
Venue: Books & Company

See more pictures on facebook.

The Ambassador's Staff by Sherry D. Ramsey

2009-04-29T07:21:00.002-07:00

"Met" Sherry D. Ramsey this morning by reading her story, The Ambassador's Staff on the e-journal Thoughtcrime Experiments. It's a future-noir. Well put together, goes down smooth, and captures my feelings about too little sleep and too much coffee, to boot. Allegorically speaking." Below is the bio on Sherry D. Ramsey from the site. Sherry is also an SF Canada member, which is how I came across her story.

Sherry D. Ramsey (sherrydramsey.com) never expected to become an Internet geek. However, after publishing a web magazine for ten years, creating websites, copyediting for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, networking with writer’s groups online, and becoming part of a writing community in Second Life, she fears it’s an inevitable conclusion. Her stories have appeared in On Spec, Oceans of the Mind, Neo-opsis, Speculative Realms, Undercurrents, and elsewhere. Sherry is a member of the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia and SF Canada, and a founding editor of Third Person Press.

Random Ethical Resonances

2009-04-26T10:19:00.004-07:00

Twice in the last week I have happened across a statement that resonates with me as strongly as if I had written it myself - proof there is comfort and stimulus in exploring the world of other people's thinking more, which is the goal of this blog. Here are the two examples.

In Charles de Lint's 2003 "Addendum to Afterword" to his 1985 novel Mulengro, addressing the question of political correctness in writing from the point of view of races, genders and situations not our own (after respectfully noting some caveats):

Let the criteria be good writing--books that inform and enlighten us while they tell a story--not the source of the writing. And if that makes me sound naive, so be it. But I'll continue to read as widely as I can, and I'll be enriched by it. And I'll continue to use as large a character palette in my writing as the story requires, because I can't do otherwise and still maintain my integrity to my work.

Author Allan Weiss, on his website, in the section on philosophy. I expressed a kindred sentiment, I think, in my online story "Going Back Out", which is an allegory tale in which Ann berates a young Reetion pilot for giving up her sense of mission because Sevolites can fly harder than she can (a quantitative measure), without considering the cause for which they fly (a qualitative, ethical consideration). The point being that sometimes "what" you are doing has to matter more than the "how much" aspect of your success at it.

I see much moral complacency around me, and it distresses me. Writers are more interested in their careers--in making sales--than taking a potentially costly moral stand. (Weiss)

References

de Lint, C. Mulengro, (2003), New York: Tom Doherty Associates.

Weiss, A. "Philosophy and Ethics" retrieved 25 April 2009 from http://www.allanweiss.com/

Small differences call for loud distinctions

2009-04-26T09:09:00.001-07:00

In chapter 5 of Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee (p. 99-109), the author describes the way we humans tend to pick mates who are similar to ourselves, based on a search image established during our formative years. Diamond is, as always, convincing. What, then, about the maxim "opposites attract"? After a little thought, it struck me that this is another example of a syndrome I think of as "the finer the hairs to be split, the sharper the knife". In other words, where a transgression is slight or a difference is minor, the more aggressive people are in asserting it. A good example are the psychological differences between men and women. Compared to man and tom cat, or man and nematode, the psychological and emotional differences between man and woman are pretty trivial. But it is very important to humans to delineate and defend this difference, so it is played up and exaggerated. I suspect the same could be found to be true of efforts to make black and whites seem radically different in apartheid South Africa, or patricians and plebs in classical Greek society.

References

Diamond, J. (1992). The Third Chimpanzee. (1st ed.) New York: HarperCollins.
Labels: depression, evolution, Jared Diamond, psychology

2009-04-21T12:38:00.002-07:00

Many thanks to Cathy Palmer-Lister (http://www.conceptsff.ca and http://www.monsffa.com/) for alerting me to the Montreal Gazette story Everything you need to know for a dinner conversation about ... Reading.

The story includes the following lovely paragraph:

Isn't reading a little passé? Well, it's true that nearly one-third of Canadian adults didn't read a single book for pleasure all year, according to an Ipsos Reid survey looking back at 2007. But the 69 per cent of Canadians who did read were voracious, digging into an average of 20 books over the year.

And went on to point out the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer was made a best seller by young people. I can attest to the truth of this! My 16-year-old daughter, Angela Lott, is reading it over and over. And, I'm thrilled and proud to say, she's looking forward to reading my next novel, Part 5: Far Arena of the Okal Rel Saga, when it comes out in May.

Why marry a guy who gets down?

2009-04-18T08:58:00.001-07:00

Reading (Diamond, 1992) p. 128 about the evolutionary biology rational for aging in humans and wondered about depression in men. Jared describes "optimization" as the explanation for why an obviously good trait, like longevity, wouldn't get as pronounced as physically possible. The answer is that whole organisms live or die, not just single traits, and the entire organism is a cooperating whole of multiple strategies each with cost-benefit aspects. Why, then, would depression exist at all? I believe dysfunctions like depression are runaway versions of functional features of an organism's makeup. Depression mitigates ego. It might, therefore, make a beta male more attractive to an alpha female by dampening his will to dominate her, making it possible for them to be cooperating mates instead of knocking the female out of the breeding game due to her unusually potent resentment of being dominated. A woman who fought back with enough determination to kill or cripple either herself or the offending male, or who was sufficiently repelled by the dominating behavior of males to run away and live in isolation from them, would eliminate herself from the gene pool. But a strong, male-resistant woman succeptible to a romantic approach by a less macho man would make a resourceful mother, especially with the support of an emotionally dependent mate. Evolutionary biology authors often talk about the role of year-round sex in keeping fathers at home to help raise their own children. Depressive tendancies might just as convincingly create an emotional dependence of the moody male on the more resilient female with a strong sense of family, assisting to keep him around. The benefits for her, and their offspring, would naturally depend on the extremity of the respective traits in play. But optimization for the organism may well have included a checkmark on the plus side for mild depression in the male, working in partnership with an emotionally robust female, especially since getting the blues does not preclude other desirable traits such as intelligence.

References

Diamond, J. (1992). The Third Chimpanzee. (1st ed.) New York: HarperCollins.

Sandra Kasturi

2009-04-01T07:28:00.002-07:00

A line or two from Sandra's poem Broken Houses by Daylight, recently shared over her sonnetaweek mailing list to which I belong ...


What to do when the house has not quite caved in to the demands of its
roof, the quarrels of its blown windows, the fallen bricks saved
against the leaning wall ...

A Spell for Cameleon by Piers Anthony

2009-03-22T10:47:00.002-07:00

Enjoyed the surprisingly clever and heart-warming quirk of discovering how the secret magic of the protagonist, Bink, motivates moral behavior on the part of the Evil Magician Trent. Bink is a magical 'every man'! Even the powerful must work for his benefit because it is ultimately in their self-interest. Great metaphor! Jolly good story. (By a belated convert to Xanth.) I got my copy of A Spell for Cameleon in a box of books purchased at a Calgary SciFi con last summer. I've been working my way through them. Lots of duds. But enough discoveries to make the project worthwhile! A good book is never old.

The Wind and the Sky by Suzanne Church

2008-07-07T13:40:00.002-07:00

I bought a copy of The Best of Neo-Opsis at its launch at VCON in 2006, but as life will have it, I just read Suzanne Church's lovely interpretation of the Prometheus legend this morning. "The Wind and the Sky" does a touching job of critiquing our contemporary obsession with science in the context of myth-making and with matter-of-fact pathos that is never maudlin. Polnine belongs to a race of post-disaster androids that are the heirs of mankind with respect to science and technology but have lost interest in their primitive progenitors and pursue knowledge as an end in itself. Curiosity leads Polnine to visit a degenerate tribe of humans where he meets a woman named Ve'keso who becomes the focus of his research into understanding the meaning of life. Church handles the ensuing love story with an intelligence rarely seen in its gendre, never flipping a switch to miraculously make Polnine human. She executes the whole package with charm and humour. Polnine's connection to Ve'keso is shallow and deep at the same time, and his nature always alien. Yet by his actions he is heir to the mightiest of legends uniting men and gods. A gem.

Old Men, Smoking

2007-12-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

Came across the poem "Old Men, Smoking" while googling for Sandra Kasturi and had to say something about it. I found it on the ARC Poetry website in a 2005 review by John Barton . The poem describes the interior world view of the men through exterior details - tells a story in images. I love the way Kasturi makes lovely language reveal hard realities and then lets it stand, naked, in this poem: admiring the "guileless crocodiles" who steady the "tilting world" even while exposing their ugliness, like an object and a disease "humming in the voices of God". Just wow.

Chasing the Bard by Philippa Ballantine

2007-12-13T08:41:00.002-08:00

I picked this book up at a con in the spirit of sampling works on my publisher's table. (Dragonmoon Press is now part of Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. I'm published by Edge.) I've read a couple other fantasies from Moon Dragon Press which were competent and interesting enough to finish, but this is the first of three I have felt the urge to blog about. So - why did I like Chasing the Bard? For characters like Puck and Anne and Oberon, I think, although Sive and Will himself are the main protagonists. I suspect Sive is Ballantine's invention. A quick google for "Sive" turned up references to an Irish play by John B. Keane and a bunch of acronyms from various industries and adding "Oberon" yields hits from the software industry, not mythology. Sive is Oberon's smarter, tougher sister in the novel and the savior of her kind from the evil machinations of her ex-boyfriend, Mordant. For this she needs to woo Will Shakespeare for magical reasons which play out over his lifetime. I recently did a course on Renaissance literature which featured Shakespeare, so perhaps the interweaving of the bard's story with faery was another reason I enjoyed the book. Readers are idiosyncratic creatures, after all, who respond to what an author offers based on what they have already laid down as a foundation in their own brains. As villains go, Mordant was predictably vile and mindlessly destructive. He is given a little scope by his back story, but not much is made of his betrayal of his former nature. Everyone important seems to grasp, from the start, that he is possessed by the story's god of chaos, the "unmaker". The lively interactions of characters from faery with the world of mortals is the fun part of the story. Ballantine’s portrayal of multiple universes bridged by fey immortals reminded me of Martha Wells’ book, Elements of Fire. I suspect anyone who liked one of these books might find the similarities and differences interesting. Both feature a powerful female misfit from faery-land whose alliance with a mortal is critical to beating the bad guys.

Princes of the Golden Cage by Nathalie Mallet

2007-09-03T07:44:00.001-07:00

Nathalie Mallet sets up the problems faced by her hero, Prince Amir, on the very first page of her lively novel, The Princes of the Golden Cage. From that point on, she artfully entwines a mystery with a journey of self-discovery that includes a motivating love interest on the side. The characters are individuals from the start, and the tale beguiles the reader with a story-telling armoury drawn from the best tradition of secret passages, hidden identities, supernatural thrills and dramatic combat.

At the center of the story is Prince Amir, a decent young man despite his life’s alarming circumstances who longs to survive the struggle among his brothers over who will succeed their father as sultan so he can fulfill his dream of exploring the world beyond. Unfortunately for Amir, he has over two hundred brothers and must live with them inside the confines of a palace governed by formal rules of combat and gangs led by stronger contenders for the throne than himself. His strategy has been to trust no one and disguise his own strengths in the hope of escaping notice but this, too, his risky because his loneliness and isolation can pitch him into periods of hopelessness. At the start of the novel, his only companions are two mentally ill brothers and his precious books.

Amir’s very reputation as a reclusive scholar gets him drawn into investigating the eerie deaths of his brothers when some supernatural evil begins to harvest them once a month when the moon is full. In the process, he makes the acquaintance of an eccentric but friendly brother named Erik who turns out to be much more important than Amir thought. Because of Erik, Amir becomes embroiled in the struggle for the throne, like it or not, and entangled in the schemes of powerful women, including the beautiful and well-educated princess intended for whoever wins the throne. Politics and personal desires create good chemistry for action with high stakes, emotionally.

The setting in which the novel takes place has a charm of its own. The insider view of life as a surplus prince is plumped out with stolen glimpses of the harem and tales of the past that haunt the present. But Amir himself is definitely the best part of the book. Impelled to act by circumstances and leery of his own better impulses, he betrays a good heart through his choices and his thirst for friendship. His moody hours are easy to identify with and his fear of betrayal is completely understandable even though it can seem peevish at times. His flaws make him human and his misconceptions inject humour. Amir is fundamentally an optimist, game to carry on with whatever comes his way and bold enough to brazen his way through the rough spots. I look forward to seeing him in print again.

The Princes of the Golden Cage is a rewarding read for anyone with a taste for historically based fantasy, a supernatural mystery or just a fondness for charmingly flawed, heroic characters struggling to find their way in life. It is suitable for readers of any age sophisticated enough to understand the historical setting and young enough at heart to enjoy evil genies and a bit of sword play.

According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

2007-08-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

I picked up According to Queeney for $5.00 as a remaindered book for the prospect of an historically plausible glimpse of Dr. Johnson, an eccentric whose dictionary made him an icon of his era and beyond. I bogged down a bit in the middle and wasn't sure I would review it here as a book that touched me in a special way, but I found myself thinking about the characters and wondering how I would feel about the opening that frames the story after I had finished the book and re-read the beginning which is actually the end. It has the power to make the reader share the lives of the historical characters within its covers in an intimate way that left me with two lasting impressions of note: how human legends really are, and how sad it is that genius of Johnson's kind would be lost in the modern world. Telling the story "according to Queeny" placed the point of view solidly on the sidelines, in the hands of someone unimportant to historians but as much a person with her own goals as anyone who makes it into Who's Who, for whom the great man was both a very real person who was a long-term friend of the family, as worthy of both criticism and compassion as her mother or other family friends, and a bit of a bother to a young girl with little person interest in him. Perhaps I, like Dr. Johnson, was suffering a bit of a depression when I put the book aside, temporarily. I am glad I completed the journey.

The Steam Magnate by Dana Copithorne

2007-07-10T04:39:00.000-07:00

The city of broken glass is the central character of Dana Copithorne’s novel The Steam Magnate. Protagonists Kyra and Eson, and later Jado the inventor, play out their parts in the arms of a dreamlike world of lost knowledge and serene days filled with filtered light and settings presented one by one like paintings in a gallery. The reader determined to have a love story or a tale of intrigue surrounding power will be tantalized but might be ultimately disappointed by the way conflicts wash away before the greater significance of mood and setting, but the eerie feeling of having visited a unique place with deep secrets will stay with the reader when the book is finished.

The Steam Magnate’s strengths lie in the pictures it creates in the reader’s head filled with brooding undertows and the haunting impression of lives trapped in amber. The featured line drawings enhance the effect. I sometimes paused to study an illustration until I felt satisfied and then reread the scene it described before continuing with the next chapter. It would be a mistake to read The Steam Magnate with too much urgency.

Drama, in the book, is vested in marvellous details rather than events in the lives of the characters. It is ultimately not very important, for example, why Kyra comes to the Glass City to meet Eson or that he originally mistook her for another woman named Sarah. It is not clear whether Eson’s entrepreneurial endeavours, with Jado, is ultimately successful or desirable. And although the characters intertwine, each is profoundly alone to the very end where Eson and Kyra are parted. Important questions are resolved in introspective solitude. I was fond of the use of letters as bridging instruments in this internal dialogue, sometimes answering questions left unanswered from the earlier part of the novel. The letters span time and place like artefacts of communication that create a false sense of certainty about slippery relationships.

Science is a shadowy spectre in the world of The Steam Magnate. Its power is nodded at occasionally in items like the fantastical vision bird explained as a product of lost craft from an earlier era, but the feel of Copithorne’s realm is magical although the magic might be understood as a metaphorical cipher for real phenomenon. Eson’s power over his debtors, for example, is bound up in potent documents it is easy to interpret as legal ones that drain their victims of vitality. His attempts to profit from nature, first through steam power and later through attempts to harness the might of the ocean in the city of Rising Waters, parallels the exploitation of natural resources to create wealth in the mundane world. But whatever the deeper significance of the magical functions and objects in The Steam Magnate, they wind through the book’s gently flowing plot like bright ribbons.

In one sense, The Steam Magnate is a book about how we succeed and fail to connect with each other as spiritual beings with hopes, secrets and aspirations, but its unique charm is in the interplay between these and the settings in which they take place. Place and personality interact in the search for identity. Jado the inventor sums it up well in the following passage:

The places Jado knew had been the settings of stories he had heard all his life. When he was a child, the stories were of heroes and thieves, ghosts and angels. As he got older he was told other stories that changed his view of each spatial reference point. Sunlight Appears Only at Dusk was at first a ghost tale, a place where one must be fearful for his soul when walking past. Later, Jado learned it was also a place where some of his past relatives had been arrested and taken away on false grounds a hundred years earlier. So the place took on a different meaning, and his sense of identity sharpened.

Anyone nimble-minded enough to appreciate the bleed of spirit between character and setting, history and present, will find The Steam Magnate an interesting meditation.

Element of Fire by Martha Wells

2007-01-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

This is the first book I have stayed up all night to finish in a long time. It happened over the Xmas holidays which made the extravagance possible, but I would have been captivated by the characters and situations of Wells' novel even in the middle of the busiest of weeks. Wells achieves a fantasy setting with enough historical realism to retain the interest of the older, more cynical reader who would like to experience the joy of once more sympathizing whole-heartedly with worthwhile characters. I worried she was going to crush my revived joy in the noble and heroic just enough to be unable to sleep without finding out what happens to the gallant, jaded Thomas and the brash young mortal-fairy hybrid Kade Carrion who begins the tale as a problem for Thomas, the captain of the Queen's guard, but becomes the answer to more than he'd bargained for. Thomas' relationship with the dowager queen and the character of Ravenna herself weave a rewarding counterpoint to the growing entanglement of Thomas and Kade, keeping the story grounded in politics that reminded me of bits and pieces of European history surrounding royal families, their favorites, scheming courtiers, and interminable struggles for dominance with other powers. Students of literature and folklore will likewise enjoy Wells' portrayal of fairy, which cleverly incorporates both the 'ugly and evil' view of fairy-kind based on medieval legend and the 'beautiful but inhumanly cold' alternative, with Kade knocking around all realms as a misfit in every one.

I highly recommend the tale to intelligent readers, young and old, who like to cheer for deserving, if imperfect, good guys and experience the senory pleasures of a romp through an enchanted land.

Element of Fire by Martha Wells was originally released by Tor in 1993. I reviewed the 2006 edition re-released by the author after a tidy-up edit in order to keep the book accessible in print. Cover design for the 2006 edition is by M. Wilson with typesetting by Katya Loney.

PS for a map of the palace to let you locate characters in scenes as they unfold, see Palace of Vienne in the Ile-Rien on Wells' website.

Rarity From a Hollow by Robert Eggleton

2006-11-10T07:32:00.000-08:00

"Knowing everything doesn't mean that a person has a true answer to an actual question."

Lacy Dawn (character)

Intrigued by what I've glimpsed of Rarity From a Hollow by Robert Eggleton and especially liked the quote, above, from the free online sample of the book. Owe a few reviews to others that will keep me busy until Xmas, so I'm blogging an expression of interest for the time being.

Homepage of Theresa Crater

2006-11-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

Just started reading Under the Stone Paw by Theresa Crater, which was sent to me for review, and surfed to her homepage. Very classy. Loved the picture and the clean, simple functionality of the choices. (Oh, how badly doth the Okal Rel Universe website, of mine, need to be re-vamped to move the background material, er, well, into the background. Maybe next year.)

Attributes of a Goddess

2006-10-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

I've never been one for inspirational pop psychology on how to fix your life or get in touch with your inner whatever-it-might-be, but I recommend Denise Torgerson's Attributes of a Goddess with pleasure. It is fun to read and well crafted. The sense of a personality behind her descriptions of how to get in tune with your inner goddess is a playful and unpretentious one, making it easy to take what works for you and stand clear from those aspects of Torgerson's philosophy that do not fit with your own. In a world full of desperate competition for diminishing resources, Attributes of a Goddess breaths with the graceful wisdom of being satisfied with less than everything, so long as the journey taken is a true one. Organized into fifty-two short passages, for consumption at a rate of one a week, the book can easily be sorted or shuffled to suit a reader's fancy as required. I take a few pages with me on trips to remind me to open my eyes and my heart and laugh at myself with affectionate humor from time to time, because goddesses need a good sense of humor as well as the strength to walk among "the small ones" without losing their own, vital spark. Attributes of a Goddess is an e-book. It may be purchased online at http://www.attributesofagoddess.com/.

Kynship by Daniel Heath Justice

2006-09-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Daniel Heath Justice's Kynship blends mythic traditions of North American natives and medieval Europeans in a magical re-telling of the archetypal conflict between those who belong to the land and the avaricious rapine of invaders. The story plays out against a cultural mosaic complex enough to cover the problems of half-breeds and misfits as well as each culture's exemplars. Told from multiple points of view, the first book of this three part series succeeds in making readers care about the characters, particularly the cheerful and self-assured "pixie" (Tetawi), Tobhi, who becomes an emotional focus for many of the large cast of colourful characters. I was fortunate to have this book brought to my attention by Renee K. Abram, the Publishing Coordinator its publisher, Kegedonce Press, and to get a sneak peek at book two in the series, as well. I recommend it to readers who like their good and evil well defined but human enough to entertain, and all who have longed to cheer for nature and the bonds of community in the struggle against an alienating and avaricious lust for progress that is really all about amassing power. The sensory stalks of the 3-gendered Kyn, interspersed histories of the gods, many races of unhumans, charming illustrations of the characters throughout the book, unexpected connections between characters, handy glossary and many other details and touches contribute to the story's richness and originality.

Peony by Pearl S. Buck

2006-08-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

I and my family recently stayed with my publisher, Brian Hades, who invited us to help ourselves to the paperbacks lining the walls of his basement, as he is planning to clear them out soon to make way for rennovations. My daughter, Jennifer, took home a big load. I confined myself to about ten. Well, maybe twenty. The first one I read was old and dry that pages fell out as soon as they were turned, so I wandered around Heritage Park, in Calgary, periodically discarding pages of an Agatha Christie novel in waste bins. The second one I read is the jewel that inspired this blog entry: Peony by Pearl S. Buck, written in 1948 and still delightful.

The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay

2006-06-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

The Air Loom Gang is a strange and compelling tale, blending the history of madness in England with the social upheaval leading up to the French Revolution. Author Mike Jay also traces threads from the "Air Loom" of his subject, James Tilly Matthews, forward and backward in time, concluding with a look at its descendants as spun from the imaginations of more recent madmen. But the story's real power lies in the personality of Matthews, himself, a madman who was half right; a husband who was much loved, and a patient with more popular appeal than the doctor who used him to achieve fame. The book is a unique piece of social history: part biography of a remarkable human being and part detective story.

Prisoners Under Glass

2006-03-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

Rachel's adventures evading the wicked Lilah and her people-shrinking mother, engaged me and my eleven year old daughter, Tegan, for many pleasant nights of bedtime reading. We had a bit of a hard time believing in the scale of things (literally), in a climactic scene but that, itself, was cause for discussion, and the emotions all worked even if the physical proportions were dubious. This is a book you can laugh out loud with as you read, and shed a tear over as well for the sake of the heroine's sorrows. I stress the shared enjoyment factor because R. Patrick's book has plenty of punch and quick developments that are ideal for a chapter-a-night affair. I recommend it to all mothers and other adults looking for a good read to share with the reluctant (or voracious) reader in their lives, and for all those who are young at heart whatever the number of candles on their cake, next birthday. My daughter and I particularly enjoyed the astonishing transformations, the sparkling imagery and the humorous dialogue. Tegan's favourites were the colourful supporting cast of characters, who each had their own unique voice, quirks and personal growth challenge to overcome. We also have a new family saying, delivered in an over-the-top Italian accent: "The size of a chilli pepper!"

Copenhagen at the Prince George Playhouse

2006-03-22T06:52:00.000-08:00

I don't know how to thank Sue Murguly properly for her production of Michael Frayn's brilliant play, Copenhagen, at the Prince George Playhouse March 9 to March 28, 2006. I will have to settle for telling her and and her accomplished cast that I have never seen a local production of a more difficult and important play executed as professionally as her Copenhagen. The last one I saw in Prince George that made a comparable impact on me was Michael Armstrong's original, two-person production of his play In Their Nightgowns, Dancing, and for some of the same reasons. Both plays use language and a complex interplay of time and perspective to get at concerns as profound as the atrocities of war, and as personal as a friendship. In talking with Sue Murguly, during the run, I discovered that she offered Copenhagen in the full knowledge that it would not be a box office hit. No matter how well staged, the play is demanding and its subject matter threatening. Not once, but through a multiplicity of possible realities, we see how the decisions of a few individuals could make the world end, and for reasons even they can never clarify entirely although they are the most intelligent -- if not the wisest -- of men. We seem to be in the mood for ligher fare. Ironically, the more densely packed the action and violence in our entertainment, the less able we seem to take it seriously as a threat to civilization as we know it, and perhaps even to life on Earth. It is almost as if the game-player who blows up worlds a dozen times a game is innoculating himself against the terror of the real thing by making it surreal. If so, we need more producer-directors like Sue Murguly to bring us down to Earth. If only we could get more people into theatres to see plays like hers.