Little luck in a big country

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Saturday 2 June 2012

Among the books to which Richard Ford pays homage at the end of this quite wonderful novel is Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a family memoir which blends occasionally with fiction.

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Review: Alan Taylor

It is, however, just one of many books which lie like tectonic plates beneath the surface of Canada. There are, for example, as Ford's narrator Dell Parsons acknowledges, Heart Of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories and The Mayor Of Casterbridge, all of which somehow inform Dell's narrative. Then there is John Ruskin, the Victorian critic and aesthete, from whom Dell quotes as if he was a secular divine, which in a sense he is to him, especially Ruskin's dictum about composition being the arrangement of unequal things.

Dell is a teacher of literature, who uses the story of his own life to illuminate his lessons. Above all, he wants his students to appreciate that the 66-year-old standing before them was not always that age, that in the course of reviewing a long life, as in, say, the case of Thomas Hardy, there is need for perspective, imagination, flexibility. And he also tells them not "to hunt too hard for meaning or opposite meanings – even in the books they read – but to look as much as possible straight at the things they can see in broad daylight. In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you'll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world."If this makes Canada seem like a very literary novel, that is not how it reads. Yet it carries with it echoes not just of the books and authors already mentioned but others too. In young Dell's thirst for education, for instance, it is hard to ignore the shade of Dickens torn from school because of his father's irresponsibility and forced by his mother to work in a blacking factory. Then, as there often is in American fiction, there is the murmur of Huckleberry Finn, in particular the directness of tone that is the mark of the born storyteller. Dell Parsons, like Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield and countless others, is a man eager to unburden himself. And like them he is in no hurry. What he has to say will emerge over 400 and more pages, each of which slips over like an iced soda on a scorcher.To all outward appearances the Parsons are an ordinary American family on one of the lower rungs of the ladder that leads to the realisation of the American dream. They're more poor than rich but they get by. Dell's father, Bev, has done his bit in the Far East in the 1950s, flying B-25s and dropping bombs on whoever's unfortunately on their receiving end. That he is not haunted by the experience is significant. He is a remorselessly optimistic man who survived in uniform but is ill-suited to civilian life. Inch by inch, he will lead his family to the point where they must all go their own ways.Dell's mother, Neeva, and his father are opposites, which it's often said are attracted to one another. That's as it may be. It's also said that they're complementary, which in the Parsons' case is not so. Neeva is more educated than her garrulous, deluded husband. She reads French poetry and uses French words her children cannot understand. Her parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, never wanted her to marry Bev and cut off contact when she did.Dell has a twin sister called Berner. They don't look alike and they're as temperamentally different as their parents. The portrait Dell paints of his sister is not an attractive one, but then neither is the one he paints of himself. Younger seeming than his 15 years he – like the rest of the family – has few friends, preferring to immerse himself in the World Book Encyclopedia, play chess and dream about keeping bees.Like all unhappy families, the Parsons are unhappy in their own way. Functionally dysfunctional they get by from day to day but Bev, being feckless and the kind of man who has more hope than sense, first falls foul of criminal Native Americans and then the law when he convinces his wife that they must rob a bank to pay their debts. "He wanted robbing a bank to be congenial," recalls Dell at one point. At another, he says, "Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks."Canada is a novel in three parts, the first two of which make up its bulk. The first is largely set in Great Falls in the northern state of Montana, the second in an empty part of Canada where people go when they don't want to be found. It is here that Dell's rite of passage, like Jim Hawkins's in Treasure Island, reaches its violent crescendo. His Long John Silver is the Kurtz-like figure of Harvard-educated Arthur Remlinger, who owns a louche hotel and whose story is a counterpoint to his own.But bad as the events that occur are, there is throughout Canada – the novel as well as the country – a sense of acceptance and tolerance and integration which runs throughout Richard Ford's work, in particular the symphonic Bascombe trilogy. Better perhaps than any other living novelist, he understands that for people to cope with the hand they've been dealt they must first attempt to place it in context. But for families like the Parsons, that's easier said than done.CanadaRichard FordBloomsbury, £18.99

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Little luck in a big country

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