No happy endings in Canada

Patrick Skene Catling

DIGGING UP THE MOUNTAINS by Neil Bissoondath

Andre Deutsch, f8.95

MAN DESCENDING by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Bodley Head, f8.95

MY PRESENT AGE by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Bodley Head, £8.95

Fiction may not be intended to provide the reader with means of psychotherapy as soothing as basket-weaving and painting by numbers, but one is inclined to mewl a bit in feeble protest when fiction's main effect is to make one feel suicidally depressed. These three books, two collections of short stories and a novel, are unusually well written, with sensitivity and great powers of observation and so on, but they made me feel that the sun would never shine again. The 31-year-old nephew of V.S. Naipaul, who admires his work, Mr Bis- soondath was born in Trinidad and mi- grated to Canada in 1973, where he taught French at York University, in Toronto. Being a Trinidadian of Indian descent and a French-speaking Canadian in an English- speaking province, he is well qualified to write stories about alienation. That is his subject, which he examines with painful intimacy. Like himself, his characters are displaced from their ancestral and native homelands and become nostalgic for ori- gins from which they and their antecedents wished to escape.

His island's 'simplicity, its unsophistica- tion, had vanished over the years and had been replaced by the cynical politics of corruption that plagued all the urchin nations scrambling in the larger world.' Independence from Britain has been spoilt, but many Indian West Indians who migrate to the North suffer a bewildering identity crisis and miss the warmth of a tropical community as it was before it, too, experienced irreversible change. But staying is evidently as bad as leaving. In a story typically entitled 'Insecurity,' an un- happy Indian businessman in Trinidad is disillusioned when he sees the 'euphoric state [of Independence] quickly degenerate into a carnival of radicals and madmen.' As well he might.

The protagonist of 'Continental Drift' regards expatriates as the `wanderlose. Another dispossessed Trinidadian in a land of snow and slush dreams that he has been cut in half: 'his hips and legs lay two feet away, beyond reach,' and a man who seems to offer help to put him together again proves to be armless. Mr Bissoon- dath's melancholy anthem could be called `The Maple Leaf for Never.' Mr Vanderhaeghe, who was born 35 years ago in Saskatchewan, is an energetic, eloquent, bitterly indignant wit, a Cana- dian gentile Philip Roth whose comedy is about as much fun as a January blizzard on the prairie.

Every life, Mr Vanderhaeghe observes in the title story of Man Descending, reaches a peak and then declines. The narrator mournfully says: I am thirty now, still young I admit, but I sense my feet are on the down slope. I know now that I have begun the inevitable descent, the leisurely glissade which will finally topple me at the bottom of my own graph. A man descending is propelled by inertia; the onlY initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene.

In 'A Taste for Perfection' the scene is static and only the people pass on. dying', the principal character tells himself for the first time, realising that the hospital ward to which he has been committed is for terminal cases. Not really very much to enjoy there. `Dancing Bear' is about an incontinent, senile man whose bullying harridan of a housekeeper, well named Mrs Hax, insists that he try to sleep on an uncomfortable rubber sheet. She comments boringly on the rain.

`0h?' he answered, feigning some kind of interest. He picked a flake of dried skin from his leg and lifted it tenderly to the light like a jeweller, intently examining its whorled grain and yellow translucence.

`Sam, Soren, and Ed' is a short preview of Mr Vanderhaeghe's first novel, about Ed, a fat young Canadian whose wife has abandoned him to his writer's block. He is introduced sitting alone on a park bench, eating junk food, 'swigging a Coke' and eyeing the nymphets'. 'A public park on a weekday is a sobering place,' he com- ments.

His wife, also well-named, Victoria, happens to jog by in the heat. When he tries to stop her, for the sake of her heart, she demands to be unhanded or she will scream 'Rape!' Their divorce is being arranged by a lawyer who was Ed's room- mate and best friend in college. Ed is worried about money and, of course, sexually desperate. He, too, is failing to enjoy the passing scene. In the novel, Mr Vanderhaeghe ex- am. ines the case of this unfortunate misfit In fine detail. When Ed submits to Psychiatric interrogation, he is moved to say:

If a patient expresses displeasure about how the world is constituted, one had better change the patient, since one cannot change the world. The only other possible alterna- tive is for the patient to re-invent the world, and that is a capability given to only a very few.

The author does not seem to be one of them. His novel is distressingly realistic. Its dark humour consists mostly of the hyster- ical exaggeration of the chronically thwarted, rather in the manner of early Kingsley Amis weirdly mixed with late Woody Allen. The mixture is shrilly neuro- tic. It induces some electric shocks of comic outrage; however, unlike ECT, they bring about none of the tranquillity of amnesia, let alone anything approaching euphoria. At one low point, Ed writes a fake legal letter to torment a broadcaster who pres- ides over a radio phone-in show. 'Writing that made me feel cheerier,' Ed says. `There is no better antidote for the terrible feeling of powerlessness which clutches modern man by the throat than a vigorous exercise of the imagination.'

Perhaps My Present Age made Mr Van- derhaeghe feel cheerier. It is certainly Grade-A gloom. It may make gloomy readers feel less gloomy, as they compare their lives with Ed's. On the other hand, if they are in search of a happy ending they would do better to revert to the Book of Job.