I wrote my first novel between the time I was 17 and 22. It was dreadful, as you might expect. The story was set in a veteran’s hospital in Vancouver, and all of the characters had symbolic names. My parents had met in a veteran’s hospital where my mother was a nurse and my father was visiting an army buddy recovering from terrible burns. But I knew nothing about veteran’s hospitals, nor did I have any idea how to research the subject, much less how to write about it.
I’d always wanted to be a writer, no idea why, and signed up to major in creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia. But I hated the first-year class, workshopping so much bad writing, by which I mean mine. I ended up dropping out of the program to study political science, meanwhile starting the hospital novel on my own.
Five years later, I finished the manuscript—I’m proud of that—and sent it around to publishers in Toronto, where I was living at the time. Most sent back surprisingly courteous rejections, given how bad it was. But Anna Porter went one step further. She was then a star editor at McClelland & Stewart, and she called me in for a meeting. There she advised me to do what I should have done at UBC: read and write short fiction to learn my craft. Afterward, she said, I would be ready to write my real first novel, probably a coming-of-age novel set where I grew up.
Over the years, I kept trying to write my bildungsroman and kept failing. It was only with my ninth book that I wrote the novel Anna Porter had advised. Far Creek Road centres on a nine-year-old girl named Tink as she tries to navigate the terrors of the Cuban Missile Crisis in suburban Vancouver.
I started writing the novel during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, when I was effectively barred from visiting the West Coast. I fell into a deep nostalgia for the forests, the firs, and particularly for a boisterous little creek that runs down Grouse Mountain near the house where I grew up.
Far Creek Road was published last fall by ECW Press, and since then I’ve been devouring novels set in B.C., especially novels involving children, silently congratulating the writers for doing what I tried to do but took so many years to achieve.
Here are two of them.
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The Double Life of Benson Yu by Kevin Chong, published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster
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In his seventh book, Kevin Chong does a very hard thing. He writes about the abuse of a child in a remarkably moving and un-graphic way. Considering that his protagonist is a graphic novelist, that’s a trick. His main character, Benson Yu, grew up in Chinatown, and although Chong doesn’t get specific about place, I kept picturing Vancouver’s Chinatown, since Chong grew up in the city (and studied creative writing at UBC). The grown-up Benson has enjoyed success with his graphic novels about a Samurai lizard, which have been made into a series of pop culture films.
I loved the underlying realism of a sometimes-fantastical story, and the complex characters Chong creates. Benson doesn’t ride a straight line to riches and fame, bringing on imposter syndrome, self-hatred, all the usual cliches. Instead, before the novel opens, Benson has signed a bad contract giving away his rights to his Samurai character. The money has never been never good and lately it’s dwindled, while the franchise movies have grown embarrassingly bad.
Now Benson is flailing, drinking too much while trying to find a creative way forward by writing a book about his traumatic childhood. We see more or less what happened in alternating chapters focused on young Benny, whose mother dies young and whose largely-absentee father creates havoc whenever he appears. There’s also Benny’s grandmother, the harsh and reliable Poh-Poh, who’s there until she isn’t, and the blue-eyed karate teacher who is the model for the Samurai lizard, and whom we realize in horror is nothing like the heroic character in the graphic novel.
Revisiting his childhood has plunged Benson into crisis, even as he insistently tells readers that his own childhood differed from the fictional Benny’s. His own life wasn’t nearly as bad, Benson tries to assure us. Then Benny comes to live with Benson, brought by a social worker who’s the same age in Benson’s present as she is in Benny’s past. What follows is mesmerizing, moving and terribly sad.
Chong’s novel is impossible to summarize briefly, involving as it does a thoroughly unreliable narrator, time travel, visions and a lot of booze. It’s also very funny, on top of being so sad. The Double Life of Benson Yu is one of the best books I’ve read lately. Highly recommended.
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Greenwood by Michael Christie, published by McClelland & Stewart
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It’s almost as if Michael Christie and Kevin Chong set out to write books inhabiting opposite ends of the novel spectrum. Chong chose a long title for a short book, while in the concisely-named Greenwood, Christie has written a whuffer of a 490-page multi-generational novel. Vancouver lives between the lines of Chong’s book, while the old-growth West Coast forest is the central character of Christie’s novel, beautifully described and minutely detailed down to the intertwined roots of Douglas fir trees.
I could go on about the differences, but there’s one major similarity (aside from the fact Christie also studied creative writing at UBC). Both novels are about unhappy families and the trauma they generate, which rumbles down through the generations. The sins of the father: I sometimes wonder if there’s any other theme in literature these days.
Greenwood opens in 2038 after a devastating worldwide die-off of forests called the Great Withering. Jake Greenwood, who is a woman, works as a guide in one of the world’s last old growth forests, a privately-owned spread on Greenwood Island off the B.C. coast, where One Percenters come to forest bathe for an exorbitant price. Jake isn’t related to the Greenwood family that owned the island historically—at least she doesn’t think so as the novel opens.
Yet as the action moves back in time to centre on Jake’s father in 2008, then her grandmother in 1974, then ancestors in 1934 and 1908, we learn a more complicated story of birth and inheritance. As the action moves forward once again, Jake is tantalized with the possibility that she actually owns the island.
Greenwood is intricately researched, down to its complex understanding of the early days of forestry in B.C. I found the characters a little too straight-line for my liking, meaning they didn’t zigzag through life the way most of us do. When Jake’s hippie/environmentalist grandmother gives away every penny of the soiled Greenwood fortune she inherits, I thought of another novel I was reading at the time, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea.
In Strout’s novel, a character also inherits a dirty fortune and resolves to give it away. But as the narrator Lucy notes drily, in her experience people who resolve to give away all their money always find a rationale for keeping enough to live on comfortably. I would have believed more thoroughly in the hippie grandmother if she’d done that, too.
However, Christie’s project isn’t an examination of character, and it’s unfair to criticize novelists for not writing a novel they didn’t set out to write. This is a book of ideas and environmentalism, and Christie uses the pages to raise a forest of facts and warnings about our careless stewardship of the planet, and the dire consequences that we can’t seem to quite admit are already here.
Last February, I was asked by The 49th Shelf to write about the novels I’ve been reading in a post called Childhood in British Columbia. These are two of the books I reviewed. More to follow.
You can order Far Creek Road here.
And read what I wrote about Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea via this link.
The top image is of Roes Islet, BC.