David Barton is the Canadian-born professor of English at Taiwan’s National Central University who, as he related in an interview with Taipei Times on Nov. 25, 2007, when someone in Jhongli had a knife between his ribs in a drunken encounter, casually thought, “Well then, are you going to push it in or aren’t you?”
The local artists Barton wrote about in Pornography of the Emotions represented “an extremely alienated and violently schizophrenic Taiwan.” And in Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan (reviewed in Taipei Times Oct. 28, 2007) he penned a brawling assault on the whole TOEFL ethos, written by (in his own words) “an uncontrollable, laughable risk-taker riding to certain destruction.” Now we have Saskatchewan, a novel, and Barton’s third zany, but by no means unintelligent, publication.
The story opens in 1909 with the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier (a historical figure), stranded in the northern wastes and due for detoxification by a native “sweat lodge ceremony” that involves his lying for days in a tent alongside some specially heated boulders. Far away in Russia, meanwhile, two friends, Walter and JoJo, are visiting the aged novelist Tolstoy on his estate.
In this startling second chapter, that by no means presents the great writer as he’s usually remembered, the two are urged to carry the sage’s pacifist and egalitarian philosophy to Canada, using as emissaries seven Doukhobors, or “spirit wrestlers,” all called Grigory, currently masquerading as a troupe of acrobats in an Odessa circus. Together with a group of female tumblers called The Flaming Angels, the whole unlikely party embarks from Copenhagen on the 10-day voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
It’s only from the occasional phrase that we learn that Walter in fact stands for Barton’s real-life great-grandfather. The sepia photo on the book’s cover apparently shows him, his wife and their son, Barton’s grandfather, shortly after their arrival in Canada from Denmark.
The fictional group, though, after acquiring more members in the person of some African musicians, moves from Halifax to Quebec, then Ontario, Toronto and Winnipeg. Christian Scientists are encountered in these cities, and there are various performances by the acrobats and musicians, usually in intoxicated circumstances. Eventually they encounter the unfortunate prime minister, but with no very notable results as far as the plot goes. The book ends with an evocation of the Canadian prairies, ending with this sentence uttered by a local prairie-dweller: “Well, f anybody ever read this they w’ud ’ave a heart attack, they’d never get better — she thought it was going to be like a luv story, u know where the girl gets sick and died, but it’s nothing like that.” And indeed it isn’t.
What it is like is hard to say. Of Barton’s two previous books, Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan was weird and exhilarating by turns, and often both at the same time, while Pornography of the Emotions described the work of prominent but always offbeat Taiwan artists. Saskatchewan, by contrast, is a novel, and here Barton has to decide on the distribution of zaniness between himself and his characters. That he makes his characters unrelentingly weird is certain, but what he opts for as his own authorial tone is less apparent.
Some things are clear, however. A common general image of Canada is of a tolerant, fair-minded, sober place with massive natural resources and full of good intentions, but lacking the will to power and charisma of its less benign but more colorful southern neighbor. Barton, though, will obviously have no truck with any of this blandness.
There’s a great deal of historical knowledge in this book, much of it obscured by the satirical, Rabelaisian tone. Among such knowledge is the fact that in 1909 nine out of 10 Winnipeg inhabitants couldn’t speak either English or French. They were a mixture of Germans, Scandinavians, Jewish Eastern Europeans, Chinese and others, and Barton is anxious to represent their history, albeit in his own distinctive, anarchic style.
“These were people who had been born unwanted,” he writes in a rare straight-faced moment, “people for whom marginalization was all they had; genetic gypsies who had come this far wandering and scavenging to get away from conformity of any kind.” Things may have quieted down since then, but Barton’s collection of acrobats, drunks and whores stands for a rebellious, non-conformist history that, as a level-headed academic, he probably doesn’t want forgotten.
For the rest, the St Lawrence River is described as “singing the same empty, meaningless song it had always sung” (elsewhere it’s referred to as “sucking off half of Canada”), the future — presumably present-day — inhabitants of Saskatchewan are seen as “small-minded, envious, conniving, bitter, prejudiced people,” and, in a fascinating digression, Zoroastrianism is perceived as having revived in 18th century Europe the belief in a dualistic system (a good God in charge of a spiritual world, an evil one in charge of the material one) that had gone underground when the Cathars were wiped out by the Albigensian Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries. Their Anabaptist heirs, Barton writes, re-surfaced in Saskatchewan.
Comedy, though, is this author’s chosen style, and much of Saskatchewan is farcical in manner. I didn’t always find it funny — the tone is uneven, and the story at times hard to get to grips with. Excellent chapters stand out, however, notably the one featuring Tolstoy and the penultimate one, The Great Winnipeg Orgy of 1909.
All in all, Barton is a writer the likes of whom Canada has probably never seen. Many Canadians will relish this book, and laugh at its in-jokes. It seems strange that it’s being published first in Taiwan, and surely the sooner it’s available in the country it deals with the better.
Saskatchewan is available at Caves Books (www.cavesbooks.com.tw).
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