As winter entertainment, we've started a reading group which recently had its first gathering. To make it guilt and anxiety free, it's not a book club where we all read the same book each month. We have a theme, novels of place, and each month one or two of us will read and report on novels which are rooted in a different part of Canada. February was Northern Ontario (notes below) and March is Montrea.
If anyone in the Saint John area is interested in joining us, please let me know.
Wendy
Novels of Place
A quality of good novels is that they pay attention to place.
Noah Richler
This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada
Northern Ontario
Canadian shield, rock outcrops, thick forest, clear lakes, swamps
Resource based, one industry towns, masculine, tough, gritty
Loners, eccentrics, escapees, places to come from
Long distances, takes forever to drive across
Isolated, marginal, far from the mainstream
Dangers of getting lost, cold, blackflies, long snowy winters
Beaver, moose, loons, great blue herons
Canoeing, cross country skiing, hockey
Small cities with relatively short histories
English and French but limited aboriginal presence/contact
General Fiction
Crow Lake
This award winning first novel is set in a small farming community in northern Ontario and narrated by Kate, the family’s only daughter.
The Other Side of the Bridge
Mary Lawson
Three Day Road
Boyden, who has some Ojibway ancestry, worked on reservations in northern Ontario and spends time there regularly. His first novel’s principal characters are 2 Cree snipers returning after WW I.
Through Black Spruce (No one had read yet)
Joseph Boyden
Summer Gone
David Macfarlane
This first novel by a prolific magazine writer and columnist, set among the islands and lakes of cottage country, centres on a divorced father and his son. One of the most memorable things was a description of cigarette smoking so vivid it almost made me want to try it.
(This one is clearly set in cottage country, which doesn't really meet our definition of Northern Ontario.)
The Retreat
David Bergen
An urban family spends the summer of 1973 in a compound outside Kenora, where the mother is under the spell of its leader and an unhappy 17 year old gets involved with an aboriginal boy.
Bear
Marian Engel
A spinsterish librarian/archivist heads north from Toronto to catalogue a bequest, housed on an island in the vicinity of Sault Ste Marie, and meets a tall dark haired stranger.
The Line Painter
Claire Cameron
A road trip novel. A 30ish woman whose boyfriend has died suddenly tries to leave her grief and guilt behind. Heading from Toronto to Vancouver, her car breaks down, leaving her stranded by the highway in a remote part of northern Ontario. She meets locals, has a close encounter with a bear and demonstrates her lack of woods smarts before completing her journey.
The Dominion of Wyley McFadden
Scott Gardiner
Another road trip novel. This time the destination is Alberta and the goal is quixotic. A girl mysteriously emerges from the woods and is picked up by a Toronto self-styled urban trapper; we gradually hear his story and eventually hers. More than half of the book is set in northern Ontario.
First novel by the author of The King of Canada
Lost Girls
Andrew Pyper
Two teenage girls have disappeared from a small community just beyond cottage country. There are no bodies and the Toronto lawyer protagonist is assigned to defend their high school English teacher, the presumed murderer.
Young Adult
The Sundog Season
John Geddes
First novel by this journalist who grew up in a small mining town in northern Ontario. A new police sergeant arrives in town, takes over as coach of the 13 year old narrator’s hockey team, and rumours circulate in this portrait of small town life.
The Maestro
Tim Wynne-Jones
A boy escaping from a bad home situation in a small hamlet encounters a recluse, modeled on Glenn Gould, who changes his life.
Science Fiction
Hominids
Humans
Hybrids
Robert J. Sawyer
Neanderthals are still among us in this trilogy, which begins at the Neutrino Observatory in Sudbury.
Mystery
Forty Words for Sorrow
The Delicate Storm
Blackfly Season
By the Time You Read This
Giles Blunt
This screenwriter grew up in North Bay, which he thinly disguises as Algonquin Bay for this series featuring relocated Toronto policeman John Cardinal. Of particular note in these well plotted and paced mysteries is his treatment of Cardinal’s wife, who struggles with mental illness. His fictional location bears many similarity to the real thing, in setting and street layout, although all names have been changed.
Blunt’s newest novel, No Such Creature, is not part of this series.
The Tenderness of Wolves
Stef Penney
This debut novel begins with a murder in an isolated community on the shore of Georgian Bay in the winter of 1867.
Author to Watch
Tristan Hughes
Revenant and other novels set in Wales
Born in Atikokan, interviews indicate his next novel will be set in Northern Ontario
Resources
Bibliotravel.com
Northern LIT Awards, Ontario Library Service North
CBC Radio North – Read Northern Ontario
Talk by John Geddes at Nipissing University, “Cold Towns, Hot Novels: A Writer’s Thoughts on Northern Ontario in Contemporary Fiction”
Photo Credit: Roving Photographer Jack Hill
