Canada

This is a novel in three parts. In the first, the narrator Dell Parsons recalls the events leading up to the imprisonment of his parents when he was fifteen and living in Great Falls, Montana. In the second, he depicts his young life in Canada, working for a man with a violent past in a remote town in Saskatchewan. In the final part, Dell is sixty-six years old, still in Canada, and on the verge of retirement from teaching. He recalls his last meeting with his twin sister Berner and tries to draw out some meaning from the events recounted in the first two parts of the story.Dell's father, Bev Parsons, is retired from the air force after having been caught in an illegal smuggling racket. Bev tries his hand at selling cars, then real estate, but in an attempt to make better money he revives his smuggling operation, this time linking a group of Cree Indians with a buyer on the Great Western Railway. Dell's mother, Neeva, is a teacher whose Polish immigrant parents disowned her after she got pregnant and married Bev. She regrets the marriage and longs for a more cultured existence than the one she experiences in Great Falls. Dell's twin sister is also keen to get away and links up with a tearaway boy named Rudy, hoping he will be her passport to freedom. Dell himself is focused on his interests of chess and beekeeping, and looking forward to senior high school.Bev's smuggling operation goes awry so he decides to rob a bank in order to get the money that he owes to the Indians. Neeva, against her better judgement, decides to go along with him. The pair are no Bonnie and Clyde, and a local newspaper describes the ensuing heist as a comedy of errors. Bev and Neeva end up behind bars, Berner heads off into the night and Dell is left alone and bewildered. The family is no more.Mildred, a friend of Dell's mother, collects Dell and drives him over the border into Canada so that he can stay with Mildred's brother Arthur and begin a new life. In fact Dell spends most time with an odd and menacing character named Charley. Dell works as a cleaner in the hotel owned by Arthur and very slowly is taken into Arthur's orbit. Dell later learns hunting and butchering with Charley, and is also befriended by Florence, a local artist and Arthur's girlfriend. Arthur has a dark past and ran away from a career at Harvard to escape the police. He settled in Fort Royal in Canada, but after Dell has been living here for a while, two men from Arthur's past come from Chicago to seek him out. Arthur ends up murdering the two men and runs off. It is Florence who then rescues Dell and sends him to her brother in Winnipeg where Dell finally returns to school and builds his future life.Dell never saw his parents again after the day they went to jail, and his mother committed suicide there. Dell later married, though he and his wife had no children, and generally he has led a happy life in Canada. In the end he visits his dying sister back in the United States. She has been a heavy drinker and has a cancer that is rapidly killing her, though after a series of failed relationships she is finally living with a man who is good to her.Despite the bleakness of his youth, and the tumultuous events that saw him uprooted and set adrift in Canada, Dell has remained forward looking and determined. His view of life - though he does not articulate it in this way - is a mixture of the Buddhist ideal of living focused in the present and the existentialist idea that life has no intrinsic meaning and that it is our role as individuals to give it significance. To survive and be content, Dell says, you need to tolerate loss, avoid cynicism and keep a sense of proportion in your life. Sometimes it can be hard to see the good, but it is always there if we are willing to look with unclouded eyes.Dell experiences some harrowing things for a young teenage boy, but he never surrenders to despair. When the bigger picture is grim, he focuses on the detail of the world around him and maintains a curiosity about life and the way nature works. It might be wrong to call his approach optimism, but in the end that is what it looks like.Richard Ford's prose is clear and finely etched. Both Great Falls and Fort Royal, small towns with little going on, come alive in Dell's story. The wide open spaces of these lands contrast with the densely cluttered thoughts and fears that run through Dell's mind. Dell is saved by the kindness of strangers - Mildred, then Florence - but his ability to make an ultimately happy life for himself is down to his capacity to build on the cards he is dealt. His sister Berner doesn't fare so well, in many ways embodying the weaknesses of her mother, though she is cheerful as death looms.This is a long and detailed novel. The key events - the bank robbery and the murders - are spelled out by Dell in the opening pages, so there are no big surprises on that score. Instead, the novel is a study of how a young boy comes of age under dire conditions, and how good can win out over evil and tragedy if we approach life in a particular way.Dell is reconstructing events from a long time ago, both explaining how they seemed to him at the time and how he understands them in retrospect as a mature man. It's a difficult technique but Richard Ford manages it very well and the voice throughout is authentic and convincing. Ford captures the period (the early 1960s) well and the behaviour of the female characters in particular evinces the division between the older generation still adhering to pre-war values and the sixties generation seeking a new way to be. Oddly, Dell fits into neither side of this divide, instead charting a course through life that is at once idiosyncratic and instructive.

Fatalism is one of the tenets of American literary naturalism, embodied in the character (Maggie, Hurstwood, McTeague, Ethan Frome) who struggles to assert his or her free will in the face of overwhelming determinism. Naturalism was the segue from 19th-century romanticism to 20th-century existentialism. Life was not chamber music and romantic excess, but rather a hardscrabble existence fraught with little hope and no redemption.And so it is with Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford’s somber and thoughtfully provocative latest novel, Canada. While we might, for a moment, think the plot revolves around his parents’ ruefully clumsy bank robbery, it does not. Illicit and unlawful activities only serve to illustrate the basic unforgiving nature of nature and life. Yet the bank robbery, which changes the lives of Dell and his twin sister, Berner, is more aptly characterized by his comment, “blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.” As we learn, nothing really leads anywhere. We’re dust in the wind.Ford creates an intimate view into the lives of both Dell and Berner, their father Bev and Neeva, their Jewish mother. Bev and Neeva’s marriage is yet another example of the random acts of people: she has married outside her faith, into a different social caste, and they are an uncomfortable pairing. Even so, Ford characterizes two people striving almost senselessly for some kind of fulfillment under the dreary shroud of determinism. The parents’ ennui is not lost on Dell, nor on Berner.The story is set in characteristically naturalistic Montana in the 1960s, which exemplifies the bleakness of the environment and that vaguely puzzling era between the end of World War II and the assassination of JFK when it seemed as if the country was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen next. That mood is intensified by the shift in focus to a timeless, even more bleak, even more unforgiving Canada, where nothing has changed since forever and where, we learn, nothing much changed thereafter. The world of Ford’s novel is either dying or just plain dead, which makes it all the more difficult to define and exert one’s free will. Bev seems to think he can master his fate. Neeva sits quietly, hoping her life will somehow right itself without her effort. Berner senses things are wrong but longs only for escape. Her brother observes, records, but lacks the wherewithal to interpret or place anything that’s occurring into a perspective upon which he can act in his own behalf. Dust in the wind. His childish innocence portrays the absence of an ability to shape any kind of moral compass, sensibility or philosophy of how to be in the world. Dust in the wind.Canada is not a novel to gobble down like a fast-food burger. It is not an action-oriented story, although it is filled with portentous events that, again, characterize its naturalism. It moves inexorably through Dell’s life at age fifteen years, which he portrays as if writing a personal journal or diary. Dell apparently wants to remember and describe each event in detail; we want to know why that is so, but he won’t tell us. He writes as if he were a newspaper reporter: objective, detached, with no attempt to imbue events with meaning. In the final pages we meet him fifty years on, still trying to get a grip on what it all meant and struggling with his inability to assert himself. But even as we see him play out his reunion with Berner, even as we hear him speak of his staid life and his vapid accomplishments, we see only Eliot’s hollow man, the one for whom we ache because his worldview is so painfully myopic- and it’s not his fault. Berner, near her own death, asks, “You feel like you’ve had a wonderful life?” Dell says, “I accept it. I accept it all.” She replies, “We all accept it. That’s not an answer. …What choice do we have?”Canada is a somber novel, one that gave me cause to reflect on the Sisyphean nature of life. Although free will is an illusion; because we have no real control over our lives; since there is no higher power guiding us through life, toward either fate or meaning: given that the idea of randomness (a concept so deeply embraced by millennials, although one wonders if the really understand it), is what imbues life, the universe and everything, what is one to make of a mournful story such as Dell’s? Can we close the book and think, “No, that’s not the way I want my life to go. Here’s what I would have done differently.” But Dell understands that at least for him, there was no different way. Should we pity him? He does not engage in self-pity. He does not mourn his parents nor grieve his sister; rather, thinks of them, and of his and their lives, as, quoting the essayist John Ruskin, “the arrangement of unequal things.”That pretty much says it all: Dell Parson’s life is devoid of meaning or purpose, except that’s a bitter pill. We live. Random things happen to us. Maybe they’re meaningful, but then again maybe they’re not. We die. That’s all. That’s all?

This is one of those books you think about during the day in between reading bouts. Not sure that the title quite fits, but I can see why the author went with it. I was surprised the authorities didn't collect the children straighaway but I was able to suspend disbelief. I think it's his style that I really like, and his introsepcrion. I didn't find it boring, as some reviewers have said, rather it was grippping. This is the second of his books I have read and I will go on to read others. His description is most evocative.

Canadaby Richard FordCanada is an unusual book, not least in its title. There is only one brief reference to Canada in Part One and the action does not move to Canada until Part Two, by which time you are half way through the book!The narrator, Dell begins by telling the reader that he is going to start by telling us about the robbery his parents committed, then the murders, which happened later.The first half of the book is about the relationships between the family members, particularly his apparently mismatched parents, and also himself and his twin sister, Berner. It goes on the explain how his very 'ordinary' parents came to the point where they decided to rob a bank. Like all children Dell assumes that his family is made up of normal people. He finds it shocking that his parents could be bank robbers, as though they should be a recognisable 'different category' of human beings. They just made a wrong decision, were unlucky and drifted into it! There is naturally tension between the fifteen year old Dell's ability to understand and that of the adult writing years later with the benefit of hindsight and maturity.Their father, Bev, ex air-force, struggles to adjust to civilian life after the war but is always upbeat, easy going and optimistic. Neeva, their mother; shy, artistic and from a totally different background, that of an educated, immigrant, Jewish family, is insular and discourages the children from making friends or mixing.When his happy-go-lucky approach to a bit of wheeler-dealing ends up with himgetting into debt, to the wrong people, Bev decides that the solution is to rob a bank!After their parents are arrested a family friend arrives to take the children away before they fall into the hands of the authorities. Berner decides to run off but Dell is smuggled into Canada and a strange new life in the care of Arthur Remlinger, himself an exile from the USA.Everyone seems to be where they are because of some kind of external threat or circumstance. Bev and Neeva married because Neeva was pregnant. Bev is just not successful at making a living in civilian life and therefore gets involved in criminal activities. He is encouraged by the fact that similar actions during his service years had worked successfully, ignoring the difference in circumstances, mainly that in the air-force everyone knew what was going on and turned a blind-eye, to the benefit of everyone involved.The children feel threatened by the juvenile services and their mother has already taken steps to avoid them falling into their care, reinforcing their belief that it is to be avoided at all costs.Arthur Remlinger lives in fear of being held responsible for a foolish act that ended in tragedy in his anarchistic youth. He clearly has something on Charley who works for him.Dell wants to go to school. He wants an education and the chance to make something of himself but his youth and lack of experience mean that he does not know how he is going to make that happen in the back-water where he finds himself.It is a coming of age novel in which the central character is surrounded by adults whose own personal and emotional development has been stunted.The atmosphere throughout is bleak and it is difficult to explain how the book engages the reader as much as it does. The murders and the aftermath are quite shocking when they occur but this book does not pretend to rely on high drama, fast action, or changes of pace. It will appeal most to readers who like exploring the psychology of the characters.The novel is written in a very 'American' style and also there are references that I found irritating as they were not familiar to me, although I am sure they would be to an American reader. Otherwise it is well written and well constructed so that the story unfolds clearly and unambiguously, if at times it seems a bit slow.

Such a great novel; surely the best of the last fifteen years or so. Each page has surprises, each paragraph rings totally true, the landscape reaches across into the characters. The pace of the telling perfectly done, like reading Huckleberry Finn, though in a darker mode. Loved each and every word of it.

Canada was the first novel by Richard Ford that I have read. This is a very strange book. I found it quite a page-turner although I cannot really explain that! A lot(most)of the writing is very beautiful although some of it I thought was sloppy in the extreme and there were sentences where the grammar was so bad that I literally could not understand their meaning (and the English language is my academic speciality). I agree with some other reviewers that there is a disjoint between the first half of the novel and the second half, and that the characters are not entirely convincing. I found it hard to understand how Mildred Remlinger could be the sister of Arthur Remlinger. But my main problem with the book is that it is so unrelievedly downbeat and bleak and ultimately that got to me so much that I almost could not bring myself to finish reading it. I was also left wondering how Dell could have left the families of the murdered Americans wondering for the rest of their lives what had happened to them when he could have put them out of their misery. But that is not the book that Richard Ford wrote I suppose.Despite it being a compelling read, especially the earlier part of the book, I could not wholeheartedly recommend anyone else to read this book unless they are prepared to feel seriously depressed. In the end I felt quite angry and irritated too by this novel.

I love the Bascombe novels, and RIchard Ford's style seems almost effortless, as all great writers can make a novel seem. But this book didn't work for me in the same way as the Bascombe series. It starts promisingly enough, with a description of a typically dysfunctional family, as only Ford can hatch them. But the way the story unfolds, effectively in two halves (either side of the border between the US and Canada) is the disappointment. Part one is just about believable (I won't give out any spoilers), but is on the cusp of being too clearly a creation. Part two tips over that edge. You know the new lead character is a wrong 'un, but the way that ultimately presents itself is both predictable and unbelievable - in other words, you see the denouement coming, but you can't quite believe that's where Ford is taking the story. Beautifully written isn't enough sometimes, and unfortunately the plot here emphasises that.