What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book still patiently awaiting its readers,
From a Canadian writer,
With thanks,
Charles Foran

Letter:

Dear Mr. Harper,

Books, like people, can get overlooked. I’d like to use this slot, so generously offered by Yann, to tell you about a wonderful Canadian work of fiction that still awaits real discovery. Ray Smith’s Century first appeared back in 1986, and didn’t cause much fuss. It had a decent publisher, and Smith had already released two books that had won him a small but noisy crowd of admirers: Lord Nelson Tavern and the humbly-titled Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada. These were charming, off-the-wall fictions, of a cheerful piece with the prankster stuff then emerging from the coastal regions of the United States. Smith, a Cape Bretoner exiled to Montreal, had his own coastal vibe, but it wasn’t stoner/surfer cool: it was late night FM radio, chill and iconoclastic, joshing of mainstream tastes with bite but no malice.

Still, Century didn’t launch. It took Ray Smith a long time to finish, and it wasn’t as easy in its literary skin as his earlier work: more moody and anxious, less sanguine about the triumph of light over dark. It was also set mostly in Europe, and spanned a near century in just 165 compacted, almost pointillist pages. Things had changed in Canadian culture and literature in the interim, and Smith responded by, in a sense, going even further off-shore than the island where he comes from (and now lives again, in retirement). Whatever Century was, it wasn’t “Can Lit,” as the impulse or industry was being dubbed.

I called it a “work of fiction” for a reason. The book, which has six parts linked by a single character and regular tonal overlaps, could be classified as a novel of the, yikes, post-modern variety. But, besides having no interest in any desiccated academic trope, the stories are all self-contained, as in a collection. Even Smith’s one discernable theme—how art must embody the morality largely absent from a corrupted world—isn’t writ in BLOCK LETTERS, so everyone will get it. Century defies categories and shrugs off expectations. Look, says the text, of course this isn’t life; of course it’s just a book. Allow these elegantly arranged words to fall over you, confetti at a wedding, and then decide what the marriage is comprised of.

“Matter of fact,” one admirer recently observed, “the textures [of the prose] may be the meanings; Smith has too much respect for language, and too little patience with theme-speak, to insist any overarching concerns upon these smart, bright words. At moments, he may even be counting on musicality to serve as medium and message alike.” Actually, I wrote that about Century, for a preface to new edition published in 2009. Dan Wells, editor of Biblioasis Editions in southern Ontario, has been both re-issuing old Ray Smith books, and supporting his newer ones. I won’t say Biblioasis has been overlooked as well, but both these men are original, nervy literary sorts, operating from either the margins, if you insist on drawing the cultural map that way, or simply from where they need to be, as artists and publishers, in order to consider their day’s—or life’s—work worthwhile. I’m most happy to include my last copy of the Biblioasis Century with this note.

Sincerely,

Charlie Foran

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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