See the papers this morning (Wednesday, October 7th) – for instance, Vit Wagner’s typically thorough column in the Toronto Star – and all is again rosy with CanLit.

At the announcement of the Giller shortlist on Tuesday – a dozen books reduced to five – both the English biographer Victoria Glendinning and the American novelist Russell Banks were at pains to emphasize just how wonderful Canadian novels are. “Mind-changing,” said Glendinning of the shortlist – and Banks, more specifically, that the evidence of the year’s survey of 95 novels was that our fiction shows both “an engagement with history and engagement with the natural world. And unfortunately those are not characteristics of American fiction that this time.”

Wow. No more talk of toques or eavestroughs, of grannies in the Ukraine or of the muddy homogeneity of the middle range of novels. This year’s nominees are Kim Echlin for The Disappeared, Annabel Lyon for The Golden Mean, Linden McIntyre for The Bishop’s Man, Colin McAdam’s The Fall and Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault.

It’s an interesting list, certainly, with novels set in different epochs and places – Ancient Greece and modern-day Cambodia; a bit of ancient Egypt as seen through the lens of the modern day, from the flooded lands behind the Aswan Dam. Boarding school where emancipated kids get up to what they want; bad Cape Breton, where kids get an education they never expected.

It’s a good list, certainly, and one that will put to rest – at least for a few months – charges that Canadian fiction is somehow not concerned with the rest of the world, or that a Canadian novel is somehow unusual when it does step out. In truth, there has always been such a strain in CanLit, one that has a parallel, it could be posited, in Canadians’ fascination with photography – not just our occasionally excelling in it, or the place that photographs often have in Canadian novels (Katherine Govier’s Angel Walk and Michael Ondaatje’s early Coach House works come to mind), but the often cool and at-a-distance remove that characterizes much of Canadian photography.

Think of Jeff Wall’s acutely staged pieces, or of Edward Burtynsky’s large photographic still lives of industrial scenes (most recently and about to open in Washington and Toronto, of oil fields.) We are used to watching the world from a ledge at the edge of the action; we are used to making the leap and having to imagine others’ worlds – and this, of course, is the starting point of all good fiction. This ability underpins the empathy and curiosity about another that makes a story happen. I can’t tell you that this tendency is stronger than it may be in America – perhaps it is in the present troubled moment – but this tendency exists and certainly underpins much of the writing we do.

Now, time to do some reading – before next Tuesday’s GG list comes out!