Something like seventy per cent of the Canadian book trade’s business is done in the week before Christmas for good reason. Books make great gifts because they tend to be thoughtfully chosen. Here are a five of the best I’ve read this year:

David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (McClelland & Stewart).

This is the best novel I have read this year, the Israeli novelist David Grossman’s central figure, the mother Ora, to my mind one of the great characters of literature. Grossman, author of See Under: Love and a couple of non-fiction books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (known in his homeland simply as “the situation”) veered away from taking on the tension head-on, has returned to it with a novel that is simply a masterpiece. To the End of the Land demands (as masterpieces do) that you read it at a pace that the author has determined, and here the pace is slow because you will not want to miss a line – not for its beauty, though the language has plenty of it, but for its longing and astonishing, wrought intensity. In brief, Ora drives her son to the Lebanese front (with the family’s habitual Arab taxi driver, a chapter that is in itself brilliantly telling about a “situation” that tears even the most ordinary human relationships apart) and then, in a heartbreaking exercise of magical thinking, decides that if she is not at home to receive the notifiers’ bad news, then the son’s death she dreads cannot happen. So she takes to a trail that crosses the country with a former lover, and through it her life and that of the country is revealed. I spoke to Grossman some time ago, and when I asked him if it felt odd to be in privileged Canada, he answered that war is as unimaginable here as peace is in Israel (which is why, he said, Israel and Palestine needed someone like Obama, with his mixed race and cultural heritage, to imagine it for them), This is an extraordinary book.

Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (House of Anansi).

To hell with scandal, I’ll tell you this: Winter, nominated for the Writer’s Trust and Governor General’s Awards and the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction, was robbed: this is the book that should have won. Joanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, fantastically over-hyped, is a hopelessly sophomoric novel with nothing like the “trip-wire taught” prose the jurors proclaimed it to have. It is purple, wan and so narcissistically written – like a novelist imagining how a literary novelist should sound – that I am completely baffled as to how it got by sensible readers like Claire Messud and Michael Enright. I am friendly with both and, one day, shall ask them.

Annabel is not a novel on the scale of Grossman’s, but it is the best Canadian novel that I have read this year, certainly. (I was not a great fan of another over-hyped novel, Emma Donoghue’s Room, that I felt did not actually deliver any real insight into captivity, or provide an ending I can remember). Its portrait of a young hermaphroditic child whose father (another instance of wishful thinking) insists on raising as a boy is entrancing, as is Winter’s painting of scenes of Labrador – of the landscape, but also, so important, of the relationships between people in a close society. There are occasional moments that test the belief of even sympathetic readers, but most will accept these in passing, take them on faith. The rewards are great. Winter’s novel is tender and, above all, wise. Here, as I have said before, is a novel that will prick the senses and make its readers look around themselves and scrutinize things they thought they knew, realizing that perhaps they don’t.

Chris Hedges’ The Death of the Liberal Class (Knopf Canada).

Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter whose work from various troubled places, including Iraq, led to his breakout book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, is an impassioned – no, an enraged – journalist and observer of the United States whose gross dissatisfaction with what he sees as a homeland on a permanent war footing has led to a series of polemics of which this is the most recent. Not everything that Hedges writes should be accepted unthinkingly (and there are some critics, like Christopher Hitchens, who will tell you that Hedges’ proclamation that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian children for target practice is one of the classic tropes of a liar). There are moments in this, as in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, in which what comes to the fore is the thrill of a correspondent finding the rapturous treasures of a good library, but Hedges writes eloquently and extremely forcefully about issues that far too many would prefer not to have to acknowledge – a societal failing in these troubled times, especially. In the Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges delivers a knockout punch to struggling liberals everywhere (even if, amusingly, he describes Michael Ignatieff as the head of the ‘Labour Party’ in Canada) as he accuses the movement of effectively having sold out to corporate power and the political game to the point of outright betrayal of the causes that made the American liberal movement great.

There are chapters here on the liberals and politics, in social welfare, the media, theatre and the arts. Occasionally, Hedges goes a little overboard. As someone who believes that the phenomenon of reporters becoming self-appointed boots-on-the-ground interpreters, as they did from the first Iraq war especially, has contributed to the unreliability and credibility of the media (in other words, maybe Hedges was fired by the New York Times for good reason), I’d say this is true of the media chapter, especially, but without question this is a fiery, riveting and provocative read, a text that provides fresh meaning to what it is to be an honest and meaningful participant in society – and this, as an artist, too. This is a slim, bold and unsettling book that demands the reader and liberals, most of all, find some way—before things “get worst” (as my chum Barry Callaghan would say) to pitch in. A fantastic buy, and not just for the young you may think the book is for.

Ian Wallace’s Gordon Lightfoot Canadian Railroad Trilogy (Groundwood Books)

This wonderfully illustrated rendering of Gordon Lightfoot’s unforgettable paean to the railroad and Canada’s working roots is a keeper, a picture book for kids (but only ostensibly) that is actually a first-class souvenir of a song that comes close to being an alternative Canadian national anthem. Wallace’s illustrations formed part of a public exhibition that started at the CBC, the organization that commissioned the song from the young, dashing troubadour back in 1967 (as part of the country’s celebrations of its centennial. A bonus, the musical score is printed in the back pages of this really beautiful book—and one, note, that would never do in e-form.

Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden, Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (McClelland & Stewart).

Poet Molly Peacock’s unusual biography is an utterly charming portrait of a collage artist whose works exist in bountiful numbers at the British Museum. This is a finely produced and atmospheric book enhanced by lavish colour plates showing details of Delany’s work. Peacock’s meditations on art inspired by parts of Delany’s collages ring true, though what really makes The Paper Garden work on a higher plane are its evocations of the 18th century gentlewoman Mary Granville Pendarves Delany’s life – her miscalculated marriage, aged sixteen, to a 61-year-old alcoholic squire, a sequence of suitors and then a better marriage, her second husband’s death and then the Georgian society in which she operated as a widow and finally, so late in life, as an artist whose prime tool was a pair of scissors. Peacock interweaves reflections on her own life into the narrative without ever halting it. A patient, affecting book with genuine rewards – as is true, of course, of any good garden.

Enjoy the holidays – and reading, if you are able.

So I have set myself exactly 04.57 minutes to write this, corrections included—and if you open the attached Youtube link, you’ll understand why.

I apologize for not writing much recently. Like the teen you never hear from (so that you have to conclude she’s having fun), I have been busy with other things. Good things—or, to be accurate, a good thing. I’m steaming ahead on a good full draft of the book none of the big boys wanted but that Goose Lane, bless them, are publishing. As tends to happen, this outcome is the best as the book—more of a pamphlet really, due out in early summer, called What We Talk About When We Talk About War, started as the Antonine Maillet/Northrop Frye lecture that I delivered last April in Moncton, of which they are the habitual publishers.

So that’s why I’ve been quiet for a while.

Anyhow, other writing, when I have managed it, has been bad. Off topic, though only sort of. Like the insane bit of raging I wrote about Canada’s new Axis of Idiocy—Rob Ford, Toronto’s Mayor, Don Cherry, who had his idiotic moment at Ford’s investiture, Julian Fantino et alii, and I was feeling really shitty about it all until I saw this.

And we’re coming up to 04.57 minutes of typing, so I better be quick—00.24 seconds more than John Cage’s famous bit of silence, but all that the Niagara Choir needed to thrill the unsuspecting crowd at the Seaway Mall in Welland, Ontario (near St Catharine’s) in this video that is exactly the sort of vindication of the triumph and purpose of art that we need in the face of buffoons such as Ford and Cherry et al. The video has had over 14 500 000 views! Amazing, though possibly disconcerting when you consider that at least a few million of these (see the web comments) will have been by Christian Americans thinking it an argument for a White Christmas (and I’m not talking snow).

And now my 04.57 minutes are gone.

And thief you’ll permit, an extra bit, which will take me up to what, 05.15?

Here we are in Toronto, aghast—check out the very funny urnews.ca satirical website from Newfoundland. Canada needs more of this, for their take on hillbilly Toronto and other things—at the buffoons we have put in power, so I was thinking: Okay, so this superb choir missed Don Cherry’s idiot moment, but there’ll be more, damn it, so who’s going to arrange for this bunch of artsy left-wing kooks to pull their next flash mob at Toronto City Council? Preferably they’ll step up as Rob Ford is about to speak. Brought tears to my eyes, the choir did.

Now back to the book.

Lest some web stalker vilify me for not saying so, let me come clean: I am married to one of the losing publishers at this year’s Scotiabank Giller contest. One that, according to Andy Steeves of Gaspereau Press, prints its novels on paper of such bad quality he would not use it in the company loo. I am pals with Jack Rabinovitch, the founder of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and, like Joanna Skibsrud, author of this year’s winner, The Sentimentalists, grateful to Gaspereau, with whom I am presently contracted for a book, for supporting me when no other Canadian publisher would. I am also much relieved that, when they finally get my manuscript, they’ll only have to sell a thousand or so copies to get even, as opposed to the several thousand McClelland & Stewart still has to flog before they can stop sending me humiliating royalty statements. As must have been true of Skibsrud a year or two back, I see no run of 70,000 books in the near future to complicate my modest market plans with Steeves, Canada’s self-described Thoreau, hand-sewing his books’ bindings in some shed in Kentville, Nova Scotia, where they only shit on papyrus, apparently.

However, would Ali Smith please note, I have no agent.

Bringing in novelist Ali Smith, the Giller juror making this year’s faux pas, was meant to be a good idea, what with her superior British tastes. But she appears to have behaved every bit as badly as any compromised Canadian juror might have done. It’s been an interesting season, as the Chinese say. Smith denied having told her Wylie agent Tracey Bohan to snatch up the unrepresented Skibsrud before the shortlist was announced. Steeves has been quoting from an e-mail implying that she did, and the Scotiabank Giller bunch admits it was an indiscretion but claims she pushed not just the eventual winner but many authors. The truth is, whether Smith blabbed to Bohan on the Friday or the Monday, Canadian agents were scooped of the possibility of an auction that might have served Skibsrud even better than what is now her present gilded circumstance. Still, it must be said, this year’s conduct by the international jury’s British component is nevertheless a vast improvement upon last year’s, when Victoria Glendinning, believing no one in Canada ever reads a foreign paper, wrote in a Financial Times column that Canadian fiction was hardly worth publishing at all. That’s good news, no?

The Wylie agency, knowing it is on to a good thing, has visited the Giller before this year in which Bohan came as Ali Smith’s date. The ultra-powerful agency is reviled by – well, every single publisher in the world, and for good reason: Wylie, a.k.a. the Shark, once declared that if a publisher made money off any of his authors then he’d failed at his job. The wholesale strategy of the Wylie Agency is to swoop in on a novelist once fame has been managed and to bully the publishers unrelentingly until they have in their hands as many sequestered rights as possible. Any investment publishers make in their authors’ work – and, let’s get real, they are not the enemy and they do – counts for naught in his Wylie’s world, a recent illustration of this nasty creed having been the agency’s plans to sell the e-book backlist of the star authors on his roster himself without any agreement and paying nothing to their publishers. (Bertelsmann put an end to that little bit of thievery, quick). Taking Skribsrud’s foreign rights away from Gaspereau, as Bohan did effortlessly, was small potatoes but still it must have had her colleagues slapping her back and laughing hysterically in the halls.

Steeves, though, has come out as today’s hero to an iPad-hating minority that regards the meager profits from book sales (when they are made at all) with more contempt than an Angolan might a diamond tiara on Naomi Campbell’s head. Plainly he doesn’t give a toss. Possibly to his credit. Possibly not. Regardless, the decision to license Skibsrud’s book to the Vancouver publisher Douglas & McIntyre, as was announced on Monday, did not come without pressure, the best remark of this troubled season’s having been made by Jack Rabinovitch who, with the tone of an offer that could not be refused, quietly suggested that Gaspereau needed to decide if it was in the business of publishing or printing.

By then, the controversy had caused quite a furor on Facebook and in Tweets. Smith’s Canadian protector, Knopf Canada editor Michael Schellenberg, has been scooting about Toronto like a literary Road Runner, taking snapshots of unknowing bystanders holding up a sign that reads DON’T HARASS THE ARTISTS and posting the images on his Facebook page, though the best comment was by Tim Rostron, an editor at Doubleday Canada working in the same Random House building. He wrote: “Hasn’t the physical beauty of this book been overstated? I’d feel disappointed if I’d waited weeks for what turned out to be a paperback – this IS a paperback we’re talking about – with a cover featuring touchingly poor draughtsmanship. Am I missing something? We corporate whores do from time to time produce handsome, sturdy volumes.”

After which the whole argument became quite tedious. On the Monday morning, the glib Scott McIntyre, his year made, declared that “Toronto publishers,” whoever they are, had “resorted to all the tricks in the book” in their failed efforts to license Skibsrud’s novel. And what would those tricks be exactly? How do they differ from the perfectly straightforward ones D&M is using – Gaspereau’s label on the spine, or not; a cheaper unit price and hiring the Manitoba printer Friesen’s, the printers of Harry Potter, as just about every other publisher in the country also does?

The truth of Canadian publishing, of course, is that if you really want to make money then printing books is what you do, though maybe on the Friesen and not the Gaspereau scale – no risk at all, just take the order. Warehouses, returns, critics, they’re all other people’s problems. But it was the smugness of it all that was so off-putting, so it’s nice that now it’s all sorted. McIntyre, his year made, was sounding like a tiresome demagogue of a very Canadian kind, what with the bogus populist bollocks he was spouting that pitted a valiant countryside, the seat of our better values, against corrupt city elites and the “Toronto multinationals” – shades of the Gun Registry – when the truth is all folk in publishing work their damndest. Steeves, hero or not, was sounding ever more sanctimonious – “I’ll be sorry not to have touched every book that goes out, but you can’t touch 30,000” – though, on the other hand, it has to be said that his stubbornness comes out looking pretty good. Examine the actual numbers for the sale of Canadian novels – they’re not good – and the rational conclusion may be that what is effectively Steeves’ regional model of book publishing may be the easiest one for Canadian publishers to take.

Now, I hope, we can talk about other novels – David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, anybody? I like the paper in that thick and genius book because you can open it at any page and it falls flat – which doesn’t happen, by the way, with either my Gaspereau or my D&M books.

Though if I may, a word of caution: Nova Scotia, where I myself retire to the woods for a good part of the year to do my writing, is the province that, not so long ago, was the prime producer of wooden schooners in the world and, much as it likes to blame its misfortune on Ottawa, turn-of-the-century trade tariffs and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, because it did not take the advent of iron steamships seriously, it now has a tanked economy and no boat industry at all. Its producers, no matter the business, flaunt market economics at their peril. And yet the existence of Gaspereau is a huge relief to me. Already late delivering, I’ve been meaning to write Andy for some time – once that parcel arrives on the steam packet from Bristol with my Egyptian vellum, quill and quire. Steeves, bless him, has never been one to harass the artist.

Prizes. Right.

This overheard at the announcement last month of the shortlists for the Governor-General’s Awards for Literature, from a highly-placed and influential member of the media establishment:

“Phew. I’m so relieved Emma Donoghue is on the list [for Room].”

“Oh? Is it any good?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read it.”

Really, what more needs to be said?

Maybe just this: Love is what gets an author and her family and friends through the sometimes awful circus of being nominated or, for many, being left out.

Take a moment to think of all those omitted authors. Katherine Govier’s fine novel of a Japanese painter’s wife responsible for a lot of his good work and getting none of the credit and living under the Shogun autocracy comes to mind, a beautifully crafted and detailed novel of a completely foreign world that made nobody’s list but my own. Juries often forget that readers read to be transported, and not just kept abreast of stylistic fireworks, which may explain why Govier made none of them, though some juries’ being interested in the brave and innovative does not explain why John Lavery’s excellent and very interesting novel Sandra Beck, largely set in Montreal and the Eastern Townships, has not yet had much attention. Sandra Beck feels genuinely stylistically new. Its imagery and language are terrific (it also has one of the best covers of the season, by the way – here’s to the book as book), and the way in which the picture of his heroine is completed by the unreliable testimony of others recalls one of my three favourite novels ever, Heinrich Böll’s Group Portrait With Lady.

Yeah. Truth is it’s rough out there and you have to ignore it. To that end, here’s a video made by my friend Michael Winter, who was himself very deservedly nominated for a Writer’s Trust Award for his novel The Death of Donna Whalen. It celebrates his absolutely wonderful sister Kathleen, who was the overwhelming favourite this year for her novel, Annabel, winner of the somewhat jinxed “Trifecta” title, having been nominated for the Giller, the GGs and the Writer’s Trust Award. (Apparently she has not lived in Montreal for long enough to have been eligible for this year’s Québec Writers Federation awards, which is a pity).

Kathleen Winter lost, damn it – but no matter, look what she’s got. Hell, I’m not even saying this to be corny. Love, not royalties, is what keeps most authors going. Oh, and the song Michael chose for his sweet record of mostly the Winter family – Kathleen, the Mom, her husband, the two girls amid the guests (and four of the five shortlisted authors holding a picture of The Matter with Morris because its author David Bergen, the fifth shortlisted one, could not at that moment be found) – is, of course, apt. It’s by Corey and Trina, and about Labrador, where Kathleen’s novel, Annabel, is mostly set.

Was at the last of Douglas Coupland’s Massey Lectures delivered recently in Toronto. The Vancouver author, sculptor and, lately, screenwriter and biographer (Marshall McLuhan) has written “a novel in five hours,” Player One—a new venture for the Masseys, but one that has already made the bestseller lists. It is typically Coupland, his characters stuck in an airport in the face of a very modern type of doomsday, the world’s oil running out. (The lectures will be broadcast next month by CBC Radio.)

A bold ploy, and one that went down very well with the remarkably young crowd, one particularly keen young fella in gold shoes taking a reserved seat and, seeing the name SARAH MACLACHLAN posted on the row in front of his, making a call to a buddy and confiding that the singer was here, too, though he hadn’t seen her yet but this was no surprise as she was probably backstage for the time being. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the MacLachlan in question (that extra ‘a’ in the name, the clincher) was Coupland’s publisher and standing a few feet away and deflate his high excitement.

Attracting a younger crowd, it should be said, is actually not at all unusual for the Masseys and part of the pleasure of listening to the lectures live as the CBC team crosses the country. (They travelled to Coupland’s native Vancouver, then to Regina, Charlottetown, Ottawa and Toronto, this year). Previous authors Wade Davis, Stephen Lewis and Ronald Wright all drew young audiences. Interestingly, Coupland’s readers, while adoring, were also quite hard on him. There was a certain whiff of Joseph Campbell in the air as a couple of dedicated fans took to the public mike after the reading (not lecture) and, citing his own work and even particular lines from previous novels and stories back at him, asked why he was, in effect, plagiarizing himself. It was as if, being an example and the emblem of their very own accelerated youth, it was now the moment for them to slay the mythic figure him—an interpretation that may sound a little dramatic but as someone who has known and followed him for nearly 20 years, I’m sure that’s how it felt.

Doug, though, responded in his surprising, wonderfully idiosyncratic and no doubt genuine fashion. He loves his fans, speaks to each of them as they approach with a book no matter how long he’s kept there (and even if a certain Hefner dread of the worst has him sterilize himself afterwards). “Yeah. Wow,” he says, sharing in his fans’ excitement and speaking as if he was one of them and needed as much to be pointed out to him and confirmed. He shares a confidence in up-speak, of course: he’s written the draft of a novel in an altogether new vein, he says, one that’s so filthy he’s embarrassed about it, and then says, yes, Player One may well be the end of that particular apocalyptic road.

And its apogee, I’d say. Coupland, who now resembles Orson Welles though without the paunch, has at his fingertips that similar combination of exceptional characteristics that the Hollywood icon had: an acute understanding of exactly the way in which we fear the future acting in concert with a profound ease with our present technology. In Welles’ case, the technology was radio (his famously interrupted broadcast of The War of the Worlds) and film (Citizen Kane); in Coupland’s it is not just the web but facets of today’s lesser technologies passing one by one into the realm of yesterday. After a long signing, a hundred or so fans lining up to have their copies of Player One signed, the fella in gold shoes took photographs of Coupland and his delighted international fan club – delegates having travelled from the United States, Germany, and Japan, but also Hamilton, Ontario, and whatever was the town in Northern Ontario the self-appointed photographer was from, snapping shots like he was trying out for a remake of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Coupland, meanwhile, discreetly had his hands sprayed with germ killer and then, as I started to gather up the Post-it notes that the publisher’s staff had given to the public to spell their names on to make the author’s work easier, halted me with a friendly, “No, no, don’t do that!”

“I file everything,” he said. “You won’t believe how quickly the things we take for granted today become anachronisms.”

And so I am braced, now, for a Coupland collage of yellow squares of gum-backed paper put to some other purpose, some day in the very near future, already far enough for me to have wondered why I myself am, not regarding, let alone keeping, these and other detritus of our rapidly accelerated culture. That last phrase is, of course, his – from Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the book that launched his idiosyncratic worldview into prominence 19 years ago. There is no one who draws more revelatory insights from the seemingly banal and superficial than Coupland. And this really is an achievement. Most interpreters of popular culture are undone by their subject and are made banal by it. Not Coupland. Ever. If he’s at the end of the road, it’s because he’s travelled it well.

To the visitor who but once or twice a year drops into Calgary, as I am doing this week, it takes a moment to adjust to this thriving city’s culture of jocular enjoyment, clean-pressed shirts (none frayed at the collar), and Blackberrys or other mobile devices attached to the hip. Calgary is booming and clean, boisterous even, and somehow still spanking new. Energy is the driving engine of the economy but it is the sector’s spirit of can-do entrepreneurship and innovation that is infectious – spreading even into the realm of the arts. At the sixth annual opening night ‘Wordfeast’ dinner celebrating the city’s autumn literary festival, now in its fifteenth year, the fella next to me was immaculately turned out – damn it, I should have worn a tie. He probably found the proceedings touchingly quaint: authors toting their own books (I’d helped the accomplished Katherine Govier at the airport with her carton the day before) and most somehow managing to get by on print runs of a few thousand according to a publishing model he declared, with some authority, to be “broken.”

Jane Urquhart was at the podium, but to my left the future of reading itself had a voice and it belonged to Jeff Buick, a thriller writer whose longtime publisher, Dorchester, operates out of New York. “Are you writing a book once a year?” I asked, knowing that publishing houses are desperate to find authors who can do just that, year in and year out, and in this way build a constituency. Buick writes one every four months, and has thirteen stockpiled. His print runs are around 120,000 and the Calgary-born author (who still lives here) said he “sells through pretty well.”

That would be exciting enough for most but Buick, who struck me as an interested and generous sort, is banking on a whole new publishing model to blow the old one out of the water. Also sitting at our table was Wayne Logan, a musician-turned sports and entertainment lawyer working out of the Field Law Group’s Calgary office, one a team of “over-achievers,” Buick calls them, behind the new publishing venture Enthrill Entertainment, “a boutique publishing company specializing in digital media and experience,” according to the operation’s actually quite fascinating website. Enthrill claims, with legitimacy, to be something altogether different – a publishing company that is much more than that, ahead of the curve and creating “books” for today’s mobile reading platforms with sufficient investment, innovation and ingenuity that Apple itself is watching with a view to developing texts for the specific capabilities of its iPad.

Enthrill describes its interactive books as “projects” and is putting very substantial resources behind each. “If we try to play by [other publishing companies’] rules,” says the website, “we’ll be flattened and left in the dust. So why bother doing things the same as everyone else. We’re small and agile – innovative and visionary – determined and grounded. We see incredible opportunities opening in the world of publishing and we’re chasing them. Even better, we’re defining them.”

Buick calls the books “immersive experiences.” They go far beyond mere hyperlinking and include embedded audio-visual material that can be called up and dismissed on the iPad (and, presumably, RIM’s tablet when that is launched) without having to leave the text at all. Apple has been pushing this sort of development of texts recently, though more so with a view to non-fiction – where, say, it might be handy for the reader to be able to remind him or herself of who Martin Luther King was and to hear, immediately, about that dream he had. The Calgary company is doing exactly this but providing fictive material, too. Buick’s One Child is a novel about the war in Afghanistan that culminates in the U2 benefit concert played this last August in Moscow, with a cast of principal characters ranging from an Afghan child and a soldier and embedded reporter in the country, to a Wall Street trader in New York. Buick‘s text was released in a sort of test-case build of daily installments on the web from July 27th to August 25th, having culminated on the day of the concert itself.

The site logged thousands of hits and Buick and Logan calculate from its very useful return of information that 20% of buyers bought both the physical and electronic version of the book, though whether as a gift or to keep themselves they cannot ascertain. For the “interactive” Enthrill version (the e-book costs fifteen dollars, and the good-old fashioned paperback beach read, twenty), the company spent more than thirty thousand dollars on live enactments to be available to mobile device readers, as well as links and even Facebook pages for the characters that will answer readers when they write. The director, actors and marketing staff who do this are a part of the very large budget for each book: Buick said that Enthrill put more than $100,000 into the developing and marketing of One Child, and is prepared to do so for all the books it publishes. Money is the object and, true to that Calgarian entrepreneurial spirit, Enthrill believes it can work.

A lot of claims are made for the internet, what it will do for publishing, and a lot of them are very dull, a repackaging of the same old and by now very dull Don Tapscott message that the whole world is changing and only he (or the web journalist in question) has noticed!

Yawn.

What is fascinating about Buick and Enthrill.com isn’t only the massive confidence they display – with money – in their re-imagining of publishing, and the fact that they are putting their money where their e-mouths are, but that the venture is laced with a very interesting idea about the place and power of the novel in today’s world, as well as an honourable sympathy – and more than that – towards other writers. Buick may have found backers to put him at the forefront of publishing developments and technology, but he has not forgotten where his heart is, and nor has Enthrill CEO Logan – whose father, he reported with evident pride, had played for the troops during World War Two and was Alberta’s Senior Champion Fiddler 23 years in a row. (Aside from practicing law on behalf of impecunious writers and athletes, Wayne himself plays keyboards and the fiddle: “What else was I going to do?” he says). The company is actively looking for other writers to enlist to its new model. It wants to grow.

“At this year’s Thriller Fest,” said Buick, “I talked to a dozen really good writers who were all mid-list and pretty well destined to stay there and every one of them said ‘yes’ when we talked about bank-rolling their projects.”

Who wouldn’t? But there was more to the talk. The ‘En’ in ‘Enthrill’ comes from the company’s maxim to “entertain, enlighten and engage,” and it believes, with some reason, that fiction is the medium to do this, that it offers 100,000 words and a whole imagined world where an op-Ed column offers 800 words and a Tweet the statutory 140 characters, and that the novel has the power to propel the community even to political action.

This is not an outrageous thought, and it is akin to the explanation Eva Gabrielsson provided to CBC Radio’s The Current on October 13th, when asked to explain the global success of her late common-law husband Stieg Larssen’s Millenium trilogy. The books had tapped into a sense of powerlessness before corporations and governments, and the courage of the ordinary person heroically fighting back. Enthrill, to this end, is actively looking for thrillers that address issues such as the world’s imminent water shortage crisis, and even provides researchers to develop stories to that end. In a manner of speaking, it is a Harlequin for the modern, anxious, digital age – and that is no slur, the internationally operating Harlequin probably being the most successful homegrown Canadian book publishing company ever.

Enthrill, says Buick, is going to be publishing books that offer a “merging of fact and fiction … a coming together of multi-media, ideas and writing.” It will elevate publishing from selling a mere product – the book – to marketing “experience,” and that there is a healthy and untapped revenue stream to be found in doing so.

In a sense, we’ve been here before, a number of Californian companies inspired by the Hollywood story factories in their neighbourhood already having tried to look at publishing as the marketing of ideas and experiences to be issued in complementary rather than competing forms – films and books, in particular – but there is an energy and a trans-disciplinary literacy (and numeracy) at work here, that means they’re worth keeping an eye on, this bunch. It’s something to see book publishers of any kind sitting with healthy expressions on their faces – as if there is no reason to believe the sort of success that has come to software companies in this day and age cannot also be theirs, a welcome change from the haggard looks of self-doubt that now possess just about every author and publisher I know. And it’s even more cheering to see that values routinely described by the journeymen seers of the new digital publishing reality as “fusty” and “old world,” et cetera, have not, in truth been left behind.

When I asked Buick if he actually thought he was in the book-writing business anymore, a great big smile lit up his face and he said, “Absolutely. Oh my God, I love writing. I love books. I live to write.”

Started the week in a terrible funk: payback for a glorious seven days in Venice, for my being on the short film jury for the Toronto International Film Festival, and then an indulgent weekend in Prince Edward County. Subsequently, I managed lots of sketching of assignments but little finishing of them and then the back-to-earth of the house after its still not yet finished renovations, bills to pay and other reminders of mundane responsibilities and the truth of never quite being able to evade them – at least not on my income.

A while back, I wrote about “time around time,” the necessity for a writer to have a stable period of uneventful time around those hours in which he or she effectively creates – time without disturbance, time without minding phone calls, dealing with contractors or children or trips across town to the single place where a certain errand can be done.

Recently, I’ve not had a lot of it. The year started well but then renovations ripped right into it, had me out of the house for twelve weeks and not three, and cost me not the standard twice but three times the original amount. I’d thought about going to court, my brilliant defence resting on a high oratorical moment in which I ask, “And in what other profession, Your Honour, is the client liable for every mistake, every wasted and redone minute, every bit of incompetency or slow work merely because the contractor is doing it?” And then it occurred to me that the other profession in which this is true is, of course, the law. And so, desultorily, I decided to pay and not drag the whole thing out though I did manage to whittle the bill back to merely outrageous levels and highway, rather than autobahn, robbery.

At one point during the renovations, I found myself introducing a couple of poets at the Young Centre, down in Toronto’s Distillery District, where I’ve been one of a dozen resident artists for a while. I riffed, mumbling to myself as much as to the audience, about what it cost me to watch over a sequence of plumbers, finally directing them myself, bumbling the job of fixing my toilet. I wondered openly how it would be if I charged, say, the Toronto Star, for every draft of a piece I write. How much better off writers would be if this were the norm. A friend in the audience was so amused that he went out and had a couple of tee shirts made, a hand holding a pen and a spanner for an emblem under the imagined company name, “NOAH’S PLUMBING AND POETRY.” I wear this tee shirt happily, and thought of it a lot as I had to settle the bill and see my Line of Credit launch me into the Dangerous, Irresponsible Non-Saving Threat to Canada’s Economy section of the general wanton populace.

It grates, it really does to have to fork out like that, though recently I had a spending experience that was utterly elevating and showed that spending money is not the issue when value is on offer.

Back in March, I’d travelled to Dneprodzherzhinsk, the industrial town in Eastern Ukraine where Leonid Brezhnev as well as one of the founders of the KGB was born. Dneprodzherzhinsk was a steel town even before Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union and, today, the steel plant is just on of many factories that dominate the skyline of the city on the River Dnepro. On my last day, I bought a painting off the wall of the hotel I was staying in – a dull, uniform eight-storey building that could have sat as easily at Bathurst and Steeles, in Toronto (where many Soviet and Ukrainian émigrés have made their first Canadian stop). The Hotel Montana had become an endearing place, a great big mixed hospitality metaphor, what with the Montana name, its bar called the “Manhattan” (with a couple of tables, a bar the size of ones you’d find in a North American suburb basement of the 70s, and a huge photographic mural of Manhattan at one end, twin towers of the World Trade Centre included) but also, curiously, red maple leafs affixed to the doors and to the exterior of the hotel itself.

This mix was explained to me when, on that last afternoon, a part of the negotiations for the painting was a meeting with the owner and then his son – a cheery, chubby fellow in a baseball cap who, it turned out, had spent several years studying in Winnipeg (seeing no other part of Canada). I rolled up the painting, in haste, having e-mailed my wife who, in a previous life, had worked at the Guggenheim in Venice, to see how best to do this though rolling it paint-in or -out would not have mattered much because, as it turned out, the painting was in bad shape what with many hairline cracks and some of the dry paint flaking off the canvas.

Still, it was a beautiful painting, the artist unknown (or at least I was not convinced he was who the owners said he was), but the portrait of industrial Dneprodzherzhinsk at sometime halfway through the last century immediately compelling. In the right foreground is a tall votive column with, on top of it, the figure of Vulcan, patron figure of the city. In the park around its base, people amble along the path of a snowbound bit of park. A couple sit on a bench. A parent pulls the hand of a small child. The scene could well be Parisian, except that in the background of the scene, and mirroring Vulcan’s column, several stacks of the steel factory also push priapically into the sky, belching furious, brilliant red smoke that occupies nearly two thirds of the painting.

In the owner’s office was an altogether different painting; a sort of smutty collage of muscular Russian in chains with busty mistress and to which he had affixed packets of condoms as well as Allan keys. This one I did not try to buy.

For a long time, we in the West would have dismissed, too easily, the painting I did come away with as Soviet Realist art devoid of any real lasting worth, though it struck a chord with me instantly (and I looked at it admiringly every day for a week). Not only was it beautifully composed, but as a Canadian I felt a fresh understanding of the sincerity of such a work, the Soviet Realist label implying a propagandistic purpose on the part of the painter and the likelihood that such paintings were created in bad faith. It made me think of how Québecers, a decade or two ago, and now the proponents of the Athabascan Oil Sands, venerate these industrial projects and truly regard them as the engine of the nation. Even the Oil Sands’ opponents, I believe, feel a measure of guilt as they are aware, in some buried part of themselves, that these projects have protected Canada from the recession that has rocked the United States and Europe, and in the Ukrainian painting there was a very absolute sense of the factory and the smoke being the thing that enables the benign, quasi-domestic scene of strolling in the foreground.

In Toronto, after making enquiries at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery (Ed Burtynsky and John Hartman’s dealer, among others) and then of a couple of the painters in his stable, I was advised to visit Laszlo Czer, whose Restorart studio in the west end of the city is extremely highly regarded by many in the artistic community. It’s a bit of a haul – I live in Cabbagetown, on the east side of downtown Toronto – and you have to make an appointment with Laszlo before showing, a process which is not entirely straightforward as he answers his telephone and e-mails erratically.

Once there, it was immediately apparent why. Czer is lean and tall, and with his shoulder-length hair pushed back, he appears of another world – the Old World – and another century. His studio is large and spacious and crowded with paintings but nevertheless neat. In one corner, by the window at the front, is his large desk with a slightly Dickensian air, stacked high with papers and, in front and at the foot of it, a pillow for his small white terrier. There is an old world sense about the place though the equipment that is also in the room, including large tables and what looked like a man-high microscope, presumably for examining paintings, betrayed it as being an office very much of this era.

I handed over my painting with some trepidation, waiting to be told that it was worthless or for him to laugh at it or simply tell me there was nothing that could be done for it. Instead, he unrolled it and spread it out over one of the large tables and said, “This is a good painting.” No overstatement, just those few words so wonderfully convincing because they were few. “He knows how to paint. He makes beautiful strokes,” and then, pointing to the orange and grey smoke, “this is bold. He knew what he was doing.”

And then he went through the procedures he thought would be necessary, dabbing at the surface with a q-tip as he would later more rigorously over every part of its surface, to illustrate how a cleaning would enliven it. He examined the hairline cracks and explained that he would apply a resin to the back of the canvas to hold it from behind. He quoted a price, three times what I had paid for the painting, and I accepted. It was an odd, uplifting experience to be in such a craftsman’s company. It felt a pleasure to spend, in this instance, because I was in the aura of his excellence.

Several months later – just yesterday, in fact – the experience was repeated. Finally, the painting was ready and , the appointment made, Czer received me. The painting was on an easel, and magnificent. “It’s such a relief that I still like it,” I said, having been away from it for so long. And then we embarked on a long, philosophical but also practical discussion about the principles and application of conservation techniques – a part of the high aesthetic experience of having taken the painting to him – and the conversation made forays into music and reading and a whole bevy of ways in which we receive and are altered by art. At the end of it, we walked over to The Gilder, next door, where a more muted but equally agreeable craftsman, Peter, helped me decide about the best way to mount it.

I’d spent over two hours in Laszlo and Peter’s company, and left their studios’ courtyard in an altogether different mood. I felt high and cleansed of the rotten experience of having been made to spend a fortune on the house while suspecting what value there really was in that expenditure. Value was the operative word.

“I don’t think about cost,” Czer had said (while sticking to his original estimate exactly). “I think about value.” That value, he explained in the most articulate terms, is determined by thinking about the object and its particular needs – techniques of conservation that have evolved over centuries and are now little short of remarkable. What he does, Czer says, is unnatural – in so far as he is arresting the decay that is a part of the natural life of the painting – but so much a part of him now that he recognizes the needs of the painting instinctually and, it is clear, is quite unimpeded by any feelings of doubt. His father was a blacksmith and now he is a master of his own trade recognized internationally. Fascinating, it was to feel in the hands of a kind of sorcerer. I left feeling sorry that I could not afford to take other paintings back to him and learn more about his world (though knowing that I would find other ways to do so). And his art had been medicine for me, my funk dispelled as had been the dirt and the cracks from the painting. How thrilling to see work well done.

“I told you not to make assumptions,” said my wife, Sarah, with a certain satisfaction. At the screening of Barney’s Version at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday the 12th – just a couple of days after the movie had its world première in Venice, I’d been bothered by the fella in the row behind me. I thought I’d heard him laughing some, but mostly he was shifting and turning in his seat and seeming not to enjoy the film at all.

We’d watched the producer, Robert Lantos, speak before the showing (as is the custom in Toronto) and introduce the cast, including a somewhat frosty Minnie Driver apparently pissed off that her monologues had been cut, and my mother who was gracious and congratulated the movie’s makers. During the first half of the film, the mostly Anglophone Canadian audience had laughed loudly – more so than in Venice, where the audience depended on sub-titles – and it all seemed to be proceeding nicely, but in the second I’d become aware of the fidgeting behind me and wondered if the movie wasn’t actually working out so well at all.

Toronto, note, is a much bigger festival than Venice’s, and the public plays a much bigger role in it, lined up for blocks at several of the Festival’s many venues. The “gala” screenings, however, can be odd, what with many people coming who care less about movies than about being seen at the festival, so that there can be a lot of crinkling of sweet wrappers and talking and getting out of and into seats. But the fella behind me just seemed not to want to be there, and I was hard put not to turn to him and say, “Listen, mate, if you don’t like the movie, get on out; you’re ruining it for the rest of us, who do.”

I didn’t, not during the showing, anyway, but at the end of it there was strong applause and as the lights were brought up on Lantos and Paul Giamatti and Rosamund Pike et al., the fella behind me, in a purple shirt, leapt over the back of his seat and out of the theatre and into the glassy atrium of Roy Thomson Hall. The crowd in our box spilled out through the same door and into a corner of the atrium where the actors were gathered and receiving their congratulations. “Who is that guy in the purple shirt?” I asked Minnie Driver, who has the tall body and thin waist but also electric and actually very sexy air of a nineteen-forties actress who might lose her temper at any time and without explanation (and any subsequent need for it).

“That’s Rob Brydon,” she said. “He’s a very talented Welsh actor.”

“I’d like to have a word with him,” I said to Sarah, who knew how pissed off I was.

“Don’t start a fight,” she said.

“Yeah,” said a smiling, langorous Scott Speedman, leaning against the railing. “Don’t start a fight, not now.”

Steve Coogan, the fantastically talented English comic who stars with Brydon in the movie, The Trip, appeared in the melée. Suddenly Driver and Brydon, the guy in the purple shirt, were in a scrum of London movie people in a crowd of Canadians and Americans. They appeared to be looking around themselves impatiently.

“Let’s get out of here,” said the redheaded moll to either Coogan or Brydon, I was not sure.

“Yeah, let’s do that,” said Minnie Driver.

“Right then,” said Coogan, scruffy with beard and wearing a tweed walking cap.

It disappointed me that Coogan, one of my own comic idols, was so eager to leave, obviously not having enjoyed the movie much at all either.

“I hate the English,” I said to Sarah. “They’ll always look down at Canada and Canadians and everything we do.”

“Don’t make assumptions,” said Sarah.

We hobnobbed for a while and then went to a party being thrown for Barney’s Version on the converted top floor of a parking lot in Yorkville, the fairly chichi part of downtown Toronto where the hotels that celebrities and the big studios use are but it was loud and noisy and there was no food and so we left quite rapidly and went to a friend’s house to have a late meal of prosciuto e melone and spaghetti alla Bolognese. (It is hard, after a holiday as we had, to put a week in Venice behind one.)

“That guy really pissed me off,” I said, before launching into a diatribe encouraged by my late several glasses of wine. I was about to start on another – about Blackberrys and iPhones and those who seem never to be able to let go of them – when Sarah handed me hers and its display of the Twitter feed from Rob Brydon, said actor, whom I’d come close to assaulting at the Roy Thomson Hall.

“Hi from Toronto,” said Brydon’s Tweet. “Mr Coogan and I saw Barney’s Version last night. INCREDIBLE. I predict that it will win Oscars. Such a great film … Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman and Rosamund Pike and Minnie Driver are all exceptional. WOW!”

“I told you not to make assumptions,” she said.

And if there’d been a hat about, I would have eaten it.

In summer, relaxed more than I usually do, away from the city and the myriad ways in which it bleeds a person: contractors, idiot city councilors, parking enforcers giving tickets for leaving the car more than 14 inches away from the sidewalk (that one my favourite, as the ticket was given in the middle of January, the curb not visible, and immediately in front of our house).

There’s a mathematical formula to be worked out some time that compares the urban and the rural economy and illustrates the inverse relation of the factors of money and good will in the sum of daily exchanges we make. It’s not just a matter of the possibility of being kind being stamped out in the city, it’s about the way in which that kindness is actually currency – or takes the place of it. Margaret Thatcher, way back when, said that “there is no such thing as society.” She was looking for a way for her new Conservative Britain not to have to care for people who could not take care of themselves, and attacking socialist ideas of the common good was one step in that direction.

She was wrong, of course, for although yours and mine may be different there is absolutely something called “society” for each of us though it is really no more (and no less) than the sum of all those mundane transactions – on the street, with the neighbour, with the dry cleaner, the cashier at the grocery store and the streetcar or bus driver – that make up our day. We can gauge the quality of our life by the health and satisfaction we derive from these very ordinary transactions.

In the Nova Scotia village where I am fortunate enough to be able to spend time on a few occasions during the year, good will is not so much bartered as proffered in all sorts of ways, call them transactions, that not only cater to needs but strengthen the ties of the community. I write and, when I can, do so in the village’s and the region’s interests, and people are welcome to use my house for their friends or relatives and so on. One pair of friends, much more integral characters to the village than I could ever be, have a large and very beautiful vegetable garden and let their friends cook with the produce from it readily. (When it is suggested they might sell the vegetables, they pooh-pooh the idea. “That would make it work,” they say.) Others offer fresh fish, or labour. When my wife cracked a tooth, another neighbour – a dentist – insisted that she come out to his practice to have it done for naught. “That way, you’ll visit again,” he said. Last year we ferried stuff to Toronto for him, though we never did so with an eye to the future; we just did it because we could.

It’s a banal realization to see how frequently occurring and important to the health of the community these exchanges are but as I get on and am weighed down by the burden of worthless, meaningless and time wasting complexities that constitute my city day – all that shit in the newspaper that Olaf would not eat, all those exchanges with yet more rapacious conmen and people, even people I know, who say one thing and do another (something you would never get away with in a village where every one knows each other: you could do it, but you would be remembered for it) – I find myself not only wanting to state this banality but to work out that formula so I never let go of it.

And what is it?

The greater the number of people forced to live together, the more an impartial system of money and contracts will take the place of un-notarized human transactions and trust. It’s in the second part of that equation that we lose out, of course, as “trust” includes a whole packet of indices that we do not bother to quantify, let alone measure, because we cannot. They include things like admiration, affection and a sense of shared interests and outcomes – quantities that are vague not because we do not know exactly what they are (we do, and especially when they are transgressed) but because they do not need to be articulated in the sort of small community where every one is likely to meet the others regardless of whether or not they are “friends” with them. By contrast, contracts – agreements that, as W.G. Sebald said of tall buildings, invite their own destruction – seek to dispel these vague quantities from the realm of their consideration. Commodities from peaches to real estate have fixed prices because we assume the people who trade them have no personality, or at least not a personality that can affect the value of the exchange.

It is a model of surpluses, I suppose, that says where there is no perceived surplus, then everyone and their welfare will be seen as essential to the prosperity of the community – whatever meagre skills I have writing are seen to be as critical to the health of the village as my friend’s vegetables, another’s labour or somebody else’s wisdom. All these very different things are perceived to have a comparable and even equivalent value in the structure of the village and in the face of its real and hypothetical needs. A fancy way of saying someone will lend me his car or offer to pick stuff up in town if I am not going because that person may need me to do so in the future, but also because we position ourselves as members of a community that will only cohere if good will, and not currency, is the measure of our exchange.

At some base level, the members of a village know this; at some base level, the residents of a city forget this. The more a society grows, the more it depends on a system that uses money as the measure of surpluses and as a reserve against needs that by its very nature has absolutely no human quality. It provides no check on personal behaviour that might be described as moral. When I challenge the contractor, or the person taking my call at Shaw or Rogers, that person or the company they represent is free to move on without my views or feelings having any real consequence because there is always another transaction with another stranger to be had in which the exchange of money will take the place of trust and whatever reputation is accumulated from upholding or breaking it. All that is dealt in is money, and the pivotal place we in the city have given it makes me miss that place where other human qualities mattered. Where they “counted”. Like coins. Only better.

Sandy Cove, an exquisite and storied fishing village halfway down the Digby Neck, on the Bay of Fundy in southwestern Nova Scotia, is the hideaway I could not do without. Were this an English village – and with its United Empire Loyalist history, it verges on being so – our house would be the pub. Such is the nature of the village, however, that a local would of course be redundant as friends gather on the beach, or come sunset at the bluff looking over it and the fishing weir on the western Bay of Fundy side, and then in their kitchens for a pot luck, a bit of a musical jam, or just for conversation. The fella who decided to charge for any of this would soon be bust.

My days have an idyllic rhythm here. The Neck is narrow, less than a mile wide, and at seven a.m. I have my morning coffee on the deck where I look east to the wharf on the Baie Ste Marie side – yes, I’ve started again (but I make my own espresso and not from any of those damn Nestlé pods) – and beyond, on a good day, the port of Weymouth on the Acadian French shore is visible. Then I’ll work until noon or so before taking the dogs and myself for a dip in the bracingly frigid Bay of Fundy and afterwards a more authentic “swim” in Little Lake. Then lunch – of fresh haddock or scallops from the local fish plant, so good I won’t eat either anywhere else – and then a little reading in the early afternoon before my eyes close: “research,” as I tell the kids. On a good day I’ll get a couple more hours’ work done in between four and six.

Life is good here, very good, and free of all the exhausting ways in which the city makes its demands. Here I am slowly but effectively catching up on all the work that was horridly not done in the last few months as my Toronto home underwent harrowing, over-extended and wildly over-budget renovations. (So common is this story, that I believe contractor estimates should be considered actionable examples of false advertising.) The book project that was in hand in March but out of reach from April through June is at last in view again and the other work that I have lined up – a few radio programs, a couple of essays – seems manageable and not the stuff of nightmare that has me waking up at four and feeling like a fraud – that spectre of French 432, again. Here I can give other authors the space and the faith they deserve without innumerable chores, bits of list making or seeds of rage busting in on every sentence.

This week I have been reading several novels – I keep different ones in different room – all of them Canadian. Not a plan, just the way it is, though, on the other hand, I also know how profoundly bored I am with the petty, invidious and misguided assailing of ‘CanLit’ in the media by a strident bunch of mediocre writers of little or no achievement. I can’t call them “critics,” because they aren’t. They are bitter little people with no idea of just how unoriginal they are. They do not see that they, rather than the novelists they are attacking, are the conventional ones. Typically, this bunch attack Canadian novelists for eulogizing place, the domestic life or, in this fallacious cartoon of an apparently clichéd literature, for being stuck in some house on the prairie and not, say, writing novels set outside the country or in cities. In truth they are the ones operating in a long line of self-loathing Canadians who wish they belonged to a club with its headquarters elsewhere. They are missing the point.

But, in truth, who expects much of books pages these days? The Globe & Mail, the other day, ran an editorial that declared the book not to be dead citing, with a spectacular lack of imagination, the success of the Stieg Larsson novels (“Reports of the demise of the book are greatly exaggerated,” August 4th 2010), but its book section is a far cry from what it was when, in 2000 or so, the newspaper rivalry with the National Post was at its peak and, true to form, on the day that Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, the paper had dedicated precious arts pages space to Margaret Atwood. Again. (Their coverage of Canadian films is not much better, our movie-makers apparently limited to Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Deepa Mehta.)

Books coverage is no better in other papers. Back in 2000, the Toronto Star had just a few pages but a section that had a clear sense of national purpose and that gave Canadian stories proper and interesting attention; now these same pages are a lacklustre, pointless joke. Even the Quill and Quire, the magazine of the book trade, is a mess. I have no hesitation in saying that I have never seen the Canadian discussion of books in such a sorry state though I suppose I have only been paying attention to them for a dozen years – and the e-reader phenomenon is no excuse. Were I ever asked to be a books editor again (I was for a while and headed Canada’s first stand-alone all-colour books section with contributors from all around the globe, that was fun), I’d splash across the head of the opening page, the words: IT’S NOT HOW YOU READ BUT WHAT YOU ARE READING THAT MATTERS.

All the novels I have been reading this week are Canadian. The first of these, Piers’ Desire, is by Marianne Ackerman, a Montreal writer whose love of things French extends in this story to Avignon and a middle-aged male writer living there. Marianne, you should know, is my boss so I suppose nothing I say about it can be taken on faith but you know as well as I that I have to be able to stand by whatever I write in this small country so why would I bother mentioning it were my position not defensible? I liked Piers’ Desire very much. Its story is slightly redolent of another age when getting away to do anything, let alone write, actually seemed possible because the Internet had not yet reduced the idea of “away” to a fiction (this, at the very same time that its virtual world undermines the user’s state of being “here”) least in our psyches) though, on the other hand, its characters and situations render it most definitely a story of now. It’s winding narrow streets and architectural spaces, from Papal cathedrals to small rooms, are convincing but also her array of characters – the thriller writer, Piers Le Gris, who could use a little of Sandy Cove to win his writer’s routine back; the landlady, an older woman who played a part as a young girl in the French Resistance and who owes something to Simone Signoret in the film of John Braine’s Room at the Top; Magali, the wayward teenage girl who—he can’t help himself (this is France and, besides, the book is at its hardest point of being nearly done) – distracts him, and Moloud, an equally misguided adolescent whose troubles are amplified by being French-born but of Arab descent.

The other three speak to Canada directly. Summer is for picking up the unexpected and the first of these novels, Maclean, I bought because my wife Sarah, a publisher, had heard its New Brunswick author Allan Donaldson speak and spoke so interestedly of him. What a pleasing discovery the book is. Maclean is a crisply written novel – and, at 160 pages, short. It tells the story of a soldier returning to his New Brunswick village from the trenches of World War One and his alcoholism and his inability to fit in. There is, in a way, nothing “new” at all about the book (“novel,” after all, is a word that essentially means new), which leads me to admire it and its author all the more. Right from the opening paragraph, in which he describes the muddy battlefields of France, the reader senses he is in sure hands. Donaldson is equally adept at describing battle, the mill-town landscape of New Brunswick, and Maclean’s flashbacks and regretted life. There is the toughness of David Adams Richards here, and the eye for male despair of the early Richard Wright. And in all this weariness, there is light. Donaldson has another book out this autumn called The Case Against Owen Williams, and I shall certainly read it.

Kathleen Winter’s first novel, Annabel, is an altogether different creature that is also riveting from the very first page. I was part of a jury that awarded Kathleen Winter Newfoundland’s Winterset Prize a couple of years ago, and even I am taken aback by this book’s power. At its most basic, Annabel is the story of a hermaphrodite child raised in Labrador. It is about the struggle of genders within one child, and how that struggle makes the child another thing entirely, and the struggle of those around the child to come to terms or even acknowledge what can hardly be spoken. Kathleen Winter’s sense of place, of the landscape of Labrador and her sensitivity to the small numbers of people who make a bargain with it for a living there, is exceptional, and her subject is thrilling because – hard to manage these days – it really is new and has the consequence of making at least this reader look around himself at people and communities he thought he knew and wondering what secrets have been kept there. Yet neither is the book about being a hermaphrodite to the exclusion of other things. Annabel’s story is a metaphor for all kinds of suppression and utterly, deeply moving.

Kathleen is sister to Michael, an equally talented writer whose playful illustrations improved the only book I’ve written a few years back, and who also served as the focus of its Newfoundland chapter. One of the pleasures of getting on a bit is discerning those among the explosion of writers in their twenties and thirties who will stay the course and to be able to follow the trajectories of certain artistic careers as journeys in themselves. Michael Winter is, to me, a fascinating and highly original writer whose work must be noted on the one hand for its entertainment and, on the other, because every book he writes is at the same time, a declaration against his craft. In This All Happened, he played with the idea of writers making things up; in The Big Why, he challenged the conventions of historical fiction; and in his new novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, he inverts Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that the recounting even of “true” stories is fiction (if only because the mere act of selecting memories to recount them is an arbitrary one), and decides that the best way to write the novel of the murder of a woman who, in 1993, was stabbed 31 times in St John’s, Newfoundland, is to hand over all right of representation to the characters themselves. He has written his novel by selecting verbatim from the words the characters themselves used in the subsequent trial and, in a sense, making up nothing. True to form, Winter’s book puts the value of the novelist’s contribution on trial though it still doesn’t manage to convict him. There is artifice here, plenty of it – and, as with his sister’s and Donaldson’s novels, there is not just a rooting in place but an outright love of it. Pace CanLit’s tedious, baying snipers, there is nothing provincial at all about any of these books. You realize, the more you read, that whatever their universal truths, almost all great literature is local.