If you listen to Canada Reads, it’s actually much better than either Vartanian’s defence or Kamboureli’s condemnation suggests. Jim Cuddy, for example, turned out to be an astute and careful reader in both of the years he participated. If he helped Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing become a bestseller, it’s not because brainwashed Blue Rodeo fans were willing to buy everything that won his stamp of approval, but rather because he made a forceful case that the novel combined its accuracy of historical detail with archetypal resonance.
Literature thrives on acrimony, on argument, on the tug-and-pull of competing visions. Whatever else you can say about Canada Reads, it has fostered lively talk about books. It is, at its best, superb radio: the voices on the show are impassioned, idiosyncratic, entertaining, and contentious. Even when they lack a sophisticated literary vocabulary, they bring real emotional intensity to the proceedings, which often generates genuine drama, as when filmmaker Nelofer Pazira became snappy after the defeat of the book she had championed, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.
One captivating aspect of the show is the chance to eavesdrop into the book talk of non-bookish people. It’s no surprise that different readers bring different values to the table, and the resulting interplay and clash sometimes produces fruitful debates. Politicians such as Kim Campbell often see reading as a form of civic engagement. For Campbell, the value of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is that it would get Canadians “talking about issues of our time that affect our shared future.” Literary writers, of course, often bristle at this sort of pragmatic, utilitarian view of fiction. When we’re all united on the Elysian Fields, it’ll be fun to introduce Campbell to Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote in his introduction to Bend Sinister that “there exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction… I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (or in journalistic and commercial parlance: ‘great books’).”
Often jurors resort to the personal connections they feel with a novel. “What I’d just like to say about this book is I really related to the realism of this novel and how it related to my father’s past,” Donna Morrissey said in a heartfelt petition on behalf of Rockbound. “My father is a very beautiful man, and he’s always talking about the past with such love. Not nostalgia, just love. Because he spent so much time alone in the woods and in the sea. When he talks about it, his eyes soften, and there’s such love in him for those days… These were the kind of men who built nations. I would just want to share with Canada these proud Atlantic Canadian men from our past.” This touching display of filial piety goes against the grain of academic literary analysis, which tends to emphasize formalist properties over personal connections. In a persuasive and deftly argued chapter of her doctorial thesis, literary scholar Susanne Marshall sees the celebration of Rockbound as part of a larger tendency to promote “primitivist, nostalgic and static representations of the Atlantic region.”
As an example of how Canada Reads facilitates zesty debate, consider this memorable dispute from 2008, with Dave Bidini and Lisa Moore using Thomas Wharton’s Icefields to argue about their reading philosophies:
Bidini: Aren’t those characters a little small? I would have liked to have known more about the characters. I would have liked to have gotten into the heads of those characters a little bit more. But as a writer he doesn’t dwell on that; he dwells on them lighting out and discovering.
Moore: No, because there are silences here, there are spaces here, where the reader brings something to those characters.
Bidini: I don’t want to bring anything.
Moore: Well, then you’re lazy. You’re a lazy reader.
Bidini: Is that right?
Moore: Yes.
Bidini: No, the writer spends his or her time in their rooms bleeding over a book so you don’t have to when you read it.
Here we see in stark form two different ideologies of reading: Bidini’s populist love of accessible fiction clashing with Moore’s call for strenuous reading. My sympathies are with Moore, but I appreciate Bidini’s bold statement of his case. In a regrettable reversion to Canadian standards of politeness, Moore later apologized for insulting Bidini — a shame, since this exchange is precisely the type of lively literary discourse we need.
Canada Reads choices are never passively accepted by the country at large. Rather, they tend to provoke intense debate and counterproposals. “What we’ve determined here is there really isn’t a consensus,” Jim Cuddy wisely noted in 2004. “We have five books, and they are all worthy. Of all the people working here, you couldn’t get the same list of five in a row. Reading is more often than not a solitary pleasure, or least one shared with people of similar mind.” It’s hard to dispute these words, and the failure of consensus should be seen as a virtue: the show has proven that Canada contains multitudes too discordant to be bound in a single volume.
The books that end up on the short list and win tend, on the whole, to be decent and rewarding reads, often much more quirky and off the beaten path than choices by the Governor General’s Award or the Giller Prize. At worst, some Canada Reads winners tend to be a little too middle of the road, a bit too full of life lessons and pressing political issues. Lowbrow genre works — thrillers, romances, fantasy — never make much headway (although spoken word artist Jemini gamely made the case for Nalo Hopkinson’s zombie-infested Brown Girl in the Ring ). Only once did a barbed-wire highbrow novel, Hubert Aquin’s Next Episode, carry the day, an event that provoked much consternation. Still, the superior middlebrow novel is, in fact, a Canadian specialty. Canada Reads is doing nothing more nor less than replicating our nation’s existent literary values.
