Book review: The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson
Published by Thomas Allen, 310 pp, $32.95, hardcover
Cultural activists take note: Caroline Adderson’s new novel was financed in part by a grant from the Canada Council, and that’s going to be a useful piece of information the next time Stephen Harper and his evangelical friends start taking potshots at the funding of left-leaning art. The Sky Is Falling may be about a young band of radical peace activists—near contemporaries of the Squamish Five—but it is a deeply and disappointingly conservative piece of work.
Adderson no doubt sees it differently, and makes a point of quoting Anton Chekhov’s rebuke of those who look for political meanings in art. But as any good Marxist will tell you, the disavowal of politics is in itself a political statement, and one that inevitably favours the status quo. No wonder the moral here seems to be “Leave well enough alone.”
Caught at the Peace Arch border crossing with a pathetically ill-made bomb (smuggled into their van by the most rabid of the activists), the peace group implodes. Adderson’s narrator, Russian-literature student Jane Zwierzchowski, sheds her convictions like a moulting snake and is soon rewarded with a cute doctor husband, a son, and a beautiful Shaughnessy home. Sonia Parker, in contrast, refuses to cooperate with the authorities, spends 20 years behind bars, and ends up in an apartment (poor thing!) in New Westminster (shudder!) with her bull-dyke ex-con lover (the horror!).
While The Sky Is Falling purports to be an exploration of how fear can motivate violent rebellion, its implicit message is that of a Victorian romance: marry well, or else. The book’s literary approach is similarly unadventurous: even the metafictional conceit of using quotes from Chekhov as a kind of running commentary falls flat, largely because Adderson follows his advice to Maxim Gorky so literally. “Take out adjectives and adverbs whenever you can,” the great Russian wrote, and for Adderson this translates into prose that is clear, efficient, and surprisingly lifeless.
Never mind that she’s skating blithely over some of the big issues of our time—the peace activists of the 1980s might have been naive, but they did succeed in stalling the nuclear doomsday clock for at least a couple of decades. Never mind, too, that the stakes once Zwierzchowski is outed as a former “terrorist” are so low.
Her son’s best friend can no longer come over to play? Big friggin’ deal. They’re 15; they’ll figure it out.
Mark The Sky Is Falling down as an aberrant lapse from a writer who can do much, much better.
Comments
5 Comments
Barbara Lambert
Sep 15, 2010 at 3:20pm
It’s hard to believe that a reviewer for an online source as savvy as Straight.com could so miss-read Caroline Adderson’s remarkable new novel The Sky is Falling.
Clearly the brilliant sparks of complex human behaviour that light up this novel have eluded the Straight’s reviewer entirely. I can only conclude that he has neither the ability, nor the imagination, to picture the sort of terror -- and idealism -- unleashed on a generation young students at the time of the missile threat, nor the human understanding to grasp how this terror and idealism could play out in confusion, aching moments of misplaced love, desperate bungling.
Adderson’s depiction of the cell-like organization of the various political movements of the time is spot-on, and her description of the communal living arrangements of the group of students who join together to fight world annihilation is marvelous. We hear the music, smell the incense and the compost, listen to the creaking bedsprings as lovemaking goes on behind thin walls while others fold “peace” cranes or try to study; and we smell the flaring, searing, jealousy that ultimately leads to chaos.
I’m not sure what the reviewer means by saying that Adderson is “skatng blithely over some of the big issues of our time.” I guess that love and death and the end of the world don’t quite cut it for Alexander Varty.
Eslin
Sep 15, 2010 at 7:11pm
The reviewer is correct. This is a politically naive piece of fiction, poorly plotted, low stakes. Chekov appears to be thrown in merely for literary prestige. Browse at the library if you must.
Dougster
Sep 16, 2010 at 9:38pm
Could Varty have possibly read the novel any MORE literally? He's practically doing mental arithmetic. Anybody who spends years writing a book about a particular time can hardly be described as "skating blithely". Examine the absence in local literature of references to the 1980's & that time for starters. Where are all these other novels examining or even referring locally to this time? All we get from this review is pompous Varty declarations. An Aberrant Lapse from a critic who likes the sound of himself too much. As critique it's weak and reactionary rather than informed and considered.
Ms. Reads-A-Lot
Oct 3, 2010 at 1:22pm
Kudos to Varty. For too long, in Canada, we've paid homage to boring domestic novels with some literary device pasted on to give it credibility. I'm impressed he has the courage to call a spade a spade. After all, what use is a critic to the reading public if he doesn't tell us his honest opinion?
Cancon
Apr 11, 2011 at 8:35pm
The Central Library does have a reference copy of this book, and if you have an hour to kill, perhaps even less, you’ll realize that the reviewer of this book was being way too generous.
The “bull dyke” stereotype borders on being hateful. As for the doctor-husband with wonderful abs, the late Sylvia Plath viciously and brilliantly ripped apart the paper-mí¢ché persona of the athletic medical student boyfriend in The Bell Jar. But then Plath was a genius.
As for the pretentious, superficial references to Russian Literature, couldn’t the author have bothered to make a passing reference to the Russian geniuses who were terrorized during the Bolshevik and Stalinist purges?—Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolay Gumilyov, Ossip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Boris Pasternak—just to name a few.
Anyone who has been wire-tapped, or interrogated in some sterile grey room, or illegally finger-printed, or has had to endure libellous and defamatory witch hunts by idiot provocateurs – Anyone who has SURVIVED this horror will find solace in the work of dead Russian poets rather than this shit.