ORTH VANCOUVER writer Claudia Casper has had the experience every aspiring author dreams about. After five years of juggling the demands of work, marriage, pregnancy and a srnali child, chipping away four or five hours a day to complete her first novel, all seven pub- lishers she contacted asked to read the manuscript and three of the biggest in the country offered to publish it. : _ _ Casper handled her own negotiations and clinched a deal with Penguin Canada, who launched The Reconstruction earlier this month. Stardust! Cinderella shai! go to the ball! But hold off scribbling your magnum opus to Penguin. Best to read The Reconstruction first. It only takes a few pacagraphs to recognize that this Story of a woman sculptor undergo- ” ing the destruction of her sterile ‘Martiage to a doctor while she works on a museum-commissioned reconstruction of “Lucy”, mankind's most ancient female ancestor, is not simply the work of avery gifted amateur. Jn fact, Casper has been writing for 15 of her 39 years, has won Event magazine and B.C Federation of Writers competitions with her short fiction, worked as a typesetter ‘at Arsenal Pulp Press locally and -even took a screen-writing course to help; develop the sense of struc- ture and pacing essential to carry a longer work of fiction. She studied the structure of the novel as painstakingly as her character Margaret stud- ies the casts of Lucy’s small bones and the imprint of her footsteps, frozen in time in vol- canic ash. Ironically, it was Casper’s attempt to get away from reading so much fiction that inspired her first novel. Six years ago. when she went into Duthie’s Bookstore vaguely seeking “something good” in the vast non-fic- tion shelves, a helpful clerk recommended Donald Johanson's Lucy: The Beginnings of Human Kind. Lightning struck and Casper emerged from the book cellar with a novel sprouting in her brain like a bulb forced in a glass jar. “{ sensed that Don Johanson and other researchers were ‘intrigued with the idea of who Lucy was, but they couldn't Speculate because they're scientists.” Casper recalls, “Then T realized that’s exactly what a novelist can do. [ started thinking about what it would mean to a modern woman to confront Lucy as an ancestor.” Casper deftly uses the physicul reconstruction of Lucy both as a plot device and as a metaphorical skeleton to sup- port Margaret’s speculations about the nature and evolution of monogamy, love, sex and the sense of individual identity provoked by the ambivalent emotions aroused during the disintegration of her loveless marriage. The real set of ‘Lucy’ footprints preserved in volcanic ash, showing a small “afarensis” female wandering slightly away from the group, becomes a particularly powerful sym- bol of Margaret's own hesitant steps toward a new self-defi- nition. The footprints, shadowed by those of a tentatively fol- lowing male, have sparked all kinds of theories Casper had to consider while doing her research for the novel. “There's an obvious temptation to interpret the footprints metaphorically as those of Adam and Eve, the first married couple.” she notes, plotting perfection John Moore interviews Claudia Casper “And there is definitely a mythic tone in much of the writing about this science. Someone described evolution as ‘the modern creation myth’ and there is a sense in which that is very true, The language used by some writers on the subject is more mythic than scientific.” Having studied language and litera- ture at the University of Toronto — including a course from Canada’s greatest critical analyst of myth in literature, Northrop Frye -—~ Casper * ays was well-equipped to read between the lines of scientific books and papers and to sift facts from speculation and hypotheses from polemics. “The discoveries we're talking about are really only about 20 years old and at that time a tot of women were entering the field (of anthropology).” she observes, “While | read some feminist interpretations [ didn’t agree with, | think the input of women scientists is very Important because it meant that a whole new range of concepts are being considered.” That Casper is able to explore so many of those possibil- ities in The Reconstruction is a testament to her dedication Timothy Renshaw _ hopping The Raven, 1052 Deep Cove . Rd., North Vancouver. 929- 3033. Open everyday from 11 a.m. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Vegetarian options. A few. Take the kids or cali a babysitter? Call a babysitter. pisode No. 3 of Table Hopping's North Shore pub crawl: in which department pub spe- cialists journey to the pleas- ant eastern land of Deep Cove and observe the renais- sance of The Raven. In charge of that most welcome Raven revival: Dave Feller. west-side See Raven page 13 to a concept that has unfortunately become somewhat quaint in our literature: that of ‘craft’. The Reconstruction runs to some 65,000 words, a ~ respectable length for a novel, yet every chapter, every page. every paragraph, is as carefully crafted as were a short story, without sacrificing the narrative impetus essen- tial to keep the pages of a novel turning. Achieving this effect in a story that isn’t a “plot-driven” thriller, takes some doing and Casper knew what she was up against. . “knew plotting wotild be a weakness,” she admits, but she sought no input | from readers along the way, relying on her own instincts and training to target the soft spots. “‘l always knew what I had to change, what needed more work, and ] didn’t want ° anyone telling me what [ already knew.” She also knew she could expeci little help from edi- tors, that the days when 4 Maxwell Perkins would shape the unwieldy manu-_ scripts of a Thomas Wolfe into something publish- able were long gone. “1 don’t think that kind of relationship between edi- tors and writers exists anymore, except maybe between Nan Talese and Pat Conroy. I knew I was responsible for the final product.” The proof of the pudding came when she gave.a draft to her husband, James Griffin, a co-owner of the Vancouver Film School, to read. Film producers have a hyper-acute sense of narrative flow and Casper knew Griffin's reaction would be the acid-test. . “He's my best critic. When Jim read it and liked it, that was a very big moment. | knew all [ had to do was a bit of backing and filling. The worst moments were when | thought, ‘I'm not smart enough to do this!’, when my brain ~ actually hurt from thinking.’ “But writing the final chapter was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.” Not to spoil the story, but in that chapter: Margaret — enlightened by her mother’s death — at last seems to step into Lucy's footprints, to stand alone in the spotlight of time, slightly apart from the tribe. Perhaps about to go off with a male in some pair-bonded union. Perhaps about to be killed by a leopard for having left the security of the group, embodying the human dilemma. {t's what Casper calls the “explosive spinning heady wedding of dust to conscious- ness. in all its terrible and exalting uncertainty.