Stepping next door

®» Stepping Westward, The Long
Search for Home in the Pacific

Northwest; Sallie Tisdale; Fitzhenry & Whiteside; $25.50.

® Sarah Canary; Karen Joy

Fowler; Fitzhenry & Whiteside; $27.95.

HEN SALLIE Tisdale says “‘! ignore Canada” ear-
ly in this extended homage to the Pacific Nor-
thwest, it will come as no great shock to Cana-

dian readers.

We're used to Seattle residents
who think Vancouver is a small
town in south Washington and,
when correctec’. assume you're
talking about someplace just south
of Nome.

Tisdale’s definition, which in-
cidentally overlooks Alaska, the
real U.S. Northwest, is motivated
less by chauvinism than by a need
to put geographic restraints on her
subject so she can write about
what she knows.

Her Pacific Northwest is essen-
tially the old Oregon Territory of
the Hudson Bay Co., casually
ceded to the U.S. in 1846 by the
powers-that-were in London.

Once you accept the boundaries
she sets herself, Stepping
Westward is a remarkable book:
part travelogue, part personal
memoir, with a good deal of
anecdotal history thrown in. .

Tisdale writes like Paul Theroux
turned inside-out: where he seeks
total geographical and social
alienation, remaining cynically.
disengaged from those he en-
counters, she. rambles around her
own very big.back yard, enthusing
over flora and fauna and per-
sonalities past and present, unique
to the region.

Inevitably, when a writer tackles
a large, loosely defined subject,
there are times when enthusiasm
turns to gush and the subject gets
lost in bursts of self-conscious
“writing.”

But on the whole, Stepping
Westward is a lorg fireside look at
next-door neigisbors most of us
oniy glimpse from the freeway on
our way to Disneyland.

The American Pacific Northwest
is also the setting for Karen Joy
Fowler's novel Sarah Canary,
which thoroughly takes the starch
out of one’s normally healthy
skepticism about a) first novels, b)
historical novels, and c) female
authors with three names.

Though Fowler clearly owes a

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

debt to E.L. Doctorow’s
anachronistic super-imposing of
contemporary sensibility on histor-
ical events, she has a lighter and
more deft touch than her suppos-
ed masier, and this tale of a mute
madwoman who appears to a
gang of Chinese railway workers in
the Washington Territory of 1873
reveals a rare talent for thoughtful
story-telling.

Sarah, the consummate outsider,
acquires a bizarre train of “pro-
tectors’’ and pursuers: Chin Ah
Kin, a shanghaied ‘‘sojourner” in
Gold Mountain who only wants to
go home and write the Imperial
Examinations for an already fast-
becoming-obsolete Mandarin bu-
reaucracy; B.}., philosophic, who
escapes from the local lunatic
asylum; Harold, an obsessed sur-
vivor of the Civil War's notorious
Andersonville POW camp; and
Adelaide Dixon, a suffragette
preaching radical feminism in in-
hospitable lumber and mining
camps.

Each ef them sees in Sarah a
mysterious and compelling reflec-
tion of their own alienation from
the fledgling European-styled
society struggling to establish itself
on the wild green edge of the
known world.

Sarah Canary is a marvellous first
novel that will make you want to
hunt down Fowler's previous story
collection, Artificial Things, and
pre-order her next novel.

Stand by your turntables

From page 253

Music Now: Are you one of
these people who are totally
anti-CD?

Nardwuar: “I like both. | think
eventually it will come out on CD.
But when it does come out, you
see the band The Mummies? They
refuse to be on CD. So on the CD
we'll begin the song and then brr-
tre, we'll’ say, ‘Sorry The Mum-
mies don’t want to be on the CD
so in their place we bring
you...We have a record of a kid
saying dear Canada thank you for
rescuing our people in Iran.

“The reason we did this (re-
cord format) is because you have
the look of it — you have the
book. How are we going to put
our book in a CD? It’s the bigness

of it all. It shows that something is
happening. It’s fun. People can
send away for stuff, and people do
have turntables.”

Music Now: Can we talk a lit-

tle bit about your vision for

the Nardwuar universe?

Nardwuar: One day at Flicker’s
Video in West Vancouver, hope-
fully one day we'll have the store
and I'll answer the phone,
‘NARDWUAR!!!l It will be a
famous store. We'll have the
videos to make some money, we'll
have T-shirts, skateboards, re-
cords, comic books, we'll have the
first Jack In the Box drive-through
in Canada. If Capers can do it, we
can do it -- because kids are
afraid to go for the health food.”

THIS IS ONE TEST
‘YOU WON'T WANT

TO BLOW

A roadside screening device
could be in the hands of

any police officer, any time,
anywhere in the province.

Wednesday, April 22, 1992 — North Shore News - 29

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