Beyond Robson Reviews There Is a Season
By Richard Eriksson on June 16, 2006 - 12:05pm
Degan Beley has a review of There Is a Season by Patrick Lane, the book selected for One Book One Vancouver:
"There is a Season" is Lane's memoir of a life of drinking and writing poetry. Now, for fun he likes to sit in the garden and watch birds instead. I jest , and cruelly, but 7 pages for a description of a garden is TOO LONG! Go for a walk or something! And if you thought that a life-long poet turned memoir writer would fill his prose with finely sharpened and painstakingly crafted metaphors, then you're right! Actually, they're not that sharp. The garden represents life. He was numbing himself with drugs and alcohol before and now he has come to life... blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry Patrick Lane, I really am. I know what it is like to put so much of yourself into your work and work so hard on it, but I didn't like it. I know that a lot of people did though, because McLelland & Stewart have a whole page of praise, including "Patrick Lane's There Is A Season is the best book I have read in a decade." So maybe it's me. I'm ok with that.One Book, One Vancouver - There is a Season
I'm about as unenthusiastic about a book about gardening as I was about a twenty-some-year-old book many people have already read. (That would be Obasan by Joy Kogawa, which I've read but have not yet reviewed, one year after it was selected as last year's book.) I'm still going to read There Is a Season however, and some day I'll get to reading One Book One Vancouver's first selection, Stanley Park, which sits patiently in the unread section of my bookshelf.
In other "One Book" news, Todd Wong points to Beyond the Book, which, among other mandates, "uses research methodologies drawn from both the humanities and social sciences to investigate whether mass reading events attract new readers and marginalized communities." Since starting with The Corporation, I've been interested in trying to follow the online community's reaction to the books selected, using PubSub feeds and the like, and I'm looking forwards to independent initiatives to participate in the community like Duncan's One Book One Internet. Of course it helps to read the book first, and the bookstore the Vancouver airport didn't have a copy so that I could read it on my recent 5 hour flight. That's probably what I get, though, for looking at a store with the Virgin brand.
I don't know much about writing poetry, but
I could write a book myself about drinking.
I spent three months back in 1970 at a center
which specialized in cleaning up people who
were hooked on either booze or drugs. The place
was run by the Ontario Government, and there were
about two hundred of us in there for treatment.
Only about 18 of us were alcoholics, and we were
all middle-aged at the time. The rest, a very cool
and "with it" crowd, were all young people in there
for their drug problems of one kind or the other.
I got along so well with that younger crowd that
before I left, I was practically running the place.
The head man, a psychiatrist almost hidden from view
by the piles of paperwork in folders all over his
desktop, invited me over to his office one day shortly
before my official release, and asked " Ray, have you
any plans for leaving here?" I remarked "And leave the
best home I ever had ? Are you smoking that wacky tobaccy
again?" He replied, "No, I'm not - but if you don't
decide to leave soon, I'm going to be over in one of
those wards, and you're going to be over here, running
the whole place all by yourself."
I thought about that for a minute, and asked "And what
would be so bad about that? These kids here think I'm
the only guy over 25 that they ever met who can be trusted,
and that gives me a bigger advantage than you've got,
as I'm sure you've already figured out."
He said, "That about sums it up, I'm afraid - and I'd
really like to keep on running this place."
So I replied, "Terrific! Just write a letter to my former
employers, and tell them I promise to stay away from the
snakebite medicine, if they'll agree to give my job back,
and then let's see what they say, shall we?"
He said, "That's a deal - I'll get it in the mail this
afternoon. And we'll talk some more about this when they
answer me."
I was out of there two weeks later, and half the kids in
the place were waving goodbye and wishing me well as I
threw my stuff in the car and left the parking lot.
At that time, I thought it was the end of the world,
but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened
to me. I got my old job back and even got promoted later.
And yes - I really could write a book about it.