Revolutions by Alex Good

Author:Alex Good
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-02-22T16:13:10+00:00

Killing the Beaver

Reading the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize

A Family Affair: Giller People?

Six years ago I wrote a commentary on the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The title, “Looking Backward,” highlighted a curious sense of time common to the five books on that year’s shortlist. In the essay, I observed how in each book “narrative—fiction’s engine of forward motion—does not progress except by tiny increments, while constantly leaping—via flashbacks, letters, dreams, memories, diary entries, or other crudely employed devices—into the past.” The keynote image was the portage of canoes in Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air (the eventual winner, remember?), which seems to move faster in reverse than it does going forward. “Seconds ticked forward and years swept backward”: at this rate, would the doomed travellers ever arrive? And would the Gillers, a sclerotic institution headed by a caste of Canadian cultural dinosaurs—clearly residents of Hay’s barrens, a “land barely out of the ice age, a place no different from how it had been a hundred years or a thousand years ago”—ever change?

Looking back on “Looking Backward,” the landmarks tossed up by the 2007 shortlist have now been almost entirely erased. Attending that year’s gala, Globe and Mail book reviews editor Martin Levin wondered how many of the five books would “still be celebrated, or even read, in a hundred years,” then admitted it was possible that “the non-winners might already have begun a fade into obscurity.” He wasn’t jumping the gun. I thought Hay’s novel might stick around for a while if it were made into the television program then rumoured to be in the works, but that otherwise we probably wouldn’t be hearing about any of the shortlisted books again. I had underestimated the strength of Ondaatje’s brand, which led to Divisadero, the worst book on the list, being not only kept in print but made into some kind of musical that briefly appeared on a Toronto stage (honest!). And so while oblivion will have to hunger for the Master a bit longer, the other four titles have duly disappeared and were nowhere to be found when I went looking for them recently in a couple of local bookstores.

Such erosion was predictable—few books have staying power in our accelerated culture—but what about the prize itself? Was it, I wondered, going to change? Or would it continue to dig already well-worn ruts even deeper into the Canadian literary landscape? As one indicator of where things have been heading, let’s take a look at the matter of the Giller People: those names that keep popping up perennially as jurors and nominees.

There seem to be a relatively small coterie of writers who constitute Giller People (or, as they were initially dubbed by a boosting Globe and Mail editor, the “People Who Matter”). As Stephen Henighan has noted, “one of the problems with People Who Matter, particularly in Canada, is that there aren’t very many of them, so the names keep repeating.” These repeating names, a group Henighan describes as “a small clutch

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