First, I zoomed through four graphic novels based on recommendations from friends: El Deafo by Cece Bell was sweet and a well-told story of a deaf child without being sentimental. I wasn't as impressed with Be Prepared by Vera Brosgel about a girl's experience at summer camp. Not particularly memorable, other than the image of the mother feeling guilty about making her unhappy kids stay a couple extra weeks at camp while she starts a new job in London. I also just finished reading Runaway Ralph (and the Mrs. Piggle-wiggle books) with the five-year-old, which brought back reflections about how many books about summer camp exist - and how I have almost zero experience and my kids have zero experience of sleep-away summer camp, except with boy scouts and a couple church camps here and there. But our neighbors send their kids away for six weeks to a camp in the mountains. A different subculture?
The third and fourth books were Gene Yuen's Boxers and the companion, Saints. These books tell about the Boxer Rebellion in China from the two opposing sides. It reveals the complexity of how history is told and retold, depending on the perspective of the author. I know next to nothing about Chinese history, and my knowledge of Asian culture is minimal, mostly formed from what I have learned as an adult from reading novels, biographies, and the research and experience of visiting Japan and living in Guam. Yuen's books were a quick peek at the conflict between Chinese who wanted to maintain their traditional society and the Christian missionaries from the West at the turn of the 20th century.
My favorite recent read is Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock. Cather never disappoints. I love her writing so much. Her voice is distinctive, but her subject matter is wide ranging. This book follows the develop of a young girl in colonial Quebec. Cecile Auclair tends house for her father and helps in his apothecary shop and makes herself beloved around town. Her mother died several years before the book opens, and the action takes place as Cecile is coming of age at the same time that her father is anticipating that they will finally return to France after more than a decade in Quebec in the late 1600s - early 1700s. They came to colonial Canada under the patronage of an aging count, who has offered the apothecary and his daughter portage back to the homeland. As the time draws near for the two to depart, Cecile becomes more reluctant to leave her adopted home.
The plot is slow - the book focuses more on character and on descriptions of life in a time long since past, a world long since buried. The bitter hardships of life in a relatively new colony are compounded by the hardships of life in Canadian winters. The winters are unforgiving, and the work of survival is never ending. Yet the focus of the characters is more on their day to day life, and their ability to hold on to the remnants of civility under duress. The trappings of society and court have followed them to Quebec.
But so have the traditions of the Church. The book is full of descriptions of the life of faith that Cecile leads. She fosters a young boy, the son of the local prostitute, who has an intense devotion to the Mass and the saints - perhaps partly because the sanctuary of the Church is such a refuge from the life he leads at home. The old bishop of the town is a stern leader but devoted to his people, while the new bishop is interested in accolades, riches, and growing the size of the diocese, the church, and the apostolic palace. The conflict between old and new is somewhat turned topsy-turvy here, because the old bishop has adapted to his new surroundings, while the new bishop attempts to bring the courtly practices of France to this new and wild place.
Cather recounts the stories of saints and the founders of the convents in Canada. She tells of miracles without irony. She gives detailed descriptions of the altar of the church, which has an altar which to Cecile looks just like what the Kingdom of Heaven would look like, "strong and unassailable." A statue of St. Anne is described as "noble, worn and sad," while the statue of the Blessed Mother and Child is "loveliest of all the Virgins in Kebec, a charming figure of young motherhood, - oh, very young, and radiantly happy" The little Jesus is a 'A child in a bright and joyful mood, both arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome, as if he were giving a fete for his little friends and were in the act of receiving them"
In another scene, she describes the tradition of All Saints' Day. Young Cecile loves the holy days and the break from routine that they bring, along with the opportunity for storytelling. She and young Jacques look at the book about St. Edmond, talk about the recluse in Montreal, a once beautiful and wealthy young girl who walled herself into a cell behind the chapel of the church her wealthy father built. On All Souls' Day, Cecile's father recounts the story of old Bichet the knife grinder, who was caught stealing a copper pot in France and hanged for it. Cecil thinks France is corrupt because people are tortured like Bichet. Auclair defends the king but says of the Law "The Law is to protect property, and it thinks too much of property. A couple of brass pots, an old saddle, are reckoned worth more than a poor man's life. Christ would have forgiven Bichet, as He did the thief on the cross. We must think of him in paradise, where no law can touch him." so they have Mass said for him every year on the day he died.
"At
twelve years it is impossible to sad on holy days, even on a day of sorrow; at
that age, the dark things, death, bereavement, suffering, have only a dramatic
value, - seem but strong and moving colours in the grey stretch of time. On such solemn days all the stories of the
rock came to life for Cecile; the shades of the early martyrs and great
missionaries drew close about her. All the miracles that had happened there,
and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out of the fog;. . ."
It's a surprisingly detailed look at the life of faith of these early Canadians. I wonder how it is read by Cather scholars, who often seem more interested in her status as an independent woman. Many of her books contain references to the faith of her characters, and in this one, as in Death Comes for the Archbishop, faith is central.
As a contemporary reader who has been affected by the viewpoint that missionaries often made life harder for their converts, to put it lightly, I wonder if Cather struggled with this conflict between evangelism and oppression that is central to the story of imperialism today. It is my sense that she is writing about faith as a sympathetic outsider, one who perhaps wishes for the simplicity of belief. But am I trying to read too much into the author's intentions?
For instance, she describes the faith of the colonists as both mysterious but inspiring. One night, the apothecary lies awake fretting about his friend, one of the missionary priests who struggles in his work and misses the life of the mind he had in France. But Fr. Hector has made a vow to continue the hardships of missionary life and to stay in Canada rather than go back to France to be a teacher. "How can there be men in France this day who doubt the existence of God, when for the love of Him weak human beings have been able to endure so much?" Euclide Auclair regrets that Fr Hector decides to stay. He wonders "whether there had not been a good deal of misplaced heroism in the Canadian missions, - a waste of rare qualities which did nobody any good. 'Ah, well,' he sighed at last, 'perhaps that is the box of precious ointment which was acceptable to the Saviour, and I am like the disciples who thought it might have been used better in another way.'" After he comes to this conclusion, he is finally able to sleep.
As I mentioned, the book does not focus on any one conflict, but instead Cather paints little vignettes of the life of the colonists. As Cecile realizes when she returns home from an unhappy visit to a farm family, she makes "a climate within a climate .. . [from] the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life."
Cather brings to life these characters by opening a curtain on their daily lives, as well as brief glimpses into their hearts. For instance, as autumn approaches, the ships that arrived in late summer with news and goods from the homeland prepare to return. Auclair plans to go with them, taking his daughter and all his livelihood. He busily and hopefully packs his crates of medicines, while Cecile admires the coming of fall:
"The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun. Even the ragged cliff-side behind her kitchen door was beautiful; the wild cherry and sumach and the blackberry vines had turned crimson, and the birch and poplar saplings were yellow. Up by Blinker's cave there was a mountain ash, loaded with orange berries. ... So many kinds of gold, all gleaming in the soft, hyacinth-coloured haze of autumn ... Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content. The spirit of peace, that acceptance of fate..."
Likewise, a certain peace from having faith in the eternal life of the soul descends on the old Count, the patron of the Auclairs, as he suffers an illness that will prevent him from ever returning to France. He is ready to die, as Cather recounts because he has faith in eternity: "He would die here, in this room, and his spirit would go before God to be judged. He believed this, because he had been taught it in childhood, and because he knew there was something in himself and in other men that this world did not explain. Even the Indians had to make a story to account for something in their lives that did not come out of their appetites: conceptions of courage, duty, honour. The Indians had these, in their own fashion. These ideas came from some unknown source, and they were not the least part of life. "
The death of the old count is a big blow to the apothecary. Auclair
realizes his time is over when the count dies.
Cecile wants him to live on in her time.
As Auclair returned from the count's deathbed (after undergoing the trauma of removing his old friend's heart so that it could be shipped back to France and buried in the church of his childhood), he thinks "not without reason, he told himself bitterly as he
looked up at those stars, had the Latin poets, insisted that 'Thrice and four
times blessed were those to whom it befell to die in the land of their
fathers.'"
Cecile and Pierre are the Canadians of the next generation. They don't feel the longing of exile experienced by their fathers - a sense I get from my own daughters who love California as their home, while I sense I will never feel at rest here, other than out in the mountains. Cather's book might be critiqued for the way it moves from theme to theme, or from character to character, without really delving deeply into the souls of any of them, but I loved these brief glimpses, the peek into the daily actions that make up lives and the moments of beauty and friendship that sustain them.
At any rate, I was transported by the book, and Cather remains one of my all-time favorite writers.
