The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

And then there is Shielder's Mark. One's
first impression is that somehow a character
from Salinger or Kevin Major fell asleep
and awoke to find himself in a medieval
fantasy, for he always seems more a troubled
adolescent than an Arthurian warrior.
His reactions to the courtly world that
unfolds before him are often crude and
always frank. His first impression of Gail,
for example, is not based on her ethereal
beauty, but: "What lambs a man could
make of such a ewe." His favourite expression
is "shit," or more properly, "shite," but
he is working on cutting down on his
swearing. He also wonders aloud on the
problems of learning how to "swive a
princess." His frankness, however, is not
really offensive, nor is it included as a bit of
titillating sensationalism. Rather Mark is
simply reacting as any boy would who is
not yet a man. As a neophyte, he must learn
the value of love, of his wife, and finally of
himself.
Eventually Mark must return to the Red
Keep, for his initial breaking of the spell has
unfortunately unleashed ghostly apparitions.
And he must confront the cause of
the evil: a patricide that took place long
ago, in the "grandfather days." His return
also forces Mark to come to terms with his
feelings about his own father, the man
whose abandonment left him without a
name.
Sean Stewart's award winning first novel,
Passion Play, introduced a new voice to
Canadian fantasy fiction. If anything,
Nobody's Son is even more successful. Its
narrative style, a delightful combination of
first and third person, and his attention to
recreating not only the feel of this magical
past but its language make his world a thoroughly
believable and attractive one.
There are problems. The plot is occasionally
a bit improbable and confusing, and
several minor characters, such as Lerelil,
the Ghost King's queen, and Husk, the hagcrone
who sets Mark's first task, deserve
fuller development, but these are minor
quibbles, for, above all, Nobody's Son provides
a thoroughly engaging portrait of a
man trying to discover his uniqueness and
discovering that we are all, inevitably and
inexorably, on our own. We are all
nobody's son. With his second novel, Sean
Stewart clearly emerges as one of Canada's
most important fantasy writers.
Prophetic Voices
Stewart L. Donovan
Maritime Union: A Political Tale. Non-Entity
Press n.p.
Miriam Waddington
The Last Landscape. Oxford $12.95
Reviewed by Hilda L. Thomas
One reviewer describes Stewart L. Donovan's
satiric novel Maritime Union: A Political
Tale as "a perfect gift for your away relatives
in Calgary and Toronto". Or, one might
add, Vancouver. Western readers will have
little difficulty in finding parallels to rival
the whacky Maritime politics targeted in
Donovan's irreverent tale.
Set in the 21st century, Maritime Union
uses the bluntest of weapons to attack the
perennial topics of political patronage,
Maritime union, the causeway, tourism,
and the collusion between old money and
new entrepreneurs as they scheme to
exploit the people and the resources of the
Atlantic provinces. Donovan relies entirely
on the Techniques of burlesque: grotesque
exaggeration, puns, absurd acronyms, and
broad caricature. His hero, native
Halegonian Paul Doyle-Doncaster, is an exseminarian
and peripatetic hack whose
naivete is matched only by his appetites.
Doncaster is easily seduced by journalist
Victoria Peelsticker, a.k.a. Vanity Sufferville
and Susan Numb, author of the Kitchener-
Waterloo Guide to the Maritime Provinces.
He is also made the dupe in a plot by