To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
Harry, the ex-cop anti-heroic detective who
pursues the case which has been "a sewer
from the very beginning" to discover the
facts in order to cover them up.
Shades parodies the detective novel, but
its focus is contemporary media culture.
Finding a woman's corpse on a muddy
riverbank reminds McGraw "of a late-night
news broadcast, or a series of stills from a
cheap detective magazine." There is nothing
distinctively Canadian about the culture
that Walmsley portrays; American
television, like the Heraldo and The
Newlywed Game shows that some of his
characters watch, seems to predominate.
While Walmsley's book is funny, it is also
disturbing; the sheer volume of physical
and sexual violence directed towards both
women and men in this novel leaves one to
question whether Shades: The Whole Story
of Doctor Tin and its readers are not active
participants in the culture the novel critiques.
This lack of participation, however,
may be exactly what Walmsley had in mind.
The frank treatment of human sexuality
in Home Fires has led one Calgary critic to
declare Kenneth Radu the Henry Miller of
Canlit. A more serious and deeper exploration
of human passions than Shades,
Home Fires surveys the subterranean landscape
of sexual desire in combustive
Montreal, a city where sex shops and arsonists
proliferate.
With insight and sensitivity, Radu probes
the minds and hearts of three men and
three women whose lives intertwine: Brian,
an attractive and seemingly successful
warehouse floor manager who advertises
for sex partners; Giselle, his wife; Mariette,
a middle- aged widow who answers his
advertisement; Nick, the respectable family
man who owns sex shops and indulges in
arson; Wanda, his alcoholic wife; and
Jacques, his muscle-bound, bodybuilding
employee. The female characters are particularly
interesting. The three men, caught
up in the fantasies of patriarchal culture,
move toward self-destruction, while the
women, struggling toward more humane
visions and values, become stronger and
self-sufficient. Giselle refuses to tolerate
Brian's infidelities and leaves him. Mariette
rejects Brian in favour of Roger, a homeless
person that she meets at the shelter where
she does volunteer work. Wanda begins to
recover her sense of self, controlling her
drinking and finding a job, when she confronts
Nick with the knowledge of his
arsonist activities. The only ring of unreality
occurs when Mariette brings Roger and
several other homeless people to live in her
upper-middle class suburban home after
the shelter is destroyed by arson; her surprise
at the violence of her neighbours'
negative reactions is simply too naive.
Radu peels back Montreal's thin veneer of
middle-class respectability to expose a city
struggling with multiculturalism and xenophobia.
Difference occasions fear and contempt.
For Nick, however, arson is a means
of consuming difference. Having escaped
from a Communist controlled country with
his parents and emigrated to Montreal
while still a child, he suffers a loss of identity
that can only be assuaged by fire. For
him, fire is "the language of his lost home,
the lost language of his true self":
Where is my home? In the heart of the
flame. I am without body, without geography,
without nationality. My French is
acquired, laboured, not heart-felt, not
part of my being. My English has
replaced my native language. I live in a
society that calls itself distinct, built upon
the exclusion of its original inhabitants,
terrified of the publicly displayed English
word. And it jumps into bed with the
Americans.
Beautifully written, Radu's second novel,
Home Fires is a thoughtful and provocative
examination of Quebec culture that articulates
many of the tensions inherent in contemporary
Canadian society.
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