To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Book
Notes
is repeating one of the many apocryphal
tales one hears in Duck Lake and St.
Laurent to this day about the now mythic
figures of 1885.
Finally, Barnholder makes the astonishing
conjecture that the memoir was spoken
in Michif, a strange macaronic dialect of
Crée and French combined. But Michif, in
my view, was a late development, which
emerged during the second Métis diaspora
after the disaster of 1885, when they filtered
out to the far verges of civilization. Gabriel
spoke highly serviceable, if idiomatic,
French to his audiences of French
Canadians in the United States and
Quebec. I have heard no suggestion at all
that he spoke Michif, though I do know
that he spoke Sarcee as his first native
tongue (from his grandmother), and then
Crée, Blackfoot, Sioux, Saulteux (Ojibway)
and Assiniboine (Stoney). It seems to me
an unnecessary assumption that Gabriel
told his tale in a clumsy jargon when he
knew French well enough to talk on a level
with the priests and with Louis Riel and to
address a variety of French-speaking audiences.
G.W.
Christine Hantel-Fraser. No Fixed Address:
Life in the Foreign Service, n.p. $24.95 paper.
Like the Foreign Legion, the Foreign
Service has acquired what may be a false
glamour, as Christine Hantel-Fraser suggests
in her highly interesting book.
Hantel-Fraser, a long-time embassy wife,
with experience of her husband's many
postings, has gathered memories and
impressions from many foreign service personnel
and their families, rather in the old
Mass Observation way, to present a composite
picture of what life is really like in
Canada's embassies and high commissions
and on home postings in Ottawa. There is
even a comparison at the end of the book
with the practices of other foreign missions.
The interest in the unfamiliar, the
pleasure of alien environments, the stimulus
of living among foreign people, all are
indeed there, but not for everybody and
certainly not all the time. The tales of loneliness,
of inadaptability, of shattering overwork,
of sickness (particularly in the ranks
below the diplomats themselves), are so
many and so extraordinary that one wonders
why people try so hard to enter the
foreign service or to stay in it. Hantel-
Fraser helps to sort out the mixture of
motives and loyalties involved, and on the
whole she does so with objectivity; only
when she is talking about personal family
experiences does she tend to gush. Still, it is
a book one would recommend to anyone
thinking of trying to enter the Foreign
Service. If it doesn't deter them, it will at
least forewarn them. For no foreign servant,
however high his or her status,
entirely escapes the negative side of this
way of life he chooses, G.W.
Howard O'Hagan. Trees Are Lonely
Company. Talonbooks. For aficionados of
the fine western Canadian writer Howard
O'Hagan, the new book, Trees Are Lonely
Company, will be welcome even if it does
sail under somewhat false colours. It purports
to be "A collection of... short stories,"
but in fact it is a combination of two
earlier volumes, The Woman Who Got on at
Jasper Station, which does consist of real
stories, and Wilderness Men, a group of biographical
essays on historical figures of the
Old West, mainly outlaws and loners like
Almighty Voice, Simon Gun-an Noot, and
Albert Johnson, "the Mad Trapper of Rat
River." O'Hagan's sketches of these men are
vivid to the edge of being mythical, but
short stories they are not. G.W.
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