\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWand rife with rasta talk. From a comfortableand complacent invisibility,Jimmy is now painfully conspicuous inhis great home overlooking the peasantvillage below the hill. Both characters tryto work out their ennui in aimless vacationers'fashion. But, in Jimmy's words,Vikki is "like a large moth drawn to thelight to die." Throughout the novel it isnever really clear if Vikki is seeking,through romance, a lost vitality in herlife or not; all that she experiences is anear-rape. Like the other characters,Vikki is not well-defined ; she neither engagesus through pity nor through admiration,say in the powerful manner ofa Judith Hearne.For despite its serious intent, there is ageneral insubstantiality to the book as awhole. As one closes it, the charactersdisappear forever. Maybe this is the verypoint of the novel : the suggestion that incertain people's lives nothing palpablereally happens. No bangs. Merely futile,soft whimpers in totally uncontrived circumstances.Kreiner appears to be satisfiedin simply revealing self-alienation,which becomes an end in itself.Tropical Jamaican texture is virtuallymissing save for a semblance of it in thedialect used by Jimmy's lover Etta.Kreiner pictures the island as hostile andpolarized: people are seen generically aseither blandly black with clichéd violentundertones; or wafer white. Regardingthe latter, says Kreiner, "The whitenessmakes them (on the island) too consciousof their colour." In atmosphere thatmight have spawned scenes of romance,one finds Jimmy reflecting that securityin his life (with Etta) "is more importantthan love." By contrast Vikki's sense ofher own imprisonment derives from herparticular search for love and self. Butall this lasts only ephemerally; as soon aswe turn the pages, the impact disappears.Interesting as the language is in someinstances, it does not achieve the richembroidery of other Oberon Press finds,in such authors as Susan Kerslake orMargaret Gibson. Neither does the paucityof action compensate for what thestyle lacks in resonance. No doubt this isthe price an author pays for atempting anovel of this sort: in aiming, that is, todepict a life-style of quiet boredom.APHORISTICSOUNDINGSCYRIL DABYDEENв. w. powE, A Climate Charged. Mosaic, n.p.FRANK DAVEY'S "Surviving the Paraphrase"(1976), a provocative discussionof the limitations of thematic criticismand the critical methods of NorthropFrye and his successors, signalled the beginningof a new era in Canadian literarycriticism, a period of re-examination anddebate about meaning, reading, and literarycriticism. Evidence of this change inthe literary climate is apparent in thegrowing number of articles and booksproposing new approaches to Canadianliterature — Barry Cameron and MichaelDixon's "Mandatory Subversive Manifesto:Canadian Criticism vs. LiteraryCriticism," Russell Brown's "Critic, Culture,Text: Beyond Thematics," StanFogel's "Lost in the Canadian Funhouse,"Paul Stuewe's Clearing the Ground andWilfred Cude's A Due Sense of Differences.Even prominent thematic criticsappear to be reconsidering their approachto our literature. In "Bushed in theSacred Wood" John Moss refers to Fryeas "somewhat of a false prophet" andargues that critics of the early seventiespresented "a dislocated perception of ourliterature." One of the surprising featuresof B. W. Powe's A Climate Charged, acollection of essays which attempt a re-