In short, Richler relishes making radio in weather and is willing to go anywhere in any season in order to situate writers in their elements. He certainly delights in producing radio as far away from the cbc Broadcasting Centre in Toronto as possible without needing a passport. (He does leave the country once, to track down Tomson Highway in southern France.) In “The Company Town,” a metaphysics is posited to account for the decentralization of the Canadian psyche. We abide a bossy central authority—a Hudson’s Bay Company, an Ottawa, a Hogtown—in no small part because we know we can count on sheer geography to diminish that control, render it at most a minor annoyance in our lives. While his ambivalence about, or indeed rejection of, centralized power and expertise might explain Richler’s peripatetic tendencies, it soon becomes apparent that the real lure is the simple pleasure of being on the road. Following the contours of a vast and differentiated land, Richler’s literary Canada is a highly physical place from the start.
The series, largely a sequence of almost novelistic journeys, is bookended by an argument. “The Virtues of Being Nowhere” opens with a three-part declension of Canada as an evolving noun. According to the parsing, the nation started off being “nowhere,” a destination literally off the European map. (For native storytellers, of course, it was never anything of the sort.) Jane Urquhart’s childhood in the deep Ontario bush is presented as a classic nowhere landscape, and Margaret Atwood, a dominant presence throughout, discusses early immigrant writers like Susanna Moodie. (Atwood also says, “There isn’t really any nowhere. There are only other people who think a place is nowhere.”) Richler remarks on how the “garrison mentality,” outlined decades ago by Frye and Atwood and which posited Canadians as quasi-victims of their own harsh landscape, put a stigma on generations of writers. By the sounds of it, certain authors today, including Urquhart, continue to feel that weight.
Episode ten, “Room Available,” is titled after a remark by novelist Yann Martel, who once referred to Canada as a kind of giant hotel. Though Martel himself ruefully contextualizes his comment—he simply meant that the country houses a vast range of people, like a busy hotel—Richler decides the metaphor remains apt. Canada’s “sole binding myth” is our ever-burgeoning diversity, a “polyphony of voices” that is altering our literary landscapes for the good. Gone, for sure, is the paradigm of the land as an empty place of menace. Multiculturalism has not only validated a “creed of racial sensitivity” among Canadians, encouraging a belated recognition that aboriginals have always lived in those spaces we presumed desolate and hostile, it has also shown us that nearly every place across the country is habitable and safe. “Iqaluit is the new Seattle,” novelist Douglas Coupland jokes of the disappearance of hinterlands.
Most of this final hour is devoted to talking to young Vancouver writers, including Coupland, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Timothy Taylor, about their city’s position as gritty urban centre and natural wonderment. Richler declares Vancouver the perfect setting for Canadian literature to continue to play out these emerging dynamics: diversity and sensitivity, nature as inhabited and yet still disquieting, a society in perpetual evolution. While this may be true, the two most striking radio moments in “Room Available” occur away from the city and serve to complicate the notion of multiculturalism as current binding myth.
First, there is Robert Bringhurst’s trancelike monologue on nature delivered from his cabin in the woods of Quadra Island. The pitch of the poet’s voice and the cadences of his elegant thinking are offered in harmony with the forest around him. Equally eloquent is the silence—ten seconds of dead air—that greets a question to Rohinton Mistry about whether Canada has had any impact on his novels. Though he eventually replies, Mistry’s hesitation is the better answer. Richler is too smart to edit out the pause, leaving it there, perhaps, as a reminder not to speak too confidently about the certain direction of Canadian literature. Writers are by necessity always lost in some space, and it might well not be the one where they reside. You can be near the future of Vancouver and still be creatively sequestered in the past of nearby primal woods. You can be a model of multicultural literary Canada and still be forever at home—on the page at least—in the Parsi community back in Bombay.
A comment by Barbara Gowdy in ” The Virtues of Being Nowhere” highlights a tension in the series. Gowdy, who once published a novel about elephants, comments that being from “Non-Mills” may be a blessing for the author who wants to “float out” into the wide imagined universe. Despite its length, A Literary Atlas of Canada has little time for discussions about what literary landscapes are and how they are created and sustained. It is almost purely concerned with literature and public discourse and grounding literary realities and, as a result, isn’t especially attentive to the qualities of the books themselves or the writerly process.
Throughout the series, dramatic excerpts are offered from dozens of Canadian novels and stories by way of illustrating the observations of their authors. And yet, none of these readings include descriptions of actual places. They are all descriptions of imagined ones. Douglas Coupland may be from Vancouver, but his fiction isn’t. His fiction is from his head. Novels are always novels before they are anything else, including mirrors of reality. There seems to be scant room in Richler’s atlas for Canadian books situated outside the country or for stories, such as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, that openly declare their topographies to be other than approximations of the real. No poetry is welcome either.
Likewise, Gil Courtemanche’s invitation to consider a Canadian geography of values isn’t taken up. Martel’s closing observation that our sole distinguished cultural attribute might be our creed of tolerance is on a similar tack. What about a possible moral landscape running coast to coast in our literature? Wayne Johnston probably wouldn’t care for this thesis either, but for this reviewer, at least, the most obvious quality shared among books by Canadians is a certain value system. (That, and a propensity for linguistic conservatism. Aren’t the landscapes in novels made up first and foremost by language? ) While Richler’s instincts to steer clear of literary theory are sound, at times his focus can be constricting.
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