Anakana Schofield won the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award for her novel, Malarky (Biblioasis, 2012).

Structured as a series of 20 episodes, Schofield's darkly comic first novel was more than a decade in the making. "I am a real passionate defender of people who live with dignity and desperation," she told Cheri Hanson of Quill & Quire in a June, 2012 profile. Her debut novel received advance attention due to its selection for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. It was published by Oneworld in the UK and other Commonwealth countries in 2013, the same year in which it was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for the best work of fiction by a B.C. writer.

Schofield's passion is reflected in her primary narrator, an Irish mother who is coping with grief, lust, infidelity and madness while scrubbing the floors of her country farmhouse. Schofield told Q&Q she has been inspired by the social-realist writing of the 1960s and 70s, compelling her to write about "extraordinary ordinary" lives.

Before Anakana Schofield emigrated from Dublin to Vancouver in 1999, she wrote a one-woman play, worked as a documentary film researcher, held drama workshops for children and completed a feasibility study for a peace and reconciliation organization in Northern Ireland. In Vancouver, she gained a creative writing certificate from SFU and completed a residency at the Banff Centre.

Schofield has contributed to the Globe & Mail, London Review of Books Blog, Little Star, Geist, Vancouver Sun, The Recorder and CBC Radio.

Her second fiction novel, Martin John, published by Biblioasis in 2015, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

BOOKS:

Malarky (Biblioasis, 2012) $19.95 978-1-92684-538-8
Martin John (Biblioasis, 2015) $19.95 978-177196-034-2
Bina: a novel in warnings (Knopf Canada, 2019) $29.95 978-0-7352-7321-4)

[BCBW 2019]

***

Bina: A Novel in Warnings by Anakana Schofield (Knopf $29.95)

Review by Claire Mulligan (BCBW 2019)

The word novel comes from the Italian word novella and the Latin one novus. That’s right, no one ever imagined up a creative new noun for a thing derived of imagination and creativity, and so that workaday adjective has been a stand-in ever since someone with a lice-ridden wig thrust the heavy stack of Pamela or Don Quixote at a wary pal while explaining “no, no it is not a true-crime broadsheet, nor a rhymey poem, it is a novel thing but, yes, be warned, stock up the candles, you’ll need to give it your undivided attention. It’s worth it, I swear.”

And so be warned, Bina: A Novel in Warnings is worth it, but it is a novel novel.

That is, Bina is a cryptic "challenging" story. It’s not a walk in the park. The eponymous Bina skirts the truth, so you might find yourself wishing for explanatory notes.

Here they are: Bina (pronounced Bye-na, not Beena) awaits trial at her home. She has been charged with the assisted suicide of lots of people. She writes her warnings and "remarkings" on ephemera—envelopes, receipts, bills. Camped out on the lawn are the "Crusties," unwanted allies who are rallying to protect her as the net draws closer.

Bina berates herself for letting in those she should not. Eddie, for one, her abusive surrogate son, for whom Bina left her coat undone & in he climbed. And the Tall Man, a sinister figure who showed up at her door and drew her into the assisted dying gig. Men stay on the mat. Don’t let them in. In Means din.

Bina soon takes to her bed, an antique phrase that implies defiance as much as helplessness—a raft, a refuge, a last stand.

Now you can enjoy the prose that is ballsy and acerbic; poetic and inventive; tragic-comic; and, at times downright hilarious. Schofield uses concrete poetry techniques to convey meaning and emotion. The lists and fragments suggest Bina’s cramped writing on bits of paper. Blacked out words suggest Bina’s paranoia. And there are footnotes for some reason.

Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are clear influencers. Beckett was the existentialist. As a dramatist, he wrote Waiting for Godot (Godot never shows up). Joyce perfected the stream of consciousness style, the one that mimics the yard sale nature of the mind, most famously in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Schofield is a stylist as much as a novelist. Bina joins a handful of novels that use the second person narrative voice throughout. That is, the text is addressed to "you," as this review is, as are epistolary novels of the past, recipes, and instructional manuals. The style is a high-wire act because, really, who wants to be bossed around for 336 pages.

To Bina, you are not a dear reader. She writes: Don’t arrive at the end of this tale insisting it was too long or too wide or too unlike you. I am not interested in appealing to you, she says. I’ve made all these mistakes for you. I will train you to say, no.

Such lines are passive aggressive gauntlets. Somehow Schofield sustains our interest with her absurdist, tragic-comic humour and by shifting around the intended recipients of her warnings—from women in general, to the powers-that-be who will find the fragments, to Bina herself, and to combinations thereof.

How is the park looking so far?

I’d never read that rubbish, she’d say of this book, Bina says of herself in an oddly meta aside.

Throw me a bone here, Bina, I said on the first read. There was a time I took pride in reading difficult books. Not anymore. Now, I have chores galore. Don’t give me the chore of figuring out what is going on and why I should care.

And is it all reminiscing? Is something going to actually happen? And you can’t fit all that writing on the envelopes. Is there a clue here? The truth only goes inside an envelope? Is that why you only write on the outside? Did I get it right? Should I have patience? Is there a whiff of pretension?

On second read, however, I changed my mind. Just like that. Like flipping a page. Perhaps because the what’s-going-on work was done. Perhaps I had more time, more coffee. Or perhaps, because Bina: A Novel in Warnings is brilliant art, and that’s how you can tell whether something is or not; you shuffle sidewise and see the distillation of craft from a new angle.

Be patient. Let her in.

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Claire Mulligan teaches at UVic and Camosun College. She wrote The Reckoning of Boston Jim (Brindle & Glass, 2007), a nominee for both the Giller and Ethel Wilson awards. Her first short film, The Still Life of Annika Myers, which is all about food, is currently in production.