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What It Takes To Be Human
It's 1941 and Sandy Grey, a university student and air cadet, wants to enlist. When he delivers this news to his parents on Vancouver Island, his father becomes enraged and there's a violent confrontation.
With his parents' blessing, the would-be soldier is incarcerated in a Saanich asylum for the criminally insane where electric shock treatments, lobotomies and insulin therapy are all practiced in the institute's East Wing.
Sandy's parents are religious zealots who want a robot son made to order, and they've ensured he's gone to the right place.
Sandy is housed in the West Wing where a caring doctor uses less barbaric methods to get him to revisit the parentally-inflicted trauma of his childhood. But his attendant, Pete Cooper, is a seething and nasty piece of work, prone to unprovoked attacks on his patients.
Cooper irrationally hates the articulate and challenging protagonist in Marilyn Bowering's What It Takes To Be Human (Penguin $26) and he's hell-bent on destroying him. The so-called asylum is an emotional war zone. Sandy Grey has been conscripted by the forces of ignorance and cruelty.
Staring down the barrel of Cooper's gun, Grey has an epiphany: "Every now and then we're given the gift of clarity, and I have it now. Just as the essence of night is to hide, the essence of Pete Cooper is to destroy: He's a negative force, it's nothing personal; the hatred that possesses him is transcendental . . . see him as perfect as his kind.";
Almost all the inmates appear normal and the forces keeping them in are abhorrent. Many are more like prisoners of war than patients. A German, a communist, a Japanese and Russians all long some word of their families. One young prisoner seems to have been detained merely due to his sexuality.
Evil wardens and misunderstood inmates. It sounds a little like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Shawshank Redemption. But Bowering's storyline also includes, sea serpents, submarines, improbable sea rescues, implausible escapes and Grey's saviour, Georgina, an older woman whose life has also been savaged by her family. Georgina's son's book, The Storehouse of Thought and Expression, focuses Grey in his writing and in his thinking.
What It Takes To Be Human also relates the tale of Alan Macaulay, a prisoner from forty years before, who was hanged and buried at the asylum when it was classified as a prison. Macauley was another innocent who was destroyed by a man much like Cooper. Grey is driven to exonerate Macauley and to exorcise his ghost by writing the executed man's story, thereby providing a story within a story.
With over a dozen books of poetry, Bowering knows the power of words, and as an award-winning novelist-in 1998 she received the Ethel Wilson fiction prize for Visible Worlds-she knows how to construct plot and character. It's the mark of a master that when reading this novel, you're unlikely to find it cumbersome or unwieldy unless you try to recapture it for others.
Sandy Grey is the perfect Everyman. You want the story to end well but you just don't see how it can ever happen; whenever hope arises, it seems Cooper is there to glower and to hate. But then comes a surprise dream-like ending that few writers would ever attempt.
Only a pro could write a book like this and get away with it.
[Cherie Thiessen is a freelancer writer on Pender Island.]
With his parents' blessing, the would-be soldier is incarcerated in a Saanich asylum for the criminally insane where electric shock treatments, lobotomies and insulin therapy are all practiced in the institute's East Wing.
Sandy's parents are religious zealots who want a robot son made to order, and they've ensured he's gone to the right place.
Sandy is housed in the West Wing where a caring doctor uses less barbaric methods to get him to revisit the parentally-inflicted trauma of his childhood. But his attendant, Pete Cooper, is a seething and nasty piece of work, prone to unprovoked attacks on his patients.
Cooper irrationally hates the articulate and challenging protagonist in Marilyn Bowering's What It Takes To Be Human (Penguin $26) and he's hell-bent on destroying him. The so-called asylum is an emotional war zone. Sandy Grey has been conscripted by the forces of ignorance and cruelty.
Staring down the barrel of Cooper's gun, Grey has an epiphany: "Every now and then we're given the gift of clarity, and I have it now. Just as the essence of night is to hide, the essence of Pete Cooper is to destroy: He's a negative force, it's nothing personal; the hatred that possesses him is transcendental . . . see him as perfect as his kind.";
Almost all the inmates appear normal and the forces keeping them in are abhorrent. Many are more like prisoners of war than patients. A German, a communist, a Japanese and Russians all long some word of their families. One young prisoner seems to have been detained merely due to his sexuality.
Evil wardens and misunderstood inmates. It sounds a little like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Shawshank Redemption. But Bowering's storyline also includes, sea serpents, submarines, improbable sea rescues, implausible escapes and Grey's saviour, Georgina, an older woman whose life has also been savaged by her family. Georgina's son's book, The Storehouse of Thought and Expression, focuses Grey in his writing and in his thinking.
What It Takes To Be Human also relates the tale of Alan Macaulay, a prisoner from forty years before, who was hanged and buried at the asylum when it was classified as a prison. Macauley was another innocent who was destroyed by a man much like Cooper. Grey is driven to exonerate Macauley and to exorcise his ghost by writing the executed man's story, thereby providing a story within a story.
With over a dozen books of poetry, Bowering knows the power of words, and as an award-winning novelist-in 1998 she received the Ethel Wilson fiction prize for Visible Worlds-she knows how to construct plot and character. It's the mark of a master that when reading this novel, you're unlikely to find it cumbersome or unwieldy unless you try to recapture it for others.
Sandy Grey is the perfect Everyman. You want the story to end well but you just don't see how it can ever happen; whenever hope arises, it seems Cooper is there to glower and to hate. But then comes a surprise dream-like ending that few writers would ever attempt.
Only a pro could write a book like this and get away with it.
[Cherie Thiessen is a freelancer writer on Pender Island.]
Submitted on October 4, 2006 in By David.
