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The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass $19.95)
Ever since she discovered her first favourite book-One Fish, Two Fish by Dr. Seuss-Angie Abdou knew she wanted to write, but it took a near-fatal accident to get her started on fiction. The turning point was a head-on collision on the highway between Calgary and Crowsnest Pass, about a month before her thirtieth birthday, at about 100 kilometres per hour.
"After surviving that,"; she says, "suddenly the logic of stalling on anything tends to disappear. The prospect of failure or embarrassment doesn't seem nearly as dire as the prospect of not ever having tried at all.";
The driver immediately quit his job as an engineer at Nortel and moved into a little backwoods hut with no running water or electricity. And Abdou, who was a passenger in her own car, began writing her first fiction collection, Anything Boys Can Do (Thistledown 2006).
Abdou's sports-related first novel The Bone Cage (NeWest 2007) was recently shortlisted for the CBC Canada Reads Award. Now she has published her second novel, The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass $19.95), reviewed here by Cherie Thiessen.
Once upon a time, it was common for people to take turns telling stories, in the same way as contestants take turns singing on American Idol.
That's how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales-modeled on
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio-became one of the first staples of English literature.
The Canterbury Tales is a sometimes bawdy conglomeration of 14th century tales told by 29 disparate pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.
Set in the avalanche-ridden mountains of eastern British Columbia, Angie Abdou's The Canterbury Trail gradually introduces 14 characters on a Chaucerian quest: to take refuge in a back-country skiing hut called Camelot.
All the action occurs near Coalton, a fictional community that could easily be mistaken for Fernie, where Abdou lives.
All characters will follow a wilderness route forged by a disaffected hermit named Heinz who detests the powder puffs.
Although the reclusive Heinz abhors the noise and the messes that visitors and their dogs leave behind, he has nonetheless erected a van-sized sign mapping the area from the trailhead right over the summit and on to Camelot.
He has also erected signposts and named the route The Canterbury Trail. Youthful ski-bums prefer to mawkishly call it The C- Trail.
This is how some people talk-and live, love and laugh-particularly within the brash ski culture of risk takers who partake of marijuana and booze. Some locals in the Fernie area have taken offense at such crudity appearing in print.
In The Canterbury Trail, we first meet Three Musketeers in toques; a trio of intense skiers nicknamed Loco, F Bomb, and SOR. SOR stands for Stud on Rockets. Loco refers to someone who is a local. And F Bomb is a First Nations man. And they swear a lot.
They take along a big city journalist, Alison, who is documenting her descent
from gentrified Toronto into countrified Coalton, getting her squeezes in wherever she can. Her female competition is Shanny, a hot young hitchhiking snowboarder.
Add to the mix, heavy drinking snowmobilers Kevin and his friend, Frederik, who both drive trucks for the local mill, and Kevin's second wife, Claudette.
Back-country skiers include Michael, a real estate developer, his very pregnant wife, Janet, and Michael's friend, Lanny. Add two of Janet's lesbian friends, the earth mother, Cosmos, and her lover, Ella, who use snowshoes.
It's a small town-Ella was Kevin's first wife before he left her for Claudette, prompting Ella to try the other sex-and it's late April. Everyone will be squeezed into Camelot. They will share their hovel with four dogs, one of which doesn't appear to be house trained.
Nearly everyone will drink and/or get stoned on magic mushroom tea, hash brownies, and other concoctions. They'll fight, they'll puke, they'll pout, they'll storm and they'll slumber, encountering anger, frustration, disappointment,
jealousy, passion, elation and boredom.
Abdou clearly knows of what she writes. Along with her whimsical character sketches, she includes local tidbits such as a recipe for Mary Jane's Cookies, a hangover cure and instructions on how to mix a Shotgun.
Echoes of Chaucer tend to recede as the narrative pace picks up along the Canterbury Trail. Only a few characters seem to match those in The Canterbury Tales. Lanny is a miller and there's a miller who tells a tale in Chaucer. The ribald Wife of Bath correlates only slightly to Abdou's lusty Alison. The storytelling of the characters tends to fizzle due to fatigue, drugs and alcohol. Only Lanny completes his story of an encounter with an angry, mother moose.
This amounts to a gnarly, original fictional journey. Abdou's second novel is not the first literary work to emulate Chaucer's classic, but it could be the most uninhibited and most fun. 978-1-897142-50-9
[BCBW 2011]
"After surviving that,"; she says, "suddenly the logic of stalling on anything tends to disappear. The prospect of failure or embarrassment doesn't seem nearly as dire as the prospect of not ever having tried at all.";
The driver immediately quit his job as an engineer at Nortel and moved into a little backwoods hut with no running water or electricity. And Abdou, who was a passenger in her own car, began writing her first fiction collection, Anything Boys Can Do (Thistledown 2006).
Abdou's sports-related first novel The Bone Cage (NeWest 2007) was recently shortlisted for the CBC Canada Reads Award. Now she has published her second novel, The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass $19.95), reviewed here by Cherie Thiessen.
Once upon a time, it was common for people to take turns telling stories, in the same way as contestants take turns singing on American Idol.
That's how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales-modeled on
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio-became one of the first staples of English literature.
The Canterbury Tales is a sometimes bawdy conglomeration of 14th century tales told by 29 disparate pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.
Set in the avalanche-ridden mountains of eastern British Columbia, Angie Abdou's The Canterbury Trail gradually introduces 14 characters on a Chaucerian quest: to take refuge in a back-country skiing hut called Camelot.
All the action occurs near Coalton, a fictional community that could easily be mistaken for Fernie, where Abdou lives.
All characters will follow a wilderness route forged by a disaffected hermit named Heinz who detests the powder puffs.
Although the reclusive Heinz abhors the noise and the messes that visitors and their dogs leave behind, he has nonetheless erected a van-sized sign mapping the area from the trailhead right over the summit and on to Camelot.
He has also erected signposts and named the route The Canterbury Trail. Youthful ski-bums prefer to mawkishly call it The C- Trail.
This is how some people talk-and live, love and laugh-particularly within the brash ski culture of risk takers who partake of marijuana and booze. Some locals in the Fernie area have taken offense at such crudity appearing in print.
In The Canterbury Trail, we first meet Three Musketeers in toques; a trio of intense skiers nicknamed Loco, F Bomb, and SOR. SOR stands for Stud on Rockets. Loco refers to someone who is a local. And F Bomb is a First Nations man. And they swear a lot.
They take along a big city journalist, Alison, who is documenting her descent
from gentrified Toronto into countrified Coalton, getting her squeezes in wherever she can. Her female competition is Shanny, a hot young hitchhiking snowboarder.
Add to the mix, heavy drinking snowmobilers Kevin and his friend, Frederik, who both drive trucks for the local mill, and Kevin's second wife, Claudette.
Back-country skiers include Michael, a real estate developer, his very pregnant wife, Janet, and Michael's friend, Lanny. Add two of Janet's lesbian friends, the earth mother, Cosmos, and her lover, Ella, who use snowshoes.
It's a small town-Ella was Kevin's first wife before he left her for Claudette, prompting Ella to try the other sex-and it's late April. Everyone will be squeezed into Camelot. They will share their hovel with four dogs, one of which doesn't appear to be house trained.
Nearly everyone will drink and/or get stoned on magic mushroom tea, hash brownies, and other concoctions. They'll fight, they'll puke, they'll pout, they'll storm and they'll slumber, encountering anger, frustration, disappointment,
jealousy, passion, elation and boredom.
Abdou clearly knows of what she writes. Along with her whimsical character sketches, she includes local tidbits such as a recipe for Mary Jane's Cookies, a hangover cure and instructions on how to mix a Shotgun.
Echoes of Chaucer tend to recede as the narrative pace picks up along the Canterbury Trail. Only a few characters seem to match those in The Canterbury Tales. Lanny is a miller and there's a miller who tells a tale in Chaucer. The ribald Wife of Bath correlates only slightly to Abdou's lusty Alison. The storytelling of the characters tends to fizzle due to fatigue, drugs and alcohol. Only Lanny completes his story of an encounter with an angry, mother moose.
This amounts to a gnarly, original fictional journey. Abdou's second novel is not the first literary work to emulate Chaucer's classic, but it could be the most uninhibited and most fun. 978-1-897142-50-9
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on June 3, 2011 in By David.
