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The Tinsmith (Brindle & Glass Publishing $21.95)
This book should come with a warning: Not for the squeamish. Tim Bowling is uncannily expert in creating a sense of place, but the places he writes about are not places most of us want to be taken.
The American Civil War's bloody Battle of Antietam in 1862 and the salmon carnage on the Fraser River nineteen years later reek of rot, guts and gore. All of the senses are assailed in what are two very dissimilar and very similar worlds: dissimilar in that they're set in different places and times, but similar in their human conflict and charnel house imagery.
Why all the slaughter? Bowling says: "The idea of families fighting on opposite sides-of blood loyalty versus principle-just haunts me. And then, the American Civil War is drenched in the romance of loss, which suits my melancholy temperament somehow.";
Readers may have encountered this melancholy in some of the author's bibliography: ten collections of poetry, four novels and two non-fiction works, one of which echoes some of this novel's sentiment, written in 2007 (The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture).
Anson Baird is a doctor who leaves his sleepy medical practice in order to be of service in the war. Now, a year later, he's chronically exhausted and operating like an automaton as he routinely saws off arms and legs with a bloody knife, tossing the limbs onto a growing pile, and wiping pus and blood off his face only when it obscures his sight.
His one positive encounter is with a mysterious soldier, John, who brings him the wounded and assists him in his hacking off of limbs. To Anson, this soldier, whose skin he perceives as "pale with a curious dark cast to it"; is his salvation, giving him hope for the future. In the midst of so much futile slaughter and suffering he wants to save this gallant young soldier, whom he suddenly recognizes as needing his help. Assuming that John is a runaway slave who has just horribly mutilated and killed his owner, the doctor gives him the identity of a newly dead solder and 'John' becomes 'William Dare.'
Bowling says that the character is very loosely based on John Sullivan Deas, a mixed-race man from South Carolina who really was one of the first salmon canners on the Fraser. In Part 2, we find him there and once again in a battle, this time against unscrupulous British thugs determined to run him off the river. "And yes, I did want to balance the battlefield scenes with the river scenes. I did want the continuum of violence to be apparent. It is a dark and heavy book, which is exactly what I wanted."; 978-1-926972-43-5
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2012]
The American Civil War's bloody Battle of Antietam in 1862 and the salmon carnage on the Fraser River nineteen years later reek of rot, guts and gore. All of the senses are assailed in what are two very dissimilar and very similar worlds: dissimilar in that they're set in different places and times, but similar in their human conflict and charnel house imagery.
Why all the slaughter? Bowling says: "The idea of families fighting on opposite sides-of blood loyalty versus principle-just haunts me. And then, the American Civil War is drenched in the romance of loss, which suits my melancholy temperament somehow.";
Readers may have encountered this melancholy in some of the author's bibliography: ten collections of poetry, four novels and two non-fiction works, one of which echoes some of this novel's sentiment, written in 2007 (The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture).
Anson Baird is a doctor who leaves his sleepy medical practice in order to be of service in the war. Now, a year later, he's chronically exhausted and operating like an automaton as he routinely saws off arms and legs with a bloody knife, tossing the limbs onto a growing pile, and wiping pus and blood off his face only when it obscures his sight.
His one positive encounter is with a mysterious soldier, John, who brings him the wounded and assists him in his hacking off of limbs. To Anson, this soldier, whose skin he perceives as "pale with a curious dark cast to it"; is his salvation, giving him hope for the future. In the midst of so much futile slaughter and suffering he wants to save this gallant young soldier, whom he suddenly recognizes as needing his help. Assuming that John is a runaway slave who has just horribly mutilated and killed his owner, the doctor gives him the identity of a newly dead solder and 'John' becomes 'William Dare.'
Bowling says that the character is very loosely based on John Sullivan Deas, a mixed-race man from South Carolina who really was one of the first salmon canners on the Fraser. In Part 2, we find him there and once again in a battle, this time against unscrupulous British thugs determined to run him off the river. "And yes, I did want to balance the battlefield scenes with the river scenes. I did want the continuum of violence to be apparent. It is a dark and heavy book, which is exactly what I wanted."; 978-1-926972-43-5
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
[BCBW 2012]
Submitted on January 17, 2013 in By David.
