Canada

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Canada is a long novel - 511 pages - but in some respects it's two shorter novels and a postscript. Part One could certainly have been a book in itself, though getting the fuller life perspective is obviously what Ford is after by moving the story forward into Canada from Great Falls, Montana, where the first section takes place, to what happens next and thereafter. To make this a little clearer: Part One - 15 year old Dell Parsons and his immediate family before his parents unexpectedly decide to rob a bank and ruin their lives. Part Two - the same year and the next few months, now in rural and abandoned Saskatchewan, Canada. Dell, on his own, and in bad company through the misguided from-jail-plans of his mother. Part Three - sixty year-old Dell Parson, seeking out his sister before her upcoming death, thinking about his life since the days of his youth.

There's nothing in this plot summary that gives too much away, because Ford uses the narrative foretelling technique to let the reader know exactly what's coming; the trick is the way he tells the story. It's not so much that in letting you know about the bank robbery, for example, he is indicating anything about fate as such (though all will be determined by the day). It's more that getting the event 'out there' allows him to slow down the pace of the story telling and take the reader into the lives of the characters making bad decisions and preparing for these as slowly as anyone does in life.

As an Australian reader, it's hard to exactly place the tone. When we say 'laconic', we mean something else; matter-of-fact doesn't quite do the trick, either. Perhaps it's the voice of the fifteen year old here that allows Ford to describe criminality in a way that neither glamorises mistakes nor condemns them out of hand: he keeps the reader between childhood and adult views as successfully as anyone using this technique, and therein lines the success of both the narrative tension and the character sympathy.

I've read a few other Ford books now, though I am yet to tackle Independence Day. I read and enjoyed The Ultimate Good Luck (Harry Quinn in Mexico, in trouble with drug dealers); Hope Springs ('stories of ordinary men and women ... on the way back to prison, marriages in tatters ...'); and The Sportswriter (Frank Bascombe, once-fiction writer, now sports journalist grafter). These stories take a certain amount of patience by nature of their subject matter, but they get at something I can only dream of achieving in my own writing: the truths of everyday experience, written in everyday language but with very fine crafting and finesse. I enjoyed Canada and read it quite quickly, as I have other novels and short stories by Richard Ford. It's a sad picture really, one of survival of childhood and a certain straightforwardness of outlook despite grim moments at a crucial time of adolescence when ordinary parental foibles are enough for most of us to live through, and make sense of later in life.

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