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It’s spring, but the sun can’t get through, smoke from unseen fires smudges the air, and there’s a stench of garbage in the wind. Alike not in setting or vision – Lundin’s debut is set in rural Manitoba circa 1971 – but in dark atmospherics. Leroux’s One Hand Clapping and Steve Lundin’s This River Awakens are in fact more alike than they might at first seem to be, which is to say, not at all. Maybe what’s most fascinating is that, here, leeside of the millennium, the nasty future it conjures doesn’t seem at all unlikely. The writing isn’t always as sharp as you’d like – Leroux has a regular tendency towards bad sentences. Leroux has a rich imagination and she’s written a novel that quickly absorbs your attention, despite – or perhaps because of – its grisly tendencies. But some others – there’s just no urgency in them, they feel like they’re doing nothing but supportive duty, a pillar’s work, holding up a part of the story without finding a convincing way into it.
ONE HAND CLAPPING REVIEW SKIN
Several of the main players are instantly, grimly engaging: Estra, who keeps her husband imprisoned inside – inside – her hand and Wynne, who works in the subway tunnels scraping human skin from the tracks. The meshing works well enough – but on the subject of overcrowding, the cast is probably too large. More and more, with each new chapter, Leroux meshes these benighted lives together. Leroux’s cast of central characters is 13 strong (and includes the ear-backed rodent), each of them rating a chapter of their own. Six pages into the novel, Marina’s got a new hand growing under one of her breasts four pages more and she’s gone back for a multiple encore, an implantation of 10 extra hands, one of which she becomes particularly friendly with. On television Marina sees a mouse on whose back a human ear is being grown for use in a transplant, decides I could do that, and sets about it, signing herself up at the Hurtigger Institute, where they pay people to grow surplus body parts that can be harvested at a later date. Lately she’s taken to picking up men from the subway and bringing them home for sex, but she’s beginning to hate herself for it, and she’s soon willing to try another kind of, um, fellowship. The story starts in the company of Marina, a woman in her 30s who’s a little down of heart. A malevolent one, mainly like a dog who’s seen too much boot, science is biting back. It’s a place wherein science – especially medical science – is the presiding power.
ONE HAND CLAPPING REVIEW FULL
Leroux’s dystopia is overcrowded and full of threats it’s a septic city short on some human essentials, joy and ethics notable among them. One Hand Clapping is a spooky arrangement of overlapping stories set in London, England, in the not-so-far-off future. But then could their strangely simultaneous appearance mean that perhaps – well, could it be that the flow of excellent fiction coming out of Canada has been somehow reversed? Is it fair to compare two such novels, different as they are? Not a bit. What are the chances that two first novels by Canadians living in the very same foreign country would appear in the same season? Not very interesting at all. Leroux lives in England now, just like Steve Lundin, another expatriate Canadian (Winnipeg-born, Toronto-raised), whose first novel, This River Awakens, is the other half of the day’s reviewing business. The sly filch from Jane Austen, the facetious wit of the appeal for literary exodus, the broadly generous (if vaguely, Englishly condescending) benediction of Canadian fiction.īut if you are a young Englishwoman thinking of writing a novel and, crazy like a quilt, you do move to Canada, you won’t find Lise Leroux. If you read reviews or write them, you have to admire the finer shades of Shilling’s opening gambit. Many of our natural resources are in constant and abundant flow. There are those who might stickle that the words “steady” and “flow” and “out” devalue the compliment Shilling seems to want to pay. Out of that country has come, in recent years, a steady flow of excellent fiction, much of it by women.”
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So Shilling writes: “For a young woman thinking of writing a first novel, a move to Canada might be an option worth considering. They’re both first forays and they have in common their Canadian parentage. Reviewer Jane Shilling inspects two novels, Leaving Earth by the Toronto writer Helen Humphreys and One Hand Clapping by the Montreal-born Lise Leroux.