Along Came a Spider

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman likes to mingle humanity and divinity; even more, he likes to suggest that divinity has a lot to learn from humanity. That's fine with me, I'm not comfortable with unexamined uses of power in the first place, which is in large part why Anansi and most other trickster gods have never really been my cup of tea.

Doing something just because you think it's going to be funny is not, in my mind, a good principle for organising your life, especially if, as a god, you can survive, even laugh off the consequences of practical jokes that do damage to the other people involved. Tricksters are often little more than bullies who use their brains, not their brawn.

So one good thing about Anansi Boys is that the demi-god son of the Trickster learns a little about human compassion, connection and love. But then, that's what happens to boys, in most cases - they grow up to become adult human beings.

Other good things about the book are that it's funny, it reverses the conventions of most European and North American writing that says "if the person's race is not signified, then they must be white," and while the boys are the headliners, there are a goodly number of very well-written, strong and distinctive women who talk to each other about many things other than boys.

The Power of Silence

The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald

This is a book about power and silence - the abuse of power, the power to command silence, the power to conceal, the power to damage, distort and destroy, the power of privilege, the power of authority, the power of secrecy - and all the ways - personal, familial, social, political, institutional, ideological - that power can go wrong and the truth can be suborned or silenced. It is also about making ethical choices - when, if ever, is it proper to lie, and when must one tell the truth, no matter what.

It's a complex story. A young girl moves with her family from a military base in Germany to a new base in rural Ontario. An officer is asked to do something very confidential, and vitally important, for an old military friend. A sexual predator collects and grooms his victims, shaming them into silence. A torture survivor sees one of his torturers on the streets of a quiet town. A murder is committed. The Cuban missile crisis and the cold war threat of nuclear warheads hangs over everything. Strategic alliances and the desire for power and dominance, whether at the school-yard level or the global arena, hold the keys to two interlocking tragedies.

Reading the book was unsettling for me, and for more than the obvious reasons. I knew beforehand the era in which the book is set (1962-3), but I hadn't realised that the protagonist, Madelaine, is about the same age that I was in that year. Some of the general circumstances of Madelaine's life, right down to the references to certain textbooks, I remember perfectly. But other things are totally unfamiliar. The author has Canadian children performing the same "duck and cover" drills that were common in the U.S. at the time, but I have no memory of ever doing that. Maybe it's something that was a part of living on an air force base in heavily populated southern Ontario that wasn't part of life in Saskatoon public schools, which is where I was at the time.

Despite such instances of the atmosphere not always ringing completely real for me in such details, the book moved me deeply. And asked me, once again, to consider my own standards of ethical choices.