The Final installment in our Canadian series of female and male writers, old and new.

Joseph Boyden, Rohinton Mistry and Rawi Hage could not be more different. A Scottish-Irish-Metis, a Bombay born fellow who lives in Brampton, Ontario and a Lebanese-Canadian who came to Montreal by way of Cyprus and New York City. These three men, from very different places, have very different tales to tell in markedly different styles. What they share are mantelpieces filled with prizes and the fact of being Canadian writers who have come into the international limelight over the last couple decades.

Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden has a couple of things going for him, not including the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize he won for his first novel, Three Day Road, and the Giller prize he won in 2008 for his second, Through Black Spruce.  For one, the guy can write. The Washington Post described his prose as “raw poetry.” So he’s got the craft thing down. With a blue-eyed Catholic father who was a Canadian war hero and a Metis uncle who served in the First World War, the guy also has a variety of cultural and historical wells to draw from. What’s more, he’s clearly got a rich life of his own. When he was 16, he left his home in North York, Ontario to travel through the Southern US on his own and, for a time, became a roadie for a band. All these decades later, he now splits his time between (as he puts it) the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf of the Arctic (ie. Northern Ontario).

The story goes that Three Day Road was so well received that Penguin offered the fledgling novelist a six-figure, two-book deal. Boyden’s debut novel is inspired in part by his uncle’s experiences in World War I, and also on the lives of two legendary military snipers, Ojibwa Francis Pegahmagabow and John Shiwak, an Inuit. Set partly in Moose Factory, Ontario, the novel tells two stories. One is the narrative of Xavier bird, a Cree soldier and crack sniper, wounded physically and deeply scarred emotionally. He returns to Northern Ontario to his Aunt Niska. As his aunt attempts to heal her morphine addicted nephew, he recounts his experiences in the Great War. The second narrative is Aunt Niska’s, a Cree woman who has rejected a Canadian society determined to assimilate her. Instead she has fled for the bush, which is where she lives and takes her nephew Xavier to try and heal him.

Boyden’s Giller winning follow-up, Through Black Spruce, was described by Now magazine, at heart, as “a page-turning campfire story told by one person to another in hushed tones, heartbeat to heartbeat.” The story is concerned with descendents of characters from Three Day Road, Uncle Will Bird, and his niece, Anna. Will lives in Moosonee, Ontario “on the edge of the world.” Like Boyden’s first novel, this story is told by two narrators, the ex-bush pilot, alcoholic uncle (now comatose), and his niece, who sits by her uncle’s hospital bed and recounts her experiences of traveling to Toronto and New York in search of her younger sister, a model.

To the delight of an ever-growing and loyal fan base, Boyden has hinted in interviews that as the two first novels are connected, his next book may well continue the story and complete what would be the trilogy of the Bird family.

Rohinton Mistry
 

Rohinton Mistry is the only writer in the world with the distinction of having had all (three) of his novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In his profile of Canada’s most famous Indian author, Rick Gekoski’s of the Guardian, wrote: “Mistry has a great eye and a huge heart, and if the world he describes is often cruel and capricious, his characters have a remarkable capacity to survive.”

Born in Mumbai, India, Mistry studied math before coming to live in Brampton, Ontario. In his early days in Canada he worked in a bank while earning a second degree in English and philosophy at the University of Toronto

Before he wrote A Fine Balance, widely regarded as Mistry’s masterpiece, he won both the Governor General’s Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s prize, as well being shortlisted for the Booker and the Trillium for his first novel, “Such a Long Journey.” The enormous critical and popular response to the writer’s undeniable ability to spin a fantastic yarn was good reason for the novel being made into a movie not a decade later.

Then came A Fine Balance.  Fiction writers often speak of a kernel—that first image, or spark of inspiration—from which even a tale as epic as A Fine Balance can spin forth.  Mistry told Oprah, who had selected it for her book club (that’s how big this book was) that the image that started the whole book for him was of a woman working at a sewing machine.

Set in India after Independence during The Emergency, the nearly two-year period in which India existed in a state of emergency, is the story of four very different characters—from starkly different social strata, in a society profoundly divided on those lines—coming together. It is a tale at times harrowing and bursting with despair, and yet it ultimately comes encased in a redemptive whole that is all the more affecting for never bogging down in sentimentality.

Though a citizen of Canada for some few decades, Mistry’s muse is clearly Bombay (modern day Mumbai) and he would return to his muse for his third novel Family Matters,  a book that the Guardian put on par with A Fine Balance.  High praise considering the esteem with which Mistry’s most famous book is held.

Those who discover Mistry seem to make their way through all three of the writer’s great novels. What they sometimes miss is the writer’s first ever book, the collection of short stories that started it all, Tales from Firozsha Baag.  Still, for Rohinton Mistry fans everywhere the big question remains: how much longer until the next opus from the great Indian writer from Brampton, Ontario.

Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage serves as a compelling counterpoint to Rohinton Mistry. Not that they aren’t both remarkably accomplished writers in their own rights, but where Mistry tempers his bleak with hope, Hage, if he tempers his bleak at all, does so with dark humor or with the stunning lyricism of his stylized sentences. Writers with as assured a voice and striking a literary style as Rawi Hage do not come around very often. For their part, the Montreal Mirror spoke of Hage’s “visceral, visual style,” an apt description for a writer who works as a visual artist when not penning award-winning novels.

Born in Beirut, Hage grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus. In his youth in war-torn Beirut there were constant power outages across the city. Hage has said that the simple math of no power equaling no TV is the reason why he became such an avid reader so young. There simply wasn’t anything else to do. The political unrest and ongoing violence, however, became too much to bear, and like so many others Hage left his beloved country in his twenties.

He moved to New York and worked in warehouse jobs under terrible conditions and endured a kind of racism he had never before experienced as an Arab man in America. But Hage, whose first languages are Arabic and French, worked hard to perfect English, and in 1991 moved to Montreal where he lives, happily, to this day.

In Montreal, Hage started out driving a cab. As the story goes, he was only able to quit the job and start writing full-time after his first novel, DeNiro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.  At €100,000 ($155,000), it is the world’s richest literary award for a single novel. In defending their selection, the IMPAC judges remarked that "its originality, its power, its lyricism, as well as its humane appeal all mark DeNiro's Game as the work of a major literary talent and make Rawi Hage a truly deserving winner." This is all the more impressive when you consider that the novel was plucked from the slush pile at Anansi. “It happens once every 10 years or so that you get work of that calibre coming out of nowhere,” Anansi publisher Lynn Henry, who edited both of Hage’s novels, told Quill and Quire.

Set in war-ravaged Lebanon, what sets Hage’s novel apart from other works with similar backdrops is that this is not just a novel engaging the reader on the level of political intrigue. There is also a lyricism to Hage’s prose that while markedly different from Hemingway's stripped down, direct sentences—Hage displays a freer, more creatively bursting force behind his streaming sentences—it is reminiscent of Papa’s unique ability to combine the journalist’s first-hand experience of war (“For Whom the Bell Tolls”) with the prose stylist’s ability to paint it for your mind’s eye while also shaking the emotional ground underneath you.

Although the follow-up to DeNiro's Game did not win the IMPAC Award nor carry the promotional excitement of a writer’s debut, Cockroach, like its predecessor, managed to get shortlisted for both the Giller and the Governor General’s Award. The most refreshing aspect to “Cockroach” is that, though haunted by the same history that is the setting for DeNiro's Game, it’s set in modern day Montreal. Better still, it is told by a narrator who, while morally correct in his thoughts, is a thief by profession who can, in a blatantly Kafka-esque manner, transform himself into a cockroach so as to get into homes or other places to steal as he pleases. In the Guardian’s review of the dark and often sexy novel, the book is described as a more ambitious sort of sequel to DeNiro's Game.

Whether you like your fiction lyrical, dark and intense, or if you like it epic in scope and redemptive in conclusion, or perhaps steeped in the conflict of the native culture coming against the Western, there is no doubt that any of these three writers next book will be a big event, and for good reason.