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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Nothing is simple in story collection

Reviewed by: Rory Runnells

21/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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The Moon of Letting Go

By Richard Van Camp

Enfield & Wizenty, 214 pages, $30

NOTHING is simple in the writing of Richard Van Camp, whose second story collection, The Moon of Letting Go, shows us not only the messiness of our lives but our longing for the spiritual to infuse them.

Van Camp, a Dogrib from Fort Smith, N.W.T., which hides superficially in his town Fort Simmer, gives us a vision of the North which in its own way is as distinct and rich as Flannery O'Connor's South, or, more close to home, Armin Wiebe's Southern Manitoba.

The quality of an oral culture, now disappearing even in the North Van Camp celebrates, marks the best of the stories, published by the literary imprint of Winnipeg's Great Plains Publications.

Indeed, most of these tales have the sense of the storyteller inviting us to listen, and take away what we wish, not as a lesson, but an experience of life. In the collection's title story, a young woman and her son, seeking a quiet escape from her abusive ex, are chosen by a perhaps even bigger evil, an elder who, the community believes, kills with his medicine, or spiritual power.

He commands, she listens, but more out of a deep curiosity than fear, as it seems to her he is slowly winding up his life, and promises a "good" deed, namely killing her enemy, the ex's lover.

Her rejection of this leads to the deepest epiphany of the power of forgiveness, the need to embrace it fully, but also the need to be recreate your life.

The old man's song rises within her: "She closed her eyes and whispered, 'I give you back.' " The metaphor of her cleaning the old man's house, in other hands, might seem trite, as the old man cleans his existence to wait for the end, but Van Camp makes it both touching and funny.

He isn't afraid of presenting what seems entirely natural in his North, that the spiritual, a mix of traditional native beliefs and mystical Catholic piety, exist together, as does a serious belief in evil and good as human essence, not as social constructs.

The ghost story Don't Forget This exudes this, as does The Power of Secrets, and, most powerfully, I Count Myself Among Them, in which a self-described gentle giant, a First Nations gangster, finds himself taken up as a kind of redeemer in a bizarre ceremony.

This is both unsettling, darkly humorous and poetic: "I was born a giant to become this -- a child or something else -- and, oh my Maker, as I burst into flames I have finally found my way home."

Another character who finds his way home, though more conventionally through domesticity, is Gerald, the late teen narrator of Love Walked In. His community might dislike him for informing on the school principal's nasty behaviour, and his current sexual fantasy for a French girl is out of line, but his moral centre keeps him steady, and with girlfriend, Donna, even at his young age, "this could be my life, he notes in pleasant surprise." This story is hilarious, and shows, Van Camp's ability to write of male angst without judging or patronizing it.

He also makes keen observation of the sexual and romantic into darker territory as the final stories, especially Wolf: A Ceremony of You, show. The nine stories are grouped under the headings Healing, Medicine, Teachings, and Love.

But nothing is that simple, and Van Camp, while providing the list, knows we, as readers, will mix them, as does life.

Rory Runnells is artistic director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights and drama editor of Prairie Fire Magazine.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 H8

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