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Linden MacIntyre writes from female viewpoint in Giller follow-up, 'Why Men Lie'

By: Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press

Posted: 03/29/2012 11:49 AM | Comments: 0 | Last Modified: 03/29/2012 3:52 PM

Acclaimed author and CBC-TV journalist Linden MacIntyre has just published his new novel,

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Acclaimed author and CBC-TV journalist Linden MacIntyre has just published his new novel, "Why Men Lie." It's the follow-up to MacIntyre's 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, "The Bishop's Man." THE CANADIAN PRESS/ho-Joe Passaretti

TORONTO - Acclaimed author and CBC-TV journalist Linden MacIntyre says he didn't initially set out to write his new novel, "Why Men Lie," from a woman's perspective. But he wound up doing so out of necessity.

The follow-up to MacIntyre's 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner "The Bishop's Man," the newly published book follows 50-something professor Effie MacAskill Gillis as she reflects on past and current relationships with men, from her frightening father to her ex-husbands and her priest brother.

MacIntyre, 68, admits he first tackled the story from a man's point of view in an effort to explore middle-aged male preoccupations with impotence of all kinds, but "it just did not work."

"It didn't come together, and it was only after a long, long struggle that I realized men aren't credibly conscious of what makes them what they are. They don't have that much self-knowledge, self-insight into something as intrinsic as that, and I just wrote it off as a failed idea."

That was around the time when "The Bishop's Man" hit shelves and went on to win the Giller, which MacIntyre wasn't expecting and which brought "a lot of great expectations."

As MacIntyre met with readers of "The Bishop's Man," he fielded many questions about its two strong female characters, Effie and Stella, and that provided the spark he needed for his next book.

"I suddenly said to myself, 'You know what? Who knows the pathologies of a middle-aged man better than a middle-aged woman who has a lot of experience with men? I'm going to try this from a woman's perspective,'" MacIntyre, co-host of "The Fifth Estate," said in a recent interview at the Random House of Canada offices.

"How do you do that when you're not a female? Well, I just happened to have grown up surrounded by women, dominated by women, bossed around and abused, tortured by women of all ages."

Those women include his school teachers; his wife, CBC Radio broadcaster Carol Off; his two sisters; his three daughters; and the reporters he met in the newsroom in the '60s and '70s, "at a time when women were coming into their own as journalists" and "had to be tough and smart and quick."

"I knew an awful lot of those women, I'll tell ya. Worked with them closely, had my bell rung by a few of them for the wrong statement or the wrong presumption at the wrong time," said the genial Nova Scotia-raised MacIntyre, winner of nine Gemini Awards for broadcast journalism.

"So I figured I had a pretty good grasp of what makes a particular kind of woman tick, you know — a strong woman, a smart woman — and those were the women I wanted to reflect in this story."

"Once I realized this is going to be Effie's voice — pfft," said MacIntyre, mimicking the sound of a small explosion. "It just happened."

"Why Men Lie" continues MacIntyre's Cape Breton thread that started with 1999's "The Long Stretch" and evolved through "The Bishop's Man."

The new book begins in 1997 in Toronto, where Effie runs into JC Campbell, an enigmatic TV news producer who used to run in the same circles as her and her playboy of an ex-husband, Sextus.

Eventually Effie and JC begin a romance that grows complicated when he begins to show a darker side.

Complicating matters is JC's bond with Sam Williams, an inmate who's on death row for murder in Texas and who agrees to be interviewed by JC about his case.

Like JC, MacIntyre also became entangled in the case of a death-row inmate in Texas. Stan Faulder, a Canadian, agreed to chat with MacIntyre in what marked the first time he'd ever spoken to the media. MacIntyre even spent several hours talking to Faulder the day was executed in June 1999.

"I got close to him," said MacIntyre. "I got closer than I ever planned to get, not out of any kind of particular curiosity. He just struck me as an anomaly."

MacIntyre said didn't intend on building a novel around that case, but as he thought about the story's theme of male potency, he realized Faulder was the most impotent person he's ever met.

"He had absolutely no power in his existence, and I found that the man had extraordinary dignity, presence and fearlessness. So that flowed into the process of telling a story about middle-aged people and impotence."

"Why Men Lie" also looks at how the consequences of violence migrate through generations. In Effie's case, she and her Cape Breton contemporaries were indirect victims of a wartime killing witnessed by her father and his friends.

It's yet another topic that's close to MacIntyre's heart, having covered news from war-torn regions around the world.

"In each of the books, in different ways, there's a lot of stuff that comes up out of the experiences I've had as a reporter," said MacIntyre, who lives in Toronto and wrote about his childhood in his memoir, "Causeway: A Passage from Innocence."

"In reporting, you go through all kinds of experience. You skim off the top-quarter of an inch and you put it out there for everybody to consume, and then you walk around with the rest of it stuck in your craw or your memory or notebooks. And a lot of it is probably more significant than the part that you reported.

"I've been doing this reporting thing for close to 50 years, and there's an awful lot in there that would never get reported. So it's kind of inevitable that when I'm stirring the old pot and the imagination that there will be stuff come up into the imagination out of the memory or out of what we used to call overmatter — all the stuff on the spike that never got in the paper that day."

MacIntyre said he's now working on his next novel, one that features totally different characters and situations. It explores the fallout of people taking the law into their own hands and is set against the backdrop of the international debate over whether or not to invade Iraq.

That doesn't mean MacIntyre is necessarily through with his Cape Breton characters, though.

"Somebody was asking me this morning if I was finished with the trilogy," he said.

"I said, 'I hope so,' and she said, 'Well what about (Effie's daughter) Cassie? She's screaming out for it.'"

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