17. Age 16

By Rosena Fung

19. Bastion Falls

By Susie Moloney  

Bastion Falls was on my list for years.  I only heard about it years after it was published (back in 1995) and was intrigued by its premise -- like a Canadian take on a Stephen King story.  The only description I had was “town trapped in snowstorm w/ psychic teen girl”. 

 

Recently, while perusing Abe Books, I found a copy of Bastion Falls for only a few bucks.  It came with my first order (along with St.Lucy’s Home for Girls) and I only realized it was a mass produced paperback after I opened the box.  Inside the back page was a library slip from Eagle Nest Public Library, N.M. with three sign-outs in 2001, 2003 and 2016.   On Goodreads, Bastion Falls had only 78 ratings and 9 reviews.  This was obviously a pretty obscure find, so I was prepared to be disappointed. 

 

     There were northern towns just like Bastion, and yet Bastion stood alone among them. It had in its earlier days a harder edge, a meaner desperation, a need for the fulfillment of some kind of darker order.

     Things change; in that Bastion was no exception. The years piled on years brought it an air of civility that was inevitable. Its past was buried with the ruins of the old fort. What remains of the fort, in irony, are only its walls, the bastions.

 

When a freak September storm envelops the town in snow, strange things start to occur in Bastion, but no one is able to trace it back to the old fort site.  That is, no one except a teenaged girl named Shandy.

The strangest thing about the fort was that no one ever went to see it:  there were no field trips to study Bastion heritage, no commemorative dates to mark on the calendar, no Familis of the Fort to celebrate. People around Bastion almost pretended the fort didn’t exist.  They never denied it was there, and it was brought up, duly, during local history cases, but there was an unspoken agreement that the history of the fort was not up for public view or scrutiny.  It had seemed a town eccentricity, and before today Shandy had never questioned it, it having never been important. But it’s important now.

In recent years, a “mall-like” complex was built in the town centre, constructed out of “good old Bastion Falls limestone” and providing an epicentre for the inhabitants to gather.  The public school and bar were also part of the complex.  When the blizzard descends upon Bastion, many people stayed inside the mall to wait out the storm and pretty soon the mall became a refuge centre.

 

When running late for work, Marilyn got caught in the sudden blizzard, but made it to safety and took refuge inside the mall.  The same morning, Shandy was pressured by her boyfriend to skip school so they could hang out, but she was reluctant to because of the approaching storm.  She relented, and unfortunately, later witnessed her boyfriend overtaken by an unknown entity.

     In the corner of his mouth, for just a second, Shandy saw a black tail-like thing, attached to something bigger, but like a shadow. It moved down his throat to the center of him, she followed it with her eyes as it moved into his chest.

     It reversed. The swell disappeared.

    “David?” she whispered.

     David’s body shrunk into itself, the blood disappearing from his flesh leaving it the color of corn husks, the flesh shrunken.

Shandy is the psychic teenage.  Through her abilities, she sensed that the source of the entities originated from the old fort site and comes to the realization that she must destroy it.     

    Somewhere up around the old fort site. That was where it was coming from. Whatever it was that was happening. (Something to do with the storm, the storm and those things.). That was where she had to go. Shandy knew this, the same way she always knew.

When Marilyn finally met Shandy and saw how determined she was to set off on her suicidal mission, she went with her and helped Shandy set fire to the fort.

 

There were some obvious flaws with the plotline and which ‘genre’ this work of fiction wanted to fit into.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find the quality of the writing quite solid.  There was care and detail in describing the town of Bastion Falls and its various inhabitants. 

Like Candace Bergen, the new principal of Bastion Falls Composite Highschool and “by Bastion standards, the most progressive principal the town had ever known… But by standards formed by the rest of the liberal world, she was conservative to the highest degree."  In describing her personality and dedication to her role, Moloney also painted a general picture of the student body, where chronic truancy, teen pregnancies, substance abuse and dropout rates were relatively high. 

 

Another interesting character was Joe Nashkawa, mall manager.  “Besides running the mall, Joe was chief o the Bastion Volunteer Fire Brigade; in the winter he coached the under-six hockey team, the only team to play inside the rec center’ and he was a band elder…”

 

And then there was Emma, the cheatin’ stay-at-home mom, who killed time by having serial affairs, her latest being occasional handyman and closet toxic male, Tully.

She sometimes thought of divorce, and then having all the affairs she wanted, but she did love Don—it wasn’t anything personal—and hadn’t loved any of the others. She had hardly even liked any of the others. They simply were a part of that other life, add a lift to her day. Her days were desperately lift-less, and her affairs were very, very important to her in their own right.  She wouldn’t give it up, didn’t even want to think about it, even though she did, every single morning when the before of it all was happening and the excitement high and her genitals were throbbing and all of it overwhelming her. She simply could not help herself.

It looked like Emma was gonna get punished for her sins when her lover didn’t handle being dumped well.  Her being trapped by Tully the Unhinged Handyman was probably the most tense part of the novel.  When the entities got him, it was pretty satisfying to read.

 

Last but not least, there was Ed, the manager of the bar that also provided a safe haven for the locals to take refuge and drown their boredom.

Just about all his regulars were there, having been in for most of the day. But a lot of folks were people he hardly ever saw, the twice-a-month folks, the once-in-a-while folks, some of them were in the bar. Most of those folks had come in out of the storm for refuge and found it in booze. There was no helping that: he couldn’t exactly start throwing people out into the worst storm he’d seen in years… Therein lay the problem. What was he going to do with all these people?

It looked like Moloney was going to build up to a big massacre or showdown between the townsfolk and the mysterious entities.  I mean, that’s what Stephen King would’ve done.  Despite all the care and attention that Moloney put into the setting and disparate characters, it never all quite gelled together into a gripping cohesive narrative.  Oddly enough, the only character who was sparse on background and detail was Marilyn, the young divorcee who ended up helping Shandy defeat the entities and save Bastion.  For someone who was the sole remaining witness to what went down at the old fort site, we didn’t know much about her, yet Moloney devoted so many pages to the other side characters, like Emma and Candace, that had nothing to do with the main plotline.

 

When Marilyn and Shandy finally met, it felt kind of rushed considering all the time spend developing the other characters.  What’s more, their attempt to burn down the fort (“fire cleanses”) was somewhat laughable, as Shandy only packed several cans of lighter fluid in her knapsack.  Shandy somehow holds back the demonic entities with her mind while Marilyn sets the fort ablaze in a snowstorm with those cans of lighter fluid.  But it really seemed like they needed something with more oomph, like gallons of gasoline and/or a flame thrower!

 

It was pretty miraculous that two ordinary people were able to defeat a legion of supernatural, soul-sucking entities with a few cans of lighter fluid and the whole thing was disappointingly anti-climactic.  Shandy even died an unsung hero, with the people of Bastion unaware of her sacrifice.  Only Marilyn knew what really happened.

The stones were black with soot, and more of the limestone bricks that had held such misery had fallen over. The acrid smell of smoke was still there, and under it the smell of the lighter fluid. It truly looked like ruins now. Marilyn thought it looked harmless. She knew it felt harmless. Her amazement at the place was mostly because she didn’t feel much changed from that night. She felt no ghosts at her side; her mother didn’t come to her in dreams. She was herself again. The aches were gone. There were no echoes in her head. There seemed no aftermath, except that some people had died; many that she knew, one that she felt responsibility for, even if she’d tried.

Despite it’s anti-climactic-ness, I still found Bastion Falls a low-key page-turner, which makes it very Canadian. Yet the novel is written in a way that doesn’t point out how Canadian it is.  We know that Bastion Falls is a northern prairie town, but which province, it didn’t really matter.  There were clues though, like when Joe always had his radio tuned to CBC, “the only station he would play in the office, damn the others all to hell if they wanted to listen to their shit-kicker music, he liked his news.”

 

Moloney also sidesteps any explanation regarding the supernatural forces.  Were they pre-colonial?  Did early European settles massacre a First Nations village?  Was the fort built over some ancient burial site?  Stephen King would’ve delved into the origins a little, but Moloney is no Stephen King.

 

Still, Bastion Falls made for a good winter holiday read while I was staying at the in-laws. Thanks to Abe Books, I'm glad I finally got to read it, but unfortunately, it ain't a keeper.

5. The Handmaid's Tale

By Margaret Atwood 

The Handmaid’s Tale was the kind of book I should've read during university.  As I mentioned in my review for Cat’s Eye, I’d been trying to find a used copy of THT for some years  It wasn’t until last September when visiting my brother that I finally found a copy at a used book store in Abbotsford.

One reason I didn’t read THT sooner was my fear of (self-)serious fiction, particularly CanLit.  I also quietly harboured a suspicion of Margaret Atwood as a visionary writer despite highly reputable rags like The New Yorker hailing her as a “prophet of dystopia”.

Let me be clear that Atwood is, without a doubt, a great fiction writer.  But over the years, she has done things that made me question her visionary status.  From trivial to worse, there was:

• Her championing of Vincent Lam’s highly overrated debut story collection which I didn’t like very much
• Her snobby dismissal of science fiction as mere genre fiction
• Her public support of Steve Galloway in his sexual misconduct scandal when he was a writing prof at UBC
• Her doubling down on her recent TERFish twitter posts

The last three items certainly demonstrated self-serving arrogance, but even more alarming, there was a lack of fundamental understanding of social issues that reveals a world view that might be possibly and ironically limited by the privilege of being enshrined for decades as a so-called visionary.

For Atwood fans who may disagree, let's take a look at this Guardian article:

    Enter science fiction’s saviour, Ursula Le Guin, who in a 2009 review of Atwood’s The Year ofthe Flood criticised Atwood’s “arbitrarily restrictive definition” and laid bare Atwood’s motivations for proposing it: “She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.” This literary bigotry is more than just rhetoric; the very first line of the New York Times review of Oryx and Crake, for instance, proudly declares that “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L.’” While sympathizing with Atwood’s motivations, Le Guin refused to endorse Atwood’s proposed solution.

                                                                        ----

    The widespread acceptance of the term “speculative fiction,” as Atwood has defined it, would spell the end for continuing efforts to legitimize science fiction as a genre. The resulting schism, presented as a defensive measure to protect works from the “literary bigots,” would plunder genre-transcendent texts like The Handmaid’s Tale to fill the snobbish stables of “speculative fiction” and leave “science fiction” to describe only much-derided 50s pulp novels.

And how does The Handmaid’s Tale stand as speculative fiction?

The day after Trump’s inauguration as POTUS, there was a well-known photograph taken at the Women’s March on Washington of a protester with a sign bearing the slogan: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again.”

No one could predict that Donald Trump would become president, but Atwood certainly predicted the rise of the evangelical movement that helped put Trump in the highest office of the US of A.  As a first-person account of a woman serving as a reproductive handmaid in a dystopian America ruled by patriarchal evangelicals, The Handmaid’s Tale was a captivating read.  I was absorbed by Offred’s cloistered life as a handmaid and her quiet rebellion.  But as soon as Atwood widened the scope to depict Gilead, a profound flaw revealed itself.  And it wasn’t just the utter lack of sci-fi world-building that was the problem.  Atwood is dismissive of genre fiction, yet her portrayal of Gilead as a society was thin at best.  If this was genuine science fiction, Atwood would’ve had to flesh out Gilead - significantly.  But as “serious literature”, Gilead could conveniently serve as allegory or symbol.

If I had read The Handmaid’s Tale as a naïve university student, I wouldn’t have caught on.  But reading this in 2022, with racism and colonialism laid bare by BLM and MMIWG2S, and the horrors of the Residential School system etched into the collective consciousness, the omission is glaringly obvious.  A real elephant in the room.  I don’t wish to spend my precious time dissecting all this, when it's so easy to google articles that explain this better than I ever could.

By portraying a dystopic America ruled by evangelical Christian, Atwood omitted an entire history that has been part of America since its very founding - a country that was built upon the enslavement and suffering of African peoples.  It’s common knowledge that The Handmaid’s Tale is about a society built on the oppression of women, but what’s much less known was that it's also about "a society built on white supremacy":

You’re forgiven for missing that major plot point because even Atwood quickly glosses over it. The narrative never really pans out far enough to give us a full picture of Gilead as a society. Our protagonist, Offred, is a white woman and has a narrow scope of the dystopian world of Gilead. Searching for mentions of race in The Handmaid’s Tale feels like digging for clues.

In fact, the most obvious statement that Gilead was a white supremacist society doesn’t even come until the conclusion, a section titled “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale,” that reads as a lecture given by the historian who found Offred’s recorded story hidden away. In it, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto of Cambridge University, gives his audience some historical context for the fall of the United States and the rise of Gilead. He says,

“Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time.” (Bold text added by [author].)

                                                                      ----

The only mention of non-white people at all is a line referring to the “Children of Ham” being relocated to their homeland. Vague as hell, right? I didn’t fully understand the implications of that until I read the “historical notes” section. It’s the only time in the entire three hundred-ish pages that it’s explicitly stated that the forming of Gilead was racially motivated.

I’d like to take a moment to add here that one big problem I have with The Handmaid’s Tale is that I think Atwood has done an abysmally horrible job of addressing race in the novel — and has since refused to comment on her racial insensitivity since. This tweet sums it up.

Atwood has been very vocal about her insistence that everything she included in The Handmaid’s Tale has happened in history, that every injustice is one that women have faced. I think the point is to drive home the fact that if it happened before then it can happen again. But who did it happen to before? She’s reluctant to address that because the answer is largely…not white women. Black women, brown women and indigenous women have been abused and enslaved for centuries. The dystopia is when it begins happening to white women.

 Here's a passage from an article from The Verge:

The novel is narrated by Offred, a college-educated white woman forced into service as a handmaiden. Atwood openly acknowledges that Offred's experiences of violence and sexual coercion are based on American slavery. The network that rescues handmaids is clumsily named the Underground Femaleroad, after the historic Underground Railroad. Atwood also mentions that the regime hates the song "Amazing Grace,” which was originally written as a protest against the slave trade. Handmaids, like black slaves before them, are not allowed to read, need passes to go outside, and can be publicly lynched for perceived crimes against the regime.

Atwood also links the handmaids’ plight to the oppression of women in some Arabic Muslim countries. The handmaids are forced to wear enveloping, draping outfits that mix nun's habits and burqas. And Offred muses that handmaid gatherings look like "paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads, or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard." In her world, independent Western women have fallen into an Orientalist nightmare. The terrible thing about being a handmaid is that you cease to be white.

The book does explain why black people are absent in Gilead: the regime is not just sexist, but racist. It is only interested in white babies, and therefore only interested in enslaving white women. The novel mentions a news report about the "resettlement of the Children of Ham," which suggests American people of color are being forcibly relocated — and given the American historical precedents, probably murdered outright.  Gilead obligingly moves black people away so the novel can present black people's experiences without black characters. Atwood critiques the regime, but also collaborates with it to push black people aside.

And from an article published on Vulture:

The most incisive aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale is that it portrays America not as it could be, but how it’s always been.

In Atwood’s novel, black people are mentioned in only a few sentences to alert readers that they’ve been rounded up and sent to some colony in the Midwest, in a move that resembles South Africa’s apartheid. This decision feels like the mark of a writer unable to reckon with how race would compound the horrors of a hyper-Evangelical-ruled culture.  Furthermore, it misrepresents how black and brown people resist in times of crisis. As writer Mikki Kendall noted on Twitter, “black people did not survive slavery, Jim Crow, and the war on drugs to be taken out by a handful of white boys with guns.”

The Handmaid’s Tale [the show] is best described as post-racial. In an interview with TVLine Miller explains this choice, saying, “The evangelical movement has gotten a lot more integrated” in the years since the book was published. In actuality, the evangelical movement continues to twist scripture in order to support virulent racism — a practice that goes back to this country’s founding, when slaves were stripped of their own practices and forced into Christianity while being barred from reading the same Bible slave masters used to assert their superiority as not just biological fact, but a spiritual imperative. More importantly, Handmaid’s post-racial view of America rings false because in times of strife, divisions don’t dissolve — if anything, they become more ingrained (which proves true for gender on the show). As Soraya Nadia McDonald posits in a piece for the Undefeated, “So Gilead is post-racial because the human race is facing extinction, and that prompted Americans to get over several hundred years’ worth of racist education and social conditioning that depicted black people as inferior and less than human?”

How can you attempt to craft a political, artistically rich narrative that trades in the real-life experiences of black and brown women, while ignoring them and the ways sexism intersects with racism? The Handmaid’s Tale creates a claustrophobic reality, particularly for black viewers and the characters that mirror us onscreen. Its catchy feminist rhetoric is a mask for how it propagates the same systems it seeks to critique. The bodies and histories of black and brown women prove to be useful templates for shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, but our actual voices aren’t.

 

Its catchy feminist rhetoric is a mask for how it propagates the same systems it seeks to critique.

 

THIS.  Although meant for the TV series, it also accurately sums up my feelings about The Handmaid's Tale and its author.  If you want to be brutally honest about what Atwood actually did, she appropriated the history and suffering of African slaves and transformed it into appealing yet serious fiction for white people. And she greatly benefited from that. TJ Klune also continues this tradition with a book I'm a bit embarrassed at having read.  Atwood is a talented writer, but not the enlightened visionary the literary world has made her out to be.  Atwood came to prominence at a time when white feminism and CanLit was gaining traction and becoming an establishment.  In this sphere, she should be revered.  But her status as a prophet of dystopia, not so much.

So yeah, I don’t know if I can continue reading Atwood anymore.  I have the first season of THT but don’t think I can watch that either knowing its post-racial politics will bother me. I still have Oryx and Crake (which I realize is a triology, ugh) and have decided to sell it.  I think Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid's Tale are enough to say I’ve read Atwood and can opine about her as an author.  There are so many books that I want to read and I’d much rather read from authors I truly respect.  In fact, I may look into more books by Le Guin (I think I’ve only read The Farthest Shore and it was a long time ago).