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Best and worst of new B.C. fiction

Rain Before Morning

By Michael Poole

Harbour Publishing, 2006

319 pages, $24.95

Empress of Asia

By Adam Lewis Schroeder

Raincoast Books, 2006

409 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

“We publish too many books in Canada,” Raincoast Books publisher Allan MacDougall told me recently. “We should be publishing fewer books and of better quality,” he said.

Can there ever be too many books, I wondered at the time? After wading through some of this fall’s new books I have to concede a grudging yes. There can never be too many good books, but there can be too many books on bookstore shelves that would have better been left unpublished.

One such book to avoid this fall is Michael Poole’s Rain Before Morning (Harbour, 2006). Established in the early 1970s by publisher Howard White, Harbour is a Sechelt-based publishing house devoted to saving B.C.’s natural and social history. Series such as Raincoast Chronicles have preserved B.C.’s under-rated West Coast life and Harbour has consistently produced bestselling non-fiction like Chris Czajkowski’s Cabin at Singing River and Ian and Karen McAllister’s The Great Bear Rainforest . But Rain Before Morning doesn’t live up to Harbour’s lineage with its limpid story of two young lovers pushed apart in early 20 th -century rural maritime B.C.

This is a first novel for Poole, a journalist and filmmaker, who wrote the quixotic Romancing Mary Jane: A Year in the Life of a Failed Marijuana Grower (Greystone, 2000). Rain’s two main characters, half-native Nathan who aspires to be a fisheries scientist (did B.C. have fisheries scientists 100 years ago?), and Leah, convent-raised and rebelling against backwoods parents (original hippies but religious education advocates — say what?), are inconsistent and unbelievable. Dialogue rings of 2003 not 1913 as Nathan and Leah plod through a hampered plot wherein the lovers after a rambunctious liaison — “Soon, my love, I’ll let you know. Believe me, I’m just as horny as you are.” — are separated by events of the time.

Supposedly inspired by a true event, this story might have been better told as part of a family memoir or chapter in an umpteenth issue of Raincoast Chronicles .

At the other end of the book monitoring spectrum is Adam Lewis Schroeder’s Empress of Asia , also a novel of two lovers separated by events, but so deftly crafted and enticingly written it’s a book you will want to press into hands of friends, family, or strangers on the street.

On the brink of World War II Harry Winslow leaves Vernon as a teen to sail the seas on a merchant ship, but soon gets snapped up and imprisoned in a Japanese war camp before being reunited with the mysterious Lily he had met in Singapore and married the same day. Framed by the story of Harry in old age at Lily’s bedside, the novel blends dialogue, place, character and extensive research like a well-travelled but still vibrantly-coloured quilt.

Empress of Asia benefits from Schroeder’s own backpacking travels in capturing the heat, subtleties and aromas of Asia. Throughout the novel Harry tucks the reader by his side with his B.C. boy humour, as in this scene on deck when Emerald, a rusting scow turned troop carrier, is spotted by Japanese bombers:

“They all turned together over the water to come back towards us, and then I saw the red circles on their wings. Our sirens drowned out the sound of everything — the Limeys might’ve fired their guns a hundred times but I barely heard them. I was trying to pay attention to things because in the movies it’s always some little detail that saves a guy’s life, the rusty bolt that he’s been able to unscrew with his fingernails or the scarecrow Terry managed to build so that Captain Blaze’s men wouldn’t shoot him dead. And concentrating on one thing at a time at least kept me from running around screaming…”

Schroeder, a Vernon resident and UBC creative writing grad, cleverly captures Harry’s fretful teenage voice in second person and renders him delightfully into a fussily aging but excruciatingly loyal oldster (“…the first time you ever wore a bikini was to go in that lake. You were thirty-two years old and Holy Christ did you look good… The Arnotts were with us on that trip and I turned around to Les and said Amen. Amen to that.”) who discovers he’s not so lost when he loses his tender Lily.

Influenced from reading War and Peace while travelling Asia and from remembering his grandfather’s war stories, Schroeder has produced a keeper of a novel, a rich tapestry of history and humanity that deserves to be passed from hand to hand to hand.