January 15, 1999

Fabulous prairie novel makes a stylish comeback

Some works of literature are so fixed in their time and culture they lose the ability to touch readers soon after publication. Dr. Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said, however, transcends such limitations. In fact the impressively designed reprint of this neglected classic by the University of Alberta Press could conceivably outshine the novel's first arrival on the Canadian literary scene 21 years ago.

Arguably the most fantastic of Kroetsch's works, What the Crow Said is set in the town of Big River, situated somewhere on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. In addition to the ambiguous location, the story's time frame is also impossible to pin down with any certainty - in broad terms, the action takes place some time after the Second World War when rural Alberta was making the transition to technology-based agriculture.

The opening scene is one of the most strangely erotic in Canadian literature: a young woman is raped by a swarm of bees while lying in a patch of wild flowers. From that day on, she and the town she lives in are never the same. The first sentence immediately sets the mythic tone of Kroetsch's narrative: "People, years later, blamed everything on the bees."

In the long days between tending crops, characters are worked upon by the wildly unpredictable prairie weather and fall victim to the most tragi-comic of circumstances: a costly and fatal war against the sky, a seductive card game lasting for months and leaving most of the players destitute, a baby's rescue by wolves after being thrown from his mother's horse and left for dead. This is a far cry from the dry, realistic sort of prairie fiction typically associated with Western Canada. If Kroetsch is guilty of regional navel-gazing, he has one bizarre navel indeed.

Kroetsch is perhaps best known for his novel, The Studhorse Man, which won a 1969 Governor General Award. In spring 1997, the Heisler-born writer, teacher and critic became the third Alberta author to receive an honorary degree from the U of A, a gesture underscoring his indisputable place in Canada's literary tradition.

While much of his work has fallen out of favor in recent years for its decidedly masculine frontier ethos, What the Crow Said points well beyond the confines of time and place, says U of A Press editor Glenn Rollans. Shaped by a good deal of classical and biblical mythology, and imbued with a solid dose of magical realism, the book has an unmistakable timeless quality.

"When I wrote What the Crow Said I thought it was full of magic realism," said Kroetsch from his daughter's home in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Now when I read it, it seems much more realistic. It's the way the world really was back then. I'm really delighted this one has been reprinted."

As to accusations of masculine bias, Kroetsch argues "masculinity is back in" now. "Maybe that's part of why it was reprinted. People are more interested now in the difficulties of maleness...I think it's a very positive examination of the difficulties of masculine narrative, especially as we used to tell it on the prairies, where it was such a physical thing."

What the Crow Said is the first novel released by the U of A Press, but others will follow, says Rollans, along with the occasional collection of poetry. They constitute a new interdisciplinary series called "cuRRents" (general editor Dr. Jonathan Hart), that will include a wide range of genres in original as well as reprinted editions. The series is designed to promote some of the finest, if neglected, Western Canadian writing.

"I've got an interest in seeing especially important western works that are out of print being back in print," says Rollans. "We sort of had our eyes open when Kroetsch got an honorary doctorate. He's a very forceful and in some ways masculine writer...but what comes out a lot is his recourse to classical stories. Even in horrific circumstances, there's a kind of resilience of character that goes beyond endurance."

In his introduction to the novel, Dr. Robert Wilson observes "in Kroetsch's in-between spaces very ordinary things occur, but they do so with a twist, often quite simple in itself, that makes them seem momentarily aberrant, often deeply strange."

The result is a world where every gesture brings on consequences of mythic proportions, and where, according to Wilson, "everything in nature - winter, sunshine or spring snowstorms - contains the embryos of human desire." It's a world readers will now have the good fortune to rediscover.

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