Barbara Kay gives rave reviews to Octave of All Souls

Hooray! This book by Robert Eady deserves a wide audience. Barbara Kay writes:

Writing about Canadian fiction last September, I bemoaned Canadian publishers’ penchant for somnolent navel-gazing over lively social commotion. I want novels written for real readers, not for creative-workshop peers.

As if waiting for exactly this gauntlet to fall, an author I’d never heard of sent me his novel. Braced for amateurism, I dipped in and was pleasantly shocked to discover an original, richly imagined and eloquently rendered literary world.

The book’s title is The Octave of All Souls. The author is 61-year old Robert Eady, an Ottawa area poet and essayist. Astonishingly, given Eady’s easy mastery over content and form, this is his first novel. Octave was published by a tiny independent press with little distribution, because the manuscript had been rejected by all large Canadian publishers. What were they thinking?

I’ll hazard a guess. That the novel was too politically incorrect to take a chance on.

It’s true that Eady is an unusually conservative Catholic (he attends a traditional Latin-rites church) and an outlier in the literary community — his writing was well-received until he wrote an anti-abortion poem, bringing publication offers to a juddering halt — but Octave is not a “Catholic” novel in any didactic sense. On the contrary, some of its most admirable characters are secular, and an unsympathetic character is a repugnantly obtuse, but devout Catholic.

Mortals — the good, the bad, the mostly in-between — are the novel’s subject. In Octave, Eady patiently picks apart a small town’s intimately tangled social circuitry through the lens of a vital, sensitive central character, a morally striving student of humanity on whom nothing is lost or wasted.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/20/barbara-kay-the-great-canadian-novelist-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-of/#ixzz0uGnAvVLy

Well, I was the first that I know of to review this heartbreakingly beautiful book. I did not want it to end. Here's an excerpt of my review from last year:

Eady, whose op eds have been widely published in major newspapers, has three previously published books of poetry to his credit.

His poet's ability to see and to convey with precision what he observes sets this novel apart.

But the novel has none of the affected, convoluted language that sometimes characterizes Canadian literature. Eady is able to capture the chattiness of his narrator's female voice without losing his poetic economy of language.

A master of the letter to the editor - 60 words or less - Eady also has great wit and humour that Catholic readers have probably recognized in the pages of Canada's major newspapers. He was also a contributing editor of Catholic Insight magazine for a number of years.

The Octave of All Souls is structured around letters written by a shy aging spinster to an Oblate missionary priest who is somewhere in Africa. She addresses him as "Dearest Friend" and signs her missives "J.T."

It soon becomes clear they attended the same Strathearn schools growing up and she is filling him in on the changes in the people and the town since he left.

J.T. has taken upon herself to perform a traditional Catholic practice of going to the cemetery on All Souls Day and every day of the octave to pray for the souls of 14 Strathearn residents who died in the previous year. As she goes to the cemetery each day, she writes about the present as well as the past.

Despite the use of the Catholic tradition to structure the book, non-Catholics would probably also enjoy the story.

Clearly no saint, J.T. confesses off the bat she can't stand the first person she is praying for, Paula Perristar, a former high school basketball star who became a town councillor. Yet J.T. dutifully goes to the cemetery to say the prayers anyway.

The letters start with anecdotes about the deceased townspeople, their entanglements and their battles. J.T. lives in an apartment over the bowling alley downtown.

We get to know her cats who go out on her fire escape, and see her view of the flat pebbled roof tops of nearby stores.

We accompany her to breakfast at the Democracity Café, a diner that was remodelled on themes borrowed from the 1939 World Fair in New York and left unchanged for decades. It is in this diner where many a petty argument or long-running feud plays out.

Gradually, the letters become more revealing. J.T. is no longer a cipher passing along amusing and well-observed stories about the townspeople, but unveiling her deepest self.

CIRCUMSCRIBED LIVES

One might not think much would happen in the life of a shy, aging spinster, but Eady, with great tenderness and insight, shows how monumental under the surface even seemingly circumscribed lives can be.

It is a story of unrequited love, of despair and grace, of an uneducated woman's finding a mentor in her former high school English teacher, now retired, who forms a book club that exposes her to literature.

There is a profound mystery at the core of this book that opens up the meaning of the communion of the saints in eternity. Eady is able to show this in a way that resonates to the bone.

Now if only Barbara Kay would read The Defilers and write about it in a positive light! I'm no literary novelist, but guess what, Robert Eady told me he thoroughly enjoyed it.