A Bit More Detail

Joseph Boyden's novella Wenjack is a sensitive retelling of the story of Chanie Wenjack, an Anishinaabe who ran away from his residential school one October day in 1967 and died of exposure. Wenjack's story has gained national prominence in recent years as Canadians at large have become aware of the borderline-genocidal ills of our country's Indian residential school system. Joined by another new project, Secret Path, an album by Gord Downie and a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire, Wenjack is part of a multimedia effort by Canadian artists to tell Wenjack's story, the better for us all to know.

Wenjack is as superb as one would expect given Boyden's reputation. In spare poetic prose, Boyden tells the story of how a young boy desperate to go home ended up dying alone one cold night northern Ontario railroad tracks, and why. Chanie's interior voice feels true, as true as the voices of the manitous--spirits--who, in the guise of the different animals of the bush, accompany Chanie on his final journey. As we follow Chanie to the end, Boyden helps us to understand something of who he was, and what his sufferings and his joys mean for all Canadians.



Wenjack is a sad story that needs to be told, and is here told heartbreakingly well by one of the masters of contemporary Canadian fiction. A quick read at just over a hundred pages, it's something everyone who cares about Canada should take the time to read.

"Anne of Green Gables - The Musical ™ July 20 - August 28" (Watch on YouTube)

Thanks to my sister, I was able to get tickets to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical last Tuesday. This showing will have been the fourth time I've seen the act that has been headlining the
Charlottetown Festival for the past 51 years, at least--I may have forgotten earlier performances.

What was my experience of this, possibly one of the preeminent cultural forms of my native province? Positive, if complicated.



One thing highlighted in the local media about this year's performance is the novelty of having the two lead characters being played by Island-born actors, Jessica Gallant as Anne Shirley and Aaron Hastelow as her sometime-rival and sometime-friend Gilbert Blythe. These, and their colleagues, did their jobs well, singing and dancing and acting their way through the roles that I know off by heart, to the music that I even now can find myself humming along to.

Another thing highlighted in the local media about this year's performance is a limited modernization of the script. Out of a desire to keep Anne of Green Gables more relevant as a remembered past, the sort we might have absorbed from the time of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the era of the play has been advanced somewhat, from Victorian to Edward times. When the people of Avonlea gossip about the injuries Anne inflicted on Gilbert with her slate in the classroom, they do over the telephone. Later, Diana Barry sings rhapsodies about the miracle of the electric lights of Charlottetown's Queen Street, lights which never burn down. On a separate note, Josie Pye, Anne's rival for Gilbert's attentions, is rather nastier than I remember from previous performances. The underlying story remains the same, with the songs and dialogue I remember from other iterations still intact: Anne surprises the Cuthberts and Avonlea, eventually makes her new family and community fall in love with her, and finds her place.



When I watched the musical, I was struck by darker elements of the plot. I don't think I quite noticed the desperation of Anne's early life, the young orphan suffering two failed foster families before being sent to the orphanage, long before she was sent to the Island with the Cuthberts. Her desperation to find a home bit much more with me now than before. At the same time, the desperation of the Cuthberts also came through to me: They arranged to take in an orphan not because they wanted to create a family, but because they needed a boy to do physical labour around their farm, the labour that Matthew could not perform after his heart attack but that needed to be done to keep the farm viable, even--as a last resort--saleable.

The relationship between Anne and Gilbert also made me think. Theirs is a complicated relationship, Gilbert's attraction to Anne inexplicably leading him to tease her hair colour, which leads her to reject him, until she decides she is interested in him, by which time he has resolved to spend time with someone like Josie who appreciates him, and so on and so forth. There's no question of any coercion, at either end, and I did not think Gilbert was behaving like a so-called "Nice Guy."

I was also left wondering, of all people, about Matthew Cuthbert. We learn, in the musical and in the books, all about his sister Marilla, how her life was defined by her rejection of John Blythe when the two were younger. We the audience see Matthew Cuthbert as a kind man and a good man, the first kindred spirit that Anne met in Avonlea. He is the person whose counsel to Marilla that they might be good for Anne convinces her to let the young Nova Scotian orphan stay. We learn nothing about Matthew's past. Why did he stay single and unmarried, living with his sister in the family homestead? Did he have no great lost loves, no terrible disappointments? I'm more than a bit tempted to speculate about the possibility of a queer Matthew.



I have to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical first and foremost as a rite of community. It is a thoroughly professional and enjoyable theatrical show, two and a half hours long including an intermission, but it's more than that. I found myself thinking of previous iterations of the musical that I had seen, of other versions I had read or watched (Megan Follows and her television movie came to mind). I found it functioning for me, someone who read all the Anne novels and most of the other in-universe stories and is familiar with the proliferating Anne mediasphere beyond books, as a sort of aide-memoire, functions as an aide-memoire for the fandom. Here is the character, here is her community, and here is what they do together for everyone to see.

It works superbly, and likely will continue to work superbly. It could not have lasted 51 years at the Charlottetown Festival if it did not. If you're at all curious about Anne Shirley and her mythology, or about the ways Prince Edward Island is represented in popular culture, or indeed about the lived experience of Prince Edward Islanders (how many of us have not seen this musical?), Anne of Green Gables: The Musical is the show for you.

As I mentioned before, starting in the late 1980s and continuing into the mid-1990s, I bought Star Trek tie-in novels consistently. I bought only the tie-in novels of shows actively running. I stopped buying Star Trek: The Next Generation novels at #37 or so, while with Deep Space Nine I never got past #10. Proud Helios, #9, may in fact have been the last one that I bought. It was not a bad place to stop: high points rarely are.



Melissa Scott's Star Trek novel, as noted on its Wikipedia page, is a novel about space pirates.

When asked why she wanted to write a Star Trek novel, Scott commented, "Partly, I think, it's the simple fact that when you encounter a world and characters that you enjoy, you want to be a part of it, too. In a TV series, that temptation is particularly strong, because, after all, it is a series. There are people out there who contribute the stories, create the world, and there's always the possibility that you can become one of them. In my case, because I came to Trek from the Blish novelizations, and was acutely conscious of how the written versions compared to the actual episodes, the idea of writing not screenplays but novels was very appealing. Plus, of course, I'm a better novelist than I am a screenwriter!"

Scott remembers how she got the assignment to write Proud Helios. "John Ordover approached me, knowing I was a Trek fan as well as an established SF writer in my own right, and asked if I'd be interested in doing a book in the DS9 universe. I really liked the series, particularly the constraints of keeping the show to the single station (this was early in the show's evolution), so I jumped at the chance. I asked if he had any guidelines, any stories he particularly wanted to see, or any he didn't, and he said, no, not really, he'd leave that up to me. So I went home, mulled it over and came up with the proposal that became Proud Helios. I sent it to John, who called me back almost at once, laughing. He'd promised himself that he wouldn't do any stories with space pirates--- and here I'd sent him one he wanted to use[."]

Re-reading the used copy I bought here in Toronto, Proud Helios still stands out as a good novel. Set in the third season as the pirate ship Helios ventures desperately from Cardassian space towards the Bajoran wormhole, this is a fast-moving and well-written novel, with believable antagonists and many nice little character moments that shows Scott understood the show's characters nicely. There felt like things were at risk, always an achievement in tie-in novels contemporary with the show. I also looked coming across the notes of queerness in the novel, particularly the smuggler couple Tama and Möhrlein.

I've read and re-read Wolverine: Enemy of the State, a 2008 graphic novel collecting the various issues of Wolverine in 2004 and 2005. Scripted by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita Jr., Enemy of the State tells the story of what happens when HYDRA gets their hands on Wolverine and brainwashes him to by their mass-murdering agent of the apocalypse.

I have to agree with the reviewer who said that Enemy of the State is an exciting if shallow romp through the Marvel universe. I'd go further and say that the whole thing--Wolverine's lethality, HYDRA's aims, the revelation of the terrors hidden beneath the facade of the Marvel Universe--takes on the qualities of a highly violent camp style.

Take HYDRA, for instance. Initially, it is headed by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, a moderate. What does he do? He complains that his wife does not love him in his diary, mourning the loss of his love even as he mentions in passing how he engages in the blood sacrifice of children.



What of Baroness Elisbeth von Strucker, his Satanist wife nearly two centuries old who ends up taking HYDRA away from him? Her aims are simpler.



Millar does some things well. He does not do subtle, complex villains.

Another example of this camp comes in the middle of the arc, when Wolverine breaks into the X-Mansion and tries to force Rachel Grey to use Cerebro to kill the American president. As she seemingly sets to work, obeying the man who threatens to use a terraformer developed by Reed Richards to kill everyone in Westchester County, Wolverine's brainwashers try to convince him to rape Rachel. After all, she looks just like her recently-dead mother Jean ...

This is not a good plan.



(The above image comes from a Scans Daily post collecting some images from Alan Davis' run on Excalibur, this one coming from Excalibur #61.)

"Hey, HYDRA-brainwashed Wolverine. What are you doing?"

"Oh. You're planning on raping the beloved only daughter of the feared cosmic force that burns away what doesn't work."

"Yes, sure. She's been radically depowered. She's no longer capable of draining the life-energies of the future universe to brutally beat up Galactus. She's much weaker."

"Sure. She's just one of the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics alive. But you've got claws. Go get her! I'll just stand over here."





Possibly Millar was trying to evoke a previous fight between Wolverine and Rachel, in Claremont's Uncanny X-Men #207, when Wolverine stabbed Rachel to prevent her from murdering a villain. My takeaway from this is simply that Wolverine, as guided by HYDRA, was making an almost hilariously bad decision.

Finally, one thing I've noticed in Millar's other books, like Kick-Ass, is that the actions of violent characters usually receive approbation by normal people, by people rooted outside of the realm of the superhero or the vigilante who approve of this violence because it is directed against people who deserve it. In this book, this role is played by Fukuko, a Japanese wife and mother whose only child was abducted by HYDRA as part of a ploy to lure Wolverine. (Her son was later murdered, fed to pigs, and buried on a barren hillside.) When Wolverine phones her and his husband to let them know what had happened and that he vows vengeance, she has only this to say.



Never ask Wolverine rhetorical questions.



Yes, the above is a picture of Wolverine riding a Sentinel into a mystic hidden city in Japan so he can kill ninjas by the hundreds.



Enemy of the State is a fun book, but I have problems taking it seriously. I think you can see why.

I've decided to go back to an old Tuesday night habit of posting DBWI reviews of books from alternate histories. Reactions, please.

***

I picked up this book, an Iroquoia State University book listed as required reading on some syllabuses I read online, in Cataraqui just before I finished my visit to Ontario and New York. I was familiar with the story of British Ontario from the Canadian perspective. What, I wondered, was the American perspective? It turns out that it was not very different from the Canadian perspective at all.

The textbooks I remember from Canadian history emphasize the extent to which the Loyalist settlement in what was then Upper Canada was transitory, the extent to which many of the settlers brought over under Britain were not Loyalists as such but rather Americans interested in settling a new frontier. That so few of the Loyalists accepted resettlement to Nova Scotia or the Ottawa Valley after 1815 has been seen as proof that the British identity proclaimed by so many locals on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars actually was not durable at all. Canadians are taught that redrawing the frontier between British North America and the United States of America, west of New England, to run along the 45th parallel established a durable frontier with little chance of spillage from one side over to the other.

This, it turns out, is almost exactly what Iroquoia Under Britain says. It's somewhat more generous, placing Ontario alongside rest of the Midwest as a space of mixed and debatable loyalties that could have gone either way. I suspect that this might be history written from the comfortable victor's perspective. Certainly visiting Toronto and Cataraqui I saw little enough sign of any British heritage, downtown street gridworks aside. The locals even talk with their own, non-Canadian, accent. Iroquoia is where its majority population wants it, and I cannot imagine any Canadian who would want to change this.

There are certainly uchronical possibilities here. United, American Iroquoia and Canadian Ontario have a combined population of nearly 13 million. It's unlikely that an *Upper Canada would approach this population, if traditional Canadian immigration restrictionism has anything to do with it, but even so an Upper Canada could be a force indeed inside Canada. It could plausibly challenge Laurentia for dominance in Canada, even, and undermine the whole French-dominant bilingualism of the country. In the United States, meanwhile, the changes could be more subtle. Iroquoia likely would not have become American if the Napoleonic Wars hadn't been taken over here so early, and if the Union had not needed compensation for the split of New England. Would the Civil War have been postponed?

Science-fiction author David Mack, known especially to readers of Star Trek novels, posted yesterday on his blog an excellent extended analysis of the story of Mad Max: Fury Road. He makes the argument that this film is exceptional, not only for the character of Imperator Furiosa, but for the way it builds its story.

mperator Furiosa towers above most other action-movie heroes because her character and the story of Fury Road subvert a longstanding, worn-out Hollywood action-movie paradigm—but not the one you might think. The real genius of Fury Road isn’t that its hero is a woman. It’s that the hero is the one actually driving the story in the first place.

Furiosa’s prominence in the movie has been making some “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) apoplectic, leading them to complain the Mad Max franchise was hijacked for a feminist agenda, that they were tricked by cool explosions and a freak with a flame-throwing electric guitar into watching a feminist manifesto in which Max has been emasculated. They’re at least partly wrong.

A key factor in what’s perplexing the MRAs is that Imperator Furiosa is the protagonist and hero of Fury Road, but here’s the catch: she is not the movie’s main character. Max Rockatansky (played by Tom Hardy) is not a sidekick in Fury Road, contrary to this post by Rob Bricken on io9. Max is undeniably Fury Road’s main character, its point-of-view character. He is the only character to whose inner life we are privy; he is our narrator. That said, it is true he is neither the protagonist nor the hero of Fury Road, but these aren’t bad things. They aren’t even uncommon in movies.

Excellent stuff. I really must go see this one myself.

At Demograhpy Matters I positively review Depopulation: An Investor's Guide to Value in the Twenty-First Century by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun.

I took a look again at my hardcover edition of Jane Jacobs's 1980 book The Question of Separatism after I raised it in a discussion at a friend's blog about a Scottish currency. From my memory of Jacobs' third book, Jacobs had made a variety of good points about the causes and the outcomes of separatism that were still relevant in the 21st century.

Did The Question of Separatism live up to my memories? Yes, and no. On the whole, many of Jacobs' arguments made sense at the time they were published, and continued to make sense, certainly worthy of being cited in my blog post on a hypothetical British-Scottish currency union. My problem with her book is that her central argument, about the inevitability of Québec's marginalization in an increasingly centralized Canada, doesn't hold water and hasn't been supported by the actual experience of Québec and Canada in the thirty-odd years since publication.

(For the curious, the first three chapters are available online, at the English-language République Libre site.)

The book descends from her 1979 CBC Massey Lectures, Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association. Written in the immediate aftermath of the separatist defeat in the 1980 referendum, at a time when sovereignty-association still seemed a plausible future development, Jacobs was concerned with dismissing what she felt to be the myths surrounding Québec separatism. As it happened, she believed that an independent Québec could be a success, might be necessary if Québec and Montréal were to thrive, and could well be a natural development. Smaller could well be better, and a partially Balkanized Canada not a bad thing.

Take, for instance, the word "Balkanization". Spoken with the ring of authority, "Balkanization" can be made to sound like a compressed history lesson providing the folly of small sovereignties. But what about the Balkans, really?

Before they became small and separate sovereignties, the Balkans had been portions of very large sovereignties indeed, the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires. As portions of great sovereignties they had lain poor, backward and stagnant for centuries, so that was their conditions when at last they became independent. If a fate called Balkanization has any meaning at all, it must mean that the Balkans were somehow made to be poor, backward and generally unfortunate by having been cut up small, but this is simply untrue. Or else it has to mean that if Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania had been joined together in one sovereignty after World War I, or perhaps had been united with Greece to form a still larger sovereignty, they would be better off now. Who knows? In the nature of the thing there is not shred of evidence either to support such a conclusion or to contradict it. (6)

I think that a fair point.

Elsewhere, she deals with and dismisses other myths. Would a Canada absent Québec break apart, like Austria-Hungary? No, Austria-Hungary fell because it was divided after losing a major war. Would an independent Québec be too small to be economically viable? No, there are any number of small rich countries of Québec's size or smaller (Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand) and there are no reasons to think Québec would not be among them. (Québec, she noted, might be a net recipient of federal funds, but per capita it isn't nearly so dependent as the provinces of Atlantic Canada, say.) Are there no models for the peaceful separation of Québec from Canada? Jacobs pointed to the slow dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden over the 19th century, as a Norway at first barely autonomous consistently insisted on its privileges and rights after its 1814 cession to Sweden, gradually becoming more of a modern state while its national revival took over until the union peacefully broke in 1905 over the issue of Norwegian representation abroad. Could sovereignty-association work? Jacobs felt that the insistence of Lévesque and other that an independent Québec would keep the currency union substantially undermined the whole project of independence, and that creating a new level of bureaucracy at the Canada-Québec level would further undermine things, but that it might not be a bad starting point. (Jacobs looked particularly to the example of the Irish pound, established in 1928 at parity with the British pound and remaining there for fifty-one years until the currencies began floating against each other, as a precedent that Québec might like to follow.)

Jacobs' central argument is that the reasons for Québec separatism lie in the age-old rivalry between English Ontario and French Québec, specifically between Toronto and Montréal. She makes the true point that Montréal's decline relative to Toronto started not in the 1960s with the rise of the separatist movement, but much earlier, in the early 20th century. Montréal grew, yes, but Toronto and its hinterland just happened to grow more quickly. I'll quote the passage at length, since this is core to her argument.)

Montreal used to be the chief metropolis, the national economic center of all of Canada. It is and older city than Toronto, and until only a few years ago, it was larger. At the beginning of this century Toronto was only two-thirds the size of Montreal, and Montreal was much the more important center of finance, publishing, wholesaling, retailing, manufacturing, entertainment -everything that goes into making a city economy.

The first small and tentative shifts of finance from Montreal to Toronto began in the 1920s when Montreal banks, enamored of the blue-chop investments of the time, overlooked the financing of new mining opportunities which were then opening up in Ontario. That neglect created an opportunity for Toronto banks. The stock exchange which was set up in Toronto for trading mining shares merged with the old generalized Toronto stock exchange in 1934, and by the 1940s the volume of stocks traded in Toronto had come to exceed the volume traded in Montreal.

During the great growth surge of Montreal, from 1941 to 1971, Toronto grew at a rate that was even faster. In the first of those decades, when Montreal was growing by about 20 per cent, Toronto was growing by a rate closer to 25 percent. In the next decade, when Montreal was adding a bit over 35 percent to its population, Toronto was adding about 45 percent. And from 1961 to 1971, while Montreal was growing by less than 20 percent, Toronto was growing by 30 percent. The result was that Toronto finally overtook Montreal in the late 1970s.

But even these measurements do not fully suggest what was happening economically. As an economic unit or economic force, Toronto has really been larger than Montreal for many years. This is because Toronto forms the center of a collection of satellite cities and towns, in addition to its suburbs. Those satellites contain a great range of economic activities, from steel mills to art galleries. Like many of the world's large metropolises, Toronto had been spilling out enterprises into its nearby region, causing many old and formerly small towns and little cities to grow because of the increase in jobs. In addition to that, many branch plants and other enterprises that needed a metropolitan market and a reservoir of metropolitan skills and other producers to draw upon have established themselves in Toronto's orbit, but in places where costs are lower or space more easily available.

The English call a constellation of cities and towns with this kind of integration a "conurbation", a term now widely adopted. Toronto's conurbation, curving around the western end of Lake Ontario, has been nicknamed the Golden Horseshoe. Hamilton, which is the horseshoe, is larger than Calgary, a major metropolis of western Canada. Georgetown, north of Toronto, qualifies as only a small southern Ontario town, one of many in the conurbation. In New Brunswick it would be a major economic settlement.

Montreal's economic growth, on the other hand, was not enough to create a conurbation. It was contained withing the city and its suburbs. That is why it is deceptive to compare population sizes of the two cities and jump to the conclusion that not until the 1970s had they become more or less equal in economic terms. Toronto supplanted Montreal as Canada's chief economic center considerably before that, probably before 1960. Whenever it happened, it was another of those things that most of us never realized had happened until much later.

Because Toronto was growing more rapidly than Montreal in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and because so many of its institutions and enterprises now served the entire country, Toronto drew people not only from many other countries but from across Canada as well. The first two weeks I lived in Toronto back in the late 1960s, it seemed to me that almost everyone I encountered was a migrant from Winnipeg or New Brunswick. Had Montreal remained Canada's pre-eminent metropolis and national center, many of these Canadians would have been migrating to Montreal instead. In that case, not only would Montreal be even larger than it is today, but -and this is important- it would have remained an English Canadian metropolis. Instead it had become more and more distinctively Quebecois.

In sum, then, these two things were occurring at once: on the one hand, Montreal was growing rapidly enough and enormously enough in the decades 1941-1971 to shake up much of rural Quebec and to transform Quebec's culture too. On the other hand, Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe were growing even more rapidly. Montreal, in spite of its growth, was losing its character as the economic center of an English speaking Canada and was simultaneously taking on its character as a regional, French-speaking metropolis.

These events, I think, are at the core of Quebec's charged and changing relationship with the rest of Canada. Things can never go back to way they were when an English-speaking Montreal was the chief economic center of all of Canada and when life elsewhere in the province of Quebec was isolated and traditional. These changes are not merely in people's heads. They cannot be reasoned away or even voted away. (13-16)

So far, I'm with her. Her description of the various economic and demographic factors in play are accurate. The transformation of Montréal from a relatively bilingual and bicultural city that was the dominant city in Canada's urban hierarchy into a city that was substantially more Francophone in population and no longer dominant in Canada was the culmination of a whole series of trends, including the relatively greater growth of English Canada (located increasingly to the west of Québec) and the great urbanization and modernization of French Canada. In this light, Alex Mazer's 2007 critique in The Walrus does not strike me as well-founded, in that she does address--if in passing--the questions of the further divisibility of Québec, the reluctance of the Québec electorate to mobilize behind separatism, and the survival of French Canadian culture inside Canada. Henry Aubin's 2011 critique in the Montreal Gazette gets more right, noting that Québec and Montréal haven't experienced the decline that Jacobs predicted, noting the effects of sustained political uncertainty on the province's economy, and observing that the Anglo flight from la belle province has hurt the economy of the province and its largest city.

What is my problem with Jacobs' analysis, then? It starts in her not thinking much of the Canadian economy. Based substantially on the exploitation of natural resources an on branch-plant manufacturing, Jacobs argues it lacks the creativity and the innovation to be found in--for instance--the smaller states of Europe. This, she argues, has a centralizing effect on Canadian economic life, drawing everything towards the new dominant metropolis of Toronto.

In this traditional scheme of things, Canada's regional cities also have their traditional role. They work primarily as service centers for the exploitation of resources from their hinterland. To be sure, all have some manufacturing, even the small ones like Halifax, Thunder Bay and Saskatoon and the larger ones like Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton, as well as the largest, Vancouver. But large or small, the regional cities of Canada do not serve as creative economic centers in their own right. They boom when the exploitation of their hinterland booms. They stagnate when the resource exploitation reaches a plateau. They decline when it declines.

This is devastating to Canadian regions where resources stop yielding more and more wealth. The passive regional cities, generating no innovations, replacing so few kinds of imports, creating so little new work, so few factories for transplanting, so few new markets themselves, cannot serve as substitute resources. Halifax, which boomed long ago when exploitation or resources in the Maritime Provinces boomed, cannot perform such services for the now impoverished Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island). Winnipeg, although it boomed when the wheat lands of the prairies boomed and was celebrated as the locus of the largest grain exchange in the entire world, promptly stagnated when the tasks of settling the prairie wheat lands and constructing the vast grain transportation and storage facilities had been more or less completed. Probably the currently booming Alberta oil cities of Edmonton and Calgary will stagnate in their turn -for the pattern is a consequence of Canada's curiously lopsided use of capital and its profoundly colonial approach to economic life. (21)

What does this mean for Montréal and the province it is located in? Potentially, catastrophe.

If Montreal had not happened to be the national economic center of Canada in the past -if Halifax, say, had occupied that role or if Toronto had fallen into it much earlier than it did- Montreal would surely have been merely a passive regional city, stagnant long since. At any rate, there is little in French Canada's experience, assumptions or expectations of economic life to suggest otherwise.

Now, however, Quebec is presented with a difficulty not only unprecedented here, but unprecedented in Canada. The country has never before had a national city which lost that position and became a regional city. As a typical Canadian regional city Montreal cannot begin to sustain the economy or the many unusual assets it has now. As it gradually subsides into its regional role, it will decline and decay, grow poor and obsolescent. No boom in resource exploitation can save it because -as a national center- it had already surpassed what even the most prosperous Canadian regional cities are capable of supporting. None of the traditional Canadian approaches can contend with this new problem.

A third of Quebec's populations is concentrated in Montreal. Not only will a declining Montreal have directly depressing effect upon that large share of the province's populations, it will have a depressing effect of the province generally. The city will become a poorer market for producers in the hinterland who now depend on it. It will be a declining source of city jobs for the population at large. Its all-important cultural function in the province's life will suffer.

In sum, Montreal cannot afford to behave like other Canadian regional cities without doing great damage to the economic well-being of the Quebecois. It must instead become a creative economic center in its own right. That means it must cast up streams of new enterprises which, among them, take to producing wide ranges of goods now imported from other places, including other places in Canada, and which will generate new, city-made products and services that can be marketed outside of Montreal and Quebec as well as within; and it must become the kind of place where such enterprises can find the capital they require, and in turn generate more capital.

Yet there is probably no chance of this happening if Quebec remains a province. Canadian bankers, politicians and civil servants, captivated as they are by the sirens songs of resource exploitation, ready-made branch plants, and technological grandiosities, can hardly be expected to respond to Montreal's quite different economic claims upon their attention. Beliefs and practices common to all of Canada are not apt to change simply because one city, Montreal, and one province, Quebec, so urgently need them to change. (22-24)

The changes forced by independence, Jacobs thinks, could do just that.

The huge problem with Jacobs' analysis of Canada's economy and its associated urban hierarchy is that it is wrong. She does distinguish between smaller regional centres and larger regional centres, but Jacobs seems fixated on the idea that Canadian wealth has to be centered in the single conurbation of Toronto. I don't get why this is necessarily the case. In Canada in 2013, Toronto may be the single largest city by wealth and population, but it does not dominate Vancouver and Montréal to nearly the extent that she suggests. Greater Montreal (3.8 million) and Greater Vancouver (2.4 million) remain dynamic regional centres, as do their associated provinces. Jacobs certainly failed to predict the sustained rise of Alberta and its cities of Calgary and Edmonton towards the top of the Canadian urban hierarchy as much as the analysis suggests. As it happens, the Canadian urban hierarchy is much more complex and flexible than Jacobs imagined it to be; among other things, Montréal is not doomed to become Winnipeg. Montréal, instead, is sufficiently large and has a sufficiently diverse economy to survive being overshadowed. Perhaps this connects to the extent to which Montréal, while no longer the dominant city of Canada, remains the dominant city of French Canada, particularly of a Québec that has managed to acquire much of the autonomy in cultural and economic matters that Jacobs thought Québec would need to claim if it was to thrive.

And so is undermined the economic case for Québec made in The Question of Separatism. If Montréal isn't doomed to be overshadowed in a united Canada by Toronto, and if Québec is not necessarily going to be doomed to decline, then why create an independent state of Québec? Doing so, as Jacobs acknowledges, will be costly, and she herself imagined ways--through a continued monetary union or through the creation of a new binational bureaucracy--that the sovereignty-association approach favoured by Québec separatists could undermine the whole project. Even without an unwieldy sovereignty-association to weigh an independent Québec down, Jacobs noted that Québec shared the resource/branch-plant economic culture of English Canada and that an independent Québec might well not change this mindset. What would have been gained by an independent Québec, then? How the simple act of creating a Canada-Québec frontier would avert the continued relative decline of Québec and its largest city relative to its Canadian counterparts is beyond me.

The Question of Separatism is a book that I still think is worth reading, but it has to be read critically in light of its flaws. Jacobs does do a good job of disproving many of the more pernicious myths associated with an independent Québec. However, her depiction of the Canadian economy and Canadian cities is one that was arguably inaccurate at the time that it was written, and has been disproved by the lived experience of Canada and Canadians since then. Jacobs' advice to try changing political structures radically in the hope that economic and cultural structures will change likewise, and in a positive direction, is risky advice. Quite frankly it's not the sort of advice I'd have expected from someone renowned for a non-idealistic pragmatism.

This evening, with a friend I caught the 6 o'clock showing of producer Nicholas Wrathall's Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West).

I expected much from the film. I'm not as big a fan of Gore Vidal as some, never having read any of his fiction for instance, but I'm quite aware of his history as a public intellectual of note. Besides writing popular and often thematically innovative fiction--his novels may well be the first mainstream novels in the English language to feature explicit gay sex or sympathetic transgender characters--Vidal gained fame as a witty and intelligent controversialist, in the last decade of his life gaining particular renown for his criticisms of American imperialism abroad and corruption at home. Surely, with so many media appearances in archives everywhere, any documentary would have to be good, especially a documentary filmed with his active collaboration. The advance press on The United States of Amnesia was also encouraging. (See, for instance, Norman Wilner's NOW Toronto review, Linda Barnard's Toronto Star review, and Geoff Pevere's review in The Globe and Mail.)

It was unfortunate, then, that the documentary left us both wanting the film to have had more meat to it, to have been better than it was. Technically, The United States of Amnesia was quite competent. Its problems lie entirely in the realm of its narratives.

The documentary seemed almost like an overview of Vidal's career, pointing to the various points of his public career--his filmed verbal exchanges with Mailer and Buckley, shots from Myra Breckinridge, speeches delivered at any number of public meetings on his life and politics, interviews with his intimates--but not engaging in depth with any. We got aphorisms--aphorisms applauded amid chuckles by the audience in the theatre--but little investigation beyond the aphorisms. His arguments about the decline of American democracy were scattered, separated by celebrity interviews and shots of his homes. The United States of Amnesia was a good overview of Vidal, but it wasn't quite satisfying.

On reflection, The United States of Amnesia also seemed to collaborate with Vidal in diminishing the importance of his work. Vidal was, it bears repeating, a public intellectual. He wrote critically about the processes of American empire and American autocracy, his fiction and his non-fiction alike engaging with the problems of public life in ways that are still fresh today. (When Vidal died, a revival of his 1960 play The Best Man was playing on Broadway.) And yet, even though Vidal's arguments are still relevant, we left the theatre with the decided impression that Vidal and his documentary did not think much of his life's work. Pevere's argument that Vidal came to believe that his failure to change things as much as he liked is plausible, while the sense of loss that an old Vidal felt as the people he loved were whittled away by death and disagreement is understandable. It just isn't the sort of argument that I'd expect to be made by a documentary that--I assume--was created with the intent of arguing that a man and his work are of lasting relevance even after his death.

The United States of Amnesia was a good enough documentary on Gore Vidal. We still have to wait for a great one.

I went into Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 wanting to really like the novel. I'm still quite a fan of his famous Mars trilogy, justly one of the most famous terraforming sagas out there (among other things), and he has acquired--as noted in The New Yorker, among other places--a reputation as one of the great living writers of science fiction. I had come across various critical reviews--Nicholas Whyte's highlighting of the novel's structural flaws, Ernest Yanarella's Strange Horizons wondering about the ecological sense or lack thereof in 2312's radical transformation of the solar system, Vandana Singh's review noting that 2312 really doesn't take account of most of the Third World in his future, James Nicoll highlighting as symptomatic of the novel's problems the sentence "Wahram would have been better for stuff like this, but he had flown off to America, frustrated like so many before him by irrefragable Africa."--and hoped that they were overstating things.

They weren't. The central problem with 2312 is that 2312 is almost unimaginative, pairing a radically transformed solar system with an unchanging Earth, incidentally giving us protagonists who are unsympathetic for reasons not the fault of the reader. Robinson has done this all before, and it shows.

The future of 2312 combines remarkable prosperity and abundance with terrible privation. An Earth ravaged by ecological catastrophes--greenhouse effect, sea level rise, climate control efforts resulting in catastrophic mini Ice Age, et cetera--is caught up trying to survive the consequences of our time's errors, with three of its eleven billions risking starvation of anything goes wrong. There is wealth and power in abundance--China, in particular, still authoritarian--but it is distributed unequally. This unequal distribution of wealth and power is not enough to keep this Earth from becoming the homeworld of a new spacefaring civilization. Mars is terraformed with speed, through technological and political processes not wildly different than those described in the Mars trilogy of two decades ago, while China leads the aggressive transformation of Venus--solettas cool the planet and let the carbon dioxide fall to the surface as ice, while icy chunks bring water and something is done about the day. Away from the inner worlds of the solar system, among the asteroids and on the moons of the outer planets and even on Mercury, a quantum computer-managed economy of abundance unites an ecologically and culturally diverse archipelago of thousands of habitats, one preparing to transform even distant frozen moons like Ganymede and Titan into habitable enclaves. On Earth, humanity remains the same; away from Earth, humanity is beginning to speciate, fragmenting into multiple subpopulations defined by particular responses to issues of environmental requirements, and gender, and sexual orientation, and longevity. Into this complex solar system, on the brink of transitioning into something new, an intrepid ad hoc coalition of investigators happens upon a troubling conspiracy.

My immediate problem with the setting is that it combines a not-quite-believable excess of success away from Earth with downright stasis on the human homeworld. Technical issues aside--would putting Venus in a permanent shade actually lead to its atmosphere freezing out into dry ice in a century or two?--Robinson's projects away from Earth involve the unmitigated success of huge megaengineering projects, involving the export of nitrogen amounting to half of the Titanian atmosphere to the Mars for the benefit of terraformers there, the fragmentation of a Saturnian ice moon to provide water for Venus, and more energetic projects still on outer worlds. None of them seem to have failed. Robinson mentions in passing, yes, that Mars terraforming had some problems, but these are not described in-depth to a reader told that Mars is now a perfectly pleasant Earth-like world. Similarly, while the particular route taken by the Venus terraformers leaves the world vulnerable to disaster--this vulnerability is key to the conclusion--this vulnerability exists firstly as a consequence of imaginable and defensible terrorist acts and secondly because of computing issues that feel somewhat contrived notwithstanding plot developments. Everything done offworld is a success, along the lines that Robinson himself described in the Mars trilogy of nearly two decades ago, and along the lines described by other authors imagining an imaginable future where everything has been done superbly with few flaws visible to the admirer. No unpleasant surprises here.

And yet, on Earth, nothing has been accomplished apart from a mini-Ice Age that led to mass death worldwide. There are many small-scale efforts aimed at mitigating environmental change in certain parts of the world, but the only big global project tried by humans on Earth was a failure. Manhattan and Shanghai may be flooded, a wide belt of territory from the Mediterranean basin west through to South Asia is desertified, and everyone is worried about a single big catastrophe that might tip the planet into a new human-hostile era, but no one does anything. This inertia is unsurprising because, it seems, Earth hasn't changed in any positive way at all in three centuries. Have the rich countries remained rich and the poor poor, with few exceptions? Has Africa remained "irrefragable" (a real word, apparently)? Does China remain an authoritarian state? Yes, yes, and yes. It felt as if Robinson was going out of the way to stack the deck, to contrast a relatively successful and dynamic off-Earth civilization with a consistently unsuccessful and unchanging Earth. The argument of many of 2312's characters that the Earth's situation was too complex for anyone on the planet to engage with felt very unconvincing. No surprises at all here, alas.

(How did the relatively progressive off-Earth civilization ever manage to form at all, given its unpromising beginnings? I don't think I quite got an answer. There was a certain amount of self-selection in the migration to space, but this self-selection seems to have created populations relatively alienated from Earth and alien in varying degrees to each other. The Mondragon economy of the progressive space habitats never quite struck me as plausible for this reason. In a single habitat, sure, but so many diverse and often antagonistic habitats? But I digress.)

Into this complexly unsatisfactory universe came Robinson's characters. They weren't badly-conceived characters so much as badly placed characters. Robinson's chosen protagonist Swan Er Hong, a temperamental ecologist and artist plunged into the investigation of the conspiracy through family ties, was an unconvincing focus of action in the story. Events did not plausibly happen because of her so much as around her. (She was involved in a Venus-related incident that strikes me as not quite believable, while her involvement in the attempted rewilding of Earth with wild animals does not lend that ill-thought plan any credibility. What happened to Nunavut's needed wheat exports when caribou and wolves colonized those fields?) Her colleague, Titanian diplomat Fitz Wahram would have been a better focus. Even better than this would have been the exiled Mars-born "small" (read "dwarf") and investigator Jean Genette, who had a very interesting backstory. Alas, 2312 had very little of the story told from Genette's perspective. Kiran, a South Asian emigre to Venus via New York City who was Swan's ally on that world, had more of the story told from his voice, and Kiran unfortunately wasn't the most thoroughly-sketched of Robinson's characters. Things happened, to different people connected in a variety of different and often distant ways, and then the novel ended.

2312 could have been a much better book. Robinson could have done a better job picking characters; Robinson could have done a better job imagining an Earth that would change as radically as his solar system did; Robinson could have imagined the megaengineering projects of offworld being complicated, and shown us the resultant meanderings. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Robinson chose not to. Instead, Robinson built the same old future that Robinson and others have imagined before, and more freshly at the time. I'm still glad that I read the book, since there are some interesting ideas, and characters, and passages of prose like Swan's description of her arrival in a futuristic flooded Manhattan are a pleasure to read. I just wish that there had been more than these gleanings and retreads of past glories.