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Against Disaster
J. B. MacKinnon The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be. Vintage Canada $14.40
Maria Mutch Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours. Knopf Canada $28.00
Beth Powning Home: Chronicles of a North Country Life. Goose Lane $24.95
Reviewed by McKinley Hellenes
Solitude is its own wilderness. The kind experienced by the narrator of Know The Night meditates on varietals very few experience, and even fewer spend time imagining: Arctic explorers alone beneath the indifferent Aurora. Jazz musicians caught up in a rictus of expression for which a conventional time signature will never be adequate. A mother whose child battens down the hatches of night with a litany of shrieks. "The shattered mind also tends to dwell in isolation. . . . Night is never really blank." Whether she is waiting out the night, sleepless, taking her son to a jazz club, or poring over inventory lists of long-ago Arctic expeditions, Maria Mutch deftly weaves the seemingly disparate. She draws us into the dark with her. "I wonder how many of us are in this darkness-" she ponders, "And who would take the census, rapping on our shadowy doors, to count us like coins or diseases?"
Drawing on the experiences of explorer Admiral Byrd and the music of Thelonious Monk, Mutch meditates with such power on the strange task of shoring oneself up against disaster within an environment so inhospitable that survival is only ever piece-meal. Drawing parallels to her son Gabriel, a baby born with autism and Down's syndrome, she struggles to...