Subject: SARAH CANARY by Karen Joy Fowler

From: [email-masked] (m.r.leeper )
Date: 15 May 93 14:17:19 GMT

SARAH CANARY by Karen Joy Fowler
                  Zebra, ISBN 0-8217-4088-1, 1993, $5.99.
                      A book review by Mark R. Leeper

     There is a bookstore in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is, I am sure,
not unlike bookstores in a lot of college towns.  The store stocks books
that as nearly as the managers can arrange apparently represent one
consistent political viewpoint.  In the store's repertoire you can learn
just about all you want to know about that one viewpoint.  But if you want
to compare it with other ideas of people who do not ascribe to that
viewpoint, you have to go elsewhere.  It is not that I disagree with that
viewpoint--politically it is close to my own--but as far as diversity of
opinion, I find I do better at the average airport newsstand.  Ironically,
the store calls itself "Food for Thought."  But it is sort of the literary
equivalent of the "House of Toast."  "Food for Thought" is a good name for a
bookstore, but if I ran a bookstore with that name it would have DAS KAPITAL
and MEIN KAMPF, not because I agree with either, but because I don't.  It
would have Spinoza and Plato and Mishima.  A store with that name should
have Hawking and Velikovsky.  It would have Jeremy Rifkin and Frank Lloyd
Wright and Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan.  As food for thought,
this place is pretty slim pickings particularly if you are not interested in
their one social viewpoint, but they are smart enough to know that there is
a ready market for books written in this narrow band of political thought.
I guess people feel secure with reading matter that agrees with their own
way of thinking.  Authors writing from that viewpoint will have as ready a
market as they would if they were writing in the "Star Trek" universe.  I
thought of "Food for Thought" many times when I was reading SARAH CANARY.
It was written for their market.

     A nameless woman mysteriously shows up in a Chinese railroad labor camp
in the Washington Territory in mid-winter 1873.  The woman is dressed in
black and speaks no intelligible tongue.  If abandoned to the cold, she will
surely die.  Chin Ah Kim, a surprisingly erudite laborer, decides to adopt
the woman in black, at least until he can get her to a place of safety.  In
grand adventure style, the simple trip to take Sarah Canary, as the woman
comes to be called, to safety becomes a far greater adventure than Chin Ah
Kim could have expected.

     Superficially at least, SARAH CANARY resembles HUCKLEBERRY FINN.  We
have a set of fugitives running across a stretch of America and while the
travelers themselves are of some interest, really it is the backdrop, the
portrait of the world of 1872 and 1873 in the Pacific Northwest, that is the
focus of Fowler's attention.  Most of what Fowler sees in this period is
injustice and ignorance.  Undoubtedly that is not too far from the truth,
but what our characters see is mostly a very 1990s view of the injustice.
We see white male injustice against Chinese, Indians, blacks, and especially
women, but Fowler never has a white woman being cruel to an Indian.  Fowler
is describing a world in which there are the oppressors and the oppressed.
The oppressed all basically have sympathy for each other.  And the choice of
the oppressed seems to have come from a 1990s checklist: women, Chinese,
blacks.  Now, I cannot imagine that this not being a time of a tremendous
reliance on animals and certainly there would have been no small amount of
animal abuse that the characters would have seen on their journey.  That is
not where Fowler's sympathies lie, apparently, so no descriptions of animal
abuse are mentioned.  Fowler, on the other hand, has a good deal of interest
in feminism and so, as a result, do all the 19th Century women in the book.

     Not having a time machine or being able to read minds, it is for me
impossible to tell you what was on most people's minds in the Washington
Territory of the 1870s, but I certainly felt while I was reading this book
that Fowler misrepresents the situation.  She takes the attitudes of a very
small number of women--the pioneers of the women's movement--and spreads
them liberally over the minds of the women in this novel.  My suspicion is
that more women were concerned with the issue "Will there be food enough for
my family this winter?" than "Don't I have the right to as much sexual
pleasure as a man gets?"  Does this sound more like an 1870s or a 1990s
woman?  Just worrying about sexual pleasure implies a much more affluent
society, one like our own, than one like was present in Fowler's setting.
While there may have been a few men who sat around like Fowler's men do and
spat and complained about uppity women, far more were worried about issues
like "Will there be food enough for my family this winter?" When you are
scratching your existence out of the ground as much of the population of the
Pacific Northwest were, trying to get enough food to eat, food and shelter
are the major issues on both men's and women's minds.  Sexual politics is a
long way down on the list.  At least that is my impression.  And it is
considerably different from Fowler's impression apparently.  Fowler writes
as if she knows the history of the women's movement and believes that is all
that is necessary to understand the period.  If the history we learned in
schools is indeed just white men's history, Fowler's history is certainly no
broader or more inclusive.  When she has a character say, "Someday we will
learn that when one woman is wronged, we all are wronged," she is not
writing in the 1870s I picture.  That was probably a very rare sentiment in
the 1870s.  You would find far more women believing "Blood is thicker than
water."  (Actually I might question that even as a principle for the 1990s.
Do I feel, for example, that when one New Jerseyite is wronged, we all are,
or when one science fiction fan is wronged, we all are?  Unless I was going
to spread the sentiment to everybody, I am not sure it is an idea I would
buy.)

     Time and again, Fowler's characters turn out to be warped just a bit
out of the reality of the setting.  Just about everybody in the novel seems
to have an unrealistically broad knowledge of the world.  Chin is a Chinese
railroad worker laborer who knows not just about the folklore of China, but
also of India.  He speaks fluent English and German.  It is eventually
explained that he was, in fact, more high-born than the other laborers.  But
his views are as far from those of a high-born Cantonese of the time as they
are from those of a Cantonese laborer.

     Another character considers the possibility than Sarah Canary is a
vampire, having read some LeFanu.  Yes, it is possible that someone might
have read about vampires, but it is very unlikely and such a person would
know other creatures of folklore that they would be equally likely to
choose.  It is only since Bram Stoker wrote DRACULA that vampires have
become so central in popular folklore.  Perhaps a little more realistic is a
self-styled scientist who is a font of amusing misinformation; some of it
includes a sexist belief that women are more primitive than men.  Fowler
smugly pokes fun at all the strange and unscientific beliefs the man holds.
Of course, Fowler comes from a time when reliable scientific knowledge is
readily and cheaply available.  It is easy for her to laugh at the
misimpressions of people who have not had her opportunities.

     However, my impressions of SARAH CANARY are certainly not all negative.
Fowler's prose style is actually what attracted me to this book in the first
place, and it is what I liked best about the book.  She has a short, clean
writing style.  She never lets the writing get in the way of the story-
telling.  She tells a story that involves the reader quickly and has a plot
that moves well.  She has sprinkled in a good deal of historical detail,
though not all of which I would rely on.  For example,  there was indeed
historically a mechanical device that supposedly played chess (and which
really was operated by a midget chess player inside), but she associated the
device with P. T. Barnum.  That is just not true.

     Fowler does have one stylistic quirk.  She mixes story chapters with
chapters of historical background, usually with a didactic bent.  But the
story chapter headings are spelled out (like "Chapter Two"), while the
historical essays are numbered separately with Roman numerals.  Why?  It is
never clear.

     SARAH CANARY is an enjoyable book to read, with interesting nuggets of
history, but occasionally you want to ask Fowler her if she seriously
believes this very weird and eccentric view of the period.

%T      Sarah Canary
%A      Karen Joy Fowler
%C      New York
%D      March 1993
%I      Zebra
%O      paperback, US$5.99 [1991]
%G      ISBN 0-8217-4088-1
%P      381pp

					Mark R. Leeper
					att!mtgzfs3!leeper
					[email-masked]
					Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper

-- 
Mark R. Leeper <[email-masked]>, (908) 957-5619  Fax: (908) 957-5627
AT&T Bell Laboratories -  MT 3D-441, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748