Canada [Kindle Edition]

Richard Ford is a master of the written word, this is clear. But...perhaps I need a story that is more plot-driven than Canada. Beutiful language, imagery, and characterisation just aren't always enough. This is why I gave this book 4 stars not 5, so we are talking about a difference of opinion on what a novel should look like.

Perhaps part of the problem with Canada for me was the way the author would tell what happened first, then tell us how it happened. I would much rather find out the story the other way around.

In Part One we meet a desperate family in desperate circumstances. The story is told from the point of view of the teenage son, Dell. The book starts with this sentence, 'First I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders , which happened later.' It's a brilliant opening, and had this been the only time Ford had told the reader the outcome before the story, it would have been fine with me.

The novel is a hefty one and is divided into two parts. I enjoyed Part One, of the family in both emotional and financial turmoil in 1960's America. It has a tragically seductive quality about it. While you know the dreadful thing is going to happen, you still wish it would not have the monumental consequences it does. But even here, time and time again, Ford lets us know what the character's fates are going be well before the narrator gets to tell the story.

Part Two, where Dell is taken to Canada, was more depressing and difficult for me to read. I couldn't really understand where the story was going. The awful circumstances of Dell's life, where he was alone, unprotected and uncared for at such and early age (I think he was fifteen), and so soon after his parents demise, just seemed too dreadful to contemplate. As I read on, all I could be was afraid for Dell. There seemed no hope for his future.

Canada is really a family saga, a terribly sad and tragic one, but I fear probably quite realistic one too. I guess this was the author's aim; to make the narrative look as if it was told by a non-professional author.

Perhaps I need my fiction to look like fiction and to have more happiness, and less realism?

Dell Parsons, a school teacher at the end of a long career,thinks back to 1960 when he was 15 and living in Great Falls, Montana,his parents robbed a bank and his life was changed utterly...

Richard Ford is at the top of his game. He has woven an extraordinary and emotionally draining novel about growing up,full of compellingly strange but real characters and absorbing incident, and written in a plain but vivid style in which a strong atmosphere of menace is evoked from telling detail.Ford creates a whole world for the reader - the wheat fields of Montana, the geese-filled Canadian skies, run down hotels and families split apart. Told in three distinct parts, yet completely integrated, the book is both clever and moving. And there is something optimistic there too perhaps.

Highly recommended- and for Ł4.99 a real bargain.

A new novel arrived this summer from a favourite writer of mine, Richard Ford, with the simple title, Canada. At 432 pages, its a substantial read and bears little relationship to Ford's earlier Frank Bascombe novels. This is a long, meandering book about a 15 year old boy, Dell Parsons, who's life is marked by disaster. Dell lives with his twin sister in Grand Falls, Minnesota. The twins' parents are a mildly dysfunctional marriage marked by mutual disappointment the nature of which Ford captures succinctly in the first half of the book.

Dell's father has left the Air Force after serving as a bombardier in the Second World War and is now trying to make his way in the world, but without much success. After some shady deals fall through he finds himself under pressure to pay off debts before he gets shot by his debtors and turns to bank robbery, an occupation he is not suited for. He involves his wife in the robbery not realising the potentially disastrous results for his two children in 1950′s Montana, a state with an under-developed social-services structure and cruel orphanages.

The build up to the bank robbery is described superbly. We see the tension building up from Dell's perspective but with adult insights for he tells the story in the first person many years after the event. The tragic outcome is inevitable, for Dell's father is cunning only in an almost innocent way which is bound to result in his capture, while his mother, the more intelligent of the two seems to have been deluded by the thought of the large sums of money which would enable her to finally get out of her fatally-flawed marriage.

The second part of the book, and the one which gives the book its title follows Dell on his escape from the clutches of the authorities up to Saskatchewan north of the border, where he stays with a distant relative of a family friend. His life seems barely tolerable in this desolate landscape but he manages to make his way in an equally dysfunctional setting only to have another set of disasters come his way. It is only because Ford drops in references to Dell's reasonably successful adult life that this section is at all bearable, because the misey of Dell's life in Canada would otherwide be unbearable.

Canada is a slow-burning, meandering novel. Ford takes his time to get to the point, but he is a fine writer, whose digressions are as vital to the text as the story itself. The reader has to relax and slow down (read the Wikipedia article on slow reading to get the idea). There is no point in hurrying this book - there are pearls hidden among the text which it would be a shame to miss and it is apparent from other reviewers that unless you can enjoy well-crafted sentences for their own sake you are going to find this book unsatisfying.

For myself I luxuriated in Ford's circuitous prose, with its insights and burgeoning wisdom. I was reminded slightly of Marilynne Robinson of Gilead fame, and also perhaps of David Gutterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), both of whom have a similarly quiet style, allowing any plot to unfold as secondary to the exploration of character and relationship which are at the heart of their books.

Richard Ford's many fans will have been wondering for a long time what he would do next and Canada seems to have been a surprise for most of us. I am well-satisfied with Canada. I a literary landscape where disappointment so often predominates, I am happy to say I found a week or so of deep satisfaction with this novel.