The advent of fall marks the beginning of a new season, one
that promises to delight millions of Canadians from coast to coast. The 96th
National Hockey League season opens at the beginning of October and the wealth
of fiction and nonfiction material about our national game can sometimes be just
as compelling and entertaining as the actual play.
Indian Horse (2012) is powerful, gripping tale by Richard Wagamese the National
Post lauded as an “unforgettable work of art.” Saul Indian Horse, the
protagonist of the story, lies dying in a hospice high above the clamour and
strife of a big city. As he lies on his
death bed he embarks on an extraordinary flight of imagination back through the
life he led as a northern Ojibway.
Saul, taken forcibly
from the land and his family, is sent to a residential school where he finds
salvation on the ice as an incredibly gifted hockey player. But Saul also
battles the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, the callous and cruel racism and
the soul destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement. And it all
unfolds against the stark beauty of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and
cedar.
This October also marks
a different kind of hockey and literary milestone. It is the thirtieth
anniversary of the release of The Game
(1983), a timeless classic work of nonfiction by the former great Montreal
Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden. The book, widely acknowledged as perhaps the best nonfiction
hockey book ever written and lauded by Sports Illustrated as one of the top ten
sports books of all time, transports you to the heart and soul of the game.
It includes vivid and
affectionate portraits of the team’s characters—Guy Lafluer, Larry Robinson,
Guy Lapointe, Serge Savard and coach Scotty Bowman among them—that made the
Canadiens of the 1970s one of the greatest hockey teams to ever face off in
history. But what sets the book apart is that Dryden also reflects on life on
the road, in the spotlight and on the ice to produce a work that offers you a
singular, inside look at the game of hockey. The latest edition, published in
2005, includes black-and- white photographs and a new chapter by the author.
Coincidentally,
during the same month in 1983 another accomplished Canadian writer, Roy
MacGregor, published The Last Season,
hailed at the time as the best novel ever written about our national game. Felix
Batteriinski, the protagonist of the novel, grew up in Northern Ontario where
hockey provided one of the few avenues of escape from a live of grinding
poverty. But Felix escaped and eventually cracked the Philadelphia Flyer
line-up as an enforcer.
The seasons passed
and Felix, now in his thirties and at the end of his playing career, decides to
accept a position as player-coach of a Finnish hockey team. When a
controversial play destroys his comeback Felix comes face to face with his
obsolescence and tragically descends into disillusion and despair.
Cold-cocked: On Hockey (2007)
by talented West Coast author, professor and born-again hockey aficionado Lorna
Jackson is a sardonic, passionate nonfiction work about hockey written with a
sportswriter’s energy and discipline and the wit and cynical eye of a cultural
critic. It explores the game of hockey--once called by poet Al Purdy a
“combination of ballet and murder”--through the eyes and heart of a woman.
The author, unlike
most other authors of hockey books, pays her own money to watch hockey. And the
book, deadly serious and urgent at times, is a timely reminder that it is the
fans that own the game and ultimately will determine its fate.
The Antagonist (2011)
is a sharply written, fiercely funny novel by acclaimed Canadian author Lynn
Coady. The book, shortlisted for the Giller Prize two years ago, tells the tale
of Gordon Rankin, “Rank” to his friends, a hulking player cast as a goon by his
classmates, hockey coaches and especially his own tiny bitter father. Rank, who
actually fears his own strength, gamely lives up to this role until tragedy
strikes.
Rank disappears--the only way he knows how to escape--and
almost twenty years later he discovers Adam, an old trusted friend, has
published a novel mirroring his own life. He is cut to the quick by the
betrayal but through a series of unanswered emails to Adam that covers his
early years in small town Canada and his aborted college career the ex-goon
finally confronts the tragic true story he’s spent his entire life running away
from. In short, he needs to tear himself apart before he can put the pieces
back together.
Reviews by Peter at the Vernon Branch
