Welcome to Canada
by David Carpenter
Erin, ON: The Porcupine's Quill, 2009, ISBN 978-0-88984-320-2, 245 pp., $27.95 paper.

Just a year after the publishing of his entertaining novel Niceman Cometh, Saskatoon's David Carpenter brings together eight of his stories in Welcome to Canada. (Earlier this spring, he launched his new memoir A Hunter's Confession.)

Two of the best stories are novella-length: "Luce," which originally appeared in Carpenter's 1985 book Jokes for the Apocalypse, and "The Ketzer," which won Descant magazine's Canadian novella contest.

"Luce" is told from the point of view of Drew Edmond, who was introduced in Carpenter's first published short story "Protection" (also included in this collection). It's 1983 and Drew is having problems with his wife Rachel; almost as a distraction for himself, Drew looks back on a 1953 adventure when he and others became obsessed with catching a huge pike lurking in the lake where Drew and family went in summer.

As in Niceman Cometh, there's a large cast of distinctive characters, such as Amos, a Cree who saved Drew's father when their light plane went down in the wilderness, Drew's brother Hank and friend Butch, and the rich Bothwell family next door that includes Miranda, the horny teen-aged daughter, and Mrs. Bothwell's rather outrageous father Mr. Hook. The dialogue is lively, and the story is full of action, mostly concerning attempts to land Adolph the fish.

"The Ketzer" looks at hunting deer from two points of view, that of a young man named Steve Schuyler and that of a young woman named Flora (called Harry by her father, who wanted her to be a boy). Author Carpenter's storytelling skills were never more evident than they are here, evoking hilarity in a yarn about how Steve's friend Head Kreutzer got his nickname, terrible sadness around the men's killing of a fawn, and tenderness in Flora's love affair with a German exchange student. There's even a buck Flora calls Appletree that completely wins our empathy.

In his introduction to this collection, Winnipeg writer and professor Warren Cariou speaks of David Carpenter's knack for bringing characters to life in a short space -- "his remarkable memory for accents, dialects and colloquial turns of phrase." (9)

Take for example the Texan Lester Babcock's voice in the title story. In answer to the suggestion that he could take his wife up to Canada to fish for northern pike, he says: "'Ah don't think so because ah'm wudjacall, ah am one of the newly sangle. . . . Waff and me, we recently parted company. . . . A man has to mand the shop, make his bundle. The waff, she gets to feelin neglected. Currs to me some of us aren't right suited to the married state.'" (16-17)

Here's Flora's German lover: "'This chob is my research. I am exchange student in environmental studies. I am doing total immersion in all things Canadian, then I write my see-zus. I want to go beck with a Canadian accent. . . . I'm learning Country and Vestern.'" (112)

And Lester's Aboriginal guide Norbert: "'We get da bears around da tent village. Once in a while we have to get da Conservation to soot dem. But da Conservation, ah? He don't always be dere. To soot da bear like. He might be down ta Regina, ah? So don't tell Thor about dish gun. . . . Don't tell no one about dish gun.'" (27)

Two of the shorter stories take place in the early twentieth century. "Turkle" is a tall tale about a farmer named Elmer who is caught in a horrendous snowstorm and is saved in an unusual way by his stray cow. "The Shot" reflects on a family photograph taken by a diffident young photographer back in the 1920s. The descendant telling the story offers a clever observation near the end: "A good memoir is worth a thousand photographs; it struggles to release the captives in the picture frame." (243)

And then a nice post-modernist touch: the narrator, whose name is Dave, says, in the second-last paragraph of the book, "Sometimes when I walk past the old house on a summer night I can almost hear my grandfather telling stories of terrible blizzards, problem bears, deer hunts and monster pike." (243)

Which of course can be seen as an allusion to most of the topics covered in the stories that precede this one in Carpenter's appealing and immensely readable book.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist and reviewer.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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