Near the end of this quietly extraordinary novel, James, a lapsed divinity student raised in a thatch-roofed Irish cottage, gazes up into a rain-filled sky on his first day in Paris and sees "yet another steeple."
"It made his pain and rage almost unbearable because it was so beautiful ... the way stone seemed to float up into the sky like that and remain motionless for centuries. He wanted to see, had to see, the rest of its carved harmony, but he knew it would break his heart because there would be more fanatical women worshipping in it, terrified of everlasting torture, more parts of dead bodies inside it, mingled with gold and rubies and alabaster, soaring vaults, rose windows ..."
It's the early 1970s. James, a child of drizzly, peaty, whiskey-and-blood Catholicism, has lost his beloved grandmother and rejected the God who would eternally torture her pagan soul. Paris has chanced to be the place he fled to, finding only more terrible Godly beauty, now mixed with his own belated and surging carnality. I won't say more about Bernice Friesen's France or the sun-scorched, purgatorial vineyards of her closing chapters. I will say that of several hundred first books reviewed in 10 years at this gig, The Book of Beasts is one of the very few that filled me up, page after page, with gratitude for the gift of art gracefully wielded.
This novel just won the Saskatchewan Book Awards fiction prize. Why Giller and G-G juries gave it not even a token nod is a mystery. Friesen's first sentence is irresistible. "God was a little black-haired bastard named Charlie with wet sheet skin, bleeding gums, and fists full of iron oxide pebbles which he flung in James's face, each sting becoming a freckle."
James is half Irish, his mum, Bernadette, a County Cork farm girl sent away pregnant and disgraced with the child's English toff father, thence dragged to a bookish, wainscotted life in Oxford. Ever conscious of her muddy heritage, Bernadette desperately misses its simple pleasures and familiar faces.
A car crash kills James's young sister, blinds his mother in one eye. The homecoming from the hospital is a mess of heaped-up, dirty dishes, Scotch-sodden Dad, and Mum setting to her kitchen chores like a penance for her survival.
No image is without a purpose here. Bernadette wrestles her guilt and loss by hauling James back to the Cork farmhouse of her childhood. James first sees his grandmother as she enters her peat-fired kitchen with a tin jug of milk: "She was a gnarled tree with a thin white thunderstorm of hair. The curl of her dowager's hump was so pronounced, her head seemed to be attached to the front of her throat." Her fierce eyes absorb the fact, 12 years on, of her sluttish daughter and bastard grandson. Forgoing sentiment for sarcasm, she bangs together a generous fry-up of egg and sausage.
Friesen's Irishisms feel authentic, fresh and vivid. Priests rant at pale boys in frigid classrooms; cottage kitchens hum with smoke and bacon grease, workhorse women and taciturn dung-smeared men. God tallies every wasted heel of bread, hears every silent curse.
In all of this, Friesen's smarts are expertly deployed, rarely displayed. Pure expression is the effect, the artistry itself veiled. It's said of some novels that they beg to be filmed. The pictures Friesen makes are a cinematographer's dream, from her glancing close-up of an eye wound to a sweep across Irish fields: "green rolling shoulders, hips, bellies and breasts of land."
But it's hard to imagine how a camera could make it more real. Friesen makes us witness, makes the breath catch with how she sparks and fills the mind's eye, stirs the spirit. Some books like this share a recognized argot, a stylistic code that telegraphs emotions to readers' hearts within the first sentences. Childhood, family, love and hate, pain and inevitable death, coddled into a confection, too often starch and sugar with a sprinkle of bitter chocolate. Friesen is a far better cook than that. The Book of Beasts is an earthy feast to make you swear off dessert for good.
