There’s a great deal of historical knowledge in this book, much of it obscured by the satirical, Rabelaisian tone. Among such knowledge is the fact that in 1909 nine out of 10 Winnipeg inhabitants couldn’t speak either English or French. They were a mixture of Germans, Scandinavians, Jewish Eastern Europeans, Chinese and others, and Barton is anxious to represent their history, albeit in his own distinctive, anarchic style.
“These were people who had been born unwanted,” he writes in a rare straight-faced moment, “people for whom marginalization was all they had; genetic gypsies who had come this far wandering and scavenging to get away from conformity of any kind.” Things may have quieted down since then, but Barton’s collection of acrobats, drunks and whores stands for a rebellious, non-conformist history that, as a level-headed academic, he probably doesn’t want forgotten.
For the rest, the St Lawrence River is described as “singing the same empty, meaningless song it had always sung” (elsewhere it’s referred to as “sucking off half of Canada”), the future — presumably present-day — inhabitants of Saskatchewan are seen as “small-minded, envious, conniving, bitter, prejudiced people,” and, in a fascinating digression, Zoroastrianism is perceived as having revived in 18th century Europe the belief in a dualistic system (a good God in charge of a spiritual world, an evil one in charge of the material one) that had gone underground when the Cathars were wiped out by the Albigensian Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries. Their Anabaptist heirs, Barton writes, re-surfaced in Saskatchewan.
Comedy, though, is this author’s chosen style, and much of Saskatchewan is farcical in manner. I didn’t always find it funny — the tone is uneven, and the story at times hard to get to grips with. Excellent chapters stand out, however, notably the one featuring Tolstoy and the penultimate one, The Great Winnipeg Orgy of 1909.
All in all, Barton is a writer the likes of whom Canada has probably never seen. Many Canadians will relish this book, and laugh at its in-jokes. It seems strange that it’s being published first in Taiwan, and surely the sooner it’s available in the country it deals with the better.
Saskatchewan is available at Caves Books (www.cavesbooks.com.tw).
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