Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

 

Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

What you can’t tell from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Marian Engels's Bear is a damn good book; in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.

Emily M. Keeler

Published Dec 08, 2014

Last Updated Mar 30, 2015

Canadiana is a funny and ridiculous thing — maple syrup tins, wooden hockey sticks, Mountie hats, golden-era NFB and CBC logos developed in the socialist ’70s, when the national dream was still so vivid; while Americans have apple pie, we have … I don’t know, roll up the rim? Ours is not a cosmopolitan nostalgia.

Let me be clear: I grew up in a city, and I live in one now, but I’ve hiked in the Rockies and seen the Northern lights. I’ve tasted Ontario’s peaches and Montreal’s bagels, and I’ve felt the mist on my face in New Brunswick. I was even in an intramural ball hockey league as a fumbling adolescent. But for the most part, artifacts of Canadiana tend to leave me colder than Fort Mac in January.

But then there is 1976’s Bear, newly reissued this month. Earlier this year, a few passages from the Canadian literary classic found their way onto Imgur, a social photo-hosting service. The short excerpts of Marian Engel’s most well-known novel were viewed millions of times. The passages described a woman coercing a literal bear into a sex act.

What you can’t tell from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Bear is a damn good book; in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.

Funny and sweet, Engel’s 1976 Governor General’s Award winning (more on that later!) erotic novella follows Lou, a bookish 27-year-old woman employed by a pseudo government agency called the Historical Institute out to a remote homestead in the Northern Ontario woods, where she spends time investigating dusty old books. If Bear were first published today, we’d bill it as a literary account of a woman’s quarter-life crisis; we’d say Lou’s journey of self-discovery is a heart-rending portrait of the difficulty of maintaining a work-life balance. We’d congratulate Engel for crafting such a profoundly relatable protagonist, in an era where work takes over more and more of our lives and the traditional markers of maturity (marriage, home ownership, pension plans, legitimate weekends) are being lost on the rocky terrain of an increasingly precarious contract-term economy.

Bear almost never was. Engel sent the novella, her third book, to her editor at Harcourt Brace, and was met with rejection: “Its relative brevity coupled with its extreme strangeness presents, I’m afraid, an insuperable obstacle in present circumstances.” Roberston Davies championed the manuscript to his friends at McClelland & Stewart, who eventually brought the novel onboard, only to have it be awarded the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, by a jury of Canadian literature’s most notable names: Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.

(I’m not sure, if the novel were first published today, that Lou would still fellate an actual bear, or that it would win the GG, but one can hope.)

‘Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel’

The reason Bear is the greatest Canadian novel of all time is not because I, a 27-year-old woman with a piss poor sense of the boundaries between work and life, found it relatable. Bear is great because of what it manages to do through language in its meagre 115 pages. Engel’s prose turns swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again — here she is being funny as hell, describing her protagonist’s mounting frustration with her official task, and cracking at everything en vogue in ’70s literature: “She felt like some French novelist who, having discarded plot and character, was left to build an abstract structure, and was too tradition-bound to do so.”

Engle’s comic range is broader than metafictional jabs: at one point, after licking Lou to the brink of orgasm, the bear (who is never once anthropomorphized) actually walks away from her, still in the glow of passion, trailing bear farts behind him.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you, or at least not more than I already have, but the thing about Bear is how trivial the actual bestial fornication is in the grander scheme of the novel — Lou is a contemporary woman, making her way in a world that wasn’t built for her. Sitting beneath the portrait of the Colonel, depicted in regalia, whose library she is cataloguing for the Institute, Lou, a military biography in her lap, extends her feet out into the fur of her animal lover, and feels “exquisitely happy,” because “a woman rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt of a bear was more than they could have imagined. More, too, than a military victory: splendour.”

Studying some dead rich guy, staying in his historic family house, trying to parse together his military connections to the region so that she can best preserve some arbitrary record, Lou observes that the “Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel.”

And in part for its extravagant strangeness, for the disruption it poses to that staid, woollen mitten of a tradition, Bear deserves to be celebrated. And yet. The niftiest trick Engel pulls is to simultaneously disrupt and continue that tradition — a perfect sublimation of the tensions of working to advance a living art form in a country with a hard on for the past.

NATIONAL POST