Review: What it Takes to Be Human by Marilyn Bowering
Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (2006)
My Quick Take: Deep and thoughtful literary fiction that moved me and challenged me to think about how story matters in understanding a life.
***
“...I recall that life is a story and it is full of turning points. Something happens and you’re shunted off in a new direction. There is no bad or good, there is only how well the story is told.”
I’ve just finished reading Marilyn Bowering’s 2006 novel What it Takes to Be Human, and I’m left with a heady, emotional feeling, the kind that reading a really excellent book leaves me with. It’s a novel that features a compelling character who finds himself in a most interesting and challenging circumstance, who only has his mind–which may be the tiniest bit unreliable– and his extraordinary humanness to make sense of a world gone insane. This is a book with sharp edges, the kind that I love.
It’s 1941, and the world is at war. In Victoria, BC, young Bible-school dropout Sandy Grey has just informed his devout parents that he wants to join the military, but they reject his idea, forbidding him. The book opens with Sandy in the back of a police car after assaulting his father, and despite a daring escape attempt, he finds himself a patient at the local psychiatric hospital. He is immersed in institutional life, a witness to the kindnesses that can happen there, and the cruelties and abuse that are all too common. He’s also the subject of Dr. Frank’s psychotherapy efforts, and thus avoids the modern methods of the day to treat mental illness, including insulin coma therapy and lobotomy.
Sandy meets fellow patient Karl, a German man who left Germany and declares himself a pacifist, who is writing a novel to keep his mind occupied. When Karl is transferred to the “East Wing” of the hospital where the patients undergoing the medical treatments are admitted, Sandy continues Karl’s writing legacy, and finds his own narrative voice.
Bowering has painted a vivid and lively world populated with characters that jump to life on the page. One attendant who works at the hospital, Don, is sympathetic and kind, though not without a realistic sense of self-preservation; while his counterpart Pete is a violent, racist man who targets Sandy relentlessly. Dr. Frank wants to use Sandy as a case study to advance his professional credentials and gain power at the hospital, but also genuinely cares. Georgina, a woman who met Sandy when he first attempted escape and forms a bond with the young man by visiting him regularly, has moxy to spare, but is also traumatised by the losses she suffers in wartime.
But it is Sandy himself who is the gravitational core around which this story and all of its players spin. Sandy, who is the first person narrator of his own life, who is, ostensibly, writing his own story for us in this book. We have a whole novel to get to know him and his inner workings intimately, and he is a wonderful person to spend this time with. What makes this all the more complex is that though Sandy is unflinchingly honest with us on the page, we cannot quite trust that his reality is the same as conventional reality. Almost, but not quite.
It’s this shift that makes Sandy’s search for the truth of things so much more compelling. This is a story about story, about narrative. Trapped in hospital, at the whims of those in power, sympathetic to the plights of his fellow patients, Sandy tells us his story as he works with Dr. Frank to uncover his own psychodynamic mysteries. He’s a puzzle to be solved, even to himself.
But he also finds archives about a man named Alan Macaulay who was hanged in the yard of the hospital years ago when it functioned as a prison, for shooting his work supervisor. Sandy sees an alternative truth for Alan and, with pen and paper provided to him as a part of his therapy, begins to write another story for the executed man. In Sandy’s retelling, Alan is innocent of murder, the victim of circumstance and a horrible accident, a slip of the trigger finger. A world where he was subject to an unjust trial and condemned to die by a prejudiced judge and incompetent defence.
It is as if Sandy is appealing to us, the readers, as the fair judge and jury. If we can understand his truth about Alan, perhaps we can also absolve Sandy. Perhaps Sandy can absolve himself of his own violent actions.
While Sandy sees the injustice in his own situation–How did he land in this situation, where he has no power? How did it come to this?–he is forced to witness racism and violence in the hospital. Not only this, but Sandy’s past is rife with an unforgiving and punitive religious dogma visited on him by his parents. This has created a schism in his worldview: people are good or bad, and their shades of complex grey are hard to accept.
The novel pans out to show a world in chaos. It is World War II and young men are dying, the Japanese may attack the BC coast at any time even while Japanese Canadians are imprisoned and sent to internment camps, and Chinese patients at the hospital are treated terribly. The world, we see, is also sick, and without rational sense. Bowering paints a scene at one point where the hospital is thrust into an unpredictable, lawless state one late summer evening, and the consequences for Sandy in his attempt to cope are devastating.
“You know when things have gone too far: You can’t keep up, it’s an overload. Too many details and events in a flood the brain can’t process. There’s no story here, just a great fall.”
Near the end of the book, the narrative turns slightly fantastical and dreamy, one of the delights of the story. All at once, the relentless world war, a rebellion at the hospital, and Sandy’s internal unreliability meet in a riveting sequence that tells of a fantastical nighttime flight to freedom while guns roar and explosions light the night sky.
The ending? Well, I’m going to have to leave that up to each reader to interpret for themselves. I have my own ideas about it, but it is not straightforward and I suspect that the way each reader sees it will speak to their own psyche. Kind of like a literary Rorschach test.
Marilyn Bowering’s What it Takes to Be Human offers literary fiction that engages the intellect but also draws the reader in with sharply beautiful storytelling. Sandy Grey’s exploration of his own humanity, and ultimately his ability to see the humanity in others, will stay with me for a long while after closing the book.
My Quick Take: Deep and thoughtful literary fiction that moved me and challenged me to think about how story matters in understanding a life.
***
“...I recall that life is a story and it is full of turning points. Something happens and you’re shunted off in a new direction. There is no bad or good, there is only how well the story is told.”
I’ve just finished reading Marilyn Bowering’s 2006 novel What it Takes to Be Human, and I’m left with a heady, emotional feeling, the kind that reading a really excellent book leaves me with. It’s a novel that features a compelling character who finds himself in a most interesting and challenging circumstance, who only has his mind–which may be the tiniest bit unreliable– and his extraordinary humanness to make sense of a world gone insane. This is a book with sharp edges, the kind that I love.
It’s 1941, and the world is at war. In Victoria, BC, young Bible-school dropout Sandy Grey has just informed his devout parents that he wants to join the military, but they reject his idea, forbidding him. The book opens with Sandy in the back of a police car after assaulting his father, and despite a daring escape attempt, he finds himself a patient at the local psychiatric hospital. He is immersed in institutional life, a witness to the kindnesses that can happen there, and the cruelties and abuse that are all too common. He’s also the subject of Dr. Frank’s psychotherapy efforts, and thus avoids the modern methods of the day to treat mental illness, including insulin coma therapy and lobotomy.
Sandy meets fellow patient Karl, a German man who left Germany and declares himself a pacifist, who is writing a novel to keep his mind occupied. When Karl is transferred to the “East Wing” of the hospital where the patients undergoing the medical treatments are admitted, Sandy continues Karl’s writing legacy, and finds his own narrative voice.
Bowering has painted a vivid and lively world populated with characters that jump to life on the page. One attendant who works at the hospital, Don, is sympathetic and kind, though not without a realistic sense of self-preservation; while his counterpart Pete is a violent, racist man who targets Sandy relentlessly. Dr. Frank wants to use Sandy as a case study to advance his professional credentials and gain power at the hospital, but also genuinely cares. Georgina, a woman who met Sandy when he first attempted escape and forms a bond with the young man by visiting him regularly, has moxy to spare, but is also traumatised by the losses she suffers in wartime.
But it is Sandy himself who is the gravitational core around which this story and all of its players spin. Sandy, who is the first person narrator of his own life, who is, ostensibly, writing his own story for us in this book. We have a whole novel to get to know him and his inner workings intimately, and he is a wonderful person to spend this time with. What makes this all the more complex is that though Sandy is unflinchingly honest with us on the page, we cannot quite trust that his reality is the same as conventional reality. Almost, but not quite.
It’s this shift that makes Sandy’s search for the truth of things so much more compelling. This is a story about story, about narrative. Trapped in hospital, at the whims of those in power, sympathetic to the plights of his fellow patients, Sandy tells us his story as he works with Dr. Frank to uncover his own psychodynamic mysteries. He’s a puzzle to be solved, even to himself.
But he also finds archives about a man named Alan Macaulay who was hanged in the yard of the hospital years ago when it functioned as a prison, for shooting his work supervisor. Sandy sees an alternative truth for Alan and, with pen and paper provided to him as a part of his therapy, begins to write another story for the executed man. In Sandy’s retelling, Alan is innocent of murder, the victim of circumstance and a horrible accident, a slip of the trigger finger. A world where he was subject to an unjust trial and condemned to die by a prejudiced judge and incompetent defence.
It is as if Sandy is appealing to us, the readers, as the fair judge and jury. If we can understand his truth about Alan, perhaps we can also absolve Sandy. Perhaps Sandy can absolve himself of his own violent actions.
While Sandy sees the injustice in his own situation–How did he land in this situation, where he has no power? How did it come to this?–he is forced to witness racism and violence in the hospital. Not only this, but Sandy’s past is rife with an unforgiving and punitive religious dogma visited on him by his parents. This has created a schism in his worldview: people are good or bad, and their shades of complex grey are hard to accept.
The novel pans out to show a world in chaos. It is World War II and young men are dying, the Japanese may attack the BC coast at any time even while Japanese Canadians are imprisoned and sent to internment camps, and Chinese patients at the hospital are treated terribly. The world, we see, is also sick, and without rational sense. Bowering paints a scene at one point where the hospital is thrust into an unpredictable, lawless state one late summer evening, and the consequences for Sandy in his attempt to cope are devastating.
“You know when things have gone too far: You can’t keep up, it’s an overload. Too many details and events in a flood the brain can’t process. There’s no story here, just a great fall.”
Near the end of the book, the narrative turns slightly fantastical and dreamy, one of the delights of the story. All at once, the relentless world war, a rebellion at the hospital, and Sandy’s internal unreliability meet in a riveting sequence that tells of a fantastical nighttime flight to freedom while guns roar and explosions light the night sky.
The ending? Well, I’m going to have to leave that up to each reader to interpret for themselves. I have my own ideas about it, but it is not straightforward and I suspect that the way each reader sees it will speak to their own psyche. Kind of like a literary Rorschach test.
Marilyn Bowering’s What it Takes to Be Human offers literary fiction that engages the intellect but also draws the reader in with sharply beautiful storytelling. Sandy Grey’s exploration of his own humanity, and ultimately his ability to see the humanity in others, will stay with me for a long while after closing the book.
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