Is the Novel Dying?

For Vancouverites, the title of the novel Stanley Park gives instant images of misty evergreens and dark forest nooks, where the raccoons are rabid and the homeless camp at night. But if you've never laid eyes on Lost Lagoon or Ferguson Point, Timothy Taylor's story could just as easily unfold in New York's Central Park.

Or could it?

Six authors and a few media types spent Saturday grappling with such questions in SFU's third-annual Symposium on the Novel. Held at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, whose circular layout mimics the United Nations Assembly, the symposium took on an earth-sized topic: Place in the Contemporary Novel.

Gatherings like this could soon be irrelevant if you heed the National Endowment for the Arts' new Reading at Risk report, published in the U.S. It predicts that "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century." But Canada's literary scene is hardly on life support, it seems: more than 130 people coughed up $75 to attend the SFU event (though admittedly, most were writers and publishers aged 40 and up).

Vancouver as Gloomville

"I can't imagine a reader who wouldn't consider place as important to the book they were reading," said one publisher in the audience. On the panel, however, most of the writers downplayed its significance, at least at first. "Place is simply the projection of the internal state of the characters," said Vancouver author Nancy Lee. In other words, it's a state of mind.

Before writing her novel Dead Girls, set in the Downtown Eastside, Lee said she watched people on the fringes of society to see how their experiences reflected what the city looked like.  "My rendition of Vancouver, which is very dark, rainy, gloomy and edgy, has nothing really to do with the Vancouver you might see riding on a sunny day along English Bay."

Newfoundland author Michael Winter challenged writers who favour the quirky and picturesque over the universal. "Every little place contains the world. You can be patronizing to a place if you try to limit its scope." Winter's new novel The Big Why is set in Brigus, Newfoundland. He spoke of the growing fascination for his "exotic" home province--fuelled by Hollywood movies, and yes, novels--and how it creates expectation. "It's as if fiction writers have a responsibility to accurately portray time and place, as if  there's a moral mandate for accuracy."

'Writers are not reporters'

"Writers are not reporters," declared Ira Nadel, book critic for CBC's Afternoon Show and writer of biographies, including one on Leonard Cohen. He and several other panellists mentioned Annie Proulx, author of the book-turned-movie The Shipping News, as a writer who mistakenly took the journalistic approach. (Proulx, unfortunately, was not there to defend her MO.)

Rather than recreate Newfie culture, said Winter, his goal is to capture fleeting impressions in writing. He described an exhibition of photographs he'd seen long ago of fields indented by the body of the artist, who'd slept in them the night before. "That's the kind of thing I do with Newfoundland fiction," he said, later adding, "I'm not looking for geographical accuracy, I'm looking for emotional accuracy."

Moderator Allan Twigg, owner and publisher of BC Bookworld, agreed: "I get bored really quickly when I'm reading a novel that has too much description of a place."

'Home is in the blood'

For the first half of the symposium it looked like Aislinn Hunter, Vancouver-based author of the novel Stay, was the only champion of setting in the hall. "You know your home in your blood," she said. "Place is everything."

At this point, I wondered if her colleagues' reluctance to give setting its due was a kind of backlash, an attempt to distance themselves from the rash of novels marketing access to exotic locales, however vicarious. Case in point: Alex Garland's 1997 bestselling title "The Beach," about a remote bay in Thailand--later made into a $40-million Hollywood film of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The lure of exoticism is purveyed in the most banal of places. Check out malls like Metrotown: it's easy to find beaded Indian slippers, kimono-style bathrobes, Moorish bedspreads and kimchee in the foodcourt. If it's got a whiff of global travel, it's hot. Books are no different. At the symposium, a friend described the contemporary novel, particularly those written by authors in their 20s and 30s, "as a way of justifying nomadic existence."

No 'there' anymore?

The commodification of place is so prevalent that even non-fiction writers, such as Pico Iyer, have based their careers on it. Read between his clever phrases and glib descriptions of a city in Bolivia or a Toronto street and his point is almost always the same: We're living in a global village now and there's no "there" anymore.

Panellist M.A.C. Farrant, whose memoir My Turquoise Years plays out in early-1960s Sydney, B.C., argued that the effects of globalization have made setting more important than ever. "I am looking at place as an antidote to global sameness," she said.

Not long after her words, the tides in the discussion began to turn. As Greg Hollingshead, winner of the Governor General's Award for The Roaring Girls, put it:  "We all started out saying that place isn't important, but really, clearly it is to everybody." Out of the six books he's written, the three that were unpublishable were not set in a well-defined place, he said. "They simply didn't offer enough common ground between what I was doing and
what the reader could relate to."

Sointula as setting

Bill Gaston, recipient of the inaugural Timothy Findley award, described how the environment throws curveballs at two kayakers in his forthcoming novel, Sointula, set on a Gulf Island town founded by socialist, Utopian Finns in 1901. "I think that a place often is a character, a full participant in the drama," he said.

That drama, that place and the ability to carry them with you, and re-enter them at will, are qualities unique to the novel. "Nothing else gives you that in the culture," said Nadel. It was the day's best argument against doomsday predictions of the demise of literature, and culture.

Adriana Barton is a cultural journalist in Vancouver covering visual art, music, and cultures in transition.