Sens at Land’s End

Puck Lit Project Review #3: Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley

Plot Summary: Isabel Norris (aka Iz, named after Isobel Stanley, daughter of Lord Stanley) is the daughter of a hockey player who died young, before she was born. Raised in Kenora by her grandparents, she plays hockey on boys’ teams throughout her youth until she is recruited by a university in Winnipeg to play for their women’s team, the Scarlets. In her new situation, Iz begins to question whether playing hockey is what she really wants to do.

Genre: Fiction, Women’s Hockey

Hockey Content: Lots of descriptions of the Scarlets’ practices, locker room, and games.

Choice Quotation: “‘I’m just so thrilled for you!’ she sang. ‘Finally, a team full of girls for you!’ I’d gotten this a lot. As though I’d been held hostage by that long line of boys’ teams, as though I finally got to choose. But choice had never been a part of it. I don’t remember when I first started to play. I don’t remember not knowing how to play. … This isn’t one of those destiny manifestos – the sport chose me! We were meant to be together! No. But choice was never part of it.”

My Thoughts: During my search for hockey literature, I haven’t encountered many books written by women. I have stumbled upon (but not yet read) a surprising number of romance novels, such as the Blades series by Deirdre Martin, See Jane Score by Rachel Gibson, and more. Check out this list of the best in hockey romance from Amazon if you’re interested. Who could have guessed that the best game you can name would be such a fertile source of material for the romance genre? Hockey isn’t about love and flowery stuff. It’s about the eternal struggle of man to conquer a beautiful yet inhospitable environment. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no room for cuddling in hockey (unless you count goal celebration hugs, which obviously are very different).

Anyway, the point is that hockey is extremely manly, and most hockey books are by men and about men. In terms of non-fiction, Lorna Jackson’s Cold-Cocked (published in 2007) has been called “the first book-length appreciation of NHL hockey written by a woman,” and as far as I can tell, Twenty Miles (also published in 2007) is the first novel written by a woman about women’s hockey. (If you know of another, please let me know.)

As a woman who enjoys watching and writing about hockey, I was hoping this apparently pioneering book would be good, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s very well-written, and it’s a really interesting take on the traditional image of the hockey playing boy whose father is his biggest influence: this time we’ve got a hockey playing girl, and the father is nothing but a memory for her to contend with. Iz and her grandmother Sig, the two main characters in the novel, are both easy to identify with and care about, while Iz’s Scarlets teammates are funny and likeable. Author Cara Hedley played university hockey and I think it shows in her descriptions of the games and the team’s interactions with each other. Despite all my focus on the fact that this is a woman’s book about women’s hockey, I don’t feel like the gender issue is the overwhelming theme of the book: the story is more of a coming of age type thing, with Iz’s need to figure out what she wants for herself and how that fits in with what her family might want for her being the central problem.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. Great read!

Puck Lit Project Review #2: When She’s Gone by Steve Lundin

Plot Summary: A young Canadian named Mark, disillusioned with the state of hockey in Canada after the departure of the Jets from his hometown of Winnipeg, goes with his brother Jack to the UK to try out for a goaltending position on a Welsh hockey team. The novel tells the story of their canoe trip from Hadrian’s Wall to Cardiff, as well as stories from Mark’s past about his relationship with his girlfriend Caroline and Mark and Jack’s youth playing hockey, attending Jets games, and canoeing in Manitoba.

Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Eulogy, Polemic, Adult, Youth Hockey, Mythology, uh … Travel? Very hard to describe.

Hockey Content: The characters attend several Jets games, and the book has quite a few references to the WHA, the Jets’ history, and players who played in Winnipeg over the years along with other real NHL players, and the team Mark is trying out for (the Cardiff Devils) is a real team in the UK’s Elite Ice Hockey League. This is a book that positions hockey as Canada’s greatest national myth, and several episodes from Canadian history are retold in a hockey context. Additionally, there are a few hockey folktales, such as the one about a zombie hockey team. And of course, the main characters play hockey, and there are descriptions of their games as well.

Choice Quotation: “To what god have we sacrificed our most precious myth? And who the hell said we had to and why the hell why in fucking hell did we listen to them?”

My Thoughts: I’m really undecided about this book. I wasn’t crazy about the writing style — the author is one of these people who seems to think writing really long sentences and not using punctuation is automatically “poetic,” which it is not — and some of the plot is just plain nonsensical. On the other hand, I did find the equation of hockey to mythology really interesting, and some of the guy’s rants about the commercialization of the game were well-written. What this book reminded me most of was, oddly, the Angels in America mini-series. I’m not saying When She’s Gone is as good as Angels in America, but I think they share certain themes. They are also both written from a place of real rage and sadness, and they both benefit and suffer from that: on the positive side, the strong emotions make them powerful; on the negative side, the quality of what’s being written is sometimes sacrificed to the strong emotions, if that makes sense.

Rating: 2.5 pucks out of 5. I’ve gone with 2.5 instead of 3 because there’s a fair bit of sex in the book (not to mention the incredible amount of penis talk), so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to read that sort of thing. I’m also guessing that the writing style won’t appeal to a lot of people, since it didn’t appeal to me, and the plot may be just too out there for some. But if you’re in the mood to read something that’s very ranty about the state of hockey, or you’re still feeling depressed about the Jets, then you will probably enjoy it. At least parts of it.

My Puck Lit Project is officially underway as I finished my first hockey novel, Paul Quarrington’s King Leary, last night. Now my attempt at a review.

Puck Lit Review #1: King Leary by Paul Quarrington

Plot Summary: Percival “King” Leary is an aged player from hockey’s early days, now living out his golden years in a nursing home where he rooms with equally aged sports journalist Blue Hermann. King gets a call one day from a ginger ale company wanting him to come to Toronto and do an ad for their product. He accepts the offer and goes to the city accompanied by Blue and Iain, an employee of the home. The trip prompts him to reflect on his life and career.

Genre: Fiction, Comedy, Fictional Biography, Old-Time Hockey

Hockey Content: Lots. The book references real teams (New York Americans) and players (Newsy Lalonde, Sprague Cleghorn) from hockey’s past. It’s not entirely reality-based, however, as certain things are slightly altered — the Leafs are referred to as the Leaves, and Ottawa is given a second team, the Patriots, to go along with the old Senators. As you might have deduced from the character’s name, Quarrington draws on elements of King Clancy’s life in creating King Leary himself, and Leary’s friend Clay Clinton must be partly based on Harold Ballard. The book’s modern hockey star, Duane Killebrew, seems modelled on Wayne Gretzky (or maybe it’s just the Wayne/Duane thing). Descriptions of hockey games abound in the book, as do passages celebrating the beauty of the sport.

Choice Quotation: “I bit my tongue, but the truth of the matter is, I never knew that hockey originated. I figured it was just always there, like the moon.”

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed this book. It won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1988, and while it is certainly very funny in parts, with a lot of slapstick-type plot developments, I found the overall tone of the book to be wistful rather than comic. Without giving too much away, I will just say that King Leary has some serious ghosts to deal with in his past: the flashbacks aren’t just him reliving his glory days, though there is plenty of that happening too.

Before I continue, it should be noted that I would have to be considered a sentimental person when it comes to hockey. Not only do I cry every time Canada wins an international tournament of some sort, I have in fact been known to tear up at Hockey Night in Canada game intros and that TimBits ad with Sidney Crosby. (And oh man, don’t get me started on the one with the Chinese father who never told his son he watched his games. If that doesn’t make you at least a little bit weepy, you are dead inside.) You can therefore imagine that I am a huge sucker for poetic descriptions of the purity of the game. This book does well with those right from the second chapter, which contains a lovely description of skating on the Rideau Canal. Having grown up in Ottawa, I could relate to it. I often dream of skating there.

Rating: 4 pucks out of 5. This is probably the most well-known full-length hockey novel (unless there’s something obvious I’m not thinking of), and it was also the 2008 Canada Reads selection. I think it’s worth adding it to your reading list for those reasons alone. Happily, it’s also a very good book which I think most hockey fans, especially those who enjoy reading about hockey’s olden days, will really have fun with.

I have a new project for myself: reading hockey books. I no longer remember how exactly I thought of starting this project, but I think it probably had to do with the fact that I’ve been listening to The Tragically Hip a lot lately, which got me thinking about songs that reference hockey. From there, I started wondering about books — specifically novels, because I’m not a great reader of non-fiction — that involve the best game you can name in some way. I first thought of Roch Carrier’s excellent picture book The Hockey Sweater (and the great National Film Board animated version of it), and then remembered a novel I’d read while doing my first English degree called Black Madonna, by F.G. Paci. Though that one isn’t technically about hockey, one of the main characters plays hockey, and the game is used in the book as a metaphor for Canadianness, eh?

I started browsing around websites looking for more and found that there are quite a few works of fiction and poetry about the game. I stumbled upon Paul Martin’s blog (Not that Paul Martin. No, not that Paul Martin either.), which led me to the Canadian Lit website Northwest Passages’ Hockey Lit section. I was intrigued. Since I am, at the moment, working at an institution which holds at least two copies of every single book ever published by a Canadian writer or about a Canadian subject, and am also armed with a library card which allows me to borrow any book my heart desires from said massive collection, this seemed like an ideal moment to start investigating further.

So today at lunch I did a keyword search for “hockey” in the library catalogue and came up with almost 3000 results. When I copied my search results into Word, it made a document of 272 pages that crashed the program when I tried to edit it. (I thought about printing it, but we have a communal printer and I think other people might have documents they’d like to print off sometime this week.) They really do have everything here — from every single edition of Ken Dryden’s The Game ever published to guides to buying hockey equipment, manuals about getting your certification as a referee in the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, and cookbooks published by NHL teams in the 1980s (Flaming Foods: A Cookbook of Enjoyable Recipes By Your Calgary Flames Families). It’s kind of awesome.

Before I raid the library’s holdings, I’m going to get this project started with King Leary by Paul Quarrington, which I bought a long time ago (I have a tendency to buy a book and then not read it for about three years) and had brought home with me to read over the summer. I will try to keep reading, and will post my thoughts on the books I read here. Eventually, I hope to build a list of hockey fiction, which can serve as a resource to hockey fanatics, and help to fan the flames of hockey obsession during the offseason.