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Our book club met for the very first time in January 1999. Twenty years later we are still going strong, with four original members. There are currently 8 members, all women. We meet once a month from September to June.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Book Review

This novel spans a couple of decades but takes place on a single date - 15 July, St Swithin's Day, destined to be the anniversary of several key events in the lives of the two principals. They are Emma Morley - spiky, non-U, from Yorkshire; and Dexter Mayhew, very confident, very handsome, large parental home in the Cotswolds.

One Day
by David Nicholls


Emma and Dexter first meet on 15 July 1988, the last day of their studenthoods in Edinburgh, when they sort of get off with each other and first exchange banter, if not too many bodily fluids. Thereafter, the novel catches up with them every subsequent 15 July, the annual updates charting the course of their lives and their continuing though not always flourishing friendship.

When that first date turns out to have been a one-night stand, the very unpromiscuous Emma has to work harder at coping with the platonic nature of their friendship than the bed-hopping Dexter. She also has to work harder at coping with the disappointments of post-university life and several years as a waitress in a ghastly Tex-Mex restaurant in north London.

Dexter, on the other hand, doesn't have to work hard at anything, as a couple of agreeably hedonistic gap years give way to an agreeably hedonistic life in TV and a job presenting an early-90s late-night youth programme.

While Dexter enjoys as many drugs, cocktails and women as he can get his hands on, Emma continues to serve up noisome nachos in Kentish Town. But things gradually pick up for her. She escapes her Tex-Mex hell to become a teacher and eventually acquires a boyfriend, Ian, a magnificently hopeless stand-up comedian.

Dexter's TV career, meanwhile, soon peaks and almost immediately plummets, barely pausing at cable before reaching rock bottom. Having done for his job, Dexter's drink-addled selfishness also threatens his increasingly fraught friendship with Emma. On a disastrous night out on 15 July 1995, she tells him that she loves him but no longer likes him. The next few 15 Julys see their friendship somehow surviving other threats, including Dexter's marriage to a high Tory ice queen and Emma's new career as a bestselling author of teen fiction.

Among many other things, One Day is a very persuasive and endearing account of a close friendship - the delight Emma and Dexter take in one another, the flirting and the banter that sometimes hide resentment and sometimes yearning, the way the relationship shifts and evolves as the years pass.

But the most noticeable feature of these protagonists and their friendship is their extraordinarily high laughs-per-page ratio. Nicholls's first novel, Starter for Ten, was gagtastic and, in a couple of its setpieces, successfully invited comparison with Lucky Jim. His second, The Understudy, was very, very funny. But One Day is funnier still: the headmaster's beard that becomes a balaclava, Dexter's bubbly co-presenter who talks in capitals and who "would start a letter of condolence with the word 'Wahey!'", Ian's "tracky botts", Ian's ring-in-the-calamari proposal, Ian's relentless patter - indeed, just about every sentence involving Ian.

But there's much more to this novel than the jokes and the apparently limitless supply of comic detail. Entertaining and polished as Nicholls's earlier books were, they were both genre-bound comedies where things tended to happen to the hapless heroes simply because they were in comedies. Here he adds to his exceptional comic talent a new-found depth. As the laughs keep coming, and as Emma and Dexter's years go by, One Day grows in power.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Discussion Questions

Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-of-an-eye kind of town -- the welcome sign announces a population of 1,011 people -- and it’s easy to imagine that nothing happens on its hot and dusty streets. Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo between a century -- old promise of prosperity and whatever lies ahead
But the heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people: the foundling who now owns the farm his adoptive family left him; the pregnant teenager and her mother, planning a fairytale wedding; a shy couple, well beyond middle age, struggling with the recognition of their feelings for one another; a camel named Antoinette; and the ubiquitous wind and sand that forever shift the landscape. Their stories bring the prairie desert and the town of Juliet to vivid and enduring life.
This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.
About the Author
Dianne Warren is the author of three books of short fiction and three plays. Her play Serpent in the Night Sky was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for Drama in 1992. Her most recent collection, A Reckless Moon, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2002, and in 2004 she won the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career.
Discussion Questions
1. What do you feel is the significance of the introductory story about the hundred-mile horse race and Henry Merchant?
2. How do Vicki and Blaine manifest their anxieties about their financial hardship? What type of understanding do they come to at the end of the novel about their situation?
3. What does the burning of Willard’s fence and, finally, drive-in movie screen, mean to you?
4. How important is the setting to the novel’s central themes? What influence does the setting have on the inhabitants of Juliet?
5. The characters have expectations about one another that, as the novel progresses, are often proven wrong. Discuss a few examples.
6. When Lee is riding through the desert on horseback and watching the sand shift in the wind, he thinks, “You could stand out here and watch your own footprints disappear.” How does this statement relate to the novel as a whole?
7. How do money and class affect the characters?
8. Norval shows up at the hardware store just after Daisy spilled the red paint. What does this incident mean to you? Why do you think Norval insists on helping clean up?
9. How do some of the characters change over the course of the novel? What turning points for each of the main characters spur them to change? Are these changes for the better or the worse?
10. Why do you think Norval favours the Weather Channel?
11. What do you think the image of the buffalo stone represents? How did you feel when Hank and “TNT” tried to blast it and only cracked it in half?
12. What is the novel’s overall attitude toward the past and the future? Does it take an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future (or a bit of both)?
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Sunday, March 6, 2011

Comments by Dianne Warren

Change in Rural Saskatchewan

I’ve been asked about farming in Saskatchewan, how it has a changed, and what I see as the future of rural life here. Since I am not an expert on agriculture, and the whole business seems to be so complicated these days no one knows what the future holds, I will talk about the metaphor for change in Cool Water.

I did not grow up on the farm but I am of the first generation in my family not to do so. My maternal grandparents were homesteaders and their farm is still in the family, 100 years later. As a child, I spent a lot of time there, in fact, every chance I could get. I was crazy about my grandparents. They were heroes to me for their sense of adventure in coming west, and for what they had done to turn a small, piece of prairie into a family farm.

A few years ago, one of my uncles sold a half section that had belonged to my grandfather. My uncle and his wife were ready to downsize and none of their children wanted to farm this piece of land, so selling it was the best thing to do, the only thing to do. Still, I felt sadness that the “King Place”, as it was known, was leaving the family. The sale was symbolic of impending bigger changes in our family and in the farming landscape.

When I was working on Cool Water, I was very aware of the deep attachments people have to family land here, and that became a part of the story. I did a lot of thinking about how an ancestor’s dream affects the descendent who inherits it. The last decades have not been kind to the family farm and many young people have grown up knowing that the work and responsibilities of farming do not pay financial rewards to match. When young people don’t want to take over the farm, there’s a crisis related to a family’s attachment to a piece of land, and the recognition that a way of life in the family is coming to an end.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias kept coming back to me, partly because my story is set in an area of Saskatchewan that is extremely arid and does, in fact, host sand dunes and flats, but also because the poem is about the mistaken belief that an empire will last forever. Not that family farms are empires, but the message holds true, as does the image of a monument – or a dream – covered by sand. If you visit the Great Sand Hills in Saskatchewan, you can see how the sand is held in place tenuously by the roots of plants, and how the landscape constantly shifts and changes shape.

It’s interesting that Canada is now talking about Saskatchewan as a “have” province. Although people of my generation grew up believing that our province was the “world’s breadbasket”, the prosperity being talked about has nothing to do with farming or ranching. It’s about natural resources such as minerals, gas and oil, some of the same resources that made our neighbour, Alberta, a have province long before us. The changes we might see in the near future, and the effects they might have on what we’ve come to know as a traditional way of life in rural Saskatchewan, are hard to imagine.

What I wanted to do in Cool Water was write about a contemporary farming community in a time of transition: a story in which the ancestors’ ghostly dreams hover, both a comfort and a burden. And although Juliet is a farming community in a particular prairie landscape, I hope the story is about the inevitability of change and the resilience of people in its face.

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About Diane Warren

Dianne Warren is the author of three books of short fiction and three plays. Her play Serpent in the Night Sky was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for Drama in 1992. Her most recent collection, A Reckless Moon, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2002, and in 2004 she won the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career.

Saturday, March 5, 2011