At last! Murders!

Portreeve, SK - Prototype of Portreau, town in Canada
taken from Google Maps

Well, I enjoyed reading Canada, by Richard Ford, at least for a while, anyway. If you haven't read this book by now, I wouldn't recommend it, even though it got a glowing review in the New York Times when it first came out.

Right from the beginning, the narrator and also main character, Dell, kept hinting that there were going to be murders in the future. By the time I was two-thirds through the book, I was tired of hearing about those murders, and by the time the murders actually happened, almost at the end, I couldn't care less about the victims. In fact, I wanted to shout "Hallelujah!" when the poor fools were finally dispatched. Sad, I know.

The writer did a good job of developing the protagonist and even some of his fellow characters, but I think Ford broke the cardinal rule of fiction: never make your protagonist passive. As far as I could tell, Dell never did anything to make his situation better in all the time that he was suffering through it. He accepted mutely whatever he was told to do, even to the point of helping with the murders. Dell was a lot like his mother that way. The most active character in the book was Dell's bank robber father, who at least made decisions, even if they were usually the wrong ones.

I have to say that Dell did not deserve to get off with a good life after all he failed to do. The conclusion, therefore, was unsatisfying in a number of ways in that the baddest bad guy got away with murder--three times--and Dell failed to show any character. He wasn't even a very good story teller in that he built up the murder business so much it was anticlimactic when it finally came to pass.

The best part of the book was the description of the parents and what led up to the bank robbery. Once that was over, things were suspenseful for a time while we waited to learn what would be Dell's fate. But he started to get on my nerves when he wouldn't act and just kept going along. Perhaps he inherited that bad brain chemistry his parents seemed to display.

My next reading choice is another "F" book: Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped, by Fay Fanon. It's part of the Howdunit Series, books designed to help murder mystery writers with the various aspects of crime and detection. I own a few others in the series, but this will be the first one I've read.

Stay tuned!