A Living Past and a Complex Present

“Can we agree, the past is not dead but the present is its surprising and complex flower?” posits Felix d’Amboisee in the quotation that opens Bill Gaston’s latest novel. Proving d’Amboisee’s dual proposition is the tall order that novelist Gaston seeks to fill in The Order of Good Cheer, by alternating narratives of two Canadian coastal settlements, separated by 400 years and several thousand kilometres of continent.

In the French Habitation at Port Royal in 1607, Samuel de Champlain and 45 other white men struggle to plant the fleur-de-lis in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin. It is a garden made inhospitable by inclement weather, devouring mosquitoes, shifting politics, questionable cuisine, inscrutable natives and the ravages of “the scurve,” for which there is no certain remedy.

In 2007, on Canada’s opposite shore, an amiable underachiever named Andy Winslow is content to read accounts of Champlain’s far-flung adventures from the safe remove of 400 years.

Andy is the ultimate armchair traveller, desiring no other frigate than a book and grateful that his undemanding duties at the grain terminal in P.R. (that’s Prince Rupert, British Columbia, by the way, not Port Royal) only occasionally interrupt his reading on the job.

At almost age 40, Andy still lives in his hometown—indeed, in the very home he grew up in. (Even his widowed mother has moved across town to share a house with several elderly gal pals.) Apart from one brief, aborted stint in Vancouver, Andy has not ranged farther than the college library in nearby Terrace, where he drives to pick up books he has reserved.

For much of the novel, Gaston keeps his two storylines running strictly parallel. The only deliberate point of convergence is Andy’s attempt to recreate Port Royal’s Order of Good Cheer. Just as Samuel de Champlain sought to reinvigorate the malnourished, disheartened and disease-plagued members of the Habitation with a series of improvised feasts and entertainments, so does Andy aim to bolster the economically and ecologically battered morale of the inhabitants of the other P.R., by copying that celebration—right down to a stewed moose’s nose as the pièce de résistance.

But in order to coax his present-tense world to blossom from the soil of Canada’s early past, the author must set up some other similarities. Particularly in the person of the Port Royal carpenter, Lucien, Gaston strives to present a character with whom Andy—and we—might easily identify.

Like Andy, Lucien stands out from his confreres in his love of reading. He is also a loner, far more curious about the natural world than the other working stiffs and far less interested in general bonhomie than in intimate relationships. But unlike Andy, Lucien is willing to act as well as observe. When a Mi’kmaq girl named Ndene beckons him, he follows. Eventually, her direct, impulsive sexuality prompts him to abjure books, desert the struggling French civilization at Port Royal and give himself over wholeheartedly to life among the so-called savages.

Meanwhile, Lucien’s modern counterpart has been carrying a torch for his first real girlfriend, Laura. She long ago left Prince Rupert, and Andy, for a career in dance—and another man. But Andy has never left Laura, at least not in his mind. Not only does he go over every detail of their bygone time together in obsessive detail, but he treats word of her imminent return to Prince Rupert as an invitation to recapture the dance of their past relationship. Yet he cannot seem, even now, to take the initiative.

(What is it, I can’t help wondering, about enduring literary loves named Laura? In Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter, oddball Charles is left by a Laura and spends most of the book trying to get her back. Ditto High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, where longing for Laura is the protagonist’s main preoccupation. Come to think of it, wasn’t there some way-old Italian poet named Petrarch all hung up on a married chick of the same name?)

By far the most significant link between the two narratives that comprise The Order of Good Cheer is Gaston’s preoccupation with the long history of the destructive effects of human activity on the natural environment. From the moment we enter Andy’s world in 2007, we find him shocked by local consequences of global climate change. His shoreline backyard has been suddenly and dramatically reduced by a storm, and 24 kilometres of dead fish have washed up on the beach. The algae bloom that killed the fish is the direct result of effluents produced by human activity.

In fact, the thin line between development and despoilment began to blur a long time ago. When Champlain witnesses some of his men killing hummingbirds for the easy pleasure of doing so, Gaston portrays him not only as personally revolted, but also concerned about the long-term implications of human greed. “He is reminded of his good uncle’s caution: When you capture all the fish in your pond, you have in fact lost them.”

Even more pointed is Champlain’s gloomy forecast about the inevitable erosion of this brave new world: “He sees that they will explore farther and farther inland, denuding the place of fur and somewhat of forest, as they go.”

Champlain’s ecological prescience—along with Lucien the carpenter’s love of literature and openness to other cultures—may be too far from typical of white European invaders of the 17th century. Yet it is understandable if Gaston’s impulse to vivify the past prompts him to endow characters of the past with sensibilities that seem closer to our own.

Making Andy Winslow an ordinary shlepper and at the same time idiosyncratically alive is, for a skilled writer like Bill Gaston, all in a day’s work. Unlike Champlain and his men, Andy and his pals in contemporary Canada do not require the application of extraordinary measures in order to be brought to life or rescued from appearing to be remote figures covered in verdigris.

But people of the past offer novelists—even good novelists—a tougher challenge. On the one hand, there is the need to depict a daily life utterly different from our own. This Gaston does, with a myriad of specific details, such as describing how panes of glass were typically protected for transport in barrels of molasses. On the other hand, the writer is also required to make that bygone world come alive in the here and now. At times, that puts the author in the paradoxical position of endowing the characters of that world with perspectives more typical of our era than theirs.

The overall result, as Felix d’Amboisee might be pleased to learn, is that the past is far from dead in The Order of Good Cheer. If the present in this novel sometimes feels like a more surprising and complex flower by comparison, that may be unavoidable: for no other reason than, even for Bill Gaston, it is hard to make objects in the rearview mirror appear as close as they really are.