Eden Robinson. Blood Sports

Eden Robinson. Blood Sports. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. 288 pp. $21.00 sc. Richard Wagamese. Dream Wheels. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2006.416 pp. $21.00 sc. Since 1983 novels by Canadian First Nations and Metis authors have formed a substantial, expanding, and satisfying category. Eden Robinson's second novel, Blood Sports, and Richard Wagamese's third novel, Dream Wheels, form part of 2006's contribution. At first reading, the two novels seem poles apart. Blood Sports is the sort of work always described as gritty a violent quasi-thriller set mostly in Vancouver's downtown Eastside during the years (though this is never mentioned) a serial killer casually murdered the working women of the area. Although the neighbourhood is largely Aboriginal, the characters are catalogued as Caucasian in the transcripts of videotapes that form one of the many narrative strands that crisscross to form the novel. In contrast, Dream Wheels is a cowboy novel set primarily on an idyllic British Columbia ranch, where an attractive cast of black, white, Sioux, Ojibway, and mixed-blood characters meet to effect the healing of two young men, one an Indian cowboy and the other an inner-city black youth. Although the storyline shifts from character to character without transitions, it is basically chronological and combines dialogue and third-person narrative. While Blood Sports hisses mean streets, Dream Wheels calmly suggests the healing power of nature, animals, and stories. Yet beneath the surface differences, the two novels are surprisingly similar. Each writer celebrates love, family, and loyalty against a heightened background, Robinson's of often baroque violence and Wagamese's of almost Victorian sentiment. Both violence and sentiment are sensations, created by words on a page, and both create strong and predictable responses in the reader by drawing on pop culture and the reader's own lived experience. Like Robinson's first novel, Monkey Beach, Blood Sports originates from one of the stories in Traplines, Robinson's first published book. Tom Bauer struggles to escape from his mother's alcoholism and his cousin Jeremy's terrifying and seductive hold on the two of them, a warped Tom and Jerry cartoon, in which Jeremy's successes in drug dealing and protection rackets enable him to buy a home with/for Tom and his mother, but at the cost of a good deal of emotional and physical abuse of Tom. At present in the novel, Tom and his ex-junkie girlfriend, Paulie, are clean and sober and engaged in doing their best to raise their toddler daughter, Melody. Jeremy's release from prison sets off their kidnapping, Tom's torture at the hands of some thoroughly exotic thugs, and a few murders. We know from the beginning of the book, however, that Tom, Paulie, and Mel escape and are still alive, so the focus is not on the thriller elements of the present but on discovering the crimes and connections of the past that have brought about this present. Robinson tells us in her first Note from the Author at the back of the book, I prefer the older, bloodier versions of the fairy tales.... Blood Sports is an homage to the original Hansel and Gretel, the version where Hansel uses a finger bone from a previous victim to convince the witch he's still too skinny to eat (279). Jeremy is a well-drawn witch, his cottage, a condo with a view of Stanley Park, decorated with cocaine and pretty girls instead of candy drops. Tom and Paulie are an engaging and courageous Hansel and Gretel, dealing forthrightly with the guilt accrued from their earlier excursions with Jeremy, hopeful and touching in their efforts to stay clean and particularly likeable in the kid-savvy descriptions of them with their daughter. Tom's voice and his understated narrative about the ways they have forgiven each other is the strongest aspect of the book, while the default setting of Caucasian for the characters is a realistic reminder that poverty, abuse, and addiction are the products of a class discrimination of which racism is only one subspecies. …

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