Dennis Bock
reading from The Communist's Daughter
Tuesday, 10 October, 7 pm
Faculty-Staff Club, Ward Chipman Library Building
Dennis Bock’s first novel, The Ash Garden (2002), won the Japan-Canada Award. A national bestseller, it was shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award, the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Kiriyama Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada region). Olympia (1998), his short fiction collection, won the Jubilee Award, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Betty Trask Prize (UK). In The Communist’s Daughter, Bock writes of the decade previous to the one he explored in The Ash Garden, a work set in World War II, a work the New York Times described as “elegant and unnerving.”
It’s 1938, and Norman Bethune is in Shansi province, North China. The only doctor in a 100,000 square mile area, he looks after civilians and soldiers wounded in the Japan-China War. He is writing a letter to the daughter he has never met, a letter he expects her to read twenty or forty years hence. More a memoir than a letter, his exhausted thoughts move between the present circumstance and the past – his childhood in Canada, his experience of the Great War, and the time he spent a year earlier in Spain, where he established a blood transfusion mobile unit, and where he met Kajsa, the mother of his child. From Sweden, by way of London, Kajsa van Rothman, is a volunteer in Madrid, working with prostitutes, finding them employment. Bock’s novel is Bethune’s letter. Committed to telling all, Bethune reveals his shortcomings, admits to his overbearing and manipulative manner, and does not stint in describing his accomplishments: “it became clear enough that no one but myself could achieve a similar success throughout the entire Border Region.” In his makeshift “hospital,” which is always on the move – its location dictated by action at the front – Bethune trains young medics. He is accompanied by Ho, the boy who is his sentry, valet, cook, and barber, and by Mr. Tung, his translator. In spite of his avowed forthrightness, as the journal proceeds, certain things are hinted at rather than divulged: Rumours suggest that events in Spain do not reflect well on Bethune. To his daughter, he says, “It is as if our bodies are programmed to wake up then [at four in the morning] so we can take our worries out for a stroll and exercise our darkest fears.” In the course of his year-long letter, Bethune analyses the revolutions in Spain and in China: “Since arriving to China from Spain I have come to the conclusion that the absence of a leader in the Spanish war amounts to a grave danger….” In Yan’an, in one of the caves at the city’s edge, Bethune meets Mao Zedong. After that meeting, he felt “more purposeful than I’d ever been…. I would devote myself exclusively to the fight ahead.” At issue in Bock’s novel is the nature of duty and devotion to a cause: What exactly fuels devotion? Memories of his evangelist father, full of anger – “a bully man” – trouble Bethune.
“The Communist's Daughter is a deep, well-written portrait of an important Canadian.”
---Quill & Quire
“Intellectually engaging … beautifully written … The Ash Garden will seduce anyone who reads it.”
---Maclean’s