Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 20

B10 The Edmonton Journal, Saturday, September 16, 1989 Books EDITOR: Lynne Van Luven, 429-5358 rinttmaking book tomeBy creation ELIZABETH BEAUCHAMP Growth designed with readers in mind Edmonton if Lynne Van Luven 1 Books "V- itr.tr-J 1 i I 1 i 1 Wf'6 Jr. i. sr I 7. 'J tr r. Printmaking In Alberta 1945-1985 By Bente Roed Cochran University of Alberta Press 173 $34.95 Although the fine art of print-making is as progressive and relevant as any of the visual arts, it has rarely been accorded the critical study or acclaim it rightly deserves.

For that reason alone, this new publication by Edmonton writer Bente Roed Cochran is simply a book whose time has come. In it, the author explores the history of printmaking in Alberta and redresses many misconceptions about what's sometimes called the "democratic medium." The idea for this carefully researched study also proves especially timely. Because there is no long tradition of printmaking in Alberta, it was developed by dedicated pioneers out of a combination of love for the art form and an excitement about exploring the possibilities for a fresh approach to art. Roed Cochran was able to interview many of these pioneers (some like Marion Nicoll, Margaret Shel-ton and Thelma Manarey died in the interval between the time they were interviewed and the date of publication), bringing a vibrant, first-hand quality to the historical research. Book fills void For anyone whose interest in print-making has already been aroused by the significant gains made by modern Alberta print artists in the national and international arenas, or for someone being introduced to a closer look at the art form for the first time, this book should fill a void.

Printmaking in Alberta can simply be enjoyed for its story and handsomely reproduced art work. But it will also be invaluable as a handy resource book of fundamental information for both students and collectors. Clearly organized and concisely written, it keeps artistic jargon to a minimum. However, a basic knowledge of printmaking terms is essential for a complete understanding of the text. This study successfully sets the evolution of printmaking into the larger modern art scene and argues that, as with any medium, the technique of printmaking is only successful if the resulting image is, itself, an artistic success.

The well-chosen illustrations often speak most eloquently for themselves, showing that the developments in printmaking encompass a broad range of styles and tech- It's been a long time coming, but welcomebienvenue to the new, expanded Journal Books section. For a while there, as a true Saskatchewan-bred pessimist, I thought it might never happen. However, now that it's a genuine fact of life, I hope the coming weeks will bring you lots of thought-provoking reading in the extra space devoted to books, writers and related issues. As the Old Woman said when she moved her residence from a shoe to hip waders, it's challenging to have extra room. So challenging, in fact, that I spent a few worried, insomniac nights this week staring through the murk at the stipple on the bedroom ceiling and wondering whether I shouldn't just leave town before today dawned.

However, I'm still here, and you are looking at this page, so I guess I can "settle down," as one of my friends sternly cautions me when the manic is upon me. Well, whaddya One of my hopes is that the additional space and the expanded offerings will spark you to call or write with responses and further suggestions. Since taking over this job in April, I've received some feedback from the Gentle (and Occasionally Ticked Oil) Readers out there, but I'd welcome much, much more. Over the next few weeks, you'll notice some new Books features. One of the first of these, Reader's Choice, debuts today.

It's a way to bring the local "average reader's" face to the page and to give all of you a forum for discussing what sort of books you like (or hate). We're interested in hearing from readers of all ages and dispositions, from mystery fans to philosophy students, from Dennis Lee aficionados to Barbara Cartland addicts. If you're not reading the latest publication, don't worry. Books keep forever. But don't wait for me to track you down through my erratically placed spies or ferret you out of my dog-eared files (as I did with the somewhat non-plussed Steve Pezim) and skewer you with a brusque, "So, now you're reading WHAT?" Call or write me and tell me what book you're engrossed in.

Or tip me off about some compulsive reader you'd like to see featured. There is a fun bonus in all this: everyone appearing in Reader's I 1 Choice gets a free book. The catch is that I get to make the choice, based on my careful assessment of the darkest caverns of your personality (as revealed by your reading habits). And if I happen to send you a book you already own, you can exchange it. If Reader's Choice works, it will be fun and informative.

But it won't work without your calls and letters. Other changes: next week, you'll find a best-seller's chart to give you a sense of what books we're buying as a nation. The popular Notes to you continues, but for this week only, you'll find on page B9. And with the additional space, we're able to review more new books immediately upon publication. On today's pages, reviewers Marty Chan, Andy Ogle and David Staples review Canadian books released in the past week.

This is a NEWSpaper, after all, and our book reviews should be as current as we can manage. In November, watch for a new column written by staff at Edmonton Public Library, the busiest book check-out terminal in Canada, telling you hat's new and exciting, hardcover and paperback, on their shelves. People ak me how many books I read in a week. The answer is, it depends on the week. Sometimes only two or three.

Sometimes five or six. One weekend in July I read five novels, but two of them were thinnish. There's no doubt about it: Book-editing is pretty exciting. I can't remember the first book I ever read or when I first started reading (it had a lot to do with being the oldest child, marooned on a farm without electricity), but I do know I'm too hooked to ever stop now. Best of all, I also know there are hordes of you out there who've got it just as bad as I do.

Maybe even worse. Ain't it great? John Kenneth Esler's The Last Waltz, intaglio, 1978, achrns new art book's cover selves the techniques through "trial and error" in the 1950's, learning together because there was no one in Calgary who knew any more about it than did the two rookies. In the light of these early remembrances, the rapid growth of a vital printmaking community in Alberta with a world-wide reputation is quite remarkable. Elizabeth Beauchamp is the Journal 's art critic. shops.

"Anything I could find that didn't have a cost We also learn how well-known artist Maxwell Bates got his start in printmaking. He was able to become a lithographer when a dilficult-to-find second-hand "press, stones and roller became available." Bates and John Snow, another noted print artist, taught them niques and parallel changes in the larger visual art scene. But aside from being an objective historical and critical study, a very personal subtext emerges outlining the single-minded determination of the early print artists. That determination is evident in the memories of Kay M. Angliss of Calgary who recalls that she "used housepaints, artist's oils, can gleanings from garbage at lithographic understand Iriarriet's dSSemma Tensifrs will New fiction for young readers takes hard look at major problems of urban identity and racism I (I II II 111.

I U) IUUIIM NANCY MARCOTTE St 4 I 4 4 Dahl would have handled similar characters. Although Easy Avenue is set in Ottawa shortly afit'r the Second World War, it deals with themes and characters that young people of the 1980s will find important. It is no surprise that Easy Avenue was recently named the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year. With all the attention that is paid to the very visible problems of adolescents, it is possible to forget that small children deal on a daily basis with problems that seem just as big to them. Whump by Gail Chislett (Annick, $4.95) is for children who don't like to be alone at night.

After discussing building a fence in the hall or gluing his pajamas to his bed, Jeremy's family stumbles on the way to make him like his bed the best. Nancy Marcotte writes on children 's literature female-oriented book. However, its family-based plot and universal insights make it appropriate for adolescents of both sexes. Brian Doyle writes stories with joyful endings. His characters deal with serious problems, but they live in a universe of infinite potential.

In Easy Avenue (Groundwood, $14.95) Hubbo O'Driscoll's parents both died when he was a baby. Hubbo lives with a widow of a distant cousin of his father's. "I thought of her as my mother and I loved her but at home I always called her Mrs. O'Driscoll. It was a warm little joke we had between us." The house they rent in the Low-ertown of Ottawa is sold, so Hubbo and Mrs.

O'Driscoll must move to the Uplands Emergency Shelter. There, Hubbo meets Fleurette Featherstone Filchell. She is happy to be removed from her old of Fleurette. At the same time, he deals with the shame he feels over his embarrassment that Mrs. O'Driscoll is the cleaning lady at his new school, Glebe Collegiate.

Somebody is watching over Hubbo. In the midst of what should be the squalor of sharing a bathroom with seven other families, and being singled out as one of the few who cannot pay for his school books, he is given the well-paid job of looking after the wealthy Miss Collar-Cuff. Doyle's characters have been called Dickensian. They include Donald D. DonaldmcDonald, who plays golf very badly every Sunday to let off steam; Nerves, the clog ho mirrors human beings; O'Driscoll, who couldn't finish anything, not even a war, and drowned instead; and the six generations of Dorises.

Some of these caricatures are a gentler version of how Roald Railway Game. But the game gets out of hand, and it seems that trying to be Harriet is getting Margaret into more trouble than ever. Harriet's Daughter (The Women's Press, $7.95) is about adolescent girls pitting themselves against the serious problems of growing up. Margaret and Zulma deal with peer pressure, child abuse, racial tensions and sexual stereotypes. Then they find an unexpected ally, and come to a surprising new understanding about the rights and responsibilities of children, parents, and friends.

Author Marlene Nourbese Philip was born and raised in Tobago. She completed her schooling in Ontario, where she was a lawyer from 1975 until 1982. Philip has received several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Casa de las Americas literary award. Harriet's Daughter is a strongly Edmonton Like most teenagers, Margaret has a list of things in her life that she would like to change. She lives in Toronto, but she is constantly afraid her father will send her back to her grandmother in Barbados for some "Good West Indian Discipline." She is also tired of hearing her clad go on about how "Colored People have to be twice as good to get anywhere." Then Zulma comes to Margaret's school.

She wants only to go home to her gran in Tobago, and Margaret vows to help her. But more than anything, Margaret wants to change her name. Through a school project, she learns about Harriet Tubman, who led many American slaves to freedom in Canada. Margaret wants to be called Harriet, so she leads her school friends in the Underground I 1 1 Novel explores identity, race neighborhood, where her street was called "Feel Street" because of what she was supposed to have clone with guys in her back shed. Hubbo becomes very protective GiB3co gIucIgs cdYiGTii pon Briton's leaden first novel marred by absence of witty banter DAVID STAPLES Journal Staff Writer Edmonton WILLIAM RANKIN Edmonton First Light By Peter Ackroyd Hamish Hamilton 328 $22.95 i i i WtU 'f frftiiiiiiniff nuiw more concerned about riding around in his new Trans-Am and listening to cowboy music than winning Stanley Cups.

Throughout his career, he cared so little for money matters that he skipped meetings with his agent, Peter Spencer, who ripped Semenko off for $100,000 and was sent to jail. "Me, I didn't have a care in the world," Semenko says. "I didn't worry about roles. I didn't worry about money. I didn't worry about anything." This lack of intensity does not suit a writer, and Tucker seems to have added little fire.

While the book has enough to satisfy absolute Oiler fanatics, its sequence of events is badly mixed up, and its anecdotes lack detail and insight. Consider the analysis of the Paul CoffcyGlcn Sather feud: "Paul didn't want to take a lot of things from Slats, and Slats didn't want hear him whining about anything." The book is also laced with jokes, including: "Wayne Gretzky had more left wingers than Gorbachev." "There are a great many things you can do with money. Spending it was always my favorite." "The sight of blood really used to get me going. Especially if it was mine." "I went to Las Vegas a few-times to clean up. And it worked.

1 got cleaned pretty good." Exploring it, though, may also give the archeologists information about the origins of Britain not known before. Also seeking answers to mysterious questions is an astronomer, Damian Fall, who studies the universe from an observatory in the area. He is inquiring into the nature of Aldebaran, the red star, "the follower" of the Pleiades. But his larger interest is in the greater philosophical question of the relationship between space, time and the cosmos's origins. Damian, not surprisingly I suppose, goes mad before he gets his answer.

On a much less exotic quest is a famous comedian who is looking for his more immediate origins. He wants to know who his real parents were, and he thinks the answer lies in the midlands. He learns that he comes from a line of people whose sacred mausoleum is the tumulus. His connection to the secret society that has preserved the tumu-lous for centuries gives the novel whatever lightness it has. If you can't see what First Light is like yet, for all the darkness, I should add that the chief arche- ologist's wife is crippled and barren.

And after years of acute melancholia, she heaves herself from the window of an ancient tower. Where is there any light in all this, let alone first, middle or last light? The characters, notwithstanding their interesting pursuits and heavy burdens, are dull. Ackroyd seems determined not to lighten the load of the reader by witty banter; even witty philosophical banter would be a relief. His prose style is workman-like, so the language itself seldom rises above the mundanity of the slow-paced plot. The exception is the musing of the astronomer Damian, who is a very poignant presence in First Light.

Despite all these qualifications, Ackroyd's novel is accomplished, and in the end, patience is somewhat rewarded. The ambience he creates in the novel's morbidly droll ending resolves the tension created by the barely bearable dreariness of reading the work's first half. William Rankin is a Journal copy editor Looking Out For Number One By Dave Semenko with Larry Tucker Stoddart, 157 $22.95 "Goon is not a pretty name. Not by any stretch of the imagination," Dave Semenko writes. "But the one that bothered me most was somebody managing to turn Semenko into Cement Head." Semenko, Wayne Gretzky's bodyguard on the old Edmonton Oilers, may not be a Cement Head, but he writes with a cement pen.

His biography, Looking Out For Number One, ghost-written by journalist Larry Tucker, is lazy and hackneyed, especially when compared with other books written by National Hockey League toughs. In the late '70s, Philadelphia's thug Dave 'The Hammer' Schultz and Boston's tough-guy coach Don Cherry produced passable books, with the help of New York journalist Stan Fischler. Dave 'Tiger' Williams's recent biography had prose as pugnacious as Williams himself. Tiger's ghost was James Lawton, perhaps Canada's finest sportswrit-er. In his book, Semenko comes across as a fun-loving follower.

In his younger davs, he says he was There isn't much that's light in Peter Ackroyd's novel First Light. "Where have we come from and what are we doing here?" are the heavy questions Ackroyd explores through characters whose occupations range from music hall comedian to archeologist to astronomer. Until the last quarter of the book, the plodding pace of the plot so leadens any exciting answers to these philosophical queries that residual boredom diminishes the novel's interesting climax. The novel is set in rural England, Thomas Hardy's Dorset. An archeological team has discovered a tumulus, a mound which is the portal to a souterrain concealing artifacts collected over centuries by a secret Druiriic-like community.

The uncovering of the secrets of the underground spiritual repository threatens the stability of the local community and the perpetuation of its hidden customs. Dave Semenko's biography reveals hackneyed insights At one point, Semenko writes that he always tried to show people he was more than an overgrown goof. "I tried to show them that I am a human being. I can talk. I can even read and write." Write? Just barely, Dave Cement Pen.

Just barely. David Staples is a Journal staff hockey nut..