Like many well-regarded Canadian poets, Tim Bowling also works in other genres, namely nonfiction and novels. Still, he’s achieved most of his renown for his poetry, as demonstrated by his lengthy list of honours. Two of his poetry collections, The Witness Ghost and The Memory Orchard, have been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. Other works have won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. He’s also won the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award, and the Orillia International Poetry Prize, along with a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.
Most recently, he’s been short-listed again for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for his tenth collection of poems, Tenderman. The winner will be announced June 9 as part of this year’s Alberta Book Awards.
Earlier this year, Bowling published his third novel, The Tinsmith, and it is filled with beautiful and vivid imagery, but perhaps its parts are greater than the whole.
The novel is divided into two sections as it follows the fortunes of its main character, Anson Baird. The opening pages take place over a few days during the American Civil War. Baird is a Union surgeon and his surgery takes place in one of the deadliest of battles of that grim period: Antietam, Maryland, in the fall of 1862.
Baird meets John, a silent giant of a man in an ill-fighting uniform. John proves to be a great help to Baird, fetching the wounded and even aiding the doctor with his surgery. Then a bloody episode with a brutal slave overseer suggests dangerous secrets about John’s past as a strong bond forms between two men.
In these pages, Bowling depicts a burned-out landscape filled with the dead and the dying as doctors tend to the wounded with hacksaws and chloroform. There are shocking scenes of the treatment of slaves, even in Maryland, regarded as a “gentle” slave state. It’s powerfully rendered stuff. Bowling describes those times with a dark and vivid poetry that illustrates his skill with language:
…bent over a body, his right arm rising and falling in the fading light as he cut through an arm or leg bone – the grating sound, low and dull, remarkably akin to that of wood being sawn, filled the barnyard and made everyone present temporarily unaware of the artillery and musket noises still coming from the south.
The story then shifts twenty years later and half a continent away, to the first days of the salmon industry on the Fraser River. John comes to own a cannery business and sends an uninformative letter to Baird asking for his help. The two haven’t seen much of each other over the years but such is their connection that Baird doesn’t hesitate to seek out his old friend.
When Baird arrives on the coast, however, he doesn’t find John but instead encounters a cabal of cutthroat businessmen. John, they say, is away but will return shortly. Meanwhile, they invite Baird to stay with them.
It’s not a wholeheartedly friendly invitation, though, and John is clearly unpopular with the locals. Rumours of John’s complicated past have come to the BC coast and interfere with his livelihood and Baird gets involved in nefarious dealings.
There’s lots of interesting history to be told here, but the salmon fishing industry, even in the frontier days of the wild 1880s, doesn’t have the same built-in drama as the killing fields of Antietam. The second part of the book doesn’t fit well dramatically or thematically with the opening section.
Furthermore, there are some dramatic detours that don’t really add to the story but just make this portion of the book cluttered, even though very little happens.
In a way, I wish this were two books. Bowling lives in Edmonton, but was born in Ladner, BC, a fishing village on the banks of the Fraser River. He’s written about the salmon industry before, including a work of non-fiction he published in 2007, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture. This is a subject and geography he obviously knows a lot about, and a novel devoted to the origins of the salmon industry in that gorgeous landscape could be quite a stunner in his hands.
The American Civil War, of course, has been written about over and over, but Bowling has a special dark and delicate touch with his treatment of the mad carnival of those times, with its blood and guts, society ladies and grasping businessmen, valour and cruelty. He captures moments from one of the worst periods in the history of this continent. He could easily write more about those momentous and awful days.
Brindle & Glass | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926972435
‘The Tinsmith’ by Tim Bowling
Book Reviews
Like many well-regarded Canadian poets, Tim Bowling also works in other genres, namely nonfiction and novels. Still, he’s achieved most of his renown for his poetry, as demonstrated by his lengthy list of honours. Two of his poetry collections, The Witness Ghost and The Memory Orchard, have been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. Other works have won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. He’s also won the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award, and the Orillia International Poetry Prize, along with a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.
Most recently, he’s been short-listed again for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for his tenth collection of poems, Tenderman. The winner will be announced June 9 as part of this year’s Alberta Book Awards.
Earlier this year, Bowling published his third novel, The Tinsmith, and it is filled with beautiful and vivid imagery, but perhaps its parts are greater than the whole.
The novel is divided into two sections as it follows the fortunes of its main character, Anson Baird. The opening pages take place over a few days during the American Civil War. Baird is a Union surgeon and his surgery takes place in one of the deadliest of battles of that grim period: Antietam, Maryland, in the fall of 1862.
Baird meets John, a silent giant of a man in an ill-fighting uniform. John proves to be a great help to Baird, fetching the wounded and even aiding the doctor with his surgery. Then a bloody episode with a brutal slave overseer suggests dangerous secrets about John’s past as a strong bond forms between two men.
In these pages, Bowling depicts a burned-out landscape filled with the dead and the dying as doctors tend to the wounded with hacksaws and chloroform. There are shocking scenes of the treatment of slaves, even in Maryland, regarded as a “gentle” slave state. It’s powerfully rendered stuff. Bowling describes those times with a dark and vivid poetry that illustrates his skill with language:
…bent over a body, his right arm rising and falling in the fading light as he cut through an arm or leg bone – the grating sound, low and dull, remarkably akin to that of wood being sawn, filled the barnyard and made everyone present temporarily unaware of the artillery and musket noises still coming from the south.
The story then shifts twenty years later and half a continent away, to the first days of the salmon industry on the Fraser River. John comes to own a cannery business and sends an uninformative letter to Baird asking for his help. The two haven’t seen much of each other over the years but such is their connection that Baird doesn’t hesitate to seek out his old friend.
When Baird arrives on the coast, however, he doesn’t find John but instead encounters a cabal of cutthroat businessmen. John, they say, is away but will return shortly. Meanwhile, they invite Baird to stay with them.
It’s not a wholeheartedly friendly invitation, though, and John is clearly unpopular with the locals. Rumours of John’s complicated past have come to the BC coast and interfere with his livelihood and Baird gets involved in nefarious dealings.
There’s lots of interesting history to be told here, but the salmon fishing industry, even in the frontier days of the wild 1880s, doesn’t have the same built-in drama as the killing fields of Antietam. The second part of the book doesn’t fit well dramatically or thematically with the opening section.
Furthermore, there are some dramatic detours that don’t really add to the story but just make this portion of the book cluttered, even though very little happens.
In a way, I wish this were two books. Bowling lives in Edmonton, but was born in Ladner, BC, a fishing village on the banks of the Fraser River. He’s written about the salmon industry before, including a work of non-fiction he published in 2007, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture. This is a subject and geography he obviously knows a lot about, and a novel devoted to the origins of the salmon industry in that gorgeous landscape could be quite a stunner in his hands.
The American Civil War, of course, has been written about over and over, but Bowling has a special dark and delicate touch with his treatment of the mad carnival of those times, with its blood and guts, society ladies and grasping businessmen, valour and cruelty. He captures moments from one of the worst periods in the history of this continent. He could easily write more about those momentous and awful days.
Brindle & Glass | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1926972435