‘Every Wolf’s Howl’ by Barry Grills

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn from an advanced reading copy

“Every wolf’s and lion’s howl / Raises from hell a human soul”—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

True to this memoir’s epigraph, this is a story about one man’s ascent from an infernal point in his life to one of relative peace and self-awareness. His Virgil, during a four-year period that by comparison makes most midlife crises seem like a Sunday promenade, is a wolf-Siberian Husky cross named Lupus. More wolf than dog, Lupus has much to teach author Barry Grills about living a spontaneous and authentic life. The animal is magnificent, much smarter than your average domesticated canine and possessing deadly strength and speed. When Grills is writing about Lupus, the prose is vivid, full of awe and pride. Conversely, passages about the man, his failures, his battered self-esteem, and his contempt for competitive, acquisitive, urban society, are delivered in clear but tonally flatter sentences. The result is a muted, world-weary mood, its cadence that of one at times angry at his fate and at others resigned to it.

“Most of what follows is true,” Grills tells us in his preface. “A little of it is invention.” Memory changes, he reminds us. We construct the stories of our lives so that they match the filters through which we strain our needs and desires. With this in mind, Grills has built his story so that it runs backwards. Beginning in April 1996, each successive chapter takes place during an earlier time until, finally, we arrive by reverse steps at a point of inception, the health crisis he weathers in December 1992.

The decision to create this narrative structure is a curious one. In one sense it traces a descent into the underworld of Grills’ difficult past. Dante, Blake, Dickens, Goethe, the ancients themselves deemed such a passage necessary to self-knowledge. How can we know where and who we are without acknowledging where we’ve come from? And so, this progression of backward steps allows for small revelatory moments when a brief allusion in the present chapter is fleshed out in a subsequent one. Still, Grills is swimming upstream against the current of his narrative choice. Readers are hard-wired, I believe, to respond to and seek beginnings, middles and endings. When a story comes at us jumbled, we naturally reconstruct it to form a chronological sequence of events, as we understand them to have happened. This is not to say than linearity is the best or even the right way to structure a piece of prose. But the reason for running backwards has to be evident.

In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis releases a fluidly seamless reverse action to illustrate the absurd horror of Nazi eugenics. Charles Baxter, in his novel, First Light, employs the same approach Grills does, in this case to illustrate Kierkegaard’s adage, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Grills’ choice to tell his story backwards may be his protest against the stifling conventionality he continually rails against, but unlike Baxter, who carries us through the entire lifespan of two siblings from adulthood to infancy, Grills covers a short though intense few years. Because all the chapters in Every Wolf’s Howl have a similar emotional resonance, and because they are told in the present tense, I think this would have been a more organic and satisfying read had it been presented in chronological order.

At times reading this memoir, I couldn’t decide whether or not I would like Barry Grills were I to meet him. I realize that in suggesting this I’m committing a fallacy. The character who in this story owned and operated a newspaper, suffered a heart attack at age forty-four, lost the paper, adopted a wolf-dog, saw his love relationship die, drove across Canada to start his life over, and had to limp back from that adventure penniless and out of gas, is not in every sense the same person who has penned biographies of Céline Dion, Anne Murray and Alanis Morissette, is a past chair of the Writers Union of Canada, and who according to his acknowledgements page is happily married. Writers writing about themselves can be just as much a persona as any of their fictional creations.

It is conspicuous that Grills names his current wife at the end of his book, because no one else is identified in the telling. They are labeled according to their status or function: landlord, girlfriend, dog’s master, best friend, travelling companion. Anonymity in nonfiction is a wise tactic. In this litigious age you never know who’s going to take exception to what you’ve written about them. But not to give people names, real or made up, is to diminish them. Perhaps this too is part of the author’s strategy. Paint Lupus, his pal Mingus, Charlie the cat and the other pets in 3-D, living colour, while relegating the humans to a lesser dimension, and immediately the power balance of master and beast, owner and owned, shifts in favour of the traditionally subjugated.

Watch the animals we love, watch how completely they live in the moment and are nothing but themselves, Grills tells us. We can learn so much from them. Although he insists he likes people and enjoys conversation, for the most part he depicts his human characters as being little more than the sum of their faults. The result is a cartoon-like contrast. Noble Lupus learns successfully and quickly from his mistakes. Lupus has a sense of humour. Lupus can plan, hold a grudge, forgive, even gambol peacefully with a lamb. Meanwhile, an increasingly mean-spirited society forces us to live stereotypically stressful, unfulfilled lives. A landlord drinks during the day and embarrasses himself in the bar scene at night. A so-called best friend refuses the author help when he needs it most. Advertisers owe the newspaper and Grills tens of thousands of dollars. A different landlord wants him out. What appears to be a promising romance dwindles. “Her brand of independence,” he writes of the woman who found Lupus, “is like crossing against the light or spitting on the sidewalk, then calling yourself a rebel.”

Honesty in memoir, even one slightly fictionalized, is essential; brutal honesty can backfire. To depict everyone as seriously flawed all the time, in contrast to the perfection of the natural world, is to risk eroding the reader’s patience. Even the most disagreeable people are not ciphers. They have complex personalities and deserve to take center stage, unmediated, now and then.

Having only months ago suffered the same type of heart attack Grills did in 1992, I empathize with him in those frightening moments and afterwards, knowing intimately the altering impact it can have on a person’s life and self-image. Everything in Every Wolf’s Howl follows causally from that clock-stopping instant. It makes every decision, every one of Barry Grills’ actions comprehensible. His cardiac event is described in only a few short pages, however, as if it were simply one more bothersome barb from a diabolical world he’d rather leave behind. Not that I want to relive my own hospitalization and recovery, but Grills’ heart attack deserves more attention than he gives it.

The Barry Grills of this episode does not pretend to have all the answers. His struggle is that of a plain-speaking Thoreau at odds with the world. His memoir takes us farther and with Lupus’ help deeper into the meaning of his crise du coeur, such that at book’s end we can reverse the process and gauge just how far he has travelled, from self-destructive behaviour, from pessimism, and from serious illness, to existential acceptance of himself and his species.

Freehand | 224 pages |  $21.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1554811052