Bookworm, no. 139
Ted Fraser reviews Owen Schalk’s “Targeting Libya.” Selena Mercuri on Marianne Ackerman’s “Oyster.” Inside the April issue.
A Previous Intervention
Targeting Libya: How Canada Went from Building Public Works to Bombing an Oil-Rich Country and Creating Chaos for Its Citizens
Owen Schalk
James Lorimer & Company
256 pages, softcover and ebook
Owen Schalk’s polemical Targeting Libya traces the West’s role in the deposition and death of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Schalk portrays this episode as a shameful one of greed and paranoia: following a bloody uprising in Libya, NATO swept in, formally to protect civilians but really to overthrow the country’s leader and gain access to its oil. In the end, Canada “violated international law multiple times while prosecuting a war that was launched on lies.”
Schalk’s framing is decidedly anti-imperialist. He attempts to contextualize the repressive tactics Gadhafi used against his critics, including imprisonment and execution: “All states conduct some degree of political repression against their populations.” Schalk invokes Ottawa’s policies during the First and Second World Wars—which allowed for internment camps and the harassment of suspected communists—as comparative. He also occasionally ignores counter-arguments. “Clearly many Libyans did not welcome the Western intervention,” he writes. But a Gallup poll from 2012 showed that 75 percent of Libyans supported it. Schalk’s extensive bibliography relies heavily on news and academic articles rather than original interviews, field research, and access to information requests.
Although some journalists may have cheered too loudly for NATO, Schalk’s characterization of the Canadian media is often unfair. He claims, for example, that our “newspapers were uninterested in civilian casualties” then goes on to cite reports from the Ottawa Citizen and the Globe and Mail, which covered that very topic. He also interprets one Globe editorial as welcoming a regime change. The paper was actually more tempered, asking if a new government was “essential for the protection of civilians” while cautioning that Stephen Harper’s rationale sounded like “a blank cheque for war.” Schalk’s writing is passionate and his position valid. But his dismissal of inconvenient truths undermines what should be a straightforward argument: Ottawa and its allies were in over their heads in Libya, to the everlasting detriment of the country.
—Ted Fraser
Novel Findings
Oyster
Marianne Ackerman
Dundurn Press
256 pages, softcover and ebook
Marianne Ackerman’s Oyster follows the mid-career novelist Millie Cameron and her three siblings as they navigate the fallout of their father’s unexpected death. Each has their own complications. Dan worries that his wife plans to leave him, whereas Jean, separated from her husband, lives in South Africa and misses the funeral. They must battle their demons quietly; they don’t want their neighbours in Ontario’s Prince Edward County to gossip. “Shhh, Dan. People read lips,” Millie says during one heated exchange. “Family arguments at a public party are worse than rumours.”
Millie’s complications involve mentoring Jean’s daughter Ginny, who has won a scholarship for a novel outline but struggles to write the manuscript. Millie ends up authoring it herself, though her niece gets the byline. Before the book hits the shelves, Ginny reveals to her aunt that she based the plot on her parents’ separation. “Your mother will kill me when she finds out her personal story is about to become public information,” Millie says. Her fear intensifies when the novel makes the Giller Prize short list. In the end, the situation does not play out how anyone—including the reader—expects.
Ackerman omits quotation marks. As a result, speech and thought, external conversation and internal monologue, blur together. (The technique befits a novel written by an award-winning playwright.) Millie’s observational eye, especially, captures the details of complicated people. When her agent uses French phrases, it means he’s lying. Her father mowed the lawn until it resembled a golf course because he took pleasure in the “domination of nature.” An account of creative life and family loss, Oyster feels deceptively small until its aching ecosystem becomes clear.
—Selena Mercuri
Inside the April Issue
“Of course, fun was had. It is not every day you can watch one of the largest passenger carriers ever created motor smoothly through the Atlantic from a whirlpool tub. Bored? Try on‑deck basketball, pickleball, or soccer. In need of spectacle? See the belly-flop competition or a samurai-themed diving show at the AquaTheater. Body conscious? A fab abs class, ladies’ pamper party, IV vitamin drip, or contouring cryotherapy. And if that isn’t enough, add in trivia, an escape room, line dancing, miniature golf, karaoke, teeth whitening, boogie boarding, waterslides, silent disco, a robotic bartender, and a Latin fiesta party.” Rose Hendrie drifts with the tide of a great popular movement.
Dan Falk reads Jon Willis’s The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life.
Aaron Wherry reviews Kevin G. Lynch and James R. Mitchell’s A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO, and the Public Service alongside Stephen Azzi and Patrice Dutil’s Statecraft: Canadian Prime Ministers and Their Cabinets.
And much more!