![]() The story starts in the company of Marina, a woman in her 30s who’s a little down of heart. A malevolent one, mainly like a dog who’s seen too much boot, science is biting back. It’s a place wherein science – especially medical science – is the presiding power. Leroux’s dystopia is overcrowded and full of threats it’s a septic city short on some human essentials, joy and ethics notable among them. One Hand Clapping is a spooky arrangement of overlapping stories set in London, England, in the not-so-far-off future. But then could their strangely simultaneous appearance mean that perhaps – well, could it be that the flow of excellent fiction coming out of Canada has been somehow reversed? Is it fair to compare two such novels, different as they are? Not a bit. What are the chances that two first novels by Canadians living in the very same foreign country would appear in the same season? Not very interesting at all. Leroux lives in England now, just like Steve Lundin, another expatriate Canadian (Winnipeg-born, Toronto-raised), whose first novel, This River Awakens, is the other half of the day’s reviewing business. The sly filch from Jane Austen, the facetious wit of the appeal for literary exodus, the broadly generous (if vaguely, Englishly condescending) benediction of Canadian fiction.īut if you are a young Englishwoman thinking of writing a novel and, crazy like a quilt, you do move to Canada, you won’t find Lise Leroux. If you read reviews or write them, you have to admire the finer shades of Shilling’s opening gambit. Many of our natural resources are in constant and abundant flow. There are those who might stickle that the words “steady” and “flow” and “out” devalue the compliment Shilling seems to want to pay. Out of that country has come, in recent years, a steady flow of excellent fiction, much of it by women.” So Shilling writes: “For a young woman thinking of writing a first novel, a move to Canada might be an option worth considering. ![]() They’re both first forays and they have in common their Canadian parentage. Reviewer Jane Shilling inspects two novels, Leaving Earth by the Toronto writer Helen Humphreys and One Hand Clapping by the Montreal-born Lise Leroux.
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