Nancy Huston, Cantique des plaines

I was halfway through Cantique des plaines before I discovered it had originally been written in English. Nancy Huston usually writes in French and translates her own works into English, but in this case it was the other way round – as perhaps I should have guessed from the title, in English the more felicitous Plainsong. This of course raises the interesting issue of self-translation: how does it differ from the usual situation, where author and translator are different people? The translator always knows (more or less) what the author meant, for a start. It often seems to mean s/he can throw off the shackles of terms such as ‘fidelity’; while it might be argued that the text, once finished, becomes an entity separate from the author, who does not have sole ownership of it, it would take some audacity to tell a translator that s/he had misrepresented a source text that was her or his own work.

Cantique des plaines is set in Alberta, Canada, which immediately thrust me into a region and a culture I know nothing about. The history of the province and its early settlers, and of the fate of its aboriginal people, forms a constant backdrop to the life story of Paddon, as told by his granddaughter Paula. Paddon, the son of an Irishman and an Englishwoman (part of a cohort of women brought over at the turn of the 20^th century to boost the population), struggles with his father’s violence and his mother’s stifling piety, goes away to university but soon finds himself back again, in a teaching job he doesn’t like, trying to feed his family during the years of the Great Depression.

The entire novel is narrated in the second person, Paula addressing her grandfather as tu. The reader gets used to this after a few pages and it isn’t as irritating, or as limiting to the narrative, as I thought at first it might be – although the sex scenes do read rather oddly. It is essentially effective in rendering the speculative nature of Paula’s undertaking – she is trying to reconstruct Paddon’s life from scraps he has left and from what other relatives have told her, but a large part of the story (it is never revealed quite how much) has been invented by her. The use of the second person tells us this is a private project, Paula’s attempt to understand her beloved and unhappy grandfather; she is at once talking to him, trying to establish his story, and telling it to the reader. At times, notably in the accounts of various forms of domestic violence, this achieves real poignancy: “une fois qu’il a commence à frapper le plaisir de frapper l’envahit et se met à vibrer dans ses flancs et il continue, la frappant encore et encore au ventre de la pointe de sa botte, l’as-tu vraiment vu Paddon?” The reader does not know whether this scene was seen by Paddon, imagined by him, or imagined by Paula. What we do see is history repeating, as Paddon takes out his frustration on his own children and devout, submissive wife.

One of the novel’s principal concerns is time: the great, unfinished project of Paddon’s life is to write a book about different conceptions of time, but he feels he is always prevented by more mundane concerns. The novel flickers backwards and forwards in time with each chapter; Paula states early on that “l’ordre dans lequel m’arrive ta vie est tout sauf chronologique, oui c’est par fulgurances que je te retrouve, te reconstruis”. Most of the time, it is quickly apparent which era we are in, but I did find myself frequently confused about the children’s ages, which war was being referred to, and so on. Overall, the technique works: Paddon’s story is freed from the unforgiving passage of time. Like the aboriginal peoples for whom time is cyclical, we are forever finding ourselves back at the beginning.