Causeway: A Passage to Boredom?...Ugh.

Have you ever read a book, and stayed up late just to get it finished? Well, unfortunately, that was how I felt about Linden MacIntyre's Causeway: A Passage from Innocence. It's taken me a few days to work on this review. I am learning from this blog that reviewing books that I didn't enjoy is much more difficult than books that I classify as "good reads".
February's read for my book club is MacIntyre's autobiography, and based on my experience with the group, I predict that only a few of us will have finished it! 

Linden MacIntyre grew up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He tells of his experiences as a young boy in Port Hastings.  He uses the construction of the Canso Causeway as the narrative thread through several years of his youth. He has many little ancedotes of living in a very modest home and visiting his old relations in the backwoods of Cape Breton. MacIntyre's father is constantly leaving his small town to find employment. Consequently the author is left without a strong male figure for much of his younger years.

Although MacIntyre's writing is easily read, I was often troubled by the lack of chronology throughout the book. It jumps back and forward from paragraph to paragraph and it leaves the reader trying to figure out the time frame of events. Several times, it mentions events that have already been
described, and the reader is left juggling the time frames.

Similar to Dryden's The Game, this is an autobiography that leaves lots of questions unanswered. First, I was fascinated to find out how MacIntyre finds his way to his current career as a journalist with the CBC. Never a mention of an obvious major point of interest for his audience. Further, his discussion of his sisters is so minimal that I was surprised to find a picture of his two siblings buried at the end of the book. (I really didn't understand that he has two younger sisters, and certainly they didn't factor in his accounts at all.)

Linden MacIntyre

In fairness though, there were a couple of passages that stood out for me. One such passages is when the author tells of his Hungarian friend's suicide. Having seen Old John Suto dead, but not realizing that he had just killed himself, the priest Father MacLaughlin tries to explain to the young MacIntrye the old man's rational:   "Despair leaves no room for reason in the human heart. And in the absence of reason, there is no place for hope." (page 262) I think that this is brilliantly written and is truly poetic. 

This autobiography left me flat. I finished it (another good result of writing this blog is that it forces me to finish novels that I would probably quit midway!)

One of the great things about this book is that it belongs to the Vaughan Public Library's Book Club collection. That means that the VPL lends out sets of up to 20 copies of the same book to registered groups. Here's the link to check out the vast collection of great titles available through VPL: http://www.vaughanpl.info/books_for_book_clubs/index/adults   It also eliminates the need to purchase a book that may or may not be to your taste! I hope that I have better luck with next month's book: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.