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Margaret Sweatman

Autor von When Alice Lay down with Peter: A Novel

7+ Werke 80 Mitglieder 5 Rezensionen

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Bildnachweis: photo credit: mandy malazdrewich

Werke von Margaret Sweatman

Fox (1991) 14 Exemplare
The Players (2009) 12 Exemplare
Mr. Jones (2014) 8 Exemplare
Sam and Angie (1996) 3 Exemplare
The Gunsmith's Daughter (2022) 3 Exemplare
Private Property (1988) 1 Exemplar

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A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing (2007) — Mitwirkender — 1 Exemplar

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In The Gunsmith’s Daughter, Margaret Sweatman’s sixth novel, it is 1971. Lilac Welsh is eighteen. She lives with her parents, Ruby and Kal, sharing with them a life of splendid isolation in a luxurious house that Kal designed and had built in Rough Rock, on the Winnipeg River. Lilac has spent her youth sheltered in comfort and bounty, thanks to her father’s lucrative work as a designer and manufacturer of high-end weapons that are in demand in hot spots around the globe. She has never troubled herself with the moral implications of her father’s chosen profession. But that is about to change.

Kal’s latest project has driven a wedge into the family. He boasts that the “Stalker,” his new .50 calibre assault rifle, can take down an airplane with a single shot. He’s preparing to bring it to market, but the gun makes Ruby uneasy (she sneeringly calls it “butt ugly”). Lilac, though young, is not blind to the emotional divide that’s opened up between her parents. Then a young man arrives on their doorstep. Gavin McLean worships Kal Welsh and harbours a respectful admiration for his work. Moreover, Gavin, despite being Canadian, has decided to enlist in the US army so he can serve in Vietnam: his aim, to make something of himself. Gavin’s presence in the Welsh home is brief, but he and Lilac strike up a close spiritual and intimate physical connection, and she’s bereft when he gets on a bus bound for the US and whatever fate awaits him. For Lilac, the war in Vietnam has been an abstract concept: despite her father’s stories of being there in the early 1960s, the deadly conflict remains comfortably remote: the stuff of newspaper headlines. But Gavin’s determination to participate in a war that’s growing more controversial by the moment makes it tangible in a way she’s never experienced and sets her on a path she never saw coming.

From this intriguing setup, Sweatman fashions a gripping coming-of-age / adventure story of a young woman’s awakening into a world much larger and more dangerous and morally complex than she’d imagined. After Gavin leaves for a recruiting centre in the US, Lilac wangles a position as junior reporter with the Winnipeg Tribune, which, through tenacity, bravado and sheer force of will, she transforms into an assignment as a Vietnam War correspondent. Naïve and perhaps more confident than she should be, she travels to Saigon armed with tape recorder and notebook, convinced she wants to find Gavin so she can tell his story. But what she’s really looking for is the person she’s meant to be.

The bulk of Sweatman’s taut narrative chronicles Lilac’s efforts to distance herself from everything her domineering father stands for and assert her independence. Along the way she meets a variety of compelling characters who aid in her effort to tell the stories of those serving on the front line of a conflict that people all over the world have realized is not only unjust and brazenly mercenary, but also a lost cause.

The historical novel presents unique challenges to fiction writers. But Margaret Sweatman, who has evidently immersed herself in the history of the Vietnam War, seamlessly incorporates details gleaned from her research into a relentlessly engaging and suspenseful novel. The Gunsmith’s Daughter, possessing the forward thrust of a whodunit, makes for compulsive reading and is clearly the work of a seasoned writer who knows what she’s doing every step of the way.
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icolford | Jan 30, 2022 |
Margaret Sweatman's Mr. Jones openly confronts duplicity.

"His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d dominated and also abandoned him; heroic war service that was also the shame of his nation. He had no words for himself. He felt like an empty room without light, but for the borrowed light from his friends and the radiance of their ideals."

And complexity.

"It took Emmett three days to fall asleep. All in one blow: Suzanne McCallum’s shoulders, John Norfield’s clavicle. Falling in love, loyal forever to that one glimpse of purity you see in somebody, that kind of love, he thought, is a question of instinct, a move you make before thinking, and it changes everything in a split second."

But although Mr.Jones is about espionage, it's set in the Cold War; the action can be sudden and dramatic, but it is couched in the solidity of everyday life, given time to reflect upon what is contained in a series of sleepless nights or a fleeting glimpse.

How to spot things changing in a single instant and what things to keep secret: these things can be learned. One can also learn how to see, how to look, how to be seen, and how not to be seen.

"'And was anyone there? Besides me?'
'I don’t know. I don’t know how to look for those things.'
Suzanne didn’t really know either. But she would learn. Looking had become her domain. She had nowhere else to live."

Just as Suzanne is searching, the setting is of little consequence in this novel, for the action is more often interior, the exterior providing a shell in which secrets can simmer.

“'You and I, we have a bond,' Kimura said. 'A friendship. Our origins are in secrecy.'”

This is not a Robert Ludlum thriller, but a slow-burning story. Readers feel the characters' desire to connect through prose which leaves them on the margins; we read about love and passion, heightened conflict, but we feel isolated, solitary observers holding a bound tale in our hands.

"Sunlight struck their complicated faces, revealed them in their aloneness."

But although alone, this is not an entirey painful state; the novel presents a meditative study of life as solitary refinement, rather than an overwhelmingly sad tale of marginal existence.

"Time was created to ease our pain. The cormorant suddenly opens and spreads its slate black wings, and lake water sprays like shattered crystals in the sun. Here is perfection."

These thoughts originally appeared on BuriedInPrint.
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buriedinprint | Feb 20, 2015 |
Coming from Manitoba, I was excited to read this book because I recognize some areas described in the story. I finished the book feeling disappointed. Some confusing parts. Maybe I read it too quickly because it seems to have good reviews. I obviously missed the boat on this one.
 
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aimelire | Apr 18, 2012 |
At its base, The Players is about a woman making her way through a universe ruled by men, doing whatever it takes to survive, which makes Lilly as much an explorer/adventurer as Des Groseilliers and Radisson. Lilly is the main 'player' in The Players, but in a way, all the characters are only acting their parts to achieve their true desires. The novel is also about the death of entire worlds, whole societies, replacing them with a new one, that of 'civilization.' As the explorers rue, "Civilization will seep into everything, it will mimic, steal, atom by atom, yes, like that, so that nothing evermore will be free of falsity." In The Players, the entire world is being slowly transformed, becoming an actor as well, disguising its feral nature underneath the trappings of enlightenment.

Read the rest of the review here.
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½
 
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ShelfMonkey | Mar 1, 2010 |

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80
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