The Ventriloquist's Tale, Pauline Melville

As I started The Ventriloquist’s Tale, I worried it was going to be a totally overpowering kind of book because while I was enjoying the way it was written, a lot of the first chapter was just throwing information at you at such a pace that I almost felt the words pounding my face. For a while, literally every sentence was introducing you to something new. Gosh it was hard to get past that. Once I managed, though, it became much easier. As soon as you know everything you need to know, the story moves on.

There is a conversation on pages 78-9 about race and if integration is a good thing or not. It was a very interesting conversation between a woman who was perfectly willing to date a native man and a man who was all about “purity of the nation.”

Okay, so a priest is playing a violin for a native tribe…
He then proceeded to play the last movement of Mozart Sonata K.304 in E minor.

Auntie Bobo’s body stiffened and jerked as she clamped her hand over her mouth to prevent the laughter bursting out. Everybody watched as the priest paced the floor, his body bending backwards and forwards, his right arm holding the bow, sawing at the instrument with gusto.

Someone remarked that he looked and sounded like a great grasshopper rubbing its legs together and the room fell silent as everybody absorbed this information with some concern.

Moved by the idea that he was introducing these people to the classics for the first time and convinced, even as he played, that the awed silence proved how entranced they were by the music, Father Napier felt his eyes fill with tears.

Everyone else in the room, except McKinnon who was just amused, watched with a sort of horror as, before their eyes, the priest turned into a giant, buzzing savannah grasshopper. p119
See, I LOVE this contrast between Native thought and Modern thought. The book is full of it because it’s really about the native peoples, but the “modern” stuff is seeping in everywhere. You can really see how each side thinks and that there isn’t a right or wrong side, it’s just different.

‘I know. I shot a monkey in a tree once. It wasn’t a good shot and the monkey was just wounded in the thigh. But I saw him gather bunches of leaves to staunch the wound. I’ve never liked to shoot a monkey since. It was too human. Animals are people in disguise, they say. I can believe that. Some people say we are just the prophetic dreams of animals. Their nightmares. I could believe that too.’ p122
I don’t think I need to say why I liked this.

For the first six months or so Beatrice felt quite numb. Once, in a store window, she saw an assistant handling a mechanical doll that walked. The shop girl picked up the doll and put it down somewhere else where it continued walking. That’s how I feel, thought Beatrice, as though someone had picked me up and put me down somewhere else and I’d just continued walking. p272
Don’t we all know this feeling, but haven’t really put a name to it?

How odd, she thought, to be lying here with my head two inches from his and for my head to be still full of forest and savannah while his is probably full of the Montreal of his youth with its electric trams and toboggan slides. How odd that these two worlds should be lying inches from each other. p280
More of that contrast between Native and Modern.

Between 303 and 304 there’s a houseboy who’s trying to serve this woman, but she wants a drink and he’s got other responsibilities for guests, and he keeps dancing around with the drink and not the drink and in the end he doesn’t give anyone anything and it was just the day I was having and I wanted to slam the book down. Not that that really means the writing was good or bad or whatnot, it’s just like a soundtrack I suppose.

Frightened by the violence of the storm, he put his hands together and decided to pray. All he could remember was something he head learned the previous term at school that felt to him like a prayer. As the air grew darker and took on a bruised, greenish huge, he rattled off what he had learned out loud:

‘Always speak quietly and courteously,
A quiet voice is a mark of refinement,
If you have to interrupt anyone speaking
Always say excuse me, please.
Cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn.
Cover your mouth with your hand
And turn your head aside when you cough.

‘Amen,’ he added. His hymn to manners finished, Bla-Bla cleaned himself with a piece of stick and waited for the storm to abate. p315
I had a laugh at this one, I honestly did. I couldn’t help myself.

At that moment she knew that it was to late to reveal her own love in the way she had been planning t do when the time was right. Nothing keeps in the tropics, someone had warned her. Bad timing. p346-7
Just liked this, even if it was sad. Nothing keeps in the tropics, even the emotion.