Inking in the warts
Andro Linklater
SOLOMON GURSKY WAS HERE by Mordecai Richler
Chatto & Windus, f13.95, pp. 413
If it is true, as Lord Rothschild asserted, that a country gets the Jews it deserves, an extraordinarily knotty question must be answered. What did Canada do to deserve Mordecai Richler? Here we have in the attic of the Americas a nation created from animist native inhabitants, British im- perialists ejected from the dining-room downstairs, exiled Highlanders yearning for the lone shieling and French crypto- royalists, now busily walling themselves off in the east wing. Unable to find common ground, these disparate groups have made a virtue of being uncontroversial, and to such good effect that they are responsible for producing the Mounties, the invention of .pablum and the world's first broiler chicken. What could such blameless people have done to deserve a renegade Luba- vitcher who at an early age shaved off his curls and dedicated himself to writing books which would shock every canon of national and religious good taste by which he had been brought up?
Recognising, perhaps, that no one else was better placed to answer that question, Mr Richler has offered an explanation of sorts in his latest book, Solomon Gursky Was Here. Ostensibly it is a biographical detective story in the mould of The Quest for Corvo, a debt he acknowledges by giving the Gursky family a corvine emblem, the raven. Solomon, whose life is the object of the search, has apparently been bumped off in an air crash in 1934, but his would-be biographer, Moses Ber- ger, finds shadowy clues to his continued existence long after that date. Sometimes he's Cuervo, sometimes Corbeau, some- times Kaplansky. These hints are as incon- clusive as the memories of his friends, and it is clear that anti-Semitism makes shad- owiness, at least in public, the preferred mode of the Gurskys, whether alive or dead. The mighty drinks combine which Solomon helped to found conceals its identity behind the impeccably Pres- byterian name of James MacTavish Ltd. The founder of the family, his grandfather, Ephraim, changed disguises faster than underwear — Green the gentleman pick- pocket, Gursky the Millenarian Church minister, and Tulugaq the Eskimo shaman. In fact the longer Berger searches through the snow-white expanse of Canada's past, the more shadows he finds, and each pool of darkness reveals itself to be the glossy plumage of a Gursky raven.
The first appears with Sir John Frank- lin's heroic attempt to discover the North- West passage in 1846, when his ships were caught in the ice, and his men starved to death. Berger's researches reveal that there was in fact a survivor — the ur- Gursky, Ephraim, who managed to stay alive by eating his fellow crewmen until rescued by Eskimoes. For good measure, he also discovers that later explorers, who had noted that these Eskimoes sometimes let themselves starve to death, were mis- taken in thinking they had a death wish; they were in fact Arctic Jews, converted by Ephraim, fasting through the long night of Yom Kippur, which alas for them lasted from November to February.
By the end, most of the salient features on the pale face of Canada's history have been cross-hatched with folly, greed and malice. It is as though the author had retouched the photograph of some saintly person, (by Karsh of Ottawa for prefer- ence), inking in warts and a toper's nose. The result is caricature, but rather more lifelike than the original. Thus British Canadians are represented by a sexually repressed exciseman, French Canadians by drunks in a rundown bar, but compared to Jewish Canadians, represented by the Gurskys, they get off lightly. Here, for example, is the monstrous Bernard Gursky admonishing his son Lionel for philander- ing:
Mr Bernard, in his forties then, rocking on his tiny heels before the towering marble fireplace, seething. Young Lionel seated on the sofa, unperturbed, riding it out with a supercilious smile. When, without warning, an exasperated Mr Bernard strode towards him, unzipped his fly, yanked out his penis, and shook it in his son's face. 'I want you to know, you whoremaster, that in all my years this has only been into your mother, God bless her', and zipping up again, tearful, adding, 'and to this day she has the only cunt still good enough for Bernard Gursky. Re- spect. Dignity. That you still have to learn. Animal.'
This is an admirable picaresque novel, intricate in structure, well-written, and inventive enough to sustain its large scope. My sole reservation concerns Berger's motives for devoting his life to the search for Gursky. He shares with the author such peculiarities as an undescended testicle, a fastidious fascination with vulgarity, and an unsatisfactory father. In a weak mo- ment, the author suggests that his motive in searching for Gursky is to find a better father. This snippet of off-the-peg psychol- ogy sits undigested amidst more convincing fiction. In fact it is obvious that his real motive, and one he certainly shares with the author, is the search for a better country. This quest is successful, I think, for the Canada which Mr Richler berates with such prodigal comedy and Talmudic taste for irony remains in my memory, curious though it may seem, as a country capable of inspiring an affection com- mensurate with its flaws. It would be a pity if, having proved itself worthy of harbour- ing so accomplished a novelist, it were now to fall apart.
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