The Beautiful Children
by Michael Kenyon
Saskatoon: Thistledown Books, 2009, IBSN978-1-897235-47-8, 189 pp., $18.95 paper.

The Beautiful Children is a novel about innocence and experience, children and the monsters that shape their lives, injury and loss, and how these plights are unwittingly visited upon the children. Poetically written, with images that arise simultaneously from interior and exterior landscapes, this book haunts us with the poignancy of nightmares.

The novel opens with a man, Sapporo, waking up in a hospital, all memory of his previous existence wiped from his consciousness. He absently notices a hole in the ground outside his hospital window and a tree whose roots are wrapped in burlap--the hole providing an objective correlative for the man's memory loss and the uprooted tree for his lost ancestry. Under "misty lights" gardeners unload the tree in this Garden of Eden variant. The tree may have just been uprooted, or the hole prepared for the tree, significantly "in bud," to be planted. Equally cryptically, the gardeners "seemed concerned about what they were doing yet helpless," a state of mind that reflects Sapporo's own. While watching this scene he hears a "loud crack, as of bone on stone," and an alternative way of regarding the scene as, not one of tree-planting and redemption but of injury, arises:

And although I was the sole witness, leaning forward, taking it all in, I had the feeling this was happening for someone else. A person who'd fallen backward into a hole. A man falling while behind him an old woman and an old man slowly danced. (14)

This opening scene is psychologically powerful and allows us both to enter Sapporo's disturbed consciousness and to encounter a poetic iconography that is picked up later in the novel. Near the end, three trees appear to represent a Third World environment: one is charred by fire, another is in the process of being licked by flames on one side while remaining green on the other, and the third is pristine and in full blossom (180).

Kenyon builds ever subtler and more complicated patterns of imagery. Sapporo finds himself drawn to open mouths, whether to a man "with wild eyebrows and a reassuringly open mouth" at the therapist's clinic (23), or to the "soft mouth, cunt" of the woman who watched him and his son play baseball (29). After having walked out on his son during a rainstorm, Sapporo returns to find the boy asleep, his mouth open (27). Sapporo speculates that if he, himself, could dream, he would remember everything, and "cooped-up dreams would open [his] lips to escape." (27)

After Sapporo walks out on his son for the last time, the boy runs away from the authorities. He attempts to stay with neighbours, but their miseries of addiction drive him out to the garbage dump with the dog his father had earlier bought him.

Kenyon is a master of style and, to brilliant effect, works to re-enact the tricks of the human psyche (he is also a therapist). In an early scene, Sapporo, while putting away groceries, notes a blind man with a dog waiting at the corner. A while later Sapporo sees the blind man and dog still there, and all the seemingly random observations are reflected in the stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts:

Out in the dark couples talked, holding on to one another, marching the street and laughing, blowing smoke from open mouths; a blind man with a dog stood at the curb. I didn't know the song my son was singing. The cold glass on my palms and the light that spilled from the window over the people down in the street were veils my heart swam under. I couldn't believe that the blind man and the dog were still waiting. (30)

Sapporo becomes impatient after watching the hesitant blind man, and makes the irrational but emotionally sound decision to act by walking out on his son.

Bird imagery, in association with children and the lost generation, also comes into play. That Sapporo doesn't know the song his son is singing represents the generation gap between them. Eventually the boy, renaming himself Sparrow in the city of aliases, joins the world of "lost children." He seeks work from Dit, a dealer's girlfriend/prostitute, but she is reluctant:

"You got nothing makes me want you for nothing," Dit said.
"I got a name."
"You got a sweet prong and a sad look and you're trouble on the street."
"I can deal," he said.
"Hey hey."
"I can suck. I can run."
"You got ears?"
"What d'you want me to do?"
"Stay out of my way."
"Anything, Dit, anything you say."
"Baby, I don't even want to know your name."
"Give me a job. Tell it to me."
"You want to turn a trick, turn a trick. You want to steal a car, steal a car. I got things to do."
"Come on. People know you."
"Shit, boy. You say you can run?" (66)

The dialogue accurately captures the authenticity of speech patterns in that particular milieu, while images that have appeared earlier resurface as symbols with a dynamic multiple purpose. Sparrow's assertion "I have a name" ironically references the biblical God's awareness of each sparrow that falls.

The characters move from Japan to Africa and finally to North America, evoking old and new world settings and providing a concreteness to the theme of the "beautiful children" as lost generations. Mira, whose name evokes Miranda from The Tempest, remarks, "What a world that has such people in it!" (177), and we are struck by her generous view of humankind. She functions both as a real character and as a projection of Sapporo's Prospero-like vision as he revisits his memory in search of meaning.

The Beautiful Children is a poem of a novel, its stylistic patterns involved and intricate and ultimately convincing. I was frequently mesmerized by it, though at times also confused by the elliptical nature of the storyline. Jorge Luis Borges's essay "Tales of the Fantastic" offers guidance on how to read fantastic fiction such as this, in which the dream becomes more pertinent than reality.

Sapporo's closing words are something of a postmodern prayer: "Here comes a brand new thought all ready to polish: what I felt in my life, all my life, what I called loneliness, was nothing but smoke and oil. I regret nothing. I am tranquil. I'll begin tomorrow. It doesn't matter whether or not I finish." (189)

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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