Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

by Eric McCormack

The title of this novel (recycled from a 16th-century book by John Knox), an introductory note explains, is not to be interpreted as meaning a militant female troop. Rather, “regiment” means “magisterial rule.” We might thus assume that this superb third novel by Eric McCormack, a teacher of literature at the University of Waterloo, is about some psychic rending of apron strings. This isn’t quite right: rather, First Blast is a quest for paradise lost when baby Andrew Halfnight’s twin sister (at birth the pair are “stuck together like a package of sausages”) is killed in a bizarre christening accident.

From this point on, death stalks Andrew, sometimes on a grand scale. When he is sent to live with his aunt on an island, a catastrophic storm depopulates it. When he returns to the town where he was born, it sinks into the earth.

McCormack’s admirers will recognize many elements from his much-praised earlier novels and stories: an Oliver Sacks-like fascination with malfunctioning human wiring, a deep sense of the interconnectedness of love and death. Andrew’s birthplace, Stroven, is not far from the coal-begrimed Upland towns of Muirton and Carrick, and the deadly entity stalking Andrew is as slippery as the plague in The Mysterium. And, as usual, McCormack’s postmodern metaphysical puzzle is also a marvellous yarn. It spins out in picaresque segments, each distinct, vivid, funny, and full of sighs and wonders. Nor is Andrew’s life devoid of love: there’s his mentor, seaman Harry Greene, for example, who has more books in his cabin than he’ll read in a lifetime, and young Maria Hebblethwhaite, with whom Andrew discovers fleshly pleasures.

A headlong narrative pace slows as Andrew settles in Canada and devolves into early middle age; at 33 his body is stiff with buried griefs. His personal crucifixion involves an ocular mote of King Kong proportions, and an orgiastic, literal return to the womb. At the end – when the reader learns the meaning of all the nightmares, the visions of a grim female procession led by Andrew’s mother, and the extraordinary coincidences – the reader’s hunch grows uneasily that not only the narrator but the writer is unreliable.

Harry Greene’s posthumous revelation that heaven is where we find it (in Andrew’s case, in an Ontario town called Camberloo) is anticlimactic. By now McCormack’s readers have come to expect the words, “And then something terrible happened,” occurring after every minor slice of paradise; we know better than to believe in this neat denouement.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Viking

DETAILS

Price: $19.99

Page Count: 224 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-670-87624-0

Released: May

Issue Date: 1997-5

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Politics & Current Affairs