George Bowering

An amazing book. This book is based on the true story of the McLean Gang -- three Metis brothers and their friend Alex Hare -- in the late 1800s. It paints a picture of life in the Canadian west, including the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company, colonization, identity (as "half-breeds" the McLean Gang had challenges fitting into both the settler and the Indian communities), morality and so much more. It is beautifully written, if you stick with it. The book is a blend of stories and legends and jumps around a lot, but as the narrative becomes clear, you are rewarded with an amazing story that will make you think about our history.… (mer)

THE HOCKEY SCRIBBLER is the fourth George Bowering book I've read. I first 'discovered' this Canadian writer's work about four years ago, when another Canadian writer, Elizabeth Hay, suggested I would probably like his then-new memoir, PINBOY. She was wrong. I didn't just like it; I LOVED it! Since then I've read a couple other 'sorta' memoirs by Bowering: BASEBALL LOVE and A MAGPIE LIFE: GROWING A WRITER, and thoroughly enjoyed both of those books too. (Bowering, by the way, is a former Canadian Poet Laureate and has, in his long and illustrious career, published more than a hundred books.)

In THE HOCKEY SCRIBBLER Bowering does for hockey what he did for baseball in BASEBALL LOVE, although he admits his passion for hockey has never quite equalled his love of baseball. (Bowering played softball well into his seventies; I'm not sure if, at 80, he's still at it.) But since hockey is more the national pastime in Canada than baseball, he could not have avoided it, even as a kid in the sandy country around Oliver, BC (which is almost but not quite in the U.S.). He tells us early and often about listening to Foster Hewitt and "Hockey Night in Canada" on the radio in the late 1940s as he sprawled on the rug doing his math homework. He proudly wore "an itchy blue Maple Leafs sweater." And during that period Bowering also "bought a scribbler and got some glue somewhere and started a scrapbook of NHL clippings." That "scribbler" scrapbook, which Bowering carted around with him over the next several decades, along with other precious detritus of a life littered with sports and books - things like the first issues of Blueline and Hockey Pictorial magazines - was the inspiration for this book.

Here's the thing. I don't really know squat about hockey. Don't watch it, don't follow it. But because Bowering is such a funny, self-deprecating and talented writer, I still enjoyed the hell outa this book. I liked his humor, all the bits of memoir sandwiched in here, about his time in the RCAF as a photographer, for example. Or the fact that the Leafs' Gary Unger was popular with gay men, who "would make stupendous claims for the ardour with which they pined for the playmaker with the streaming blond hair."

And, besides the hockey stories, Bowering also talks about his writer friends, like Brian Fawcett (author of the 2013 hockey novel, THE LAST OF THE LUMBERMEN), and a road trip they made to promote an earlier Fawcett book called MY CAREER WITH THE LEAFS AND OTHER STORIES. Driving into Montreal they ogled the girls in their spring dresses, with Fawcett, who was driving, his head swiveling dangerously, saying, "Look at that! Oh look at that!" It made me laugh, and brought back my own spring vacation trip to Fort Lauderdale nearly fifty years ago.

Bowering also talks of his gradual disillusionment with the direction hockey took in the early 70s, initially with the Philadelphia Flyers "Broad Street Bullies" goon squad, resulting in "arousing performable hatred in the bosoms of paying customers all over the league." And he devotes much of one chapter, "Whack 'Em, Smack 'Em," to the ultra-violent and unscrupulous former player and coach, Don Cherry.

Bowering also gets into team names, league expansion, and where certain teams originated, then moved elsewhere and so on. Case in point, the Calgary Flames, who started out in Atlanta, their name "commemorated the great Civil War burning of Atlanta. Their logo was a capital A in flames." When they moved to Calgary, the A was changed to a C. A writer friend of Bowering suggested "they should have kept the original letter and called the Calgary team the 'Flaming A's'."

I could go on about the stuff I liked most about THE HOCKEY SCRIBBLER, but I hope you get the idea. Bowering is a very funny guy and he kept me grinning, chortling and guffawing through much of the book. But this is, after all, a book about hockey, and its importance in Canada, and to hockey fans everywhere. And it is chuck full of names, stats, and hockey stories that the real hockey afficianados will devour. Different strokes, and all that. For my own reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Thanks for digging out that old scrapbook and sharing your life and memories yet again, George. Very highly recommended, for hockey fans, and for fans of good writing. (four and a half stars, but others will give it a five-plus, I'm sure.)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mer)

Shoot! started out as a slow and very confusing read for me. Bowering weaves historical fact with native legend and his own unique story-telling. The first 100 pages of the story was a bit of a challenge to piece together, bouncing around like a pinball ricocheting around in a pinball machine. Flipping narratives and timelines every page or so can get a bit unnerving for any reader, I think. Thankfully, Bowering finally settles into his story and calms down the narrative flipping to a more manageable level, allowing me to finally sit back and get drawn in. Bowering, Canada's first Poet Laureate, captures the dead cold of that 1879 interior BC winter with a practiced hand, communicating its terrifying raw, elemental beauty. In Shoot!, Bowering strips bare and exposes to the light of day the stories that have been relegated to the 'dusty basement' of BC's recorded historical past. While this story is on its surface a story about a gang of outlaws, the posse who tracked them down and the English justice that they they faced in New Westminster, it has a dark underbelly that I believe to be the thrust of Bowering's story. As mentioned by Sherrill Grace in her afterword to the story:

"Shoot! is a story about the HBC (Hudson Bay Company), its white businessmen, their Indian country wives, and their mixed-race children who would not be fully accepted by either white or native communities. These children were especially feared by those white colonizers who wanted to make fortunes and create a civilized English-speaking society of law, order and status out of a wild, rich, as yet unexploited land, and who definitely wanted to deny their past sexual alliances."

Unlike a number of the famous outlaw gangs of the American Wild West that I have read about, the McLean Gang, outside of Allan, were still mere boys. Allan, the oldest, was 25. Charlie and Alex Hare were 17 and young Archie was 15. Their rampage was fueled in part by the way they were treated as 'breeds'. For the McLeans, their suffering started at the hand of their violent father, a Hudson Bay Company Chief Factor and grew into one of community-wide disgust, disdain and indifference after their father's death in 1864 at the hand of a Chilcotin warrior when the family's Hat Creek ranch was taken away from their Native Indian mother by the white settlers, leaving the family destitute. For all members of the McLean Gang, their anger was also fueled by the fact that one of Kamloops richest white settlers, Mara, was having his way with the McLean brothers' young sister, Annie. Bowering's story hit a resounding nerve within me as a reminder of Canada's settlement past and how important it is for stories that are a legacy of Canada's past to be communicated and shared. At their trial in New Westminster, Judge Henry Pering Pellew Crease makes a statement that, as Bowering has written, may explain why the McLean Gang and their rampage are not widely captured in the recent written histories of the province: "You have caused great terror throughout the country, and by a campaign of robbery and assault and murder you have disgraced British Columbia." They do always say that history is written by the winners/victors. I believe that Bowering has brilliantly captured in his story the very fact that everyone has a story and it is all of the stories, not just the stories of the victors, that need to be heard and shared.

I can recommend this story to anyone who has an interest in outlaw gangs of the 19th century North American west. For me as a Canadian and a British Columbian, this story has extra meaning and really resonated with me. It has also left me with a lot to think about.… (mer)